Sugar: The Other White Meat
(Catsup Plate - CPR17) LP $45.00
Side A features each in solo mode: quasi-ethnic and wordless vocals, background television, and Django-esque guitar runs from Alvarius B; sanshin-playing from Nyoukis, morphing into subtle tape manipulation and musique concrete. The B-Side is a side-long collaborative track of broken electronics, field recordings near a Gas 'n' Sip, shortwave radio, actual songs, ambient cafeteria noise, thunderstorms, and drunken answering machine messages from Harmony Korine. Silkscreened jacket and inserts. Edition of 500.
AVEY TARE / GEOLOGIST / PANDA BEAR
Danse Manatee
(Catsup Plate) Used CD $18.00
The Animal Collective brings in a live electronics ringer for this stranger, darker 2001 follow-up to Spirit They’ve Gone Spirit They’ve Vanished (Animal 2000) -- a soundtrack to a meandering journey to nowhere in particular. Complex lattices of noise and streams of consciousness, the marriage of clanking drone to disembodied voice. Hand assembled “matchbox-style” CD slipcases with four-color silkscreened art.
Campfire Songs
(Catsup Plate) Used CD $6.00
Though the sound is radically different from the digital processing and sound manipulation previously employed by The Animal Collective, the results are clearly of a piece with the percussive, almost incantatory feel of their earlier records. This was recorded on a screened-in porch in rural Maryland and the hum of the outdoors adds depth and presence impossible to achieve otherwise. The trio knits together threads of guitar strum and pluck; chanted, nearly wistful vocal harmonies; and often a pulsing rhythm that seems like it might break apart at any moment, and sometimes does. The melodies are simple and repetitive, recalling the early work of the Third Ear Band, ’70s German commune-music, and similar folk-psychedelic explorers. Edition of 1000 copies in handmade chipboard digipaks with offset printed decals and insert.
Heavy Afternoon Buzz / Late At Night A Day Lay
(Catsup Plate) LP (lathe cut) $75.00
“Broken into a pair of sidelong suites,” observe our friends at Arthur, “this album is a pure experimental response to the dictates of archaic huzz, generated entirely by an old tone generator and a broken digital delay unit. A variety of apparent loops are blended in shifts, and the whole moves through the air in your head like a buttery soft saw blade, slowly unwinding its way across the room. There are parts that have a weird similarity to some of No Pussyfooting, but let’s assume that’s unintentional.” Numbered edition of 50
Al Anon
(Catsup Plate) Used LP $8.00
“Small inner dialogues and isolated mind caves, where an idea may only last a moment and is captured and tweaked into fragments of many memories. Copeland sometimes disappears into a ‘behind-the-scenes’ role on this strangely curated time capsule from 2009, where birds beat-box with car-stereo subwoofers and the neighbors’ Español sings on top of the Sabbath siren. The familiar becomes mysterious and the unknown feels normal.” Screen-printed jacket. Edition of 500.
Rome Loves Tan
(Catsup Plate - CPR713) LP $15.00
Later French Paddleboat recordings and Scott August’s work as one-half of Vote Robot helped nudge August toward revisiting the tracks here, originally released on cassette by Union Pole. Songs and loops have been tightened up, reworked, and one song completely replaced with a more fully realized piece ("Indication of Motion”). Emphasis is on analog, homemade sound sources a la Vote Robot, though here the tone is gentle, familiar, and unabashedly pretty. The songs are, for the most part, structured on acoustic drum beats, played live and looped, with layers of chimes, bells, clarinet and warm keyboard tones in meticulous and intricate arrangements.
Winged Leaves
(Catsup Plate) Used CD $5.00
Glenn Donaldson brews “potent and unique acid folk balanced with incidental and instrumental pieces that focus on field recordings and less traditionally structured pieces. The songs here are based on guitar and voice improvisations, and fleshed out with layers of bowed bouzouki, banjo, and dulcimer, along with organ and percussion. There is a distant melancholy in these songs, a mournfulness that somehow manages to be stately and tuneful in the rumble of sounds passing by. Donaldson’s voice accounts for much of this: his echoing, wordless (or, at the very least, indecipherable) falsetto cuts through the layers.” Edition of 1000 in hand assembled, letterpressed chipboard digipaks, with full color tipped-on cover image and poster with Donaldson’s dizzying collage work.”
Mississippi Luau
(Catsup Plate) Used LP $17.50 (Out-of-stock)
A loose concept album from 1997 about Hawaiian culture in the South featuring some of this legendary South Carolinian visual artist’s most focused songwriting, while retaining his characteristic weirdness, art-splattered banjo, found-sound collages, and speak-singing in a trailer-trash tenor that perfectly suits his typical subject matter (which is, generally speaking, Southern dread, suburban hopelessness, and plain old love and death). Silkscreened jacket. Edition of 500
The One Ensemble Of Daniel Padden
(Catsup Plate) Used CD $5.00
“At times turbulent and at others somber,” report Bryon Hayes of Foxy Digitalis, these “tiny symphonies … incorporate elements of Eastern European folk, minimalist drone and string-laced chamber psych. The One Ensemble’s humbly haunted, multifarious tales look back to post-WWII Europe, following displaced settlers voyaging across the Atlantic toward the unknown. Cello, bouzouki, clarinet, guitar and piano all play a key role in reciting the woeful tale of humanity’s uncertain future. The most prominent and effective instrument however, is Padden’s plaintive wordless vocal…. The intoxicating brew crafted by the deft hands of The One Ensemble…, formerly a solo venture,” now a group