Naked Tape And Others
(Art Into Life) Cassette $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ten pieces for hurdy gurdy and tape (forty minutes) recorded between 2008 and 2013. With book-based covers about the human body (each one unique), an insert, gut-string, cotton, ninety-minute private sound recording entitled the “Naked Tape,” box of paulownia wood.
Chin Spirits
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.293) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Sound collage, songs, instrumentals and more importantly insight from the Sun City Girl slaphead. Originally planned for a vinyl ten-inch release on some Belgian label, until the Reptilians got to them. Edition of 60.
Mami
(Oxen - OXEN030) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Deliberate, confrontational harsh noise barrages, peeling and scything layers of bare-nerved sheets of complete harsh noise satisfaction. Texas-based noise artist Alexis Cash is in command on this excruciatingly gratifying on-point release. C20
Time Furniture
(Cor Ardens) Cassette $13.25
The debut release by Jim Strong and Pony Payroll Bones (both quietly active in the American underground in addition to being visual artists) unfolds over a series of brief meetings as the pair skip gleefully between an array of dueling pianos, viola, cello, keyboard and organ, undergirded with cellular networks of tape collage, invented instruments, spiritual ritual through everyday appliances and the sputtering engines of broken down cars. Named after the Greek word for “absence of pain,” a state of perfect equilibrium in the epicurean ideal of the good life, the duo is depicted on the accompanying wood block print lanced with arrows and doctors’ protruding tools. Their art experiments are tinged with a hopeful affirmation of life in the midst of serious illness and increasing industrial pollution. Drawing on traditions of psych, noise, folk , new age drone and fluxus / sound art, Aponia A.D. specializes in a kind of haunted Americana anti-music for the post-American dystopian landscape. Packaged in altered jewelry box with woodblock print.
The Good Times Are Over For Good
(Oxen - OXEN028) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
An emphatic and unsettling statement of harsh noise endurance. Abusive commotion, compelling showers of junk metal, howling noise clamor by this former Los Angeles artist now based in Texas. C30
Squash
(Chocolate Monk - choc.047) Cassette $75.00
Composed, mixed, recorded, and designed at Studio Mecca, Kyoto 1995, using only a can as source material. Packaged in a squashed can with two sets of nuts and bolts holding the package together. Inside the package is a paper strip insert. Hand-numbered edition of 100. C46 Includes a complimentary copy of Sound on Sound LP by Loop Circuit, Nakajima's mid-90s collaboration with Dub Murashita
L’ AUTOPSIE A REVELE QUE LA MORT ETAIT DUE A L’AUTOPSIE
Not Alive
(Chienne Secrete / Komma Null) Cassette $13.00 (Out-of-stock)
Music that evokes the afterlife, the psychedelia of the Pampas, or the operating room. Handmade green cardboard coffin with a bone inside. Edition of 50. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2012
Twisted & Bent
(Beniffer Editions) Cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Batson's first tape, dating back a few years before the Spare Parts LP. Fewer backing musicians lend it intimacy. With photographic proof that Batson is truly an unknown modern Beefheart. C44. Edition of 100.
baYal
([ no label ]) Used Cassette $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Recordings from 2002 by Aya Onishi (ex-Sekiri) and Nihilist Spasm Band’s John B. Boyle on kazoo, percussion, thumb piano, ring modulator, chopsticks, dishes and crystal, garbage can lid, didgeridoo, digital delay, ocarina, bugle. Angel’in Heavy Syrup’s Naoko Otani guests on one track. C46
Dylan Thomas
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.330) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A wet and windy night at the end of January saw the first teaming up of Bench and Nyoukis, opening for the Bohman Brothers at Brighton’s Sallis Benney Theatre. Focused tape improvisations and electric whack! transpired, but if you think that was good enough for these worm-lovers, you can go eat aluminum foil, pal. The following month the two hacked up the crisp desk recording from that night. Shaped it into whole new world of wonk, they did. Nyoukis’s frantic cut-up, backed with Bench in full-on bonkers mode. Edition of 50.
Voice Studies 15
(My Dance The Skull - VS15) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
Phonetic voice, noise emissions, no electronics. c50
Voice Studies 09
(My Dance The Skull - VS09) Cassette $9.50
Three live performances by the founder of Norway’s Gold Soundz label. “The Demise of Personal Hygiene” is a series of gurgles, blonks, boings, and thuds, while “Procrastination is the Square Root” and “A Possible Outbreak of Clinical Hysteria” continue the contact mic clashing crashing guttural rumble. “At various time [Bjerga] sounds like a child talking through a balloon while being manipulated by evil adults,” notes The Wire. “He breaks some plates in an industrial kitchen accident, then we take a ride through his digestive system (à la Roger Waters / Ron Geesin) until we emerge worm-like through his bottom….”
BLACK SAND DESERT / UNSUSTAINABLE SOCIAL CONDITION
Black Sand Desert / Unsustainable Social Condition
(Oxen - OXEN031) Cassette $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Volatile harsh noise delivered with taut, barrier smashing intensity by Greh Holger and Matt Purse on one side, a studio recording ahead of a neck-punch, face-melting live set at The Handbag Factory, which, as it happens, is right there on the flip. C20
Capitulation
(Vitrine - VT20) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
The source material’s puritanism betrays both a libertinage of intent and depth of connotation latent in Fraser Hall’s illustrious and long-standing solo project. Since the early 1980s, blackhumour has investigated the cracks in common speech practice and the vacancy of the signifier. Vocal event is mined for stochastic determinism and glottal smut. Sapir-Whorf collides into Krafft-Ebing. It would be difficult to categorize this material as sound poetry, despite a focus on voice, breath and the subtle diversion of linguistic intent. Repetition and magnification direct the incremental units of a sound which focuses sonic density into a concrete minimalism. Edition of 100. C40
Listen to an excerpt of “Pale Grey” here: https://youtu.be/rXDdWf7Cdbo
Joyous Junctures
(Eh?) Cassette $10.00
“Outrageous voice hoots and nonsensical flappery-barks with various forms of fragmented, doodly electronic music and percussive snippets,” says Sound Projector admiringly. “As title promises, this is indeed an album full of joyous sounds and happy coincidences, a trip in a balloon that makes absurdity and madness seem like great fun.”
Voice Studies 07
(My Dance The Skull - VS07) Cassette $9.50
"Approximate Air" backed with "Apostatic Aria" by this modern kingpin of sound poetry who twists and bends language in engaging, disturbing ways. Blonk clicks, blurts, and snaps his voice, creating unusual sounds and noises, mimicking nature and often injecting offbeat humor. c20.
Red Brut / Blood Stereo
(Chocolate Monk - choc.410) Split cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Containment of the shadow self is a pointless exercise, friend. After all shit is shadow and we are all full of it. Better out than in, right? Red Brut and Blood Stereo both understand and present a side each of tape manipulation, sound collage, etc. For fledglings of all ages. Numbered edition of 52
Two Drams
(Chocolate Monk - choc.437) Cassette $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Blood Stereo invite you to share two drams with them in a mere ten minutes, as they attempt to stretch time with two focused tape compositions. Violin drones, field recordings and mysterious distant percussion press ruddy cheeks with what sound like an underwater church organ, lo-fi muttering and various creaks, hiccups, sneezes and burbles. More sounds for your Jungian pipe. Pink cassette in card slip case with paste on art. Rubber stamped. Includes badge. Numbered edition of 50.
Inspired By Actual Events
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette + 3 x 3in CDR $26.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. A modest treasure box of audio oddities and WTF constructions. The 3-inch CDR Lobster Dildos contains four new blithers that could easily pass for the soundtrack to scary parts of a TV show about the paranormal. You know, with the distressed breathing and the uncanny metallic grinding, unnerving assurances, 1930s melodrama, unnatural chittering, left-handed shredding and distortion ejaculate, bio-mechanical threat blurts, and clusters of passion-damaged voices competing to get their bizarre assertions heard. A second 3-inch CDR extracts the audio from footage of a Bren’t Lewiis live show in 1984 in support of the so-called Mad Bombers. Viewers of Tusk TV from the golden era of Covid lockdown might recall seeing resurrected VHF footage of this clatter-rich caterwaul. Minus the visuals and left with little more than the sound of ramshackle simian-grade percussion and an audience that is clearly more interested in their own conversations than the off-center thwacking of scruffy would-be surrealists, one can pinpoint the moment that obsolescence of grandeur became a manifesto. And then a third, “value-addled” 3-inch CDR uses the Mad Bombers audio as a foundation for wild additions, brute subtractions, and EQ shenanigans. Fresh into their trial separation from Usurper, Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson team up with Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos for the collaborative cassette Lewsurpiia. Eight tracks, 38 minutes, electroacoustic AF, tape cut-ups and plentiful narrative delirium, the Wizard of Oz staged in an antique mall. Also included is a 28pp comic book Many Hands Make Light Work, which re-purposes an old Jack Chick morality tract with all new BuFMS-centric text. It’s a bona fide Easter egg hunt where a disgruntled puritan storms through a methy suburb in search of coherence, buttressed at either end by a transcript of Tielens’s early ’80s doctrine chat with an unsuspecting evangelist knob. A real page-turner. To aid in keeping the Chocolate Monk customer’s consumption conspicuous, the box also includes a small enamel lapel pin. Follow-up selfies are your responsibility. There’s also a postcard adorned with eccentric art of a sort all returning champions would expect, plus miscellaneous scraps sourced from the lost-and-found box at a California public library. Hand-stamped edition of 75
Noncanonical Gospels From The Cult Of The Immortal Tapir
(Coherent States - CS28) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Bren’t Lewiis’s after-hours guerilla performance at a Sacramento playhouse was the site of their latest maculate conception: desert-blind tales and sun-scorched allegories expunged from The Ongoing Dialogue during the greasy, soothing Council Of Nivea. Imagine an old-time radio broadcast of a pagan tent revival interrupted by shortwave transmissions from an isolated and weather-beaten theater where Swell Maps are stage-managing an all-nonmusical-interstitials Kubrick-inspired variety show. The bizarre compendium of revelations include a beastiary by an unreliable ornamental horticulturist, a sampler inventory of treats-centered Eucharist self-abasement, a postcard texticle, ersatz Beat poetry, idealized warrior vows, shattered testimonials from addled pitchmen, and faith-based texts about: limbless lizard infestation; inter-dimensional chonch worship; the personal toll of crimes against humanity; the banality of insane self-pity; pepper abuse; autobiographical cannibalism; hemoglobin-and-fur-based cocktails; false Elvis resurrection and messianic flim-flam orchestrated by the pastel mafia; compulsions of infectious diseases camp prisoners; the psychic struggles of a pilgrim getting telekinetically bombarded by epistles from spiteful, sentient mass transportation; interspecies organ transplant; and heavenly expectorant. The ramshackle performances and sound design display a pattern consistent with questionable Sudarium stains. Created using toys, tools, objects, instruments, and found voices, some details about audio events bleed through time and space while others fade into dust and ash. c50
Broken Runzel.eb Penis Gurgel.er Orchestra
(Fragment Factory - FRAG24) Cassette $10.50 (Out-of-stock)
In which Dick Flick chops up and manipulates Rudolf Eb.er material from years past. C23 in A6-sized polybag. Edition of 100.
Occult Concert
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
This California-based mail-order mystic was first known from his ads in the back pages of Fate Magazine, Beyond Reality, and Gnostica News offering a psychic meditation course, designed to teach people how to listen to music. To go along with his lessons, Burchette sold a series of instrumental guitar and electronic records, of which this unofficial facsimile edition reissue is one originally released by Amos Records in 1971.
Hell Bank Note (1993–1995)
(Nyahh) Cassette $10.00
This underground Irish band of movie obsessive shut-ins — D.F. Dresden, Smiley, J. Bassetti — with their penchant for sleazy Americana, obscure movies and exploitative daytime telly, jammed and sampled their way to notoriety in the 1990s, via experimental music that was equal parts thought-provoking funk and stroke-inducing gunk. Includes tracks from Radica Doodica, Nude Beach Rub-out, Free Steel Hand, Jet Black Barry, and Vicious Tiger Dummy.
