FENWICK ADDISON / SEYMOUR GLASS
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History of The Butte County Free Music Society
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS36) Hardcover book $30.00
Oh, how the dots do connect! Recollections, opinions, confessions, revelations, quips, anecdotes, and analyses by, for, and about the art mutants and other creative weirdos working in a rural Northern California college town in the early 1980s. It's like a Philip K Dick short story meets contagious polythelia. Answering questions no one is asking -- it's the BuFMS way. There's no salacious gossip here, no long-festering resentments litigated, no tell-all humiliation porn. If that's your thing, you'll have to content yourself with living to clutch your pearls another day. Not that it's wall-to-wall good manners. Characters and oddballs abound. Some shit-talking, but nothing scandalous like we're used to nowadays. Still, the content of this Encyclopedia Spastica is slanted toward making music, listening to music, making connections because of music: tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, punk, psychedelic rock, non-music, and general WTF. Not at the exclusion of film and video, though, and radio shows, radio plays, guerilla theater, stand-up comedy, art installations, zines, collages, poetry and fiction, television shows. Activities, projects, experiences, learning, creating, obsessing, giving up, all that, the whole wad. Every page is adorned with supporting visuals — flyers and posters, paintings and drawings, newspaper clippings, photos and stills from film, television and video production, prints, personal correspondence, interview transcriptions, and autobiography excerpts. 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Under Glass, KCSC, Beor The Friendly Thing, Jett Hotcomb, The Conduits, Daily Planet, Unlikely Modernists, Man Overboard, The Viper, EL&C, The Protons, Glands of External Secretion, Chaplain Addington, Doug Roberts, and Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, 140 pages, hardcover, color throughout. Tons of stuff you've never seen or heard of, guaranteed.
Pentecostal Gymnast Trapped in Lime Jello
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS52) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
This is some Big Gurn, Ethel: a warm and twitching box of meat long-awaited (by someone somewhere, maybe) as a requisite for the passage of Blood Stereo and Bren’t Lewiis to the next stage in their mud-worshiping pupation. The bulk of the album consists of fried and munched decimations of recordings from live events in sunny Caledonia-Upon-Entrail, miscellaneous unincorporated villages throughout the backwoods of Lower Scotland’s Britain Minor region, and a handful of West Coast pear orchards in what is now known as California. Spookily hovering objects gently clang against one another in arenas of witchy ambience. Lo-fi reproductions of crushing rumbles hiss through passages of spastic regurgitation. Voices and mouth-hole-sourced noise-type audio jiggle and whither between swirling montages of home-made fweent, bent found sound, loops, and tape-manipulated jiggery-pokery. The gorp-meisters also disrobe for “Conversation With Bicycle Horn,” a graphic score composed in the early 1980s by Richard Sterling Streeter, who hails the first-ever recording of his work thus: “Exactly as annoying and monotonous as intended.”
The Inevitable Typo On Sheila Ostrich’s Tombstone
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS73) CDR $8.00
In Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s latest reportage from the front row of a nightmarish debacle no one would want to stage, Thanksgiving is a revolting feast of Pynchon-inspired cuisine on the front edge of an exploding dirigible, yoga mats double as coffin liners, heavenly choirs are replaced by glitchy, private-press inbreds howling themselves sick in vortices of serrated cubism, and people who don’t know they no longer exist are the only ones who cry “Mortality as home entertainment? This can’t be the future. Can it? Can it?” Harmonic disarray and sour electro-splat seep upward and outward like a disturbing organ meat experiment going horribly awry. Dense electronic processes mingle with field recordings of machines defective and dying of old age. Alarm klaxons and calls to arms do not overpower the soundscape so much as wanly ooze from some anemic sky sphincter worthy of an Arch Oboler thriller. The forty-minute “The Flesh Is Already Engulfing The Guns” crawls into view like a family of zombie executives exiting a fallout shelter. Nauseated screeches dry-heave at strings of metal scraping marrow-less bones into bite-sized chunks. Swarms of clinking locusts disperse above fields of plastic thrift-store detritus getting overrun from all angles by locomotives locked in emergency deceleration mode. Flightless birds elongate their synchronized death squawks and amplify their internal doom. Molecules of electronic corruption wheeze complaints to no one. Violins groan with the vigor of an old rocking chair where a corpse has been dumped. Unattended radios transmit useless advice. Drones and pulsations slowly fall apart and atomize, a mirror image of decay and putrid nothingness enveloping untethered astronauts. A portrait of the void, disembodied space globules and all. The ensemble's version of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Assassination Raga” embalms all the stripes of the rainbow that is America’s creep-show optimism with congealed blood. That the album is released on the poet’s 99th birthday is not a coincidence.
External Organs
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS74) CDR $8.00
Simian incantations made of over-saturated squelch clangs and reptile-friendly textures that are smooth as a cheese grater to the back of the head. Hiding under asynchronous grinds and competitive echo sharpness, the five long tracks here seem to recede unnaturally, like reverse footage of a smoldering grease fire, or a predatory ballet choreographed for It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado. The ensemble feels cooked alive on External Organs, maintaining a rhythm throughout comparable to extras from Night Of The Living Dead bonking into a wall over and over again as if trying to memorize the bloodstains on the sheetrock.
Surrendering Hair to Lord Venkateswara Swamy
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS115) CDR $10.00
Six long droneur manqué tracks get to the bottom of the mystical aspects behind time-lapsed refrigerator attrition, the brotherhood of forlorn balloon animal guys, and the difference between getting carved up in tandoori hell and having to scrape chicken-meat from under the fingernails. Throughout the group's low-key but tension-infused screech, looping theremin, synthesizer, guitar, and toy instruments roil to be heard in malignant EQ baths of malfunctioning peptide and degenerate serums of unknown origin. Anonymous voice montages are silhouetted against the fading light of gut health. Murky blobs in oblong landscapes suggest gastrointestinal dusk. It's a 60-minute kaleidoscope of doom expectorant, in which nausea becomes an abstract expression of the afterlife, basically, the opposite of a perky restoratif. Includes insert.
Dreamhouse Prison Of The Pastel Mafia
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS66) CDR $8.00
With as many lop-sided bleats per minute as L. Ron Hubbard’s third annual vivisection of one of Anton Lavey’s goats of Christmas past in the parking lot of Dismaland, The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s cave noise conniptions get spinal-tapped by indelicate incursions of raw, untamed electronic thrusts and stabs. Toys, scratchy LPs of old Vietnamese showtunes, various nube-tubes, the forced laughter of a little person courtesy of Werner Herzog, and kitchen objects are some of the reassuring soundposts in this chiaroscuro dungeon, blinking between the cavernous scrape of dejected janitorial tasks, the feeble thuds of someone or something getting dragged across cobblestones caked with layer upon sickening layer of effluvia, and tiny metallic splats scurrying like immortal tapirs from one corner to the other. Disembodied voices speak not so much to communicate but to keep the creeping dread of the speaker at bay. The damaged soliloquy of the permanently distracted gets a thorough examination here, bolstered by the weirdly spirited yelps of the doomed and murmurs from a decomposing mule born under a wandering star. Throughout their patched-together network, spastic clunks engage in intimate congress with mechanical gasps, chokeholds, grunts, and the struggles of the restrained, rising and falling in parallel with irrational wheedle pulsations and hopeless density. Remote controlled drones buzz in and out of view, according to the trajectories of nonsensical flight-paths. Peculiar grinding from homemade spirit-breakers (known in the trade as aluminum maidens) morph from dispassionate sketches of abscess-befouled meadowlands to up-close chakra punctures and hi-sheen abscess pierce to collapsed thunder from failed Russian barge maneuvers. Includes industrial expressionist collage.
That’s My Deathbed
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS96) 3-inch CDR $4.25
For the third installment of the group’s Dumb Tangerine Dream series, Lucian Tielens extracts from underneath a waterbed in a ’70s skin flick bendy slide guitar wheem (bejeweled with a tasteful quantity of froth, and devoid of exaggerations about length), while loops of cheap electronic burble peer in through the slats in the closet door, rise to the surface and collapse in a haze of lo-fi turntable-and-toys clack-off. Cover art by id m theft able. Includes upholstery swatch courtesy of Kristin Anderson. Edition of 25
A Real Nice Clambake
(Butte County Free Music Society - 35) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Recorded at a confusing and ambiguous event in 1987 at Wooj, where pockets of inexplicable activity included the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble applying their singular style of awkward to guitars, bass, Casio, wooden recorders, mandolins. Cassette players throughout the house were recording, while others played loops, telephone answering machine messages, and field recordings. Numerous television sets broadcast anything from The Brady Bunch to cornball noir, while radios broadcast The Isley Brothers, Crosby Stills & Nash, XTC, Paper Lace, Malcolm McLaren, and The Archies. Hours and hours of material was edited into four tracks totaling 51 minutes in length. The incidental, the involuntary, the unintended and the accidental take the lead on A Real Nice Clambake, which captures and repeats sneezes, coughs, burps, mumbles, grunts, moans, clicks, clacks, and clunks, the obnoxious zont of cables getting plugged in, tape hiss, bottles opening, keys and bottle openers rattling on tables, silverware scuttling on porcelain plates, and doors slamming. Mics are jostled and papers are shuffled, amid the spastic xylophone–windchime hybrid of coffee mugs getting stirred with strange vigor. The motor of one of the tape recorders wheezes so loudly that its own microphone picks up the sound. The group’s magical ineptitude perseveres through abrupt left turn after abrupt left turn, dizzying in their constancy, and through stretches of meandering guitar-playing, repetition, interruption, and the peculiar declarations of those present. Released to coincide with Bren't Lewiis's performance at Colour Out Of Space, November 2011. Includes an Industrial Expressionist collage made of hand-painted screen, fragment of found photograph, and defective scrap from commercial print shop.
Worst Utopia Ever
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS76) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
On their fifth full-length album this year, the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble charges into a blood-snake melee like public-access heroes the Ill-Advised Mutants Of Wrestling. Psychedelic euphoria and dread-poisoned torpor grapple all over landscapes smeared with swirling scrape bubbles and the post-hypnotic wobble that cleanses residua from an overdose of personality suppressants. “Very smooth,” as one disembodied and uncertain and completely inaccurate voice describes hopefully, “And somewhat spooky.” Punctuated by phlegmy coughs and metallic chirps, phasing in and out of common-area ambiance, this slow-moving travelogue through between-station grinds, animalist crunch vistas, and long-form dissection of beige respiratory gack rises and falls inside an onslaught of sinister machine drones that flay and smother everything with placid steadiness. There are multiple screech havens embedded throughout Worst Utopia Ever, where ghosted rescue attempts suffocate under the hairy mud of cross-eyed tape manipulation, mushy expressway pile-ups, and out-of-control clang orgies.
