Lost Teeth
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.552) CDR $8.00
Here’s something that’ll keep your kitchen lit. (For you 20-year-olds, a “kitchen” is like the break room at work, but in your apartment.) From front to back, this disc hits like possessed plasmatic visitations happening in the middle of an otherwise silent instructional cooking program. You know that means metallic borborygmus and delicious lurching — the percussive collateral damage recognizable to anyone who has attended after-hours jousting with live but grievously unwell horses in a public library. Fear not, disdainers of randomized flail, Ypsmael + Eloine have done this before (because late fees). The duo maintains a delectable balance between electro fweep, tape fwip, and considered fwunk of the hit-it-or-quack ilk — without neglecting, as some of our peers are wont (let’s face it), sonic backdrops that enhance the ambient depth of field. The beautiful yet unprecious recording and the bounty of friction throughout Lost Teeth bring to mind a compact, super-portable Nuova Consonanza. Oh, yes they do. The homemade instrument, the field recording, the non-musical object, and the musical instrument manipulated outside the bounds of traditional propriety serve the needs of these two freedom-lickers, based respectively in Germany and San Francisco, a detail that should scream “secret tingle spoken here.”
Of Delusions
(Chocolate Monk) LP $25.00
The sound of two cracked minds locating their inner black boxes via the medium of live electro-acoustic scrambling and rummaging. Of Delusions documents the final two performances from the Ypsmael / Eloine UK tour in autumn 2023, in Brighton and Glasgow respectively, where tabletop setup damaged beyond quick repair, an unstable mess nearly collapsing on itself, and half-functioning junk (or half-damaged junk, depending where you are in the cynical-despair / wide-eyed-naivety spectrum) worked their uncanny Final-Destination-derived conspiracy. Proof, were any needed, that resonant spring clang and sine wave skittering are symptoms of a mind boggle so potent that the cosmic veil is mistaken for a handkerchief, and nasal mucus is duly expelled upon it. Murky fruit indeed. Artwork by Ian Pyper. Edition of 100.