TED BYRNES / UNSUSTAINABLE SOCIAL CONDITION
Unsustainable Social Condition With Ted Byrnes
(Oxen - OXEN018) Cassette $3.10 (Out-of-stock)
Two new tracks of fractured, scraping slides into blunt, violent vocals implicating fluid scenes of graphic horror. Matt Purse of Fenian and Of The Skull delivers harsh electronic noise and vocals, while special guest Ted Byrnes (Airway, LAFMS) brings the junk metal and all things percussion to this jarring, peak noise massacre. C10
Check out “Corpse Of Dignam” here: https://youtu.be/lkzzEfPToyk
C. R. Odette
(Vitrine - VT19) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
On the first solo release from tape-noise stalwart Samantha Flowers, inane conversation segues from isolate flutter to stoop obsolescence, swaddled in a bored headache of masked vocals and malfunction. Signal interference bleeds into positional confusion and numbskull amp burble, while still retaining an adroit sense of humor. Over the past few years, Flowers has racked up an impressive resume during residencies in Philadelphia and Detroit, with turns in various projects, including out-of-bounds rhythm box unit Growth Program alongside Chris Durham. C. R. Odette refines the confounding aesthetic of Flowers’ crud-improv duo Creode, while also allowing for perpendicular forays into AQM-style shortwave collapse, Quick Stab-fried pop debris and deep Kenzo field recordings. Edition of 100. C30
Listen to “The Ring” here: https://youtu.be/XdYideA8mJs
It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS035) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
The field recordist and lucid-dream composer articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing human interaction with environment. Intertwined with the lugubrious wash of environmental detail is dissolved songwriting described in the distant past as “rural psychedelia.” Guitar swollen with ethereal blight cycles in soft whirlpools of drone and thrum as the gloom of an Irish rainstorm pours down a sewer drain. Electricity proves a noble tool as well, as Carr extract deadtones of unanswered calls from telephone wires, revealing the ghostly stains of human existence at a particular place.
Hong Chulki + Aaron Dilloway
(Idiopathic - IR001) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Dilloway’s characteristic fits of tape swirls and Chulki’s poised turntable outbursts complement and clatter against each other effortlessly. In this live recording made in Oberlin, Ohio, subtle ambient fields and crumbling melodies grow into peaks of rattling chaos. C40
Trance Tapes
(No Rent) 2xCassette $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
Four sides of new sound materials constructed in early 2021. “Brain buzz is a familiar sensation on Trance Tapes. Anyone who makes it through at reasonably high volume will absolutely feel slightly insane by the end. A person could be convinced that this tape was leaked from a secret CIA black ops project involving the weaponization of high frequencies.”
Voice Studies 04
(My Dance The Skull - VS04) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
"The most fucked-up installment to date," marvel our friends across the pond at Volcanic Tongue. "The sound of mangled and mutilated breath fed through a grinder and coming across like a rust-coated prehistoric numbers station straining to escape the gravities of Aaron Dilloway-style 8-track loop carnage. Dark, threatening and extremely disturbing vocal recordings that work the man/machine divide with uncanny power.” C20.
The Celestial Music Of Comfort Link
(Spleencoffin - SP39) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Slow-moving compositions of layered tape loops, deteriorating mechanical tape echoes, found sounds and spontaneous tape collage. An album full of density and texture with hiss-laden traces of lost melody. Our friends at the Cassette Gods blog compare it to interstellar resonance: “As the samples repeat and deteriorate, the audio, piped in from another place, causes feelings of discovery. It broadcasts the gradual thinning of a veil that separates worlds, exposing the frayed edges of lost portals.” Covers and cassette labels are hand-made from 1920s letterpress celestial diagrams with typewriter text. Opaque red cassettes. C40. Edition of 50.
Attenuating Circumstances
(Chair Chair - hh421) Cassette $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Hypnotic fields with an arresting purity and simplicity of form by Chancre and Canker. From surreptitious machine drones to the fuzz and crackle of damaged circuitry, pitchy tape manipulation to the voids of A.M. radio, eerie field recordings to indeterminate devices cranked and throttled and ground together, Attenuating Circumstances seems to self-medicate in aloof seclusion, a practice the duo has observed for a good thirty years before the rest of us had little choice but to do the same. According to the label description: “Conspiratorial murmurs spreading out from under the door to the darkened conference room on the 17th floor. The leeway diminishes with each passing hour. No one can be trusted, but why would you want to trust someone you’d rather watch suffocate on the stink of dark revenge. Feel it closing in. There is poison in the water. Alone and sobbing in a cubicle. Everybody knows what everybody else has done. They’re all in a trance, but the unspoken agreements won’t last, if they even exist in the first place. More unclear and recursive distortions, the soundtrack to sodomizing the corpse of personal ethics.” Packaged with chips of wood flooring swatches and a plastic birthday gift bag inside a cardboard catfood envelope. C60. Edition of 25
Contagious Slaughter
(Chair Chair - hh423) CDR $10.00
(Chair Chair - hh423) Microcassette $10.00
All the material here — looped and tape-manipulated cut-ups sourced from 78s and microcassettes — was originally released by Chair Chair on the cassettes Disturbing Soap (hh400) and Mustard Gas (hh401). Though remixed and remastered, original 1983 master tapes were made by holding a Walkman up to the horn on a Victrola and the speaker on an answering machine, so brace yourself for fidelity that was already insulted and injured at its genesis. Scratchy fragments of operatic warble, sea shanty doink particles, and cornball, old-timey oompah loompah jab at the brow-furrowing howls and moans delivered via telephone by listeners of Canker and Chancre’s late-night radio show on KCSC in Chico (where they announced their home phone number on the air and encouraged people to call).
CDR is packaged in opaque black jewel box with found photos glued to front and back. Numbered edition of 20.
Tape is packaged in standard plastic microcassette box with found photo glued to the front. Numbered edition of 10
Slide Thrombosis
(Steep Gloss) Cassette $8.00
If the only thing with which the twelve tracks on Slide Thrombosis were imbued was a degree of malevolent steadiness we usually encounter when getting stared down by giant mechanical lizards copulating under a rain of electric crust, hot bone shards, and blobs of paste made of shredded motherboard, we’d have to admit that grunts of “meh, forgettable” from dismissive critics might contain some merit. But the Conduits, two reclusive characters residing in the American south, assemble their loop-dominated tracks with more complicated and nuanced bad feelz. About a third of the sound sources on the album are field recordings captured while traveling on public transportation, where they eavesdrop on and surreptitiously record other passengers talking, streaming music, and watching videos. Another large chunk of the content, also field recordings, comes from anomalous weather and atmospheric activities (some mundane, some assumed to be paranormal environmental events caused by experiments going awry due to sloppy and/or indifferent adherence to protocols by underpaid employees of nefarious corporations). Sterility and lack of feeling are definitely present, but the Conduits’ sound processing and additional electronics decimate their sources into terse fragments. The tracks are bent, damaged, frozen in a state of oxidation, undermining their own sense of predictable drone-ishness with clouds of unease, revulsion, and discomfort. Innards are gorged upon. Old timey footage of buildings collapsing is reassembled in the wrong order. Itches are scratched until they become lesions. No course-correcting is needed when the destination is oblivion. Includes download card. C60 One-minute video here: https://youtu.be/XWzdff9zdIc
KAREN CONSTANCE / LUCIAN TIELENS
...And The Antique African Neck Parts
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.297) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
On this companion tape to ...And The German Pillow Menu (Chocolate Monk 2013), a Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble stalwart trades blows with Blood Stereo’s mean queen. “Tarzan Knows We Kidnapped The Baby” is just the kind of audio glurph slathered with loops and cut-ups you’d expect from the Left Coast loon, while “Tied To A Tree In Bankkop” is loop-heavy head-scratcher with fine passages of drony drump and disorienting voices. Get far from monochrome, ya freak. C20. Edition of 40.
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Day Music / Night Music
(Amerige - Choc.548) LP $27.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.548) Split cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Constance the insomniac presents heavy, processed electronics, field recordings, mangled voices and tape wrangle constructed late at night in bed. Fend off the darkness fears with some Blackburn Academy of the Arts sun glow bloom insight. #pro-peasantmusic. On the flip, synth, tape players, loops and delay squelch and skitter into dream as early bird and morning whistler Nyoukis takes a wee stumble into a low T tower of crud. Recorded during the day live to tape. No nightmares allowed.
LP reissue, edition of 330.
KAREN CONSTANCE / JACKIE STEWART
Jackie Stewart / Karen Constance
(Giant Tank) Split cassette $5.00
Blurred-out fairytale fractures melt on top of warm and limpid music boxes just trying to keep up (including the wind-up ratchet, should you feel compelled to boogie down) in the Smegma / Tenses maestra’s futuristic transmission of indecipherable lullaby residue. An ideal ramp-down into a turntablist ravine where how to properly shit in the woods is the blotto topic du soir. Bears do it, the Pope does it, no reason you should be left in the dark. On the flip, Blood Stereo / Smack Music 7 sister’s mosaic of instructional voice vanishes into and reconstitutes out of parallel tone ribbons and subdural electronic quack. C40
Rapid Decline
(Angry Island) CD + cassette $13.50
Kevin McEleney and Matt Purse aggregate their respective harsh noise incarnations for five tracks of up-close Airbus-fuselage impact disintegration and junk-sprung mutilated harsh noise. The cassette is a split c20, with Constrain’s “The Other Side of Hell” on one side, and Fenian’s “The Last Remains of Papal Superstition” on the other.
The Boundary
(Oxen - OXEN022) Cassette $5.25 (Out-of-stock)
Perpetually chaotic compositions from the master of assault expression. Anxious, frenetic, harsh noise cut-up supremacy. C15
Gucci Tops & Bottoms
(Fake Estates - FAKE008) Cassette $20.00
Recorded live at the Islington, London, England, 2018, with Corsano on drums and Orcutt on his homemade electronic noise program Cracked. Clear cassette case with hand-stamped sticker on outside. The stamp was not perfectly struck; feel free to request a picture before ordering. C20. Edition of 100
ANLA COURTIS / RICHARD FRANCIS
Aucklantida
(Robert & Leopold - R&L042) Cassette $5.75 (Out-of-stock)
Studied and paced drone, textured without caution using cut-ups, modular electronics and bent instrumentation. This trans-Pacific mind-meld collaboration connects the Argentinean composer’s uncomfortable nest of strange and abstract music with the New Zealand sage’s ambient drone waveforms. C40. Edition of 50
Other Secretive Vehicles
(Ikuisuus) Cassette $8.00
Or maybe you're in the mood for audio excursions that whirl into position like the world's slowest tornado in the middle of a vast plain of highlighter pen hues. Might we suggest allowing Anla Courtis (of Argentinean visionaries Reynols) and S. Glass (ex-Evolution Revolution) to escort your party to a gravity pod? C42
A Mark of Disgrace Indicating Ownership
(No Rent) Cassette $11.00
Worst attitude possible. Raw. Messy. Shitty. Introspective. c30. Edition of 100
Everyone Is Welcome In My Room
(Vitrine - VT15) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Gloriously tattered” is how Tabs Out summarizes the “bizarrely mutated musique concrète by … the beloved [journeyman grindeur] with past releases on Hanson…, Chondritic Sound, and his own Mom Costume imprint. Everyone Is Welcome In My Room plays true to Darksmith’s penchant for listlessly foreboding collages…, massive but desolate scenes of vague despair and almost guaranteed doom. Found sounds seamlessly intermix with … anonymous … instruments … and noisemakers.” C30. Edition of 100
Island of Stability / Primitive Version
(No Rent) Cassette $10.00
Tempting though it may be to regard the work of Tom Darksmith as the soundtrack to a debilitating hangover in search of shameless debauchery, nope, you must be thinking of someone else. A 50-year-old who still skateboards, probably. If anything, it’s our contemporary era’s chronic malaise that seems to be what evolves apace with the ongoing doomsday-affirming mumble-scapes and murky abrasions this Oakland-based artist delivers at steady but irregular intervals — not the other way around. Sophistos and returning champions might feel oddly soothed by the new side-long grit terrains on No Rent’s c30, where master forager Darksmith smudges and gnaws the less conspicuous avenues of noise design, like a very determined ostrich auditioning for the role of truffle pig (since he’s down there anyway). It’s your classic journey-not-the-destination work, inefficiency be damned, devoid of stunt screeching beloved by shallow and cynical hacks the world over, too imbued with real-world demands to bother with the showy academic pretense of ascribing significance to the commonplace or to indirectly challenging the listener to not hate his guts by the time the play button snaps off. Darksmith works for a living, presumes you do, too — even you unemployable lunatics — and has loaded Island of Stability Primitive Version with a solid and fulfilling program: churning and grinding molded into a coherent, communal, quasi-narrative mass; voice fragments shattered and scattered near urban storm drains, where the last flickers of meaning rot and ooze downward toward the final mulch pile; and evocations of drama-free emotional desolation hobbling through borderline toxic atmospheres.
Regret Everything
(No Rent) Cassette + Poster $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Without uttering a single syllable, Darksmith Of California sketches a solid case that everyone has been replaced with replicants. Metaphorically, let’s say, if that’s what it takes to accept the premise. Throughout Regret Everything’s thirty-minute capgras-adjacent mood-kill, corrupted and near-stillborn modulations groom themselves against the bristles of truncated fidelity. Here then is No Rent’s apt herald for the invariably bright-with-optimism mornings on the West Coast, with its instances of damaged tape transforming bird-coop piano into anti-erotic asphyxiation, and croaking plank frottage distilled from five-hundred pounds of bird guts pushed out of a trombone. It is a drily disturbing landscape, to be sure, where pock-marked eggs the size of a kidnapper’s van grind against cement walls, raining down flakes and calcium shards. On this slightly reworked reissue of Mom Costume’s 2018 edition of 10, fumes of diesel fuel rise from the surfaces of amorphous chunks of scorched Styrofoam scattered in sugary puddles of avian placenta. Newborn chicks, writhing in balls of discomfort and dread, stretch to puncture the constricting membrane of disorientation, unaware they’ve been blinded by mercury leaked from ruptured polyps bearing down on them. All the machines have tumors. Hello and welcome.
Regular Man / Good Memory
(Regional Bears) Cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
A kind of sequel to Countdown To Man In The Clouds (2010), this time composed of nineties hardcore records destroyed with damaged needles and contact mics. Thick loops collapse into total mud sound on both sides, and attempting to identify deeply buried melodies through the muffled grinding will likely end in narcosis (perhaps a preferred state as the doomsday clock ticks in double-time). c30
Voice Studies 14
(My Dance The Skull - VS14) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
Performance poet and Kommisar Hjuler collaborator AG Davis flees from the rumblings, the snorts and onomatopoeia and engages a battle with his own inspiration. Poetry as a result of breath, invented language and delusions.
Crooked Doppler
(Tanzprocesz) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Figurative abstraction and butchery vs forced structures and speculative drifts, battling it out within noisy collages, field recordings, invented instruments, found sounds and electronics. C48
Gogo Underworld
(Cor Ardens) Cassette $13.25
The debut album by this Philadelphia-based multi-dimensional energy worker and interdisciplinary practitioner — known primarily as a visual and performance artist with a keen eye for the miraculous potentials of everyday objects and found materials —combs through waste streams of aural (and spiritual) detritus the way a committed cruiser scans through stations on a radio. Deal’s densely layered field recordings and plunderphonic samplings periodically break into beautiful songs, with more recognizable instruments freely mixing influences of African American free jazz, Black punk, gospel / negro spirituals, and divination rituals. Gogo Underworld presents the first installment of a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk to be spread across multiple releases and a film that explores “how the memories and mythologies of the Black diaspora can be used as conduits of historical and cultural preservation, tracing its global footprint, disrupting Western colonial thought modes, and deploying dreaming as channels for potentiality, non-linear modes of intercepting time and space, and celebration as resistance.” Packaged in wax / glass object. Edition of 100
Thing Music
(Eh?) Cassette $10.00
“Unsettled and uneasy” is how The Wire describes Thing Music, an album that “gnaws at its audience, an anti-music clot-clog so palpably physical you can almost hold it as you hear it, composed using objects including bouncy balls, mini Solo cups and a large metal spring…. A living, breathing Rube Goldberg machine determined to subdue and assimilate every sentient being who encounters it.”
Custody
(Beniffer Editions) Cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Canadian outsider rock recorded between 1991 and 1997, sounding like a mix of mangled Corvette tunes by a basement philosopher. With illustrations from lead singer Rudy Gwana's high school yearbook. C86. Edition of 100.
Low: Live In Chicago
(Maple Death Records - MDR005) Cassette $7.55 (Out-of-stock)
Yes, a complete cover of David Bowie’s 1977 album Low recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. While quite faithful to the original, Disappears’ rhythm section — Noah Leger and Damon Carruesco — injects Side A with steroids: seven buzzing songs, muscular and ferocious. On the more avant-garde Side B, “Warszawa” is an intense battleground between Brian Case’s and Jonathan van Herik’s treated guitars, while “Subterraneans” swaps saxophones for Rother-esque kosmiche curlicues, and “Weeping Wall” builds to an appropriate and fearsome Berlin wall of noise. Includes download coupon.
Listen to “Breaking Glass” here: https://soundcloud.com/mapledeathrecords/disappears-breaking-glass
A Halo Of Affectation
(777 Was 666 - 777-023) Cassette $12.00
New materials by one of the architects behind Whitehouse’s “Lightning Struck My Dick” -- Jim Goodall (Debt Of Nature, Medicine). Edition of 100
DOWNWARDLY MOBILE RENAISSANCE MAN
Seeing The Elephant
(Regional Bears) Used Cassette $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Noise, musique concrète, and sound poetry by The Melkings’ Tom DeAngelo. C40
Strategies Against Architecture II
(Mute - 61100-4) Used Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Their second annotated retrospective, with tracks from 1984 to 1990. c90.
Radio Embudagonn
(Art Into Life - AIL004) 2xLP + cassette $39.00 (Out-of-stock)
An intensely distinctive approach to sound collage by Wataru Kasahara, who has been active since the1980s. Art Into Life’s reissue rescues the double-CDr and booklet (Erinyes 2009) from self-released-in-an-edition-of-eighteen-copies obscurity. Includes handmade twelve-page booklet (purpose-made prints, porn mag collages), packaged in a envelope, tied with a black-dyed kite string. Edition of 100.
Equipment Pointed Ankh
(Sophomore Lounge - SL079) Cassette $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Ecstatic, flaming Riviera sunrise electric guitar and prison-spirited tapestries by Kentucky drone magician Jim Marlowe (Tropical Trash, Teal Grapefruit), aided and abetted by known associates and persons of interest. Edition of 100. c32
Listen to “Green Folding Room” here: http://sophomoreloungerecords.com/equitmentpointedankh.html
MARTÍN ESCALANTE / CHARLIE MUMMA
Escalante / Mumma
(Sploosh - SPLOOSH14) Cassette $7.00
In which the Peruvian sax maverick and Sissy Spacek’s lord of percussion imagine a hospital getting ransacked by an insane porcine tyrant riding a donkey with a giant scrub brush jammed up its ass. Heavily wobbled screech delivered with cross-eyed power madness, blur-limbed hooves swatting at every sterile thing in sight. Fucking stellar. c22
Juanita
(Sploosh - SPLOOSH15) Cassette $7.00
Above a jagged undercurrent of pulsating wub, Escalante blasts strangulated heat on solo sax. c20
Brittle
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS034) Cassette $8.25 (Out-of-stock)
Volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning of the side-long works on Brittle — a vibrant landmark in Evans’s catalogue of harsh wall noise, kosmische explorations, and dronologist collage. Beacons of monochord guitar. Radiant dispersions of glare and trill. Compacted bowed metal resonance. Interstitial ecological sounds from water, bird, and tree. Exhumed cassette minimalism. And a gasping, pulsing, morphing drone that bends around each of these sound objects. Parallels to the meticulous and wondrous bricolage by this resident of northeast Georgia can be found in Chalk, Organum, Toniutti, and Grzinich. C40
Botched Migraine
(Idiopathic - IR004) Cassette $6.75
Matt Purse crafts intense, full-bodied industrial soundscapes with surgical attention to detail and punishing execution and then shifts gears unnervingly to a furious and relentless noisecore blasts featuring drummer Josh Taylor (of Foot Village and Friends Forever). C20
Impression
(Spleencoffin - SP38) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Minimalist drone compositions by this modular synth master and visual artist, whose stark, textural pieces evolve over side-length explorations of raw analog synthesis.
Listen to an excerpt from “Manet” here: https://soundcloud.com/spleencoffin/christian-michael-filardo-manet-excerpt
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.349) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Jameson Sweiger used to ride high in the saddle of mind mumble combo Maths Balance Volumes, then when that braw unit evaporated he disappeared into a dank hole to lay an egg somewhere in Ohio. Although off the radar for a few years he has kept his fingers jammed into tape machines and whatnot. Tthese recordings, made between 2009-2013 in Toledo and Memphis, will simonize the thought dome of the listener. Screen printed card slipcase with stuck on paper front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 40.
A “Therefore” Between Two Non- Sequiturs
(Coherent States) Cassette $10.00
An orgiastic and furious sound collage (but, simultaneously, a minimalist composition with a repeating pattern in which to easily lose oneself). It is pure musique concrète. It is clearly tape music. It is the externalization of Andrew No C Zukerman’s mental state. It is a paranoid but delicate grotto. A Soft QSO. An experimental noise concert canceled at the last minute and moved from the venue’s basement to the adjacent pizza house’s parking lot with the artist performing for the occasional passersby as his only audience. It is the leftover fries of lovers who broke up in the midst of eating them. Dive in. Softly.
More Trivialities
(Healing Power) Cassette $7.00
“The mangled field recordings and wobbling tones continue Andrew Zukerman’s ongoing marriage of classic musique concrète techniques with his trademark sly playfulness,” observed NOW. “If early academic electronic hadn’t been so averse to pop, it might have sounded like this. Woozy tape loops, crackling static and manically skipping audio fragments often disorient but occasionally solidify songs like ‘A Man Urinating In Loblaws’ into something unexpectedly funky, albeit far too grimy and lo-fi to work on even the most forward-thinking dance floors.”
Sounds Like Zydeco
(Stoned Again) Cassette $7.00
Andrew Zukerman “manipulates sound into tapestry using an endless supply of stolen music, city noise and the natural world, explains Neon Waste. “It’s the radio tuner in your mind backing-and-forthing in your subconscious, or the disjointed reality of half-remembered dreams.”
Studio Jams
(Beniffer Editions) Used Cassette $12.00
Lo-fi house from Karlskrona, Sweden. Side A contains classic Frak club sounds with call 'n' response bumping and a clairvoyance between band members. On Side B, things get weird and abstract, with the bass handling the transportation. In a seven-inch-by-seven-inch hardboard package, five-color screenprinted front, two on the back. C45. Edition of 100
Combinations #1
(Entr'acte - E191) Cassette $5.25
Patterns, rhythms and structures, like memories from Francis’s surroundings. Recorded 2013–14 at the Künstlerhäuser in Worpswede, at Worm in Rotterdam, and at home in Auckland. Edition of 80. C60 with same thing on both sides.
Listen to an excerpt of “Two Airs” here: http://entracte.co.uk/projects/richard-francis-e191/
Middles
(Banned Productions - BP228) Cassette $5.75
Live recordings made with oscillators, signal generator, spring reverb, EQ filters, delay, noise, loop maker, computer. Approach as feedback. c30
Talking Machines
(Banned Productions - BP189) Cassette $5.75 (Out-of-stock)
Live recordings made with oscillators, signal generator, spring reverb, EQ filters, delay, noise, microphone, dried seed pods, hands, paper, loop maker, computer. C30
2018: Recent Amelioration of Lingering Proprioceptive Issues, Elimination of Winter Coat Improves Muscle Tension
(Regional Bears - RB08) Cassette $7.50
“My original approach,” explains the professor himself, “Was that of a fairly standard concrète bricolage that has characterized my previous work. I found upon listening back that the resulting semiotic content of the sounds used were not far from suggesting the type of peripheral agitations that buttress a well-hidden fragility of temperament at any given time: respiratory tics, the surfacing of unbecoming affectations, possibly born of circadian disturbances and their unconscious dream residue, and others. I had then decided that the most fitting lens through which to view these works is that of these physiological aberrations being logged, as in aural data entries, as the main determinants of these formal particularities. ‘Corporo-material conditions’ may perhaps precede my supposed choices in providing a means to navigate these recordings and place them within a scope of intent. Perhaps a more succinct title for this release would have simply been ‘Physiology Music’. In any case, one could listen in search of entertaining terminals, as one would skim a TV guide while waiting at the pharmacy or veterinarian’s office.” Totally up to you. C30
60' Cassette
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS031) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in this tape-on-tape monolith, where the murky surfaces are pricked and the bruises of multiple generations of recording are revealed. Rasping hiss, mud-gray compression, spluttering motors, rancorous textures of iron filing shards, flecked dried scabs, garbled noise, irradiated drones and thrumming bellows from the machine drown in heavy, elemental waveform crush. The forces of the grand architectural scores of minimalism are still at work on 60' Cassette, obfuscated in flurries of fetid noise and unspooled tape. Look to the crumbling roar of Kevin Drumm, Chop Shop, or more aptly Japanese obscurantist Toukaseibunshi for a likeminded approach.
Nothing Glimmers
(Spleencoffin - SP37) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Minimalist synths, mangled tapes, found sounds, and hazy depraved voices coalesce into slow-drifting murky textural pieces. Edition of 50.
Listen to “Nothing” here: https://soundcloud.com/spleencoffin/nightshade-gel-nails-nothing
The Gero-P
(Black Operations) Cassette $20.00
On this reissue of a mid-80s collaboration by Gerogerigegege and NP, Fumiyoshi Suzuki is on guitar, vocals, and violin, while Juntaro Yamanouchi can be heard on vocals, guitar, and electronics. Photocopy cover in a ziploc bag. C30
Piano River
(Black Operations) Cassette $30.00
With the deluxe edition long-ago promised by Unreliable Tosser Records having entered some sort of void where it seems to be destined to remain permanently missing in action, Black Operations comes to the rescue with the Sucker Edition, so named because it includes a lollipop. That's on top of the ziploc bag and the photocopy. Amazing synergistic design for "plastics sheet record music by cutting machine for a making seven-inch EP," no? Don't laugh, but it says "Not for sale. For friends only." Happy Opposites Day.
Convicted Felon Adjusted For Inflation
(Coherent States - CS18) 2xCassette $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Coherent States - CS18) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A surreal collage of songs, sounds, Barbara Manning’s vocals, voice samples, loops, out-of-context rhythms, field recordings, electronics, cut-up manipulated noises, a cover of The Shaggs’ “Why Do I Feel?”, and anything else which is not considered music, even if it is, and does not need actual instruments to be played, even if they are used. The duo’s twisted orgy of sound borders on audacious, which the phrase “extremely psychedelic” fails to completely encapsulate. C37
Double-cassette edition comes with extra inserts and fragments. Bonus cassette is likewise snapped in half and unplayable.
Namaste, Judas
(Dinzu Artefacts - DNZ13) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Four surrealist narratives obscured, encoded, abstracted, and projected onto wobbly canvases using loops, field recordings, electronics, found sound, improperly played instruments, and encrypted treatments where very little is what it seems to be. Includes free download card. C30
Spicy Your Life
(Beartown) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
A thirty-minute dreamscape that splatters the walls with spongiform sunshine. In this life-altering walkabout in the outback of the unconscious, messages from within to go straight to voicemail for the foreseeable. You’re on borrowed time. Imported from UK
... And The German Pillow Menu
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.278) Split cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a two-volume split tape gonk-off between The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble and Blood Stereo (to be followed, glob help us, by a Karen Constance / Lucian Tielens cassette) is a prologue to a full-blown Blood Lewiis collaboration. Glass spins short yarns using bottle cap, hairbrush, tapes, turntable, violin and voice, with guest clarinet by My Little Panda, while Nyoukis calls upon the forces of gravity and fermentation for his side-long trip to the bottom of a bottle via tapes, voice, piano, drums, trumpet, violin, reel-to-reel, Library Of Congress C1 tape player and objects. C20. Edition of 40.
Dan Graham & The Static at Riverside Studios London
(Primary Information) Split cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Recorded live on February 24, 1979, and previously released that same year by Audio Arts, Dan Graham’s “Performer / Audience / Mirror” deconstructs the relationship between performer and audience by flanking the stage with a large mirror in back and delivering a monologue through four phases: (1) the artist facing the audience and describing himself and the attitudes his movements signify; (2) the artist facing the audience and describing their external behaviors; (3) the artist facing the mirror (back to the audience) and discussing his movements and their signification; and (4) the artist (still facing the mirror) describing the audience and their movements through a reverse perspective. With Glenn Branca on guitar, Barbara Ess on bass, and Christine Hahn on drums, The Static’s 41-minute live recording rips through “Inspirez Expirez” and “Don’t Let Me Stop You,” among others. Edition of 500. C80
Listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/primaryinformation/sets/dan-graham-the-static-live-at/s-QQJby
Underrated Glances At The Edge Of Town
(Maple Death Records - MDR012) Cassette $7.75 (Out-of-stock)
Stealing his stage name from an old sage picker encountered on a summer journey through the Albanian rocky landscape, Dominique Vaccaro now resides in Bologna where he wrote and recorded his debut for Maple Death Records, an album that wanders down the path created by Takoma and Vanguard guitar legends. A fire-in-the-belly, sweat-drenched soul, J.H. Guraj soaks in cultures from far away in order to build a new sense of home and belonging. Vaccaro’s work over the last ten years as a visual artist and electro-acoustic musician (musique concrète with analog devices and tape recorders) certainly informs his approach, but Underrated Glances At The Edge Of Town creates space and dimension solely through the use of his fingerpicking and cinematic attitude.
Neu Dimension
(Helicopter - H63) 7-inch + cassette $22.50 (Out-of-stock)
Two sessions, one recorded by mail in 2004, and one recorded at a studio in Shinjuku, 2009, alternating between sharp, cut-up collage, fleeting junk sounds, hard electronics, noise, and vocals. Boxset with many inserts from Masaya Nakahara (formerly Violent Onsen Geisha).
Recorded Live In Los Angeles October 2013
(Idiopathic - IR006) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Recorded late at night in a downtown Los Angeles loft, this cassette captures Hammer’s reel-to-reel sampling at its most intimate and ephemeral. An unlikely and stirring symphony made of spliced selections from a bargain bin CD collection. Crazed. C37
Hindered Soul
(Eminent Observer) Cassette $4.50
The source material of the subtle collage on side A is a bizarre, old-woman-read dictation/exercise tape. Haunting and strangely rhythmic and beautiful in its own way. Likewise, “gives the impression of_____” on the flip is another spectral voice collage but with more space and variety of sources. C27
Preamble To Nihil
([ no label ]) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ideas that day were viewed as a bird’s eye from the foreboding above. Empty of meaning where meaning could at last be emptied. “Sounds of wonky lo-fi guitar, dreamscape poetry (word and mouth play), looped vibes, arguments, church bells and brass bands (Brighton parklife?), turntables, general rustle, hustle and bustle,” notes our friend at Remuhmuration blog. “Sax blurts, ampnoise. There’s … recorder playing that sounds like an intro to an old Good Missionaries song. It’s all in the editing and presented so smoothly, like listening to a jigsaw being built.” C32
Scarlet
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS030) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Jagged bursts of strobe lights, cackling radio signals bristling with interference, sawtooth patterns of tactile noise, torn flesh and scabbed wounds are some of the building blocks this crucible of unkempt rhythm and noise-pulse turbulence. Eight tracks, decomposed and sutured together from the various sources of electromagnetic and psychic detritus into an unstable mutation of sequential error, stand as vastly radical and obsessive variations on the theme of repetition through trauma. Each may have begun with the same system of building blocks, but quickly spiral into disparate orbits, time-lag accumulation, tunnel-vision mania, schizoid detours, amplified seances, and teleological endgames.
Throttle And Calibration
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS040) Cassette $8.25 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a series of albums where Haynes digs through Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover archive — which includes field recordings of refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of Aeolian harps, massive oil tanks, and the torrent of noise from the Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower — and grotesquely exaggerates the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. This discordant work finds company near the Schimpfluch Gruppe’s aktionist stains and the sour collages of 150 Murderous Passions. Includes an additional 20 minutes of material not included in Crónica’s previous digital release. C60
Conditions Of Acrimony
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS036) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
This prolonged electrical cramp marks the first published recording of Himukalt — Ester Kärkkäinen’s lacerated (de)compositions addressing collapsed psychological states that dislocate the body, the self, and the spirit into horror, fear, doubt, hostility. The first of what one hopes is many transmissions from Himukalt stands shoulder to shoulder next to virulent strains of power electronics and industrial decay (unleashed by Puce Mary, Anenzephalia, Maurizio Bianchi, Maria Zerfall, etc.). Exhaustive, claustrophobic, and cryptic.
Clam Bake
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.289) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Throughout Holmes’s multi-tiered assemblage of showtune tape-loops, crushed signals thrash around in the background, tangled in a pasty murk of decaying black saliva and corrupted magnetism, while the violently cornball nature of the source material (Rogers and Hammerstein’s vision of pre-bohemian utopia Carousel) gets the scrambled semaphore treatment up front. Fragments of orchestral schmaltz, melodramatic vocalizations, and snippets of dialogue with anachronistic cadences are the building blocks of this deranged spazolopolis. If your idea of heavenly reward is Flee Past’s Ape Elf, Color Him Coma, Acnode One, or I Love You, Please Love Me Too, you’ll find Clam Bake drool-inducing. Edition of 40.
Twisted Nerve
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.403) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ferric bruxism by the lowlife behind Clam Bake (Chocolate Monk 2014) and one half of the mysterious Occult Hand. Don’t let the Hawaiian shirt fool you; this album leaves your integrity in a pool of jellied crumbs on the floor. Like a three-day chemical chew with no additional hydration. Let the Prince of Dorkness help get your ass on that dissecting table, baby. Numbered edition of 50.
Megabus To Clubland
(Chocolate Monk - choc.505) Cassette $7.50
Daz Adcock and Luke Poot (with the occasional guest appearance from Ken): trapped in the flat, sometimes feeling fucking terrible, often being successfully daft, permanently kicked out of society for riding a carpet. Numbered edition of 60
Concepcion Huerta / Eve Matin
(Sploosh - SPLOOSH11) Split cassette $7.00
Damaged, pock-marked textures roll around inside oblong funnels on one side (Ms. Huerta uses tapes and contact microphones), while Ms. Matin on the flip grinds a harp into dark zones previously regarded as the exclusive domain of didgeridoos blown through the eye sockets of charred giraffe skulls. c48
T. Penn Collections
(Saga House - SH03) Cassette $6.00
Eight rarities from the archives of this centerpiece of New Jersey gunk. With a mirror bent to the spirit of Subterranean Records-era Flipper, T. Penn’s outsider haze and destabilized psych visions are implacable and humorous, not at all mystical, but still complex. The album stands as a vestige of carefully manicured messthetics, an unshakeable vision of decrepitude as fortitude. The 46-minute A-side transmutes into an even more alien prayer the familiar elements of the B-side in reverse. “Music Is Not My Religion But This Is My Prayer” opens the B-side with violent, tectonic low-end shifts. The collection proceeds fearlessly and enigmatically, from solo dirge to guitar rock squall, to subdued bedroom renditions of Marc Bolan and R. Stevie Moore. Includes free download. C92
Listen here: https://sagahouse.bandcamp.com/album/t-penn-collections
Humectant Interruption / Rorn
(Heresee - HS13SS01) Cassette $5.00
2003 release, the first in the label's Splingles series.
Cone In Horse
(Beniffer Editions) Cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Unsound by Toronto artist Kevin Hainey, whose hi-fi mic picks up ghostly atmospheres from source materials smoke and breath. In an eight-inch-by-eight-inch screenprint. C44. Edition of 50.
No Knot Of Tubes (Superhexen)
(Pleasance) Cassette $2.00
The closest thing to a rock album in the Kapali Carsi discography contains a piece for amplified gong, another for deconstructed bass guitar, and a final “Riffigy,” for self-accompanied bass guitar. Edition of 100
Much Like Yourself
(Chocolate Monk - choc.526) Cassette $8.00
At one of the last Crazy Doberman shows before the dreaded Covid jaws clamped down, a twitchy gent sporting a fine skullet and rocking a Heart Of The Congos t-shirt approached the ensemble — nothing unusual there — and talked excitedly about his “plastic & mystic art,” and how through the power of the voice he could “prove that social graces are but a side dish of deceit.” The players got edgy as Mr. Quick Talk rummaged in his bag. A tape was gifted and then off he went into the night. As soon as they jammed the tape, they knew where its natural home was and kindly proceeded to post it on to Wino Lodge. Here you’ll find the sound of Kiekes letting it all go, speaking in tongues, mumbling, singing, maybe even losing his mind. Multi-layered voice and tape crud scurry back and forth, looping and lopping, garbling and gurning. The only credits on the tape read “voice, dictaphone, microphones, cassettes, tape loops, voice memos, 4-track, moisturizer, mixer.” Hard to tell if this is the work of a student of sound poetry and text sound composition, or just a loner with a vision. Either way he is speaking our language and it is life-affirming stuff. C24. Edition of 50
Oui
(Santé Loisirs) Cassette $10.00
Lo-fi and awkward songs using an acoustic bontempi and cheap synths. Packaged inside woodblock-printed, reversed LP jacket. Edition of 100
Yume No Kippuuri No KMR
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.265) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The fourth album of right-on failings from everyone’s favorite acid-enka freak-out band delivers more broken avant-garde blues / garage rock. Edition of 100.
Standard Deviation
(Oxen - OXEN032) Cassette $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Thoroughly superb harsh noise, abounding with blossoms of metal corruption. Alan Bloor scours and scythes through the destructive stress of an active, real-time debauching of iron caging and light gauge stainless steel. No overdubs, no loopers. C40
Voice Studies 03
(My Dance The Skull - VS03) Cassette $9.50
"The tape starts out in ultra-minimal fashion," summarizes our astute comrades at Volcanic Tongue, "With Mama singing on the very edge of hearing before she bursts into a concerted almost Junko-esque series of shrieks and body convulsions and Kommissar enters with a cracked nursery rhyme theme that he repeats to the point of insanity while reducing Mama’s accompaniment to virtual hysteria.” C40
Modern Dance Technique Environments
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Originally released on the Hoctor label in 1979, and influenced by In C and minimalism as well as then-emerging west coast new age music, the unofficial facsimile edition reissue of this album of dance music for continuous movement features Roland Tripp (vibraphones, bells, traps, percussion), Kenny Sawhill (bass guitar, percussion, chorus), and Krupka on percussion and chorus.
Can Yr Ysgol
(Krim Kram) Cassette $9.75
Rhythmic sounds both dissonant and harmonious by Lauren de Sá Naylor and Hilary Knott, who use voices, loops, field recordings, bells, drums and harmoniums. c60
Leah P
(Oxen - OXEN034) Cassette $4.50 (Out-of-stock)
A confident unleashing of forceful, dissonant, soaring tracks, expertly crafted and structured to sublime and dynamic crescendos of equal parts cut-up, harsh noise and extended harsh noise technique. Peak assault intuition. C10. Edition of 50.
Refill
(Loose Medicine) Cassette $10.00
Todd W. Emmert and Edward Madill’s home-recorded electronic / industrial folk / psychedelic instrumentals — the 14 best ones from the four albums they recorded in 2020 during the pandemic.
Voice Studies 06
(My Dance The Skull - VS06) Cassette $9.50
Duo effort by Mark E. Miller and Matthew Wascovich. The former's a percussionist who knows his way around an Indonesian Gamelan orchestra and has contributed to work by the usual downtown suspects, while the latter is Cleveland kingpin and frontman of Scarcity of Tanks, with more books of poetry and artwork than most undergrads could read in a whole semester. C20. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2011
Huachafa
(Sploosh - SPLOOSH09) Cassette $7.00
Disorienting grit-befouled gusts from the ledge of a skyscraper by Messrs Escalante and Leguia, the former a lone gunman whose weapon of choice is brass AF, the latter your apex improviser from Lima. c60
Trapping Configuration
(Eminent Observer) Cassette $4.50 (Out-of-stock)
Trivial objects, sound sculptures, field recordings, and other sonic oddities — manipulated and organized with a truly amazing touch. Natural, languid, with stretches of silence that feel like inhalations. C28
Living In The Time Of The Golden Circle
(End Of The Alphabet - EAR012) Cassette $6.00
Seemingly concocted by a mad scientist, Living In The Time Of The Golden Circle brews up chemical cocktails using loopers, fuzz pedals, small keyboards and assorted electronics. On “Spinning In Sand” a pair of fuzzed out Casio-harpsichord tracks duels over various glitchy noises and burning organ drones. On the nine-minute “Save Petrol, Burn Cars,” distant submerged bangings and luminescent keyboards fuzzily glide between a handful of notes. An inviting collection of mini noise ragas. C35
Southern Bleach
(Was Ist Das - WAS33) Cassette $6.00
Blown-out sounds inspired by a long sunny afternoon talking mysticism and music with Cameron Stallones of Sun Araw in a beautiful Japanese garden in Los Angeles. C38
Jasu Jest
(Krim Kram) Cassette $10.00
The debut release by Dressing and Uoerhe seamlessly blends broken textural tape noise, magnetic wobble, faint buried melodies, fragments of distant voices and incidental sounds, and obscured domestic and field recordings. This mysterious murky tape music is an incredibly accomplished first statement akin to Hands To, Yeast Culture, early Small Cruel Party. C20
Black Night / New Morning
(Spam - #10) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Nocturnal and noisy collage fueled with wee-hours caffeine. Includes Biro Crimes, a sixteen-page riso-printed zine of Melchior’s drawings done in the waiting rooms of the Duke Cancer Clinic. Edition of 80.
Listen to a five-minute excerpt of “Black Night” here: https://soundcloud.com/flamingocreatures/dan-melchior-black-night-excerpt-spam10
Human Of Stow
(Tutore Burlato - #05) Cassette $8.75 (Out-of-stock)
An oddly satisfying instrumental-and-sound collection, layered without listening to what was already recorded. C40
Listen to a three-minute excerpt here: https://soundcloud.com/tutoreburlato/dan-melchior-human-of-stow-excerpt
Movement Musik
(Regional Bears - 13) Cassette $13.00
Thomas DeAngelo and Jim Strong follow the abnormal circumstances documented on Outten O.D.’s: A Sound Event In Five Movements (The Gift of Music 2017) with tapes, text, rooms, the former’s low fuss devices, the latter’s sculptural playables. “The Strong estate in Narberth, PA, is probed, prodded, and milked with all the dexterity of a bemused child,” says Jim. “In comparison to the two prior tapes…, something approaching ‘patience’ [is] on display, with an intermittent, hovering dread redolent of heady classics by Hastings of Malawi, East Bionic Symphonia or The Curfew Recordings. Eventually our journey circles around, as it must, [like] a dog chasing its own tail. Crucially, this music can be enjoyed solely on sensual character, without any speculation of intent or analysis, as in a dog licking its own arsehole.”
Migration Of The Snails
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
Originally released by Energy Discs in 1980, this unofficial facsimile edition reissue of the second album by this interesting branch of the Hawkwind family tree (featuring Del Delmar on electronics) is raw and heavily exploratory, often shifting styles radically within a single track, moving from quiet chamber orchestras to dissonant guitar freak outs with smears of analog electronics filling in gaps along the way.
Fluidium
(Beniffer Editions) Cassette $14.00 (Out-of-stock)
A real growler on side A, with additional sounds and final touches by Kiyoharu Kuwayama. The title track on the B side is a concrète vocal exploration with additional sax and synth accompaniments. In 1976, while preparing The Perfect Performance for the Extra-Terrestrial exhibition in the ICC, James Lee Byars saw a halo around Mich's head and manically tried to capture it in a series of twenty Polaroids (ultimately failing). Mich already tried to visualize the 11th or M-Dimension in previous performances; The Fluidium can be considered another experiment in a similar direction. In a sextuple foldout hand-cut box with five-color silkscreen on the front. The gatefold is a three-color silkscreen performance / film still. C47. Edition of 100
Harmony Hollywood
(Chocolate Monk - choc.602) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
He of Climax Golden Twins, Idol Ko Si, Sublime Frequencies etc., comes good with a beautiful tape to soothe and confuse. “All sounds created [were] with or recorded through a 1960 Harmony Hollywood H39 arch top hollow body electric guitar in improvisational bursts throughout 2022,” explains Millis. “More than 20 years ago, I traded my first ever acoustic guitar to Patric Barber from the band Blowhole for this Harmony guitar and a copy of the Sun City Girls Grotto of Miracles LP. Not sure who got the better end of the deal. I love playing that Harmony. I even like listening to Grotto of Miracles. So I guess it was me.” Uncle Jim, on the other hand, “was groping for a little more rhumba and calypso from this goblin smirker with his Lomax-molded spin pipe-drool but I suppose a Truman Capote underwater soundtrack’ll have to do, although I’m not sure how many seahorses he can stuff in his Honduran fishbowl.” So now you know.
A World Of Difference
(Regional Bears - 15) Cassette $9.00
Enjoyably varied collage work by Frans de Waard.
Thrown For Two Loops
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.284) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
While trying to squeeze magic out of a dying Bee Gees 8-track tape during Colour Out Of Space 2013, a minor disaster befell Gen Ken Montgomery: the tape jammed. Before allowing the carcass to be hauled from the premises, he tore out chunks of mangled tape and later gave them to Tom White and Sean Julian. Edition of 60.
Voice Studies 05
(My Dance The Skull - VS05) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
A breakthrough in mumbling and electronic screeching. C20.
Mystery Item #11
(Mystery Label - ???) Cassette $8.00
If you order this item, what we send to you is chosen from a rotating selection of random obscurities. It's not a hoax or a prank or a concept. You're not going to get a box of wind; we're not going to mail your order to some arbitrary address in the wrong state; there will be no Carpenters albums with "Circuit Wound" scrawled across the cover. The Mystery Items are stylistically and aesthetically consistent with the rest of our stock. And they are sent same as any other item that is ordered. The changing price and format shown is item-accurate. Artist, title, label are not dilvulged prior to purchase.
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.350) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Heavy and considered collaboration between the six-string experimenter supreme from Body/Head, Ceylon Mange, etc., and master saxophone shrill-seeker (ex-Futshitsusha). One side recorded in the studio backed with a live brain bender from the Easthampton Flywheel. Screen printed card slipcase with rubber stamp front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 50.
Lune Spettrali
(Maple Death Records - MDR006) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
The Weird Moons album (Castle Face 2015) on the A Side — true synthetic pop and pure lost-planet paranoid-night-calming songs by this veteran of the shadowy Los Angeles underground (White Fence, Ariel Pink, Cass McCombs). The B Side was recorded live to tape on a hot summer night in a tiny Bologna gallery hidden by one of the many porticos looming intensely in the city. Includes download coupon. C60
Swine
(Nuhrst - NE77) 7-inch + cassette $35.00
Following Where The Dead Things Are (Nuhrst 2009) and Betwixt Descending Corridors (Self Abuse 2009), the crypt-dwelling alter ego of Ryan Oppermann circulates madness and blood through the coarse veins of the dying. “Swine” and “Defecated Bones,” two tracks that have remained hidden within troubled chambers for years, earn a helping hand from basement scum butcher Charlie Draheim on backing squelch-sound and glass treading. Most vile. Seven-inch box includes C35 cassette, two buttons, embroidered patch, sixteen-page book. Signed in silver by the artist. Edition of 260.
These Are Not The Final Days
(Spleencoffin - SP42) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
A perfect distillation of the aggressive feedback and piercing synth deconstructions that characterize the live sound of this long-running noise project from Baltimore’s Alex Strama. “Busted beats, raw feedback, and near-punk,” says The Village Voice admiringly, “Particularly focused and amiably corroded.” Covers are printed in blue on translucent vellum J-cards with green cassettes. C30. Edition of 50.
Dire Aging
(777 Was 666 - 777-024) Cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ambient blurred music by Mike Collino and Knox Mitchell. Artwork by Darksmith Of California. Edition of 100.
Peasant Swill
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette $9.25 (Out-of-stock)
Crude experiments for voice, tape, electronics and field recordings. Side A blurts and sputters brown-out vocals followed by slowing loop meditation. Fidelity be damned. Side B is an invitation to join the lower vibration of reality that is Brighton’s Theatre district. Ding ding! Numbered edition of 28. Each cover is individually collaged and rubber stamped.
Voice Studies 01
(My Dance The Skull - VS01) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
"The Tree Is Tabled," recorded live at Nefertiti Jazz Club, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2010, reworked at home, February 2011. "Music For Trainables" recorded 2002 at home with Karen Constance, Patrick Wells, Cecile Gilbert, Caroline Lewis, Jussi Brightmore and Paul Wilson. Reworked at home, February 2011. C20.
Doomsday For Madman
(American Tapes) Used Cassette $75.00
Collaboration backed with the lone Wolf Eye solo. Hand-made paintings glued to outer box, plus standard American Tapes spatter-style spray paint. From 1998. c90
Live At Constellation
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.385) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Great live set from February 2017. Full-on electric guitar crack-pottery that blooms up into a glorious brain scrub, which will have you either shitting in your hat or clambering for the drool bucket. Come commune with a higher power. Swaddling optional. Numbered edition of 75
Pure Genius
(Chocolate Monk - choc.491) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
If lockdown has you mulling impending neo-feudalism, then spare a thought for poor William The Bearded, stuck on the left coast surrounded by braying tech bros, coming to terms with the unavoidable truth that we plebes will survive only to serve the machines. Recorded in August 2020 in San Francisco using his own Cracked app. Very few copies in stock, so prepare to be disappointed (if that’s not stating the obvious). Edition of 75
Eye of the Beholder
(Edition Schmid) Cassette $8.00
“Ortmann’s restless, physical compositions occupy an uncanny valley where mysterious and unidentifiable elements mimic the most undignified of human noises a bit too well,” according to Noise Not Music. “Sticky dragging textures evoke the uncomfortable but familiar sound of chewing; prepared guitar rattles clack like chattering teeth; saxophone skronks form wordless, despairing moans. The artwork already implies that Eye of the Beholder won’t be the most calming listen, but this dedication to such an abstract, disturbing sonic palette makes for some truly scary results.” Includes bonus track “Botched Consciousness Upload,” originally released on Sonic Resonance (UPD Organization, 2018). Numbered edition 85/100. C64
Occultronics
(Beniffer Editions) 2xCassette $19.50 (Out-of-stock)
All-analog modular synthesizer exploration of the electronic darkness. Completely screenprinted box, with more optical prints inside. Two C30s. Edition of 98.
ALIA O’BRIEN / ANDREW ZUKERMAN
Even This Old Town Was A Forest
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
Original soundtrack for Birdtown & Swanville’s production of the play written by Aurora Stewart de Peňa, performed by Jon Blair, William Ellis, Cara Gee, Donna Maloney, Naomi Skwarna & Norman Yeung in 2016. No C plays synthesizers and electronics, O’Brien plays organ and flute
20 Eyes
(Oxen - OXEN015) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Solo electronics by Chiaki Omachi. Dense HNW elongated over a static, infinite line of punishing black mold assault. C40
Magnetic Web
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
Originally released by Narco Records in 1973, this unofficial facsimile edition reissue of what Two Headed Dog calls Raicevic’s “masterpiece in all of its acid-laced glory” marks a clear evolution in his sound, thanks to an Arp 2600 in addition to his Moog, and some rhythm boxes. Bizarre, trippy electronic music with an emphasis on pulse and drone.
Zero Gravity
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
Raicevic’s final album under the Nik Pascal moniker, originally released by Narco in 1975, after which he famously sold all his synths to ex-car-racer and future electronic / ambient musician Steve Roach. This unofficial facsimile edition reissue explores the outer and inner space.
Mount Moriah Tocsin
(Alien Passengers) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
“ ‘Diamond Ring’ is a relatively songlike blob with a tin-can drum box tapping away and loops so raw they sound like they were recorded onto masking tape. Jesse Dewlow’s vocals are delivered in a mush-mouthed monotone from beneath a crushing fog of room tone rumble and negative-fidelity hiss. Behind the obtuse nods toward song, form is a stream of errant chatter from an unrelated conversation. A shuffle of mundane extraneous incidental motion persists throughout the album, acting as a sort of anchor as the seasick loops degrade and warp… I hear ocean waves (on ‘Harboring Criminals’, which opens side two), the wind blowing on a microphone, the clicks of someone shifting in their chair. The atmosphere is one of a private performance that the listener is surreptitiously eavesdropping on. And then the album ends with a major catharsis: a full-sounding church organ and chanting punctuated by synth crackle.” c47
Telephone Booth
(All Gone) Cassette $6.00
“The overall mood seems to be informed by codeine and heat stroke, but for the most part Telephone Booth is an album of songs played on guitars and keyboards with that damned drum machine still making sickly clicks as Dewlow distractedly moans verses and choruses. If you squint, you can imagine this to be the demo cassette for a future Kranky album, distortion and mistakes left in with the intent to smooth them all out later.” c47
DAVE PHILLIPS / RUNZELSTIRN & GURGELSTOCK / SUDDEN INFANT
Schimpfluch-Commune Int.
(Nihilist) Used 2x cassette + CDR $60.00
Finalized at the 20th anniversary of Schimpfluch, December 28, 2006, released 2007. Numbered edition of 100. C28 + C34 + 45min disc
Lay-by Fantasy
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette $10.50
More solo weirdness from Sean Conway (formerly of UFO Antler Band and Gas Shepherds), here serving up three tracks of burbling sounds to ease the quease. Zonked and soothing “in the pink” lo-fi analog electronics all laid down direct to tape which the man himself says is “for lay-bys and fetish gatherings and telepathic others.” So you can modulate your mung mind any which way. Numbered edition of 60
Stories of Apophyllite
(Textural) Used Cassette $5.00
Haunted, mellow tape texture and pulsations, organs, voice, flute, percussion, synthesizers, and loops. Cover art by Cody Brant. Edition of 100. C20
The Sun Is The Radioactive Wasp Egg
(Cor Ardens - 04) Cassette $10.00
Matthew Pony Payroll Bones and Jenny Moon Tucker, known for endurance-challenging performance rituals of cymbals and bells flying through the air, splintering ancient railroad surplus, and a lazy hand wielding a sparking power-tool that slowly ate through a rickety mesh of wire fence which was dragged into the center of the venue, begin with their voyeuristic transmission as two individuals casually conversing about local Baltimore eateries, the weather. Small-town observations recede toward a fluid whistling and clatter barely emerged. A swell of pots and pans heaved in pathetic rage. Sort of funny. Amphibious dirge.
The Golden Handshake That Almost Broke My Wrist
(Regional Bears - 11) Cassette $9.00
Reliable madness from Joe Murray, dictaphone and otherwise, meaning: tapes, mouth sounds, text-to-speech machines, bells, and wine glasses. Guest contributors include Otto Willberg, id m theft able, and OD Gee.
радиосон
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS032) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Through a Cold War lens of the paranoiac aesthetic where Radioson emerges. This eponymous release is the first full document for Radioson, the Russian engineer known as [S] who has operated as Five Elements Music and Exit in Grey over the past decade. Radioson maintains the representative compositional fluidity while presenting a darker, noisier, more malevolent disposition here. Disruptive interference, numbers station mechanization, various Russian military transmissions, and electrically charged currents of caustic drone are constructed from a position of clinical detachment over the psychic and physical detritus that spills forth in his homeland. The occasionally kosmiche turns for electronic sequencing are a unique take on the Schnitzler / Schulze strategies from the ’70s, though mapped out on antiquated Russian synthesizers, tape machines, and of course radios. But the exhumation of things past and the parapsychological aesthetics parallel the best work of Andrew Lagowski’s S.E.T.I. when he recorded for Ash International and the psychological dread of industrial ambient practitioners Schloss Tegal.
JAMES ECK RIPPIE / COLIN ANDREW SHEFFIELD
Essential Anatomies [Volume 1]
(Elevator Bath - eeaoa041) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Working exclusively with samples, the duo sculpts commercial recordings via plunderphonics and electronic sound art into abstract beauty, folding nebulous sound into impressions of musicality. Includes download card. C48. Edition of 100
JAMES ECK RIPPIE / COLIN ANDREW SHEFFIELD
Essential Anatomies [Volume 2]
(Elevator Bath - eeaoa042) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
The duo's second volume expands upon the ideas and techniques of the first, with surprising, nuanced improvisations via samplers and turntables. Rippie and Sheffield sculpt commercial recordings via plunderphonics and electronic sound art into abstract beauty, folding nebulous sound into impressions of musicality. Includes download card. C48. Edition of 100
Wood And Metal / The Rita
(Oxen - OXEN024) Split cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
A resolutely hypnotic fury of junk and skin-pummeling percussive mandate on one side by Charlie Mumma (Sissy Spacek, Unexamine, Sewer System) and Ted Byrnes (LAFMS, Airway), recorded live recording at (the) Handbag Factory, Los Angeles. On The flip Sam McKinlay draws from this source and constructs a highly charged, restless harsh wall blast, uncompromising and masterclass in scope. A lingering climax disintegrating all boundaries, emphatically gruesome.
Brainwave Music
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
“Each of the three pieces that make up the original LP released by A.R.C. in 1975 integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long ‘Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones,’ four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analyzed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In ‘Chilean Drought,’ three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. ‘Piano Etude I (Alpha).’ the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters. Unofficial facsimile edition reissue
Fäustchenamt
(Eminent Observer) Cassette $4.50 (Out-of-stock)
Seventeen delirious hodgepodges of field recordings, deconstructed musical performance, disarming electronic textures, and the occasional funky hip-hop beat. If you’re a fan of the dada totalism of LAFMS bands like Le Forte Four, this will be right up your alimentary canal. C40
BRYAN LEWIS SAUNDERS / ARVO ZYLO
The Pleasure Tunnel / The Temple of Paradise
(No Part Of It) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Claustrophobic dream events recorded when Saunders had a lung infection, made even more tense and surreal by the addition of Zylo’s magic. The slow, droning cacophony of “The Pleasure Tunnel” picks up depth as it grows. The whistles and wheezes of Saunders are still there, but the noise is enveloping, a bassy drive that closes in. “The Temple of Paradise” starts more abrasively and settles into whirring, echoing drones – dreamy, then colossal bass. Disconnectedness, jolting and mesmerizing. Includes written transcripts of Saunders’s dreams and a download coupon.
Voice Studies 16
(My Dance The Skull - VS16) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
Beginning with recordings of verbal descriptions of every single bodily sensation had by Saunders during one day, Z’ev returned a written edit of Saunders’s text. Saunders subsequently forced himself wake up many times throughout the night and record more, to which Z’ev then composed music using only his vocals and added the words. To quote Guillaume Belhomme , “The consequence of the gesture on the anguished speaker is always efficient.” c100
The A–Z Of Weirdo: Volume M
(Giant Tank) Cassette $5.00
“Tape-processed work with a thorough focus on voice,” is how our friends at Art Into sum up this deconstruction of descriptions from the late, great Weirdo Records website. “High-speed playback and reverse voices are piled up, and the contents are full of unclear ideas, like these people.” Edition of 50.
Benzedrine Bonanza
(Regional Bears - RB07) Cassette $7.50
Where Omelette Of Disease (Förlag För Fri Musik 2018) is an orgy in painfully hard-driven feedback, and Overdrive (Team Boro Tapes 2018) focuses on rumbling low-end, Benzedrine Bonanza brings a live all-at-once approach, not unlike Schakalens Bror’s earliest cassette excretions, yet now more refined and with the later live energy successfully transferred to tape. Fully fledged free form guitar noise in a league of its own. C18
Nigredo
(Fragment Factory - FRAG29) Cassette $11.50 (Out-of-stock)
Documentation of a live action in Tokyo 2012 by Rudolf Eb.er and Dave Phillips (side A), with the prerecorded sounds for said performance on side B -- one channel per artist, produced independently. Disturbing and challenging as always.
Upside Down
(Oxen - OXEN029) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
This Tokyo-based noise artist delivers scarred, harrowing muzzle blasts of harsh noise cut-up excellence, laying bare a cathartic declaration of an undeniable surplus of talent. This is the first physical solo U.S. release for scum following abrasive cannon volleys of caustic cut-up greatness on Stray Dog vol. 2. C20
SEWER SYSTEM / UNSUSTAINABLE SOCIAL CONDITION
Sewer System / Unsustainable Social Condition
(Oxen - OXEN030) Split cassette $4.50 (Out-of-stock)
Six tracks of vomitus ruination by Charlie Mumma on side A, whose singular strategy of feedback, percussion and growling tension deconstructs noise-core elements with unique and totally dynamic results. Matt Purse pays feedback-laden tribute to Yukimasa Okada on side B with junk-noise conflict obliteration resolving into corrosive harsh noise cohesion. C10
Can We Win
(Regional Bears - RB09) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Shots Bring It In. Due to weather, noise complaints, lack of time, artistic choice, or some combination thereof, Shots’ instrumentation moves indoors. Can We Win replaces the characteristic outdoor resonance of previous releases with tighter, more enclosed environment. The sound sources remain varied as ever, but the running water, somnambulistic percussion, and rupturing metal in play are enfolded in an intimate domestic acoustic space, making for a considered and engaging listen. C32
Accelerant
(Coherent States - CS29) Cassette + 3-inch CDR $22.00
Five massive drone repetitions (plus the fourteen-minute “Mind Gate” on the disc) by Heath Moerland that momentarily become hints of rhythm, only to retreat into subdued and atmospheric tape manipulation. No linear flow would emanate more an essence of synthesis and less a sustained improvisation. In stenciled drawstring cloth bag with six color prints. Edition of 20. C22
Two New Compositions Never Heard Before
(Beniffer Editions) Cassette $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Minimal, spatial pieces reminiscent of A Long Wait Produced Nothing Further (ERS 2001). Each movement of this mellow collage of slightly effected sounds commands attention without asking too much. C50. Edition of 100.
Stimulus Regression
(FM Dust - DUST048) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Half an hour of power, a dream-scraping cosmic drip direct from the gentle hands and addled brain of Dustin Krcatovich. Cover art by one of the following: Jess Ackerman, Jeremy Wheeler, SSC, Fred Thomas. Includes download card. Edition of 100. C30
Sic In Se Sua Per Vestigia Volvitur
(Chocolate Monk - choc.564) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
The old sound explorer does not disappoint; side A leaves your headspace in a gnarled punch-drunk flashback state before side B envelops you in a warm gas of meditative murk (assuming you can get over to the deck to flip the tape). The maestro says, “Both pieces recently assembled, disassembled, prodded and chortled in the Perche in Basse Normandie. No. 1, to the personal attention of D. Menche, concerns a close-up investigation of cascading cascades of dripping audible elements of 100% sonic origin. Perfect for flying-carpet errand-running. No. 2 is obviously a Gregorian-Normand sea chanty for use while waiting for the Vikings to return.” Mastered by Scott “Chop Shop” Konzelmann. With two-color riso print cover. C30. Edition of 75
Short Wave: Anomalous Recordings (1991)
(Cor Ardens) Used Cassette $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Long-form excerpts of home recordings made by the poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace — without editorial manipulations toward human musicality. With three-page essay “Another Mother of Us All (A Phenomenology of Short-Wave,” written in 1983 originally published in The Review of International Broadcasting, and a six-panel color J-card of original works derived from a Qbasic multivariable fractal program designed by the artist roughly at the same time as the recordings. C54
Daydream Nation
(Goofin’) Cassette $10.00
The band’s sixth full-length, widely considered to be their watershed moment, which catapulted them into the mainstream and proved that indie bands could enjoy wider commercial success without compromising their artistic vision.
Evol
(Goofin’) Cassette $10.00
“EVOL … mark[s] the true departure point of Sonic Youth’s musical evolution,” notes Pitchfork. “In measured increments, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo … bring form to the formless, tune to the tuneless, and, with the help of Steve Shelley’s drums…, [impose] melody and composition on their trademark dissonance.”
Sister
(Goofin’) Cassette $10.00
Another notch in the band’s move away from no wave, yet not entirely abandoning their experimental approach. The contexts Gordon, Moore, Ranaldo and Shelley create for their noisier elements are more assured, the incorporating of dissonance into traditional song structures more masterful.
Voice Studies 10
(My Dance The Skull - VS10) Cassette $9.50
On the entrancing “Let the Body Attend (for Angus MacLise),” Bolide member and Wire contributor Spicer yelps and gets the Gertrude Stein-esque circular verbiage going while Evie Spicer beats the hell out of percussion instruments. “The Diamond Life (for Henry Flynt)” consists of the title phrase, freakout Ornette violin-crushing by Spicer and a gaggle of friends making assorted hippy / ritual / rant sounds in and around.
Stromboli
(Maple Death Records - MDR002) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Stromboli’s dense, ambient, propulsive opera, created over the course of two years in Bologna, hints at the harsh noise isolationist toiling over four-track tape machine, lap steel guitar and ancient analog organ. It describes boundaries and territories through drones, city-dwelling rhythms, noise landscapes and elegant melodies, defying what is traditionally associated with the ambient genre by creating a beautiful dark psychedelic rotating world. Includes free download. Edition of 100.
36 Fibulae
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.545) Magazine + Cassette $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
This gnostic-horror song cycle by the visual and sound artist employs malfunctioning home-built instruments in a series of asynchronous dream-logic miniature plays. Each World is a Drop World, measured in fibulae. Most are without words and many will eventually be expressed as jewelry. Select fibulae include: 1fibulae, a small Pennsylvania suburb in which humans grow prehensile tails with a large eye at the end à la Charles Fourier’s theory of the Archibras; 9fibulae, an exploration of the erotic pleasures of botany in a world without sound; 17fibulae, an innocent game that allows the viewer to see invisible intelligences in residues of protein via various household devices; 23fibulae, The Police are here again; 28fibulae, on the manufacturing of psychoactive pharmaceuticals from a reliquary housing the preserved corpse of a child posthumously revered as a saint; and 32fibulae, against the diseases of civilization. Since the mid-’00s Strong has been developing an approach to improvisation, instrument-building, and applying material from daily life to psycho-devotional purposes. He has performed in groupings such as Melkings, Eyes of the Amaryllis and Weyesbluhd/ Weyesblood, to name a few. He also operates the tape imprint Cor Ardens. Includes badge. Numbered edition of 50
HD037
(Holodeck - HD037) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
As heard on the Netflix show Stranger Things, HD037 is steeped in vintage analog synths and pummeling, down-beat drum programming -- an exploration of their darkest territory to date, with masterful melodic sensibility, texture, and arrangement.
30 Years of Excess
(Influencing Machine) 6xCassette $45.00
Three decades of Le Syndicat — some of the earliest and most elusive of the group’s tapes — none of which have been previously reissued: Phase Segments / Phase Boucles (1982); Tot Mortar (1983); Audiostatik Repress (1983); Vagynaestetatis (1985); Staying Alive (1985); and L'Arme De Force (1986). Mastered from the original source tapes by Ruelgo, artwork and graphic design of longtime collaborator Zorïn.
Everything Lost In The Image
(Krim Kram) Cassette $10.75
Analogue synthesizer-based music with an emphasis on low resonant bass tones and slow sound progressions, continuing threads explored by the Ireland native in previous solo works — subtlety rendered to near inertia, meditation on mundanity, intuitive composition in avoidance of stylistic models. It is sometimes austere, sometimes visceral, often beautiful.
Organ 1
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.347) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Fylkingen old-timer (and acting chairman from 1994 to ’97), and one half of The Sons Of God with Leif Elggren, runs several components of a dismembered old organ into their own channels in a mixer, and pushes each until it misbehaves. If you missed his Colour Out Of Space performance where he used this same technique and blew out one of the sound system speakers, play it loud for your own personal recreation of same. Screen printed card slipcase with stuck on paper front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 40.
They Will Burn Us To Ashes
(Saga House - SH02) Cassette $6.00
Mike Mangino’s diligence with pioneer basement industrial duo SMERSH set the scene for Futurist irradiation, so it should come as no surprise They Will Burn Us To Ashes harkens back to the collapsed rhythm of cassette culture’s golden age: body-rhythmic static; curious, plaintive reckonings; static wash; hiss; suggestions of system breach; tensile and rhythmic ambience that summons dark premonitions; isolationist electronics, as if Shinichi Atobe has processed Basinski in an ominous ode to inertia. Includes free download. C92
Listen here: https://sagahouse.bandcamp.com/album/they-will-burn-us-to-ashes
Voice Studies 08
(My Dance The Skull - VS08) Cassette $9.50
Veronica Lovejoy spent most of 2004 on a residency inside Black Rose’s private gallery. The unpublicized installation, entitled Gestation, combined kinetic sculpture with performance art, and pushed the limits of movement and sound for this emerging artist. The conclusion, witnessed by a small handful of friends, family and medical professionals, concerned some with its mishandling of anaesthesia, near-traumatic contortion, and bodily fluids. Following a three-day stay in the hospital, where doctors monitored Lovejoy’s jaundice, discharge was granted and work on the next piece began almost immediately. Described as “anti-playerly” and “within an undefined nether-space between voice and brass,” This Is Yvonne Lovejoy’s “Admit It” could be seen as related to the extended techniques and subtle decibel range of Franz Hautzinger, Axel Dörner, and nmperign. Veronica Lovejoy refuses to comment on influences. c20.
Cock Pig / Unoriginal Macho Energy
(Turgid Animal - TA469) 7-inch + cassette $15.00
The third Fecalove and Torturing Nurse collaboration. Pure harsh noise, recorded in China and Italy during 2008 and 2009. C30 features longer cuts of the 7-inch tracks plus the two additional pieces "Super Rock And Roll" and "Total Fuck Off." Limited to 188 copies. Each copy has different hand-drawn labels.
Ageism
(Idiopathic - IR005) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Obsessive, delicate sound textures by Kevin McEleney and Nial Morgan, snaking through gritty depths and ascending to vertiginous heights. Mood music for the scourged at heart. C60
With Alex Drool, Maya Dunietz, Eran Sachs and Ilan Volkov
(Tutore Burlato - #16) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
“There was a cloud in the room at Dunietz Towers of the Acme animated variety,” recalls Ali Robertson about the recording of the two untitled side-length tracks here. “At its core, there was not a ball of violence, but a six-notched ashtray filled with the smoked-out butts of the central belt and the Middle East…. [I]n addition to the traditional fists and elbows [onlookers] observed protruding from the fog: three dozen bottle tops, a stick attached to a cat’s arse with marshmallow, the green glow emanating from a future past’s robotic butler’s face and The KLF’s Bill Drummond exiting slyly by the back door. Later we licked our wounds and swallowed a whole fridge before sleeping spoons in the honeymoon suite. Occupational hazards, eh.”
Audio by Visual Artists
([ no label ]) Cassette $7.00
Unofficial facsimile edition reissue of Claudia Gould’s stellar collection of sound and phonetic poetry, musique concrète storytelling, electronics, artists’ bands, sequential repetition of noise, sounds or words — from Futurism up to the late 1980s — originally released by Tellus in 1990. Tracks by Joseph Beuys, Maurice Lemaitre, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann, Antonio Russolo, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Lawrence Weiner, Essendo Stato, George Brecht, Patrick Ireland, Richard Huelsenbeck, Arrigo Lora Totino and Piro Fogliatti, Jean Dubuffet, Mimmo Rotella, Joan Jonas, Christian Boltanski, Ian Murray, Terry Fox, Jonathan Borofsky, Magdalena Abakanowitz, Richard Prince with Bob Gober, Martin Kippenberger, Jack Goldstein, John Armeider, Terry Allen, Gretchen Bender, Y Pants, Ed Tomney, Susan Hiller.
Birdsong From The Lower Branches
(Hypnagogic Tapes) 2xCassette $17.00 (Out-of-stock)
This international collection of work by what Noise Not Music refers to as “babble-stalwarts” is “wildly successful.” Highlights include “jarring tape-switch enjambments [on] a speech-only track from Eric Mingus, James King’s humbly introduced and spectacularly executed “distillations,” a duet for emergency services siren and a cappella Irish folk song by Mabel Chah, an anxiety-soaked onslaught of gasps and groans from Rising Damp, [and] a surreal, post-Super Saturday broadcast from Ali Robertson….” Also: Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Ludo Mich with Christophe Clebart, Seymour Glass, Id M Theft Able, Karen Constance, The Doll, Natalia Beylis, Jonida Prifti, Roy Clare Potter, Sharon Gal, Jennifer Walshe, and Fritz Welch. Cover art by Karen Constance
Christmas Tape 2013
(Tusco Embassy) 2xCassette $15.00
Tracks by Fluxmonkey, Onewayness, Ironing, Wether, Outmode, Vibrating Garbage, Telecult Powers Moth Cock, Birds You Once Knew, Skull Katalog, Zack Kouns, Collapsed Arc, Long Distance Poison, Bonus Beast, Lion’s Meow, Malocclusion, Black Thread, Craow, Sun Poisoning, Chemtrails, Fslux, Watchword, Dr. Quinn, Mark McGuire, Bone Rotten, Ilza, Wyld Stallyns, Quicksails, Fun, Skin Graft, Grasshopper. In three-ink silkscreened hand-assembled box. With 20pp photocopy collage booklet. c77
Christmas Tape 2015
(Tusco Embassy - T/ERIP) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Just in time for Christmas 2017! Tracks by Khaki Blazer, Long Distance Poison, Wyatt Howland and David Russell, Glands Of External Secretion, Leslie Keffer, Sharkiface and Fletcher Pratt, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Quicksails, Andrew Kirchner, Yeast Culture, Superstorms, Flower Pattern, Thoabath, Fire Death, Mike Tamburo, Sikk Laffter, The Fathers, and Chemtrails. In white and gold printed box. With gold chain bracelet. Edition of 50. C90
Common Sense
(Tape Room - TRK71201) Cassette $7.50
Tracks by Damion Romero, Joseph Hammer, Peter Kolovos, Sissy Spacek, Chambers, Monsturo, Joe Potts, Lucky Dragons, Rale, Tom Recchion, Mark Trayle, Ulrich Krieger, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Moment Trigger, Coppertone, and Hive Mind. C90.
Confluence Park
(Teen Action - TAR019) Cassette $6.00
Ohio comp with Adam Smith, Envenomist, Demonologists, Lambsbread, Ginger Fetus, and Out There Dudes. c60. Edition of 100.
First Citizens of the Moon
(Cor Ardens - 01) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Rare and unreleased material that variously combines and departs from the traditions of poetry, performance art, home recording, mail art, radio plays, sound installation, improvisation, choral music and experimental theater. With Pomona Za, Yixuan Pan, Blue Chemise, Ami Yamasaki, Sarah M. Farmer, Malachi Lily, Vox Populi!, Church Shuttle, Jessop And Co, Crank Sturgeon, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, John M. Bennett, Creode, Couteau Sang, Anaïs Maviel, Id M Theft Able, Tavishi, Jim Strong, Anna Mikhailova, Philadelphia Women’s Slavic Ensemble. Package is wire and laser woodcut assemblage. Edition of 200.
Good Alchemy Video
(Alchemy - ARVC14) Used VHS $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
See for yourself what all the fuss was about. Live footage from the early to mid-’90s of Masonna (Bears, Osaka; IMP Hall, Osaka; Zoukei-Center, Osaka; Takutaku, Kyoto; Club Quattro, Osaka), Incapacitants (Shimin-Plaza, Toyama), Merzbow (East Gallery, Tokyo; 2B, Eindhoven), Solmania (Metro, Kyoto) and Hijokaidan (Fandango, Osaka). Released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the label in 1995. Includes insert. Caveat emptor: never been played. No promises.
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden
(WFMU) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks from 2011 by Bad Party, Crank Sturgeon, MV Carbon, The New Blockaders, Unknown Artist, Kommissar Hjuler, Dave Phillips, Glands Of External Secretion, Temporal Marauder, Mammal , Richard Pinhas, Incapacitants, Kommissar Hjuler, The Haters, Nondor Nevai, Wume, Emil Beaulieau. Curated by Andy Ortmann. C76. Edition of 175
Kassett
(Lydgalleriet) 2xCassette $15.00
Curated by Lasse Marhaug for an exhibition of Norwegian cassette culture at Lydgalleriet, USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway, 2010. Tracks by Oral Constitution, Rød Stær, White Lord Jesus, Fleurety, Anders Gjerde, Zweizz & Joey Hopkins, Jan M. Iversen, FNS, Kobi, Altaar, Gabriel Mørk, Famlende Forsøk, Lars “Skjit-Lars” Nicolaysen, 1349 Rykkinn, Jazkamer, Bluefaced People, Kunstlusk, NXP, Duo Kanel, Taperne. Maja S. K. Ratkje, Origami Boe, Maranata, Juryen, Sten Ove Toft, Sindre Bjerga, Pikkulf, Waffelpung, DEL, Torstein Wjiik. Edition of 255
Noise Progression Vol. 3
(MSBR - MRV03) VHS $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
1999 footage of live performances of Spastic Colon, Speculum Fight, Robochanman, K2, Bastard Noise, Solid Eye, Magmax, Fin, Babyland.
Noise Progression Vol. 4
(MSBR - MRV04) VHS $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
1999 footage of live performances by Universal Indians, Robo Alpha, Monster Island, Princess Dragon Mom, MSBR, Noise Workshop.
Nothing Is Permanent
(FM Dust - DUST044) Cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks by Willis Earl Beal, Blood Stereo, Travis Bursik, Casino, City Center, Das Kiste Quintett, Everyday Cruelty, Lidless Eye, Dylan Nyoukis, Skin Lies, Sky Thing, Smegma, and Sophie Tulip. In a leatherette box with a print by artist / tattooer Jen Munford, a 2.25-inch button, a sticker, hand-stamped liner notes written by Dustin Krcatovich (stamp designed by Micah Vanderhoof), and a free download code. Edition of 300. C50. Feast your peepers on this infomercial: https://youtu.be/p9dH8lq2xuc
Stray Dog
(Oxen - 010) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks by P.I.G.S. (Chiaki Omachi), KIRA (Charlie Mumma and HHL’s Brent Rellstab-Randel), F.T.P., Sissy Spacek (Mumma and John Wiese), Sects, The Pig Lady, Wrong Hole, Constrain, Kiran Arora, Allegory Chapel LTD, and amk / GX Jupitter-Larsen / Elden M. C65
Stray Dog Volume 2
(Oxen - OXEN019) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks by Dromez, Kakerlak, scum, Circuit Wound, FACIALMESS, Leah Peah, Sissy Spacek, Scalp Elevator, Tralphaz, BLACKPHONE 黒電話 666, Jay Randall, Brown Piss, Black Sand Desert, and Mass Marriage.
White Eye of Winter Watching
(Hospital - HOS300) 2xCassette $22.00 (Out-of-stock)
Inspired by blizzards, lung infection, Original Soundtrack (Less Than Zero 1996), and Russian military campaigns against nature. With Genocide Organ, FFH, Gaze Campaign, Deathpile, Whorebutcher, Consumer Electronics, Mlehst, ASM, Mangled Clit, Viodre, Forcible Confinement, Sutcliffe Jugend / Prurient, Controlled Bleeding, Anti-Aquarian, Non, Contrepoison, Militia, Alberich, Bus De La Lum, Vatican Shadow, The Grey Wolves, Ethnic Acid, Ames Sanglantes, Lussuria, Sleepchamber, Smell & Quim, Anal Drill, Ahlzagailzehguh, Cloister, Karasyozoku, Age Of Enlightenment, Human Liberation Technology, Geography Of Hell, HIV Corner, Praying For Oblivion, Outermost, Incapacitants, Exploring Jezebel, Thirdorgan, Ramleh, Stillbirth, Spastic Colon, Flutter, Sickness, Gasolineman, Deterge, Yellow Tears, K.P., The Haters, Emil Beaulieau, Blackhumour, and Con-Dom. Both tapes are c100.
Head Against Wall
(Oxen - OXEN025) Cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Compositional excellence across thirty minutes of persistently rewarding, riveting, terminally tense, knotty spasms of harsh noise narrative. Complex layers of harsh squall and lashing discordance on full display.
Cry Baby Killer
(My Fiance’s Lifework) Used Cassette $100.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Something like this is probably being played in Satan’s waiting room,” muses a Russian incel. First edition from 1989, with painted sticker collage on plastic box. C46
If I Wasn’t Already
([ no label ]) Cassette $13.50
Three recordings from Glasgow 2022: Voice and movement used to generate sound by Welch with multi-instrumentalist Jessica Argo on theremin; Ego Depletion (Adam Campbell and Welch) with Benicio Del Trainwreck (aka David Moré) celebrating the broken detritus of late capitalist auto- consumption via modular synth and found percussion objects amplified by resonation chambers crafted from frozen fish containers; a solo action that unfolds in relative slow motion over a multi-hour period using voice, bass drum, objects, text scrolls and various lo-tech special effects. Unnumbered artist’s edition of A-M-G5’s release, with hand drawn panel, date, signature. c90
Nothing To Offer
(Singing Knives) Cassette $11.25
On one side, a stunning twenty-one-minute solo performance in a synagogue in Ivrea, Italy, as part of the Musiche Possibili festival, showcasing Welch’s combining of intense subjective engagement with the moment and objective awareness of the entire composition of his improvisation. Voice emphasizes the weird nature of drumming where multiple, separate limbs skip between cooperation and counteraction. Two pieces on the flip (both recorded in a sauna in Scotland) emphasize a unique synthesis of various legacies of spoken word innovation — individual (John Cage, Henri Chopin, etc.) and communal (katajjaq, etc.) — experiments in narrative form, the innumerable ways that bodily movement and bodily sound can generate each other, the spaces between poetry-making, novel-making, essay-making, song-making, play-making and myth-making, and anti-architectural sculpturing, such as that by Jimmie Durham, which seeks to liberate materials from unfortunate associations with monumentality, stability and permanence. C42
From The Mouths Of Clay
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS029 ) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
During his 2013 residencey at Museo Universitario de la Universidad de Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios in Medellín, Colombia, Whethem investigated sonic, acoustic and phenomenological qualities of the gallery space using secondhand and/or faulty equipment. With found objects and recording / playback methods of Alvin Lucier and Nicholas Collins, he applied the process of the former’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” to three prehispanic burial urns and three examples of more recent variations on this theme. The internal resonances were captured and then played back inside the urns utilizing small speakers, or through them using transducers. The process was repeated again and again, and the result was demonstrated as an eight-channel installation, with six vessels singing with their own voices and two speakers playing lower tones created by the vessels using the same process, but using a microphone inside each and a larger speaker placed against the outside. From The Mouths Of Clay combines sound material from the installation and further investigations carried out during the residency period, recorded in the space, from inside the vessels or reproduced inside and through them. C60.
Their Faces Closed
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.395) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
Live recordings from White’s fall 2017 trans-Canada express — a mix of comedy and confusion flowing through him in the moment. He was attuned to the jaw harps as well. Chrome cassette in recycled card sleeve with insert. Numbered Edition of 75.
Voice Studies 02
(My Dance The Skull - VS02) Cassette $9.50
A close read of Stephen Collins and Charlotte Arrowsmith speaking and moving, the noises they make and how they make them. This realignment of the awareness on the sounds normally tuned out and ignored is sometimes relaxing, sometimes annoying. C20.
Pocket Mutations
(Chocolate Monk - choc.582) Cassette + 2x3-inch CDR $28.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second communique with the outside world from the re-christened Constance / Nyoukis joint is a nattering and belching collection of weird for the eyes and ears. Packaged in a rubber stamped cardboard box (24cm x11.5cm x 2cm) and obi, with A6 color booklet of collages, fold out art print, button badge. Liner notes by S. Glass.
HTCH 220
(Zebra Secrets) Cassette $10.00
The energy of the Los Angeles Free Music Society is very much present on the debut cassette by the trio of John Seden, Brent Johnson, and John Alderman (along with support from Argus and Leica on barking and chains), according to Noise Not Music. “Anemic but effervescent electronics, scattered clomps and skitters of percussion, thrift-store electric guitars thumbed and shredded, and all sorts of other carelessly psychedelic doodads and vapors (there’s even a mandolin in the mix at one point) are the only guideposts in this stumbling march of lavender-hazed revelry, but whether you’re bumping into every single one or sliding between them like a smooth, sly snake, the contact high will set in soon.” Letter-pressed J-card. Includes sticker. Edition of 23
HTCH 221
(Zebra Secrets) Cassette $10.00
Tap in to the second volume in Zebra Secrets’ ongoing series of improvisations recorded in 2021 at the San Francisco Art Institute. Two side-long tracks of secret sounds. A current was engaged. Letter-pressed J-card. Includes sticker. Edition of 23
HTCH 222
(Zebra Secrets) Cassette $10.00
The third part in a series of recordings made at the San Francisco Art Institute by John Seden, Brent Johnson, and John Alderman. Unspeakable guitar, intuitive percussion, botched synthesis, and tasty free samples of oblivion. With guests Argus and Leica on barking and chains, and Fritz Welch on disembodied percussion. Letter-pressed J-card. Includes sticker. Edition of 23
Sequencer Works Volume Two
(No Part Of It) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks from between 2000 and 2003, both released in limited quantities and previously unreleased. Recorded entirely with a Yamaha Rm1x sequencer in a closet or crawlspace.