Out Patience
(Butte County Free Music Society - 33) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Performed inside a darkened, cavernous student union on the evening of April 28, 1984, this after-hours guerrilla action corrupts the thirteenth text from Aus den Sieben Tagen in a barn where damaged minotaurs are stabled. Lucian Tielens, Tim Smyth and Gnarlos were in constant motion, re-positioning themselves throughout the building, possessed by plastic flamingo, goink visions, and the compulsion to insert their heads into buckets and howl. Four excerpts totaling eight minutes in length appear on Three Christs of Ypsilanti (Siltbreeze 2010), but this is the first and only time the recording of the complete, uninterrupted 47-minute session has been available. In addition to "hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects," brentstrumentation includes The Nube Tube (a corrugated hose from a hair dryer swung like a bullroarer), harmonica, metal remnants of antique armaments, hula hoop, socket wrench, aluminum bicycle crankset, toy guitars, toy pianos, bongos, glassware, marbles chucked off the balcony, the staircase, aluminum cans (kicked), pie tins (spun), metal coils, jewelry, Star Wars pinball machine, moans, gurns, chants, sneezes, whistles and insectoid heralds. Includes an Industrial Expressionist collage made of hand-painted screen, fragment of found photograph, and defective scrap from commercial print shop. Edition of 50.
Being Happy All The Time Would Be Extremely Depressing
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS77) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Understated and skeletal arrangements, but still chock full of unsettling mixing and weirdos voicing peculiar narratives, sort of like a bizarre misreading of ASMR.
I Have No Idea What You’re Talking About
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS75) CDR $8.00
Percussive noises are a constant menace on I Have No Idea What You’re Talking About, familiar in style and purpose to crank-addled crutzers with guinea worms freaking out about dive-bombing bats that aren’t really there. Off-kilter loops and crossfades seem derived from a Waza Ensembles competition held during a calamity on a construction barge. There are more roadblocks in this twitching, raw-fi mess than would be present if Scrantonicity covered Joeboy In Rotterdam, it was filtered through Ichiyanagi’s Extended Voices and then re-imagined by Edith Hillman Boxill as an instructional music therapy album. Includes inserts.
Harvester Of Eyes
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS57) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A year in the making and largely informed by the Ensemble’s roots and experiences in the level of DIY broadcasting that SCTV once lovingly parodied, this 56-track bucket of stovies is Bren’t Lewiis’s most thorough homage yet to vox populi media: call-in AM radio, YouTube, public access TV, infomercial fails, obsolete instructionals, and amateur self-help cassettes that offer guidance of dubious utility. You get several meanings in the blink of an eye (to paraphrase Olivia Tremor Control) in this 69-minute rationality-flouting obstacle course. Assertions and their opposites contain veracity and patent untruth. Cyclical repetition meets the deliberately deployed and the gloriously arbitrary. Electric guitars and toy instruments and maniacal grunts careen across layers of grinding reel-to-reel noise and compromised cellphone transmissions. Looped fweeps and saturated hornk keep time throughout stretches of impromptu stress tests, insect percussion, anonymous background rumbles and rustles, pizza cutter schwing, and the crackle of scratchy old thrift store records. Sing-song chirps from skewed pop and cult memories meet hacked and damaged recordings of insufficient improv and anthropomorphized household objects. With two inserts. Edition of 100
All Tedium House orders of this item include the bonus three-inch CDR Translation Of The Dress, with twenty-two tracks in twenty minutes.
Unable To Suppress The Twitching
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Exploring the intersectionality of spooky chamber music and the failures of profane janitors, unnecessary announcements from the futuristic lair of a James Bond villain, and bones of the southern skull. Guests include Dylan Nyoukis and Warvette. Studio material and live recordings from Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland and KXLU in Los Angeles
BREN’T LEWIIS ENSEMBLE / SILVIA KASTEL / NINNI MORGIA
Fix It Again, Tony
(Butte County Free Music Society - 45) LP $20.00
This first-time collaboration by avatars of the new generation of European improv and blue-haired spazimodo mutants is something of a gloriously awkward thwack marathon of crumbled guitar noise, otherworldly howls, and stuff falling down stairs. The spontaneous recordings, performed in a single 90-minute session, are cut-up, multi-tracked, looped, and reassembled into thirty-two pieces that are more scrambled than the unrealized fears of an acute entomophobe, and, according to Morgia, “sometimes sound like Twin Infinitives chewed by Polyphemus.” Cover art by the amazing Todd Emmert. Edition of 175.
Loose Meat
(Butte County Free Music Society) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Over an hour of viscera untethered! A cephalic card-counting snuffler memorizing the dress-code for visitors published by the Commonwealth Of Virginia’s department of corrections. Cranksters rutting through the neighbors’ storage shed and trying to power a homemade UFO with an aquarium air filter. Miscegenation of texts by John Steinbeck and Led Zeppelin. Foul seepage and damaged percolations. Toys-and-turntable spasticity recorded live on KXLU. Heat massage grimness. Gelatinous conflagrations. Brittle geekiopathy. A spontaneous gurnathon recorded at the fire pit behind The Dome. Lily McBilly’s WTF mash-up of the go-go-boot morality ditty “Teenie Weenie Boppie” by France Gall and Play It Again Sam’s failed-pick-up-at-the-museum scene. The 21-minute “Boiling The Grackle That Killed Suzanne Pleshette,” a live recording from The Handbag Factory in Los Angeles that delivers twice the juddering oomph of sleep-deprived space cats overdosing on bovine tranques dreaming of a laser battle with a hot water heater.
Consumption
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS105) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Finding unorthodox anchors that strangle the fatuous out of abject grimness is a squid-free squid game Bren’t Lewiis mastered long ago, and Consumption certainly reaffirms that. The album’s fifty-minutes of quacking at the moon was inspired largely by mandatory wellness sequestering at a Walgreens post-inoculation, and the attendant anxiety that the pharmacist might be required to rush out of the bullet-proof cubicle because Gnarlos can’t handle the side effects of another microchip in the bicep. On any other day, a disoriented stumble up and down aisles stocked with gleaming fruits of capitalism, so desperately packaged with hot colors and zazzy lettering and borderline-lascivious hype, might earn a person a request to vacate ASAP from a polite rent-a-cop. When nano-bots in the bloodstream are part of the equation, forget it, back to the factory with you, we’re gonna have your head changed to something more aesthetic. Those surveillance cameras are not here to protect the mouthwash. Anonymous chatter from field recordings is maddeningly constant, passages of repetitive electronic yoib hopscotch across cowering backdrops, there are more cut-ups and loops than a knife fight at a prison knitting circle, and the dynamics feel like flu symptoms. The first time The City Councilman heard the finished album, he said, “I tried to listen while I was grant-writing and found it so intense that I could not do both things at the same time.” Among the album’s final straws are Lucian Tielens reading pick-up lines found in an abandoned notebook at the public library (a truncated early mix of which was included on Cough Park’s Bandcamp-only mix EZ Street Cheeze), and Steve Marquis’s psychedelic heart attack on “Tumbling Down An Embankment With A Stomach Full Of Bowling Pins.” Absent-minded mumbling, concerns about post-op complications, the appropriated voices of self-help mutants colliding in surreal patchworks of entendre all lead to the inevitable: that Hastings Of Malawi no longer have to reimagine I Think You Should Leave as an old time radio drama.
Soiled Gas Mask
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS84) CDR $8.00
“Sugar brings nice sweetness to the sauce” says an accented voice a few minutes into the group’s third album of 2019, one heavy on the fevered claustrophobia. Disturbing froth and gothic Mommie Dearest shame dissolve in a dark woont piece named after Alan Wagner’s legendary milk-bath poster (a Freakdom meme-of-the-year finalist). Joan Of Art — in surgery recovery mode, deluded and paranoid from the opioid painkillers — wanders out into traffic muttering the words to The Fall’s tale of sinister government agencies. Turntables and contact mics scrape layers of hardened parrot mucus for nearly twelve minutes in an epic examination of the difference between phlegm and sputum. There are two field recordings from The Dome in Scappoose, Oregon, made at the end of BLE’s August 2018 tour (one piece came about when The City Councilman’s phone was accidentally recording while stuffed into his pocket, and the other documents Gnarlos throwing balls of goat dung at a poster hung above the dumpster by the garage depicting President Shiklgruber cradling a baby dinosaur rescued from the twin towers on 9/11). Lucian Tielens dodges golfball-sized blobs of toxins and revelations that flicker across the bottom of an apocalyptic bucket, propelled only by grunting and orally expressed distress. A freeway execution narrated by a helicopter-bound ghoul. A jaunty celebration of urushiol. Cthulhu crèpe. Hemotoma. “The Funky Chicken” as fetishist’s instruction manual. So much dirty. So much unclean.
Cavoli Riscaldati
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS63) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first of two warm-up prequels to the group’s upcoming reimagining of Live at Pompeii, “Squat And Elevate The Perforated Cylinder” sweeps swatches of ring modulator grit across expansive Herbertian wastelands like second-hand, moose-befouled flying carpets. Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos attack the fetid void by cacking together spritz mosaics sourced from an interstellar vinegar bath. The newest member of the group, Count Darkula draws on previous experiences within the cold hard swamp and fires off volleys of epic woont, diseased mastication struggles, and mechanical flutters. Picking up on the intrusion of turd-nourished car alarms (because Bren’t Lewiis always records with the windows open), The City Councilman counter-attacks with fractured yelps from bio-chimerical slaughterhouses and a black yoga move known as “upward oozing glue gun.” Fragments of his electric guitar fwa-garnk seep into the obstacle course from all corners, deflecting mushy roars as they deep-throat throbbing and discordant echo. The second one “Plummeting Blobs Of Unguent” is slightly more low key but every bit the exercise in weightless, animalistic flailing. Pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape yoink passes through layers and layers of distressed transmissions. The edges of unidentified blocks of congealed fluids crackle and crumble. Fur-choked warbles pulsate from the intestines of a lunatic grizzly sickened by the irresistible sweetness of blood berries and lead paint. The distant screeches of metallic fruitflies gnawing the mold off the sides of a dumpster become the sickening threat-assessment howls of cats with telephone abdomens. Bracketing the twin epics are: a sullen invocation by gargoyles forced to navigate insectoid percussion, the luminescent yawp of Babuna Virus, belligerent gurgitations, and acid reassurances; and Limphoma’s impromptu, heckle-based “My Down Booties Were Eaten By Pat’s Dog,” recorded live opening for The Tenses, ending the album in a mangle of stomped-upon slurry.
Occupy Infantry
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS62) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
In abundance here are excerpts from a March 2016 appearance in the Creative Music Guild’s Outset Series at Turn Turn Turn in Portland, Oregon -- plastic egg stomps and solitary hockey ape by Gnarlos; ecto-synchronous screech from cassette players left under chairs and tables, pre-recorded by Babuna Virus, Lindy Lettuce, and The Viper; and Lucian Tielens in DJ Bruce Haack mode with his gigantic all-in-one toy console. Highlights from No Spray 205 sessions include a marvelous solo by Tielens on popcorn box, bent Memorial Day ragas with mammoth curls, and a cut-up of a clutzy failure’s stammering death spirals sourced from a found self-help cassette. But it’s the 26-minute storage closet recording “Erika’s Last Day” that is the centerpiece of the album. From Tom Timpson on the credit card machines to newest ensemble member Count Darkula raking a window to nowhere and working cardboard tubes like Paul Lynde dry heaving into a didgeridoo, the only other source for such extended anxiety and astonished dread would be a psychic battle between a levitating junior high school shop class and a home-ec class rolling around the kitchen blind-folded. One part guerilla confinement test, one part circular firing squad, the no-instruments track boasts the wince-inducing weeent of metal clothes hangers getting dragged across a metal dowel, old doors opening and closing, the hoarse scrape of porcelain mugs and bowls grinding on a nail sticking out of the wall, the brittle clink of jars and vases rotating against one another, and the insane helium whine of sticks making frantic scribbling gestures on cardboard boxes. Slats on doors of wooden cabinets and plastic hangers are clacked; boxes of nails and screws are shaken; cans of paint, vacuum cleaner tube, metal rods and anything else that could be held onto are dropped on the floor and kicked back and forth. So, yeah, it’s a very percussive odyssey, in the same sense that a hornet’s nest thwacked moments ago with a tennis racket could also be considered percussive. Using enhanced cross-pollination techniques such as running the water in the sink and molesting components of half-built mannequins, the group passes an important milestone in their self-imposed primal grunt therapy.
F.A. Henderson's Casino Sordide
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS61) CDR $8.00
Recorded in Portland, Oregon, under the influence of King Tubby, The Frogs, and shared fantasies about a 30th Century interpretation of Grey Gardens, the foundational spwahaohao of F.A. Henderson’s Casino Sordide could easily pass as the soundtrack for a demented, Justice-Schanfarber-hosted straight-to-public-access travelogue. The ingredients manifest includes: jumbush; damaged sitar; shamisen-type thing; kalimba seemingly custom-made for Richard Keel; suitcase zipper; messed-up log with big lead bolts, wire, and sounding gourd attached (like a Gambian ko that could double as a cudgel for a midget Viking); metal lid from tea canister; ScratchBox; air mattress pump; acoustic guitar; toy ukulele; flutish wind-instrument made of wood; Velcro; big exercise ball; bells; lychee-shaped keychain; metal ruler; plastic lid from a bottle of hot flash pills; homemade zither; cat toy; aloe vera gel; mild dyspepsia; and wood scraped with pushpins. These quiet, understated recordings are considerably gilded by overdubs of loops, tape manipulation, found noises, remote individual performances by farflung members of the group. Two mid-’80s tracks previously released on their debut cassette Make It Stop, along with new collage pieces, cast this album as the red-headed stepchild of Pork Queen’s Strang geeking the sort of quasi-shaman visions present on Buffy Saint-Marie’s Illuminations, covertly harassed by parasitic sociopaths, temple desecrators, and a language-impaired tribe locked in a basement long after the tornado has passed.
Toxic Beard
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS92) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
As with any improbable object that can’t help but be era-specific, especially during a time when the relentless strobe of an unpleasant glare makes the grime and pestilence smeared every place all the more opaque, when Civil War 2.0 often seems more imminent than not, when you have to wonder if you’ll get in trouble because your browser history shows that you were looking into getting a permit for a bow-and-arrow, Toxic Beard stews in disgust-suffused withdrawal. Many of the recordings feel remote, bordering on apathetic, a series of tosses-and-turns across the bow in the softness wars. A corny advertisement prattling fake bonhomie jive launches the album, and Lucian Tielens immediately annihilates it with “Blood Clot,” a solo turn on cornetto (as seen on episode number two of the Colour Out Of Space series Plague Time Television). For just over three minutes, he studiously avoids producing a single note in any key, opting instead for a tonal palette more common to slapping a disembodied lung left unattended on a stainless steel gurney in the hall. Tom Chimpson’s flat caroling dissects institutional text from the world of religious scolding on “Scuttlebutt Within Our Bubble.” Later in the album, on “Hoopo Koomkl Inheritance: Discuss,” he locates encrypted data worthy of espionage, as only a master textician and minister of psy-ops can, in toddler brainwashing narratives. It’s like The Conet Project produced by Up With People. New voices making themselves heard for the first time here will attract a decent audience on the steps of the gackolopolis, plentiful though the group’s stock-in-trade vocalizations barely more coherent than slurred vowels delivered supine on the floor may be. With Count Darkula as his missionary wingman, Vishnu Richelieu makes his first public appearance since The Date Fork Seeps The River (Nauscopy 2003) on “The Hardy Boys Meet Reverend Werewolf,” where he reads, in the style of a pro wrestling announcer, an apocalyptic email written by none other than Maurizio Bianchi himself. Lala Lu, the second of four new ensemble members making their debut on Toxic Beard, gets her diaphanous poet laureate on during the front end of “Reptile In Name Only” (with words penned by that president, our diarrhea nutsack sculpture), while Joan Of Art and Asskicker Bob jank the back end’s zarnt-scape with lyrics by noted pro-rape deer-piss salesman The Nuge. For the three-part suite by The Experimental Artists — an obscure Hayward-based trio of suburban creeps who directly catalyzed the formation of the group in the 1980s — they recruited Lacie Pound of Birmingham, England, to ensure the track pulsates underneath the gray matte non-sheen it deserves. The monolithic “Lateral Incisor At The Bottom Of A Swimming Pool” is more rickety and cartilage-deprived than a near-eight-minute track requires in order to survive, but Lily McBilly and our final noob Amferz commit to the plastic hysteria and zealous dealth-cult patriotism as if pitching an Annie Graham theme to Ari Aster. The thing shimmers hard with Hereditary-adjacent menace and otherworldly apparitia of pyromaniacal squirrels trying to set your feet on fire while you sleep. Consider yourself trigger-warned. Regular listeners do not need to be reminded of Bren’t Lewiis’s views regarding the interchangeability of features and defects. From the warble of kitchenware to the chatter of inane neighbors and ascended-master pretenders ostentatiously gasping for air, urban field recordings, elusive turntablist chirps and ping-ponging decontextualized voices, defective electronic fragments, faraway and backward everything, mumbles, clacks, grunts, loops, and cut-ups, this album rolls in the short’n’curlies on the floorboards of a schizophrenic harmhouse.
Thank You, L.A., It’s Been A Great Test
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS00) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Absolutely live recordings of “Waiting For The Dumpster,” “Elevators — How The Hell Do They Work?” “You Shoot Heroin, I’ll Wait Here In The Dark,” and “110-Degree Vulgar Tambourine Phantom.” Not as legendary as Springsteen defacing a billboard, but in the same intoxicating spirit. Thank You, L.A., It's Been A Great Test pumps the sump like no other album in Bren't Lewiis Ensemble's catalog, resembling a no-audience Fluxus document based on impossible actions never to be completed, crossed with an omelette made with eggs long after their sell-by date, stuffed with microscopic plankton and unpalatable, Pynchon-esque candy known as completist’s nightmare. Their lower-than-lowercase electroencephalography digs into a realm one might call post-reactionary, where meaning itself is a cosmic ugh, wasteful of time and space, sight and sound. Whenever one observes others gazing into an unmemorable void, it is never immediately clear if they’re dispassionate or dumbfounded, but given that they’re dissolving and the resultant grit is melting and the subsequent blobs are evaporating, and the atmosphere is an ur-destructive vacuum withholding all possibility of transcendence, it doesn’t matter. What madness it would be were this any different.
Complete Implant Solution
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS94) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
During innumerable hours isolated from each other and the world at large, and having undertaken a variety of new hobbies (such as breathing, binge-watching Ozark and Locked Up, and scraping skin off their shoulders), Bren’t Lewiis dives into this new go-crazy with their customary zeal and willful wrong-headedness. Each individual member of the group exploits assistance from consciousness-depriving substances in order to achieve isolation from him- or herself, an endeavor both effortless and far more difficult than it seems. If nothing else, the practice affords opportunity to consider that Tiffany’s version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” is actually about getting buried alive. Likewise, the despondent wail of Lee Moses in his 1971 cover version of “California Dreamin’ ” reminds us that mere gray skies and brown leaves are nothing to worry about compared to dodging pestilent spittle huffed by joggers as they prance maskless through the opaque silver morning air of West Coast fire season. Probably imminent are dead-frog hailstorms and a slurry of pig blood and bone marrow bubbling up from storm drains. Indeed, our current era may well be remembered by those who survive it as one that not only enshrined bad, vanity-based decisions but immortalized them — from face tattoos and psychedelic dentistry to any online comments section relating to public policy — an expectation hinted at by Karen Constance’s cover art depicting a rogue Moai apparently constructed in a DIY enthusiast’s garage using raw chicken, reclaimed wood, and a kilogram’r two of hijiki congealed in rubber cement. Under a rainbow of red roses, clad in a ballgown of purple roses, the monstrous head either spews celebratory streamers from its sourdough lips and tin pupils or else passively accepts the inevitable penetration of its body by aggressively parasitic space eels. Excerpts from numerous improvised sessions where life itself was squeezed into and out of guitar, synth, turntables, tape players, theremin, radio, thrift store cassettes, and laundry baskets filled with toys and objects have been sutured together tidier than the aftermath of a shopping mall massacre. Several tracks contain grafts courtesy of back-alley amputation of the more psychotic blobs from an old-timey promotional cassette starring Ronald McDonald, while others still attempt blood transfusions served in shot glasses by Stumpo (a duet for passing train and Black Sabbath, and a duet for seagulls and the spacy part of “Whole Lotta Love”). Smart discount shoppers will spot good deals on helium mice, Waylon Jennings versus carpentry, throat crackles, Lucy N’s signature gurn, the now-ubiquitous low-bit ambience of Zoom meetings, low drollery by early ’50s wise-gal Anna Russell, corrupted fife-and-drum loops strong-armed away from slack-jawed antebellum re-enactors, a hypnotism reading, screeching bigots, operatic warbles, and Inger Nilsson croaking the theme to Pippi Långstrump at 16rpm. So here it is, another pestilence-inspired, plague-mandated black hole in which the density of withholding surpasses the atomic structure of the source impulses of the refuseniks-in-chief. Cover by Karen Constance. Includes 16pp industrial expressionist collage.
Noncanonical Gospels From The Cult Of The Immortal Tapir
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS67) CDR $8.00
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS67) CDR Deluxe Edition $30.00
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. Artwork by Ace Farren-Ford. With two inserts and dried-tapir-blood tea. Includes three bonus tracks from Refreshing Hemorrhage. Co-released with Coherent States
Deluxe version in fur-covered jewelbox, hand-numbered edition of 35.
Rapture Piles
(Butte County Free Music Society - 48) CDR $8.00
Another transmission from the pataphysical intersection of surrealist cabaret, show-tune bombast, enhanced dementia, and vintage Caedmon Records, recorded live in San Francisco, October 2012. No instruments were used in the rendering of the ensemble's emerald-colored darkness, jagged with alien corrosion and haze that befouls the synapses, just mounds of thrift store objects and yard-sale treasures. Highlights include a quintet for lettuce spinners, and covers of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Klaatu, Magazine, and A.M. Baggs. Freeform weirdness from beginning to end. Edition of 50.
Bygone Baguette Mailboxes Of French Polynesia
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS88) 3-inch CDR $4.00 (Out-of-stock)
A single 18-minute track of synth yarng and woon, electronics, and messed up turntablism. More pleasant than watching a puppy try to hump a seahorse’s face. Includes a wallpaper swatch courtesy of Michael Morley. Edition of 25
BREN’T LEWIIS ENSEMBLE / SILVIA KASTEL / NINNI MORGIA
Found On Road, Dead
(Butte County Free Music Society - 46) CDR $8.00
A single track, just over sixty minutes long — the companion piece to the quartet's LP Fix It Again, Tony, using the same material from the same session, completely different mix and edit. Covers are hand-cut from discarded rejects rescued at a print shop. Insert has small metallic medallion glued to it. Edition of 50.
Keystone Cyclops
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS95) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Kinda-sorta but not really a concept album, noise opera or what-have-you, the final 2020 release by Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble is named after a one-eyed turkey from one of the many unreasonably vivid and detailed dreams that tiger-lily their way out of the subconscious of Gnarlos and make a grab for life on the material plane. While the album is free of all reference to Les Nessman, it instead jumps across time and space, logic and proportion, and intersects with scenes of obliquely rendered insurrection led by the titular character who, in addition to being that most ill-tempered of the class of land fowl known as “delicious,” also happens to be a superhero. His accomplishments in that role remain undetermined, as do whether they have any effect on anything, and if they do, whether it’s good or bad. No, it doesn’t make sense, just leave such hopes in a paper bag somewhere and move on. The group keeps things moving at a zippy pace, layering objects-only jam sessions, field recordings, guitar treatments, tape manipulation, and primitive electronic garnk that drops through the ceiling like a fat man stepping off the beams on the attic floor. You might actually omg aloud once immersed in this loop-saturated, collage-heavy snart-nado of dystopian pop culture and sci-fi, where Wanda Jackson, Lenny Bruce, Mr. French, and an ugly bag of mostly old hotdog water masquerading as a talk radio host enhance the spectrum. Not surprisingly, audio boosted from homemade internet videos, persistent voicemail scams, silverscreen classics, cornball commercials of yesteryear, old sound effects libraries, and thrift store cassettes abounds, while on the other hand, no one foresaw cover versions of Destroy All Monsters’ classic nihilist anthem, Edward Alderson’s delirious visions of revolt, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s gavotte-slash-inexplicably-affecting-lullabye-dirge (voiced with maximum creep factor by newest Ensemble inductee Commodore Slaiman and Jon The Baptist). Overall, it’s a screwball empire-toppling as heard through a cellphone infected by nano-parasites that are eating the transmission. Cover photo by Toni Smith.
Stop Yelling At Me In Neon Braille
(Butte County Free Music Society) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first Bren’t Lewiis album of the New Year arrives on Inauguration Day, on purpose, even though there are no illusions that it will have any more of an impact on the nature of the nation’s venomous collective consciousness than the event it commemorates. Still, as part send-off, part retrospective obstacle to wound management, this screeching, undulating psychocosm is dominated by four shrill, seemingly interminable portraits of noxious invisibility. Dissonant synth pulsations; loops of unpleasant contact mic scrape; atmospheres that resonate less than the aftermath of a collapsed parking garage; incessant electric guitar fractures; keeko-bleeko theremin scribbles; lost transmissions of PBS documentaries that resurfaced in a desert trailer park; unnatural congress with the inanimate populace of that rich musical wonderland, the suburban garage — screamin’ babeh jazus, what building blocks! Accompanied by production values that are both supportive and antagonistic, Lucian Tielens reads an account of a husband and wife forced to slaughter a sea turtle as published in their autobiographical 117 Days Adrift. The group’s minister of psychological effrontery and textician scrambler-in-chief Tom Chimpson navigates a cactus labyrinth of construction site field recordings, mad radio, turntable aliens, and Jon the Baptist’s murble-possessed guitar. His matter-of-fact message — about insurance, maritime infestations, messianic origin stories, and fragments that seem to say “no idea, you tell me” — arrives more garbled than perjured testimony in a kangaroo court where Masons are getting persecuted. One of two very brief tracks, Lala Lu’s confessional / plea / accusation / state of the union opens the album. And then, functioning as an oasis at the midpoint, a short mashup where Kristin Anderson’s boat slip sonata field recording rests on top of the gleeful self-pleasuring of Nixon, the rhino-hound sculptor owned and operated by Glub Pasha and Stanley Zappa. Stop Yelling At Me In Neon Braille could be a rare MRI that ends up providing no useful diagnostic assistance; fortunately, an hour-plus of your time that drops an extra smidge of stress, discomfort, and claustrophobic panic into the skull is your idea of a prized resource. That’s what it says in your file, anyway. Cover art by Steve Marquis
Gloria
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS49) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
What The Red Dragonfly calls “the well-mapped out, but slightly unmeasured, off-kilter nature” of Bren’t Lewiis’s (ahem) music welcomes overmodulation, sound saturation, tape hiss, tape decay, tape damage, room noise, and many an audio defect aided and abetted by AM radio, cell phones, police scanners, weather-damaged microphones and speakers, and anything else that could impinge signal fidelity. Massive tape collages dejectedly shuffle through hopelessness and despair. Percussion-only pieces seem to be aiming for regal, yet achieve debasement. Slowed-down, amplified voices reinforce the feeling of beaten exhaustion. Tempos come from objects getting dragged clumsily across the floor and field recordings of children, machines, and workers. The same mound of objects, electric gizmos and detritus from Rapture Piles is here (as well as some of the same tape loops and answering machine microcassettes), along with new recordings of throat-clutchingly spastic electric guitar noise, claustrophobic violin, plainly declaimed words, reel-to-reel tape, and more decrepit toys. Scandalously repetitious, enthralled by the arbitrary, and peculiarly deadpan, Bren’t Lewiis does all three in a minute and a half and makes it seem like a month. Comes with a reproduction of one of the original 24 tickets to the never-performed theater piece. Edition of 50.
Moose
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS86) CDR $8.00
Pointedly undignified improv is Bren’t Lewiis’s consistent tripping off point, the elements of which swap bacteria indiscriminately and form mutant heaps of questionable awareness. Fragments butchered from recording sessions — electronics, guitars, objects from kitchens and garages and toolsheds, turntables, loops, nonverbal vocalizations, and a variety of accidental and/or unintentional activities — spiced with nuggets plucked from the public domain (because any recipe with mayonnaise is not complete without raisins) are reconstituted with compositional prowess easiest described as unkempt; many of the tracks on Moose don’t fade out so much as wander at a leisurely pace toward silence. Highlights from the department of field recordings include the idiot neighbors playing their idiot drinking game, arguably gongable street musicians, and a time-lapse document of Warvette’s bullfight against the GPS in his pick-up truck. Gnarlos delivers the vocals on a cover of Peter Hammill’s “A Ritual Mask” with a level of passion rarely heard beyond a police scanner dispatch operator, while the reincarnation of Stentor himself, Lindy Lettuce, bellows and gurgles through a mash-up of words to the Christina Aguilera hit “Beautiful” and “The Light, The Sound, The Rhythm, The Noise” from Flipper’s second album. Lucian Tielens grins and bears it on a reading of execrable lyrics to an antique show-tune written to enhance the rich fantasy life of Coca-Cola salesmen. Thus, the end result is an album that’s one part stoned teenagers sloshing around the back of a station wagon taken off-road without permission, one part long-winded recollection of an erotic Tardigrade cosplay party, and one part endless loop of Linda McCartney’s synth solo on “Jet.” Artwork by Steve Marquis.
Fifth Dementia
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS113) CDR $8.00
There’s nothing technically inaccurate about saying the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble releases albums, though behind the scenes they are thought of as “escorted from the building.” A few just escape. Their second disc of 2023 arrives much like the contents of a piñata stuffed with Streptococcus pyogenes and exotic succulents. As the opening track shuffles into view wearing nothing but a bathrobe and slippers on the wrong feet makes clear, Fifth Dementia is glued together with preparations for the end. In the BLE’s vision of The Big Not-Any-More, the past wobbles toward oblivion and wipes its feet on the welcome mat, while the adhesives-slathered future rises up in an infinite tidal wave of impending collapse, leaving the present as a ventriloquist act called Lil Tired And Captain Defeated. On “Nearly Drowned by The Anti-Merm,” Lala Lu’s cut-up reading of the lyrics to Yoko Ono’s “What Did I Do?” — recorded as a memento mori for the late Tom Smith of To Live And Shave In L.A. — slithers between tossed scrape salads, snow-blowers, noxious Star Trek hippies, and an animatronics-damaged “A Mighty Fortress.” Tom Chimpson and Jimmy The Baptist stage their retirement-home magic show with the surreally tense “Sterno The Magnificent Spotted Bone Gambler,” seemingly for the benefit of an audience of sedative-abusing rabbits. It’s a beautifully perplexing mix of resinated guitar, epicurean wheedle that disfigures itself just above the horizon line, and disembodied clunks and clacks that ping the pong of all but the absolutely hairless. The 24-minute “Sous Vide Meat Glue Experiment” is the soundtrack to the Ensemble’s video of the same name that premiered in August 2021 as part of the UK TUSK Festival’s online concert series. To create this gargantuan cut-up, The City Councilman began by mashing together home-made footage of various recording sessions and boosts from the public and corporate domains, and then, without revealing the final sequence, shared the unassembled effects-heavy fragments with Lucian Tielens, Gnarlos, and their fellow mutants, who nevertheless assembled with pinpoint accuracy a nightmare-triggered quilt of voices (their own as well as those appropriated from thrift store cassettes, children’s records, and YouTube videos), electronics and noises plucked from years of recording sessions, sound effects records, vintage radio shows, and home-made documentation of strangers losing it on public transportation. Listen for the tinkle of cat toys on “Answer Correctly And I’ll Send You Wicker Furniture On Your Birthday” — that’s Lacie Pound saying no-no-no with tiny bells woven into his glorious winter beard, silhouetted against a Musiclandria sunrise featuring The Affable Chap on electronic sputters and The Viper on squawk fiddle. The album closes with “Looks / Isn’t Shoe Needle,” inspired in equal measure by ancient cave paintings of primitive-lobed skull jockeys and the inevitable all-consuming deep-fakes that await us all 24/7. This 57-minute cocktail (two parts premature geriatrics, one part second childhood, a splash of MK Ultra) radiates an age-inappropriate vibe on par with Dr. Zachary Smith taking over a quinceñera while dressed in an off-brand foam carrot suit.
Chewing Scenery
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS108) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A slow-motion buckshot spray of Lost in Space bleeps and bloops spreads the group’s heat-sought rash across the canvas, as usual, throbbing and twinkling in a void seemingly sponsored by the Wubb Telescoop. But be on the lookout for collisions with gravity fields that pull the elements apart, leaving their piercing shrillness to jab at nothing within the corridors of your personal solitude. If that seems a little too Star Trek for your tastes, don’t worry: no one’s gonna mention the time you took ecstasy at the convention and thought one of the parking attendants was Nyota Uhura. Still, moog-adjacent yoib whizzes past like fresh junk, courtesy of The Library At Musiclandria in Sacramento, where much of Chewing Scenery was recorded in November and December 2021. The Affable Chap, on loan from the UK home office, makes his debut appearance in Bren’t Lewiis here, and returning champion The Viper was on board to scrape the cat gut — a real life saver since the fingernail-friendly chalkboard had been borrowed by another patron earlier that day. From sessions at Hazel’s ’Lectric Washouse, a re-christened Jimmy The Baptist wrings pure glory from the ether like a brand new solar panel so potent you’d be advised to mind the UV, while Tom Chimpson reads OCD laundry demands from the script for an abandoned prequel to Seven centered around the origin story of Kevin Spacey’s character. The customary disembodied voices, field recordings, household catastrophes, animals losing it, fails video soundtracks, edits both smoother and more jarring than Daddy-o’s morning anxiety dump abound, so don’t think this is nothing more than a fresh take on space rock no one was desperate enough to ask for. Lacie Pound pops up throughout, eavesdropping on neighbors, performing a bit of Blood Stereo karaoke, and investigating electronics-enhanced grooming procedures of the co-inhabitants of his place of dwell. Lala Lu maintains her in-house wild card monopoly, singing back up to avant Cleaver Babs Billingsley, citing Shakespeare, and musing about high school sports admins. An electric baby monitor flashes the creep-on-the-subway voice of Gnarlos reading a selection from Spike Milligan’s Puckoon (page 129, to be exact). Consider that Lucian Tielens’s cover art mosaic of post blizzard powder reads like an explosion at a fire extinguisher factory, and the hint is there for you to take.
Refreshing Hemorrhage
(Butte County Free Music Society - 44) 7-inch $8.00
Both versions of “People,” the aloof masterpiece by Mancunian iconoclasts Gods Gift, are covered simultaneously on the A Side, as Bren’t Lewiis shambles along on fuzz guitar, warped keyboards, and Colour Out Of Space field recordings, while the imperious Silvia Kastel intones her dispassionate but resolutely negative critique of mankind. The B Side continues with a severely bent cover of both versions of “O Jackie O,” itself a damaged charm song by Chicago trio ONO, here performed on messed-up kazoo, holiday wrapping paper tube, and tape-manipulated field recordings from the swamp where Annette Funicello’s head was buried by The Allman Bros. An unhealthy tape piece brings the record its queasy conclusion. Overall, totally appalling, but in a good way, like the talent show scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Edition of 100.
Hard Molt
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS58) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
On the duskiest and murkiest album so far by this group of noise hillbillies, looped excerpts from studio improvisations form the congealed muck where chunky ashes of cacophonous live recordings embed and dissolve like wilted arugula paste. The album’s opening and closing tracks tear off their own feathers and hurl themselves down an embankment, choreographed by Tom Timpson’s eBay-worthy 45s on the turntable. Corrupted technique is on fine display here — a cross between Aufgehoben with lobotomies, a tourist hotel band attempting to cover The Starfuckers, and the Christian folk trio Jandek once played accordion with during his days in the military. Defeated-sounding whine’n’wheeze is the order of the day, as are Nyoukis/Constance-influenced collisions of the preordained and the spontaneously erupting, in which cut-up, looped noises and purposeful soliloquies compete with one another and sickeningly abstracted content. Lucian Tielens, wielding guitar and antique potato masher, wreaks King Guillotine-like depuration upon the unclean. Among the dark guitar extrapolations, dense processing, no-instruments montages, field recordings, live performances, and zero tolerance for finesse, warmth, or stylishness, highlights include “Baked Alaska,’’ the score for immobilist filmmaker Melvin John Addington’s Vast Expanse Of Rock And Snow, performed live by Tielens and Gnarlos at Colour Out Of Space in 2011, using nothing but toys and objects purchased at 99p shops in Brighton, England; and a centrally located duet by Tielens on Fisher-Price turntable and Silvia Kastel on electronics and voice, burbling like a mudpit underneath a crimson haze with more grace than typically dared by BuFMS mutants. With three inserts, including flyer reproductions and an industrial expressionist collage. Edition of 100
Map of Something?
(Butte County Free Music Society - 51) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two long, trigger-word-dominated tracks composited from a grim live set at The Terminal in Oakland and a hotel room recording. Kitchen-based shenanigans, inbred instrumental passages, pre-recorded voices and sound effects, live noise, samples, loops, electronics, home-made devices, field recordings, and fractured readings derived from DVD liner notes and hospitality literature. Students of veterinary medicine will find much in common here with their study of digestive disorders of livestock. All feel-good grooves are dead on arrival, put out of their misery by the lethal anti-suave of this ensemble with a perpetually rustled hive mind. Edition of 50.
The Armless Marvel
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS59) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
This supplementary hit of the dark, bad acid that birthed Bren’t Lewiis’s Hard Molt (via elagabalusian section, according to the doula) wallows in a comparably jagged dead-end of monolithic schmutz. Skull-bending free improv waterlogged by tape manipulation, body-snatched sound collage, and gaseous disorientation; off-center guitar wobble impaled on spikes of fuzz; relatively meditative spaz-outs, household objects, tape noise, waves of fweemp; apocalyptic, maniacally saturated and self-engorged Echoplex; lascivious caliph vocals, the moist fwapping of a bicyle-powered chicken-plucking machine, field recordings, and disturbing phlegm loops; murky, impaired fidelity. More inscrutable than a murder at an old-fashioned smorgasbord. Includes industrial expressionist collage insert. Edition of 100
Toupée Made Of Weather
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS98) CDR $8.00
Eventually the spring-breakers who survive their pandemic-era bacchanals are going to discover nostalgia, and Toupée Made Of Weather hereby provides many options for the inevitable retrospective anthology Befuddled Goobers of Shartwave with which all Jersey Shore wannabes worth their anti-viral cream will soundtrack their fevered reminiscences. In addition to sentences from thrift store cassettes, near constant field recordings of indecipherable voices in the background, collages of suburban VHS psychosis, and fragments of guitar and electronic flubba dubba from Fluxus Enigma and Hazel’s ’Lectric Washhouse sessions, lots of processed loops grabbed from various coordinates within the audiosphere are present — an instructive percussive vamp from Art Blakey here, disco hits by KC & The Sunshine Band and Kool & The Gang there, a little fortune-telling from Jan & Dean’s inexhaustible supply of face-palmistry, bluesman Jimmie Revard’s alien doink, weird shit by Steely Dan, yogurt-slathered sitar from a Carnaby-era Marianne Faithfull, and glitches sourced from a Paul Bowles album uploaded to Spotify (proof that the death of quality control is the noisician’s librarian card). “Dead Mackerel and a Bucket of Flaming Housepaint” is a demo submitted for consideration as the band playing in the foyer at the ceremony when guitarist Brian Ruryk earns his Lifetime Achievement Award. The Ensemble’s cover of a French black metal song relies on a phonetic mistranslation of the lyrics of the original by a wiseguy YouTube user and is also loaded with enough backstory to fill an escape pod (“you get 3-D pictures of space porn!”); in the hands of Bren’t Lewiis, it now reads like a dystopian travelogue penned by an incel from the future visiting the past to impregnate baby Hitler. Other highlights include their transformation of lyrics lifted from Daffy Duck and The Groovie Ghoulies into pathos-rich nightmares, Lala Lu’s baby-doll-off-her-meds multi-track soliloquy, and the deliciously anticlimactic finale when Stanley Zappa and Glub Pasha spend some time between two ferns.
Attract And Reproduce
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS107) 3-inch CDR $4.25 (Out-of-stock)
Eighteen minutes of electro-squawk inspired by bot larvae gestating in a nutrient-rich aspic of rancid custard and leech waste. The fourth three-inch CDR in the Dumb Tangerine Dream series. Includes a swatch of Yale University sweatshirt courtesy of This Is Yvonne Lovejoy. Cover photo by Lacie Pound. Edition of 25
Tremendous Pace Of Melt
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS91) 3-inch CDR $4.25 (Out-of-stock)
The second in the Dumb Tangerine Dream series delivers a single eighteen-minute track of spoon-bitten synth murb, irregular guitar noise pulsations, dry-rubbed crackles, clunks of indeterminate provenance, and a warped children’s record or two. Constructed of stellar foam and layers of drone-toasted loops, organized into abruptly shifting episodes that mimic a series of Julius seizures at subterranean laundromats, this amorphous-adjacent block of charred goo is sicker and sweeter than a midnight s’mores fail. Includes a burlap swatch courtesy of Yvonne Lovejoy. Front cover by Shalimar Fox. Edition of 25.
Taxidermy Frogs Copulating
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS72) CDR $8.00
Over an hour of primordial muck extracted from the squishy lobes of these rurality-damaged urp-meisters. Bendier and more musk-slathered than a nudist farm trampoline, this Eros-preoccupied companion to the group’s upcoming Thanatos-exploiting The Inevitable Typo On Sheila Ostrich’s Tombstone applies electronic yeem to backward Marx Brothers opera, the voices of slimy novelty degenerates, and everything writhing on the tiles in between. Ample time on their first release of 2018 is allotted to reimagining several of fiction’s great lotharios -- Dwight Shrute, Ernst Blofeld, Mr. Magoo, and Rod McKuen -- as a cross between fascistic playboys and sex Nazis. Bug-eyed gurgles and clacks advance and recede with satyriasis-enriched determination worthy of a home-made installation of Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse. All buttons on the cookie machine are pushable: Moistened sputters, lascivious fwaps, cascades of dirty corn popping, weird grunting, perv huff, dejected shuffling of objects unaccustomed to the attention, and primitive electronic wub from toys and gizmos and manipulations. Salacious alien screeches serenade the reluctant, propelled by the percussive fiddle-faddle of incessant gorge harassment and creepy shoulder rubs. In master suites where violins get sawed in half by morning-after dental floss spat out of inflamed urethrae, Thundertubes and Stylophones grapple like surreal Greco-Roman tadpoles. BLE’s confusing, heavily mirrored demimonde, where everything and nothing is disturbing and inappropriate, allows the sound of children’s toys to infiltrate the needlessly elaborate hideouts of villains and make everyone uncomfortable on several levels. Keeps things spicy.
The Thirteenth Century German Poet (And Who Can Forget Him)
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS55) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Rampant gaping immensity and pathologically polychromatic hoot from the BuFMS wing of Saint WTF’s Asylum. Micro-episodic tape pieces (with a head-spinning variety of appropriated voices, noises, electronics, music and sound effects) merge with field recordings, cut-ups, loops, improv, live performances, and a range of cover versions that includes a Korean plastic surgery infomercial, bona fide poetry, a book review, a YouTube waif, and Van Morrison. The group delivers pastoral yet alien meander à la The Way Out by The Books, spots of electro-creep worthy of Ruth White’s Flowers Of Evil, entertainment at a LAFMS barbecue, and a variety show extrapolated from the A.M. radios in the background of Firesign Theatre’s Everything You Know Is Wrong. A dazzling and peculiar assemblage. Edition of 50.
Live At Pompeii
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS60) CDR $8.00
Anyone whose mind was sawed in half by The Stallion’s liberties-hogging interpretation of The Wall released by In The Red stands a chance of not hating what The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble does to the soundtrack to Pink Floyd’s legendary concert film (plus a couple tertiary Floyd-related pieces), finally joining us all in the noxious haze of daylight after a fitful four-year gestation. The hairless apes don’t come at it sideways so much as burrow through the dirt underneath and pop their heads out in various places like moles trying to ambush a housecat. Hands with no arms. Torso like a leftover chile relleno. Vulcan autoharp. Alpacas recovering from the effects of tainted codeine. A cameo by Darksmith of California. You know how it is. Edition of 50, the first 25 of which include a tardigrade air freshener, because prog rock.
BUTTE COUNTY FREE MUSIC SOCIETY
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BUTTE COUNTY FREE MUSIC SOCIETY
Induced Musical Spasticity
(Butte County Free Music Society - 25) 4xLP + CD $65.00 (Out-of-stock)
Induced Musical Spasticity commemorates the nascent pollination — in the musty shadows of the real ersatz Sherwood Forest, a couple hundred miles north of San Francisco — of the Buttecounty Free Music Society, an apocryphal institution that encouraged anything and nothing, in musical and amusical contexts, sometimes intentionally, sometimes because no one knew any better or cared. Highbrow concept tracks by The Marques (brothers Cole and Steve Marquis) and the dramaturgical Unlikely Modernists, along with Ambivalent Dosage’s pre-Vomit Launch nihilism, mutter and howl next to mad paisley destructo by Dilwhip and the quartet edition of 28th Day, Hypnagogic Jerk’s overmodulated roar, and sweet, YMG-influenced instrumentals by Hallucinatory Companion (aka Barbara Manning and Cole Marquis). Ripe dementia by Experimental Artists, Lawrence Crane and John Young, and Tops Inc. stops rational people in their tracks, while turntable experiments, tape yoink, and high-lonesome electro-twarnk by Rory Lyons, Ziplok, Sidney Afrika, The Conduits, Lucian Tielens, and Richard Streeter shuffle the consciousness. And then you’ve got primitard rock dunt by The Flamboyant Offals, Walking Jock, Dead Boy 3, and shockingly raw 28th Day material that predates most anyone’s idea of the original line-up of that influential band. Four episodes of Matt Mumper’s serial radio play Beor The Friendly Thing appear, in all its inscrutable, deadpan glory. The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble pollutes the lion’s share of real estate with a side-long tape cut-up a la Faust Tapes called “Goat Embryo (Covered With Glue),” and their entire live set from the Industrial Barbecue. Also here are the spot-on country lament “Plastic Jesus”; the electronic damage of “Mid-Range Phase/Link 3"Dome”; the Smegma-influenced “Lightbulb Incident,” infamous for its live, on-air sodomy; a KCSC radio interview that includes the group’s first recordings; and a handful of previously unreleased tracks. Two-thirds of the material here was previously released (translation: a few dozen cassettes were dubbed one at time and passed through the hands of people in the same rural Northern California area code 25 years ago). All the relics in this boxset are likely unheard by anyone not specifically mentioned above.
Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition
(Butte County Free Music Society - 37) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Inspired by Non’s Pagan Muzak (more by the repeating form than by the content), Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition was created in the early 1980s by two agriculture students (now anti-GMO activists), and released on their own Chair Chair cassette label. Using a handful of sound effects records as their sole audio source, Canker and Chancre created loops on reel-to-reel tape and endless cassettes used for answering machines, which were then manipulated via cut-up, speed, direction, saturation and multitracking for their independently made submixes; those were then merged together for the final mixes with virtually no further changes, because, as Chancre explains, “We didn’t want it to sound composed, so much as manufactured, as if it was all just happening by itself.” At times maddeningly busy with the stock-in-trade of old sound effects records -- animals and machines -- smeared, repeating, overlapping, the album’s raw and relentless uneasiness is further enhanced by omnipresent crackles and infrequent but abrupt silences. Includes non-GMO pasta (raw), and one of two different reproductions of artwork from Captain Protein noodle packaging. Second edition of 37, in support of California Proposition 37.
“After strolling through [Repetition Is The Sincerest Form Of Repetition], the squeak of this ergot-tomato-therapeutic mesh still seems very far from me, its radio links out of reach of my rakes.” —Princecranoi, Reeds & Birches
Craniostomy Vol. Two
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS90) CDR $8.00
Collaged, layered, and rebuilt selections from solo cassettes Fast Moving Shadows (1983), Fragment (1984), and Sad Poetry of Departure (1985). In these two brand new mixes with a combined length of 43 minutes, Crane sticks to the more droney and repetitive parts of his original recordings rather than the song-oriented material. You won't hear electronic gargle this determined outside of a modular egg dream, no sir. This is a robust cruise through a downpour of crud-blurred shards and pulsating piles of free-rock membranes scraped off the eyeballs of zombies. All of it was originally tracked via a pair of home stereo cassette recorders, years before Crane had access to a multitrack. Using a 9v battery-powered Radio Shack mixer, he played one deck while adding another layer of instrumentation and recording both on the second deck. “If I’d had the ability to edit, multitrack, and add more effects at the time,” he says, “I certainly would have presented my recordings in this manner back in the ’80s.” Instrumentation was Steve Valin’s fake P-Bass, his Hawaiian lap steel guitar, fake Gibson SG electric guitar, Mattel Synsonics Drums, Maestro Echoplex, Casio PT-10, Casio VL-1, Texas Instruments SN76477 Complex Sound Generator, Roland synth, Pearl AD-08 analog delay pedal, Jaymar toy piano, Boss DM-2 analog delay pedal, Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal, PAiA EK-5 analog delay kit, homemade triple oscillator box, homemade mono keyboard oscillator box, guts from a toy piano, homemade passive mixer, 8-track cartridge recorder (for distortion), two Radio Shack Realistic 33-1080 Electret Microphones, and samples from The Soul of Mbira LP, 1973. Cover art by Karen Constance
Craniostomy Vol. One
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS64) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The founder of Tape Op magazine and Vomit Launch recorded and self-released numerous cassette-only albums throughout the ’80s, mostly passed around to friends and fellow noise-makers, consigned at local record shops, and traded with like-minded travelers through the mail. One reviewer wrote, “The echoing sounds, pulsating tones, and other space age noise creations melodically swim through the compositions, occasionally colliding in dissonant tones that pout over the rhythm, sometimes created by a fuzzy bass or Schroederesque toy piano rambling.” Six previously unreleased tracks plus thirteen selections from a half dozen self-released cassettes, with Steve Valin of Ziplok on three tracks, and Matt Mumper on the full version of “Beor’s Theme.” Cover art by Karen Constance. Edition of 100
Love Belch
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS110) CDR $8.00
Throughout the third album of recordings from the late 1980s by EL&C (congealed into a trio for this particular session), the bent scrapings just stop and go, because destinations are a myth. The hoity-toity can have their posh beginnings and endings. Thematic development — ew, gross. If you want a meaningful, satisfying arc, go buy opera tickets. These nine tracks do not fuss with making progress from one point to another on some big deal spectrum. Between guitarists Scud Mandrill and Phil Smoot’s heavy, bulldozed twang, damaged tape yoink streaks with more unhinged glee than nude exhibitionists, shoulder to shoulder with delay pedal jabs (and ’70s kitsch, and fragments from Bren’t Lewiis sessions). For 46 minutes, thick and rennetless improv gnaws on rock-infused, decibel-saturating garnk with a level of tunnel-vision determination that’d alarm your average neurologist. Includes bagged sample of inedible orange powder.
The Show That Never Starts
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS102) CDR $8.00
On this 40-minute live recording from 1987, seven guitarists chop the audio space into nuggets and hoard it like desperately stir-crazed fanatics in a cave. Twitching streams of bending amp shriek and atonal blats ricochet as if the guitars are getting repossessed in real time, which makes it seem like the set meanders; it does lack direction, but it’s not at all lost. EL&C knows where they are — “writhing in a filthy pile,” to quote Fred Rinne. Invert the ratios of a Peach Of Immortality / Stefan Jaworzyn collaboration and here you are: Nothing sounds like anything, and everything is louder than everything else. Grinding, churning, sharpness, nausea, a post-godly orgy of guitar noise stabbing itself in the head. Then the queasy side effects kick in and you can practically feel the octet deflating, wound-licking, seeping into the floorboards of the MCS like a bunch of doused witches. Unimpressed silence, four people slow-clapping. Pure victory. Includes bagged sample of inedible orange powder.
“A bizarro-world whack on vanilla prog heavies. Selten Gehörte Musik and Nitsch actions, check, but surely with more clothes on.” —Tom Lax
Wild America
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS99) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Atrocious as the name of the band may be — as the name is, no need to hedge — there is no denying its accuracy as a descriptor: two parts shrill, overblown, and longer than necessary; one part aberrant, oversaturated, and lacking in nutrients. The near-hour-long nature-show soundtrack recorded live on KALX in Berkeley, 1987, by a short-lived group consisting for this session of Scud Mandrill and Phil Smoot (The Whitefronts), Greg Freeman (Pell Mell), and Chas Nielsen (Idiot (The)), aims to singe whatever porthole of empirical data collection is chosen. No matter what, part of you will end up scarred by Day-Glo hues, unpleasant grit, overexposure to reptilian crunch, the hot mulch of regret, and untamed electric howl.
The Complete Film Soundtrack Recordings By Maria Estevez
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS28) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A barren, low-contrast, spooky construct from the early 1980s made of primitive field recordings, raw tape loops, machines, gadgets, objects, a variety of keyboards and string instruments, thrift store records, and guest vocals by The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, Barbara Manning, and an Akita named Grizzle. Based on the fiction of redactivist author C.F. Calderwood, the results flirt with Eraserhead filtered through Smithsonian Folkways, halfway between Dungeon Taxis’ excavation of John Pilcher and Martin McKelvin’s A Bun Dance CD, Galerie Pâche’s LP by the obscure Mr Labrador, and the backwoods subterranea of Darksmith of California. Booklet includes Calderwood’s original short story.
Meat Receiving
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS41) CDR $8.00
Two long tracks of ground-up tape noise and uneasy electronics, plus the five-minute "Venison" (previously released by From The Same Mother on a CDR comp; features Tom Lax on tongs), all previously released on the Ultra Eczema LP of the same name. Overall, an off-kilter abattoir of dread and fear and suffering. With bonus tracks.
Convicted Felon Adjusted For Inflation
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS68) CDR $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. Co-released with Coherent States.
Inoperable Turmeric Malignancy
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS83) CDR $8.00
Released in support of the April 2019 tour by Seymour Cassel and Barbara Mandrell, as Aaron Dilloway refers to them, this mostly live recording reveals the crazed shards of flavor-blasted rock always present in the duo’s idiosyncratic gack but usually obscured by a psychotic interfacing of the psychedelic and the concrète, a là Ceremony. The five tracks here, including covers of The Dead C. and Traffic, writhe around like a bunch of unforeseen side effects to ill-advised pharmaceuticals sharing. Screeching, bellowing, collapsing, meandering toward oncoming vehicles, too many impaired functions to name.
Unexplained Bite Marks
(Butte County Free Music Society - 34) CDR $8.00
Released in April 2012 to coincide with Glands of External Secretion’s third-ever live appearance (at Trapdoor Fucking Exit, a performance series connected to Helga Fassonaki’s Touching Them Touching You - A Love Song for the Dead C), Unexplained Bite Marks took place on May 20, 1994, at legendary subterranean niteclub The Purple Onion, in the Chinatown / North Beach district of San Francisco, where a loveable maniac by the name of Tom Guido holds court whenever and with whomever he wants. Michael Morley (of The Dead C and Gate) happened to be in town, and Margaret Murray of U.S. Saucer (and Manning’s Truth Walks In Sleepy Shadows album) never refuses a challenge, so this utterly impromptu occasion also marked the first and only time Glands of External Secretion was a quartet. The raw and monolithic result is loud, distorted, saturated and more obscured by murk than The Loch Ness monster on a menopausal rampage.
Do Not Disturb
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS93) CDR $8.00
Released to kick off the Summer Of Ugh, Glands Of External Secretion’s noise-snuffled psychedelica sounds like what you see when you look through a kaleidoscope that’s been sat on by the creeper staring dude who’s always around even though no one knows him well enough to say if he’s a narc or a pedophile. Doesn’t talk for long time, and then all of a sudden does, loudly. It’s an album of disconnected visions and unstable passages from recuperation diary entries come to life, composed during recovery on a moldy waterbed surrounded by unreliable nomads in a hands-free hospital run by machines. Or a Volkswagon repair shop, possibly. Hard to say. Although it’s definitely trippy. Not in a way that expands the consciousness but rather stubs your toe on the paint in the crosswalk and makes you fall over. All the cars are honking at you because the light has changed in the time it took you to get up. The bag of kung pao take-out has been annihilated and you can’t decide which of the three traumas your forearm is experiencing hurts the most. That’s what this is. The second kind of trippy. The bad kind, with the overdriven speakers, online instruments, radios, sound effects, household objects and office supplies, sentences boosted from thrift store cassettes and the internet. Three pieces are soundtracks for videos (one of which screened in November 2019 at the Poesie Carnosa / My Dance The Skull festival in Italy, and in December at the Lip Bar X Psychic Communities film festival in England, while the other two were part of the Plague Time Television and Heinous Whining isolation concerts, respectively). Duo appearances live on WRCT and at Skeleton Dust Records from April 2019 are included, as well a re-creation of a solo set performed on the air at KFJC in December 2019. Lyrics were extracted and assembled from Roberta Flack’s early ’70s soul ballad, autobiographical notes in an anthology of amateur photography, and dreams published in the first issue of Andy Bolus’s Barbequeue’d Humans zine. Plus a bunch of outbursts and symptoms of preexisting conditions. Ominous rectangles and just, you know, general yarrrnnnnng.
Absent-Minded Control Freak
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS50) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Forty-one minutes of deformed gurgles; electro-chemical spasms; Nyoukis-inspired gibber smacked by cut-up electronic damage; field recordings both exotic and mundane, mechanical and untamed; scratchy, bottom-of-the-barrel turntablism; and muy picante appropriated garble.
Reverse Atheism
(Butte County Free Music Society - 32) 2xLP $22.00
Barbara Manning and S. Glass lead a small army of guest readers and musicians through barely musical versions of tunes, texts, and tracts. Barely faithful cover versions (XTC, Gods Gift, Hank Williams, The Osmonds, Edgar Winter, The Birthday Party, New Creation), with varying degrees of overhaul, mangling and looseness of interpretation, emerge like seared remnants of a torched London happening from 1966. Texts by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Dan Ashwander, Wayne Bent, John F. Kennedy, Flannery O’Connor, Hugo Ball, Rayva Liliana, and Hippocrates traverse the spectrum of belief, resulting in a migraine coexistence of skepticism, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientology, paranoid schizophrenia, doomsdays cults, Hinduism, evangelism, Catholicism, witchcraft and wizardry, guardian angels, Armageddon, rapture, post-apocalypse, Illuminati, satanism, existential despair, purgatory, creationism and intelligent design, Darwinism, conspiracy and hoax, the Tarot, human sacrifice, Sikhs, ascension, royalty, cargo cults, divine right, fatalism, Western medicine, oaths, incantation, cosmic retribution, excommunication, alien abduction, the occult, pagans, infidels, heathens, mind control, prophecy, remote prayer, and, naturally, atheism. Guest speakers include Lucian Tielens (Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble), Bruce Russell (The Dead C.), Patricia Rowland (Vomit Launch), Jett Hotcomb (The Talented Hairdos) Thurston Graham (Resistance Works), Scott Simmons (Eat Skull), Dave Gulbis (Celine Dion) Andrew Murphy (Celine Dion, Forked, Smooch), Titch Turner (The Vaticans), Emiko Saito (Obsessive-Compulsive Cat), Cristain Ceia (Romania), Matt Mumper (Beor The Friendly Thing, The Helper), Toni Smith (HappyLucky Design), and Rainbow Cartwheel (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy). Guest musicians include Flavor Station (Ukuzuna) on ukuleles and vocals, Alastair Galbraith (A Handful of Dust) on violin, Doug Pearson (International Hello) on electronics, Black Rose (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy) on keyboards, and Earl Kuck (Tedium House) on small motors. With 24 x 36 poster. Tedium House copies include a penalty CDR containing two demo-style rough mixes, two noise-loop collages, and Kali Bahlu's "A Cosmic Telephone Call From the Angel Liesle and The Buddha" reimagined as a radio play.
Chronic Pussyfooting
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS101) CDR $12.00
If this is not Barbara Manning and S. Glass’s post-apocalyptic homage to Fripp and Eno’s early ’70s monolith, the only other explanation is hermit crabs having brain seizures inside Tibetan singing bowls. Using loops and digital delay to enhance the steroidal calliope atmosphere with a touch of relentlessness and dread, the duo’s two long, whirling tracks fling ropes of bright ooze this way, that way, and the other way. Be on high alert for supernatural beings wobbling through a series of movements and gestures that make sense only to a black yogiraj lost in some unspecified realm where space and time are mashed into an origami-like lump. Thirty-eight minutes of symmetrical splats, crackling wheem, crystals made of congealed blood, and Tortuga silt. Includes reflective packaging.
Masters Of Atlantis
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS29) CDR $8.00
This quasi-concept album chronicles an old man's nervous breakdown, his inevitable collapse, and the disastrous wake-up call. Like Meat Receiving (Ultra Eczema 2009), Tubular Bells (Starlight Furniture Co., 2003), and Icebox (Opax 2005), it is both an electronic album and a musique concrète album, though not strictly either. An unnerving montage of found sounds and field recordings (rusty hinges, antique calculators, security alarms, spewed liquids, defective mechanical pumps, public address announcements), narcotized sound effects from cartoons and children’s records, tape loops and tape cut-ups, and a smidge of electric guitar. Previously released on Inyrdisk.
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS100) CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on replicated CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak.
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Co-released with Chocolate Monk. Edition of 150
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $32.00 (Out-of-stock)
This perfect-bound paperback book is a 76pp account of the August 2018 tour that took S. Glass with and without the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble to Los Angeles, Canada, Seattle, and Portland. Illustrated in color throughout with images from Lucian Tielens’s archive of objects and documents donated to and/or abandoned at the public library, photos and video stills shot along the way by The City Councilman, the book contains informal Q-and-As with many of the artists with whom the BLE shared stages (including Pulsating Cyst, Verge Bliss of Dendera Bloodbath, Rick Potts of Dinosaurs With Horns, Dinzu Artefacts recording artist Jack Taylor, Ace Farren-Ford of Hangar Quartet, Josh Stevenson of Magneticring, Joe Peg of Red Panda Death March, Jackie Stewart of The Tenses, and David Weinberg of Sic), along with kindred spirits Doug Harvey of Mannlicher Carcano and F, Bill Chen of Baby Huey and KSPC, Jesse Dewlow of People Skills, Stanley Zappa of Manzap, former editor / publisher of The Ongoing Dialogue Blossom Ahmad, and Barbara Manning. Ask your doctor if What’s Going To Happen To Us? is right for you. Side effects include: nausea; fever; mass transportation dread; vulgar dining options; attempted murder; exploitation flicks; nightmare-inducing bedtime stories; weird fuckers doing strange shit; bio-mechanical warfare; radio interviews; vile lodgings; neurological issues; hostile environments; face-palms; hallucinatory companions; shopping sprees; celebrity touchstones; bizarre acts of customer service; and the restroom-ification of public space. As a follow-up to If You Can’t Be Good, Be Reasonable (Chocolate Monk 2018), it’s exponentially more paranoid, delusional, cryptic, bleak, over-the-edge, and disgusting. You’ll love it. Cover by Stanley Zappa.
Kubelik Unbugged
(Butte County Free Music Society - 39) CDR $8.00
Forty-six minutes of slightly off-kilter, instrumental soundtracks for non-existent, noir-ish movies, edited from three hours of improvisational boombox tapes recorded in the late '80s by Larry Crane (Vomit Launch, TapeOp), Mark Evans (Fat Chick From Wilson Phillips, Uh-Moncst), and Lucian Tielens (Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, Serious Problmz). Kubelik Unbugged collects straight excerpts with no additional processing beyond modest crossfades; the trio’s spontaneously rendered squalls form a surprisingly coherent patchwork a la Obscured By Clouds, filtered through the atmospherics of 3R4 and retrofitted for a Doug Roberts-directed episode of The Twilight Zone. Edition of 50.
JETT HOTCOMB AND THE TALENTED HAIRDOS
Give Us This Day Our Swingin' Bread
(Butte County Free Music Society - 31) 7-inch (one-sided) $8.00
Homemade Christian lounge music from the late ’70s, previously available as a free cassette (self-released via the Jett 3:16 label) for guests at a now-defunct rural motel in Butte County. Two tracks with a full band ("Jesus Digs Me" and "The Lord's Prayer") and two recorded a cappella in the shower ("Live and Let Die" and "Shampoo Bottle"). Includes reproductions of four period handbills and business cards, as well as a Butte County Free Music Society pink flamingo swizzle stick. Edition of 200.
Boundary Situation
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS51) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The debut solo album by the former vocalist of Serious Problmz front-loads dense tangles of diminutive noise squiggles and mechanical jitters, with elusive roars always corroding the fringes. It progresses through corridors and courtyards of increasing sparseness and disconnected unreality, and concludes in the peculiar triumphant glow of Man Against Nature. Voices with standard-issue clinical neutrality (as well as one or two that are unnervingly chummy) reciting assigned texts, institutionally formal instructions, and answers to FAQs zigzag between birds chirping, owls hooting, panting, a children’s playground, jet engines, railroads, and other sound effects. Mace’s labyrinths of looping and filtering, woozy guitar noise backdrops, appropriations of folky acoustic guitar, R’n’B instrumentals, and fragments of sharp piano playing are elaborate, yet navigable and uncluttered. This fairly vast, steadily churning chemo–narrative constructed with electronics, loops, signal processing, ambient textures, and eccentric voices is a masterful hybrid of electronics and musique concrete, inspired by good ol’ fashioned existential dread brought upon by a cancer diagnosis and treatment, overcome by dexterous manipulation of its own alienating elements. Includes printed insert and a section of medical gauze. Edition of 50. Tediumhouse.com mailorders include a bonus three–inch CDR.
Alone In A Room
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS80) CDR $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Over an hour of unheard recordings by the legendary singer-songwriter, 18 tracks in all, recorded in 1997 by herself — one mic, voice, acoustic guitar. All proceeds will be dispersed to three of her friends who lost everything in the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Artwork by Karen Constance.
*** Money from all sales of any other Butte County Free Music Society release ordered before December 31 2018 will also be donated to the above families.
Live 1981
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS40) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Proof that even as far back 1981, teenagers were revolting. Seven rehearsal tracks, recorded on a boombox in the park, and three at a high school talent show, performed by an unruly gang of Northern California wisenheimers led by the class president. Rants are raved, patois is bellowed, metal cans are bashed and crashed, glass bottles are ground together, general percussion and strange instruments are “handled,” toy pianos are pounded upon. Violent entertainment and guerilla war struggle, the reaching of their classmates’ inner minds and sanctifying them through sonic booms are the stated objectives, and barked polemics and nonsense, pomposity and insincerity, dry wit and tasteless camp are the glorious results. Twenty-three minutes of WTF in the grand old tradition of Psycodrama, A Band, Ceramic Hobs, and Drugs Are Nice. Edition of 50.
Nervous Youth
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS38) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The featured guest on half the tracks on this obscure 1980s quintet’s second BuFMS disc is Cole Marquis (28th Day, The Downsiders, The Snowmen, The Marques), whose guitar playing merges his recognizable elongated twang and loosened psychedelic drawl with Serious Problmz’s industrial rurf (aka very damaged rural surf). The sustainable clang cultivated by Marquis, guitarists Lucian Tielens and Mark Evans, Thor Heglund on Mattel Synsonics drum machine, and Dave, the inevitable bass-player whose last name no one remembers, supports vocalist Felix Mace’s hazy, sun-burned encounters, who recounts in full voice with autobiographical authority episodes from a sketchy drifter’s harsh journey across peculiar landscapes made of salt, through disorienting urban environments, to the middle of somewhere or somewhere else. The apocalyptic tale covers survival techniques such as boosting toilet paper from public restrooms, transporting hitchhikers and potentially lethal alien larvae, avoiding capture by whomever or whatever is pursuing them, and finally mutating into some new kind of disturbed consciousness. Friend, it’ll drop your ass in the dirt.
Order from tediumhouse.com and receive a bonus three-inch CDR with the thirteen-and-a-half-minute track “Lazarescu Follies”
369 1/2
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS50) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
This obscure ’80s quintet never released anything in their day, and performed live only a couple dozen times. The excerpts from their semi-private recording sessions preserved here (with minimal effort on a boombox) are pensive, quasi–industrial meditations peppered with dire and distorted melodies of immaculate brevity and the musings of disoriented hicks. The unhinged landscapes navigated by Serious Problmz would make Diane Arbus blush -- musical and poetic territories littered with paranoia, dread, desolation, emotional and psychological predation, spookily anthropomorphic farm animals, and objects of inexplicable provenance. As players, guitarist Lucian Tielens, Thor Heglund on Mattel Synsonics drum machine, Felix Mace on vocals, lyrics, homemade noise-makers, and assorted objects, guitarist Mark Evans, and Dave, the inevitable bass-player whose last name no one remembers, achieve a comfortable familiarity with one another, without sacrificing the ramshackle spontaneity essential to their brand of very damaged rural surf (aka rurf). Guests The Whitefronts’ Phil Smoot and Tim Smyth of Bren’t Lewiis help push the primitive jams in new directions with elements such as running water, the clack of a manual typewriter, a telephone ringing, random clangs of a metal canister, and the sinister grinds of an electronic corn-and-callous remover. Edition of 50. Tediumhouse.com mailorders include a bonus three–inch CDR.
#9
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $10.00
Toni Lee Smith and Mike Byrne, Barbara Manning, Cruel Duane, Clark Brown, Maria Estevez, Lucian Tielens, Cole Marquis, Joan Of Art, Lacie Pound, Tim Smyth, Ace Farren Ford, Lilly McBilly, Manolis Pappas, S. Glass, Raoul Tinybear, Montana Swisher, Dylan Nyoukis, Steve Marquis. Full color throughout, 32pp.
#6
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00
Images and text by and/or about Lenore, Doug Roberts, Cody Brant, The Viper, Veronica Lovejoy, The Marques, Fenwick Addison, Joan of Art, Genki Teddy, Maria Estevez, S. Glass, Lymphoma, Ace Farren Ford, Cruel Duane, Aldo Chob, Stormycedar, Dylan Nyoukis. Full color throughout, 32 pages
#7
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00
Michael Schlussler, Lala Lu, This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, Manolis Pappas, Bren't Lewiis, Kate McRae, Prof. Dino Nuggie, Lucian Tielens, Dylan Nyoukis, Cruel Duane, The In-Crowd, Joan of Art, Steve Marquis, Industrial BBQ 2021, Moira McInnes, Tim Smyth, Glands of External Secretion, Richard Streeter, Last Will, Wentz Market 2021, S. Glass, Todd Hall. 32pp, full color.
#8
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $10.00
Dylan Nyoukis, Joan of Art, Ted Trager, Glands of External Secretion, Steve Marquis, Lilly McBilly, S. Glass, Lucian Tielens, Richard Streeter, Mari Kono, The In-Crowd, Bren't Lewiis, Toni Lee Smith, EL&C, Hazel’s ’lectric Washouse, Barbara Manning, Lenore, Ratbox 2021, Orificial Surgery, Cruel Duane, The Viper, Thomas Editson, The Dome, Gnarlos. 32pp, full color.
#10
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $10.00
Like issues two through nine before it, the final compendium of BuFMS miscellanea (inspired by and named after Steve Marquis’s original fussiness-averse photocopy zine from the early 1980s) collects found and original artwork and texts, sketches and doodles, snapshots and Polaroids, collages and wait-what? ephemera, video stills, and T-shirt designs. The front cover is by Marquis, of course, and inside are contributions by and/or about Lacie Pound, Malcy Duff, The Affable Chap, Vel Swisher, Herr Mumper, Thrasher, Lawrence Crane, Gnarlos, Maria Estevez, Toni Lee Smith, 28th Day, Brother Jed, Cruel Duane, Joan of Art, The Conduits, Montana Swisher, Lily McBilly, Idler Arms, and Lucy N. Special thanks go to Lucian Tielens and The M Unit for facilitating the print run. 32pp, full-color.
#2
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00
Inspired by the single issue of this unassuming 1980s ’zine curated by Steve Marquis, the quarter-page-sized second issue keeps the spirit alive with photos, drawings, paintings, sketches, doodles, collages, found objects, newspaper clippings, flyers, video stills, fiction, poetry, and inexplicable writings. With Lucian Tielens, Steve Marquis, Joan of Art, Doug Roberts, The Conduits, The Viper, Ziplok, Man Overboard, Tim Thompson, Gnarlos, Fuzzy, Brian Tipping, Maria Estevez, S. Glass, Bruce Russell, Tim Smyth, Charles Nielsen. 32 pages
#3
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00
Inspired by the single issue of this unassuming 1980s ’zine curated by Steve Marquis, the quarter-page-sized third issue keeps the spirit alive with photos, drawings, paintings, sketches, doodles, collages, found objects, newspaper clippings, flyers, video stills, fiction, poetry, and inexplicable writings. With Steve Marquis, Maria Estevez, Joan of Art, Experimental Artists, Idiot (The), Scud Mandrill, Vomit Launch, S. Glass, Sidney Africa, Musclebutt, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Brian Tipping, Lucian Tielens, The Viper, Under Glass, The M Unit, Veronica Lovejoy, Festergirl, and Bren’t Lewiis. 32 pages
#4
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00
Inspired by the single issue of this unassuming 1980s ’zine curated by Steve Marquis, the quarter-page-sized fourth issue keeps the spirit alive with photos, drawings, paintings, sketches, doodles, collages, found objects, newspaper clippings, flyers, video stills, fiction, poetry, and inexplicable writings. With This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, La Comida, Charles Nielsen, Lucian Tielens, Dylan Nyoukis, Joan of Art, Gnarlos, The Conduits, The Viper, Tim Thompson, Felix Mace, Bren’t Lewiis, Maria Estevez, Art/Thrash, Under Glass, Musclebutt, Steve Marquis, The Hectics, Tim Smyth, and Spike Perry. 32 pages
#5
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Inspired by the single issue of this unassuming 1980s ’zine curated by Steve Marquis, the quarter-page-sized fifth issue keeps the spirit alive with photos, drawings, paintings, sketches, doodles, collages, found objects, newspaper clippings, flyers, video stills, fiction, poetry, and inexplicable writings. With Bren’t Lewiis, The Viper, Silvia Kastel, Gnarlos, Steve Marquis, Carrie Christopher, Tim Smyth, Lucian Tielens, Stumpo Hairball, Gibbs Chapman, Ambivalent Dosage, Lily McBilly, S. Glass, Barbara Manning, Joan of Art, Lindy Lettuce, Doug Roberts, C.F. Calderwood, Veronica Lovejoy, and Vomit Launch. 32 pages
#1
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $40.00
The original 1980s art zine assembled and edited by Steve Marquis, with contributions from Brian Tipping, Toni Smith, Joan of Art, Felix Mace, Carrie Christopher, Matt Mumper, Gnarlos, Joe Fixico, John Shin, and Marquis's father. Collages, paintings, drawings, writings. 22 pages. Order this and receive four of the subsequent “tribute” issues on the house, assembled and edited by S. Glass during the completion of Sputtering And Distorted.
Art For Pain's Sake
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS65) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
While enduring his high school years (1976-1980) in Livermore, California, where the jocks were known to lift up a person without warning and deposit him in a public garbage can, Richard Streeter channeled his blossoming passion for the work of Jefferson Airplane, Timothy Leary, musique concrète, comix and all things counterculture into boombox recordings with his sister and a cross-section of the local freakdom. Sometimes the batteries were due for a refresher and the results ended up fuzzy and all heliumed out. Sometimes mom and her snack tray made a cameo in the middle of the session. Whether jamming on violin in a group or scrambling his playing with reel-to-reel experiments, banging on coffee cans or trying to conquer unrequited love Charlie Brown-style, importing a little bit of Haight Street to the flavorless suburbs or navigating good ol’ fashioned angst, The Viper never loses sight of the value of his own innate lyricism. Art For Pain’s Sake has plenty of humor but it is never insincere. As anyone who has heard his track “Cookies Shaped Like Kites” on Induced Musical Spasticity or the Blood Lewiis recording of his graphic score “Conversation With Bicycle Horn” can affirm, Streeter remains committed to craftsmanship, whether exploring his fatuous side or just sketching in the margins for no particular reason. Edition of 100
Shocking Early Works, Vol. 1
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS47) 7-inch $10.00
Three raw living room and live recordings from 1985, documenting the first three months of the group’s existence, imbued with decadence and vitriol. Repetitive profanity, spartan adornment, outward-looking disgust and contempt take centerstage on “Swelling Admiration,” a tune with less dance groove than a riderless bike getting hit by a car. Honest, a skipping Suicide album sounds like “Bohemian Rhapsody” in comparison. The oblivion-embracing ode to defeatism “The Only Way Is Down” conveys, with flourishes such as impatient sighs, blasé moans and flickering drum machine, distaste for the ubiquitous, neon-colored optimism of mid-’80s fratboy / sorority girl airheads. Overdriven and sloppy in places, its pulse is insistent yet dire. Flipper’s signature tune “Sex Bomb” is stripped of all its properties, pretty much, thanks in no small part to the hand-held condenser mic recording; most of what remains is the noise of the audience in the room and the only thing potent enough to slice though it — singer Patricia Rowland’s psychotic screaming. Deep-end bonkers. Includes vintage liner notes by Lindy Lettuce.