A New Normal
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.401) CDR $7.00
Part hot shot of life-affirming glimmer, part wounds-cleanser, and, in the words of Emmert himself, part “quick postcard to people who are suffering from traumas and there is no way out. That’s what the title means: finding a new place to rest inside yourself, because all previous normalcy was destroyed by trauma…. There is no fixing things….” Numbered edition of 60.
A Serpentine Summer
(Chocolate Monk - choc.440) CDR $6.25
Brother Todd’s third ChocoMo is his sixteenth full-length album since 2015. It’s an instrumental album. “Isn’t that good?” he asks rhetorically. “Enough with my voice…. If you don’t like vaguely minimal experimental home recorded music, you’re not gonna like this either. But I do think it’s good. This one is kinda twinkly in parts and it’s built for the heat.” Edition of 60
A Summer’s Day And Night
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.390) CDR $8.00
No one makes being a visionary seem like an attractive career more than Todd W. Emmert. His beguilingly unassuming compositions slip through the cracks between the cosmic binaries — your yings and your yangs, the bottom of the aboves and the tops of the belows, the magic hours of twilight and dusk. A Summer’s Day And Night oozes with sacred perspiration wrung from the garments of the children of the supreme hypno-void getting dizzy on an interstellar merry-go-round. Four opening tracks lull you into a false sense of New Age security, better than any vegan restaurant hold muzak, before Emmert goes full ghost story and bakes your head into a wax unagi pie replica in the galley of a Unarius UFO with a series of heavy, scalp-striating distorto drones that have every right to take up entire album sides. A fine, fine distillation of “splashing” and “down.” Huff it. Numbered edition of 60
Devil's Return
(Therapy Tapes - #11) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Another masterpiece by the visionary behind Inspector 22. Infusions of loops, psychedelic structures, non-traditional instruments and techniques, and alienology take Emmert's home-recorded space-folk into new levels of the afterworld.
Everything’s Coming Up Roses
(Chocolate Monk - choc.580) CDR $8.00
The eternal golden braid that Todd W Emmert twists from strands of ectoplasm (seldom accessible to likes of you, me, or the cleaning lady wearing a gas mask) pulses like a healthy body. But this time, the tobacco haze is illuminated a little differently; the aura shimmers a little harder than usual, for a simple reason: Emmert Has Gone Electric. Instead of acoustic guitar molding the character of his songs — which are more than sketches or demos, though referring to them as compositions feels gross and flashy — here electric bass is the generative force, followed by electric guitar, electric keyboards, and (non-electric) tambourine with a drum head on it. Visions of instrumentals from Pink Floyd’s More / La Vallée era drift through the lobes. Migrating birds pass by, thunder reverberates across the valley, bleating sheep navigate the fields out back. The man understands and feels the cycles. He doesn’t seek to dazzle you, or really to entertain you at all, and probably cringes at the mere thought of your existence, to be honest. Maybe not. You seem like one of the good ones. But Everything’s Coming Up Roses is an album that invites you to immobilize yourself for a bit. Allow its languid mini-anthems to prick you with a micro-dose of perfect ratios. Nine tracks or nine variations on a theme, you don’t need to know for sure. Stop fussin’ over everything. Just sit and vibrate there like a miracle of nature for 25 minutes, whydoncha.
Hitchin’ A Ride
(Therapy Tapes - #13) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“I listened in my morning haze and thought it was [Emmert’s] best work yet,” says Caleb Mulkerin of Big Blood. “The … songs [capture] a southern Joy Division and the instrumentals … range from weird music box lullabies to cockroaches pouring out of the cracks in the walls right after the bomb went off.”
Innocence Of The Antichrist
(Therapy Tapes - #14) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Experimental folk music for the Spider God and Her followers. In Emmert’s allegorical tale of “someone” born evil trying to make good, there is beauty in existential dread and lullabies for invisible girls. The noise of ending with a question instead of an answer.
Memento Mori
(Therapy Tapes - #12) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The latest and greatest in avant garde experimental folk that Asheville, North Carolina, has to offer. Includes a cover of Spacemen 3’s “Come Down Easy.”
Open Doors, Open Graves
(Chocolate Monk - choc.525) CDR $8.00
North Carolina’s number one porch lounger returns to the microphone and the craft of song after spending 2020 singing not a single note (too busy blowing cigar smoke in the face of the cardboard God). He repents nothing and knows not to mourn this mess of a world as we are all just sea-monkeys observed from afar. You want a monk’s cell with a ceiling fan? Sorry, all we have is the mellow sound in which to drown, covering, according to the Tarheel Troubadour, “themes of death, mental illness, loneliness and solitude, and mysterious bohemian bloodlines.” Edition of 60
Remember
(Emmert) 7-inch (lathe cut) $10.00
Crystalline and primeval songcraft from the Spence / Finn nebula
So Sick Of Dying
(Therapy Tapes) 7-inch (lathe cut) $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
One track from Emmert's Funeral album. Numbered edition of 50
Talking To Yourself Is Better Than Talking To No One
(Chocolate Monk - choc.502) CDR $7.25
Emmert’s 14th and final full-length album of 2020 is a paperback pandemic romance novel without words, completely instrumental. Feel the warm themes, if you can. True pandemic romance isn’t dead, it’s just taken another form, again. Do your current pandemic lifestyles got you down? Well, just try and remember the time before time, when it was slightly more enjoyable to be alive and the clock wasn’t weighing on your back like an albatross. Let your worries slip away into the ether. Remember the fun before time existed. Edition of 60
The Key To The Seven Gates Of Heaven is Love
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Another relief cascade from this beloved mountain mystic who can atomize the ambiguity and hateful confusion that eat away at your psyche by a mere twitch of his eyebrow. If you’re not grateful, piss off. Emmert’s tremolo-ruffled drone-adjacent porch gaze favors episodic, self-contained constructs with little use for large, dramatic jumps and twists. Those of us who appreciate an all-consuming application of The Hard Soothe have known this since Dome covered “Flying” and replaced the pastel industrialism with the barn rock sound of the first Modern Lovers album. Join us. If Studio Ghibli would have a look at the Licensing Agreements page on Chocolate Monk’s website, they’d realize they could get Miyazaki’s upcoming anime about a justice-enforcing capybara soundtracked for the little more than the cost of a handful of shiny beads. The steady, micro-stated clunk of percussive objects here, what someone somewhere might refer to as drumming, backstop reverberations colored by the elusive mysticism of an Appalachian Gamelan appreciation society ploinking upstream. Each track glides into view, drifts across the panorama and exits into the blurry mosaic of silence without once making eye contact. Edition of 60
Unintentionally Marginalized
(Chocolate Monk - choc.480) CDR $6.25
The return of one of Chocolate Monk’s more musical family members who, as always, brings strumming and sonorous sound to ease the pain. “These days,” says the man himself, “Being marginalized is like getting a gold star in some segments of society. It’s a social boost that gives some people more clout in some circles. People want attention. So much so that everyone is scrambling to out-marginalize each other…. And I know I am insignificant in the greater scheme of things. I wish more people realized this about all of us…. Unintentionally Marginalized is an instrumental album of songs recorded by myself at home about living with extreme mental illness. A lot of people claim marginalization just for social bonus points, but I just want to be normal….” Edition of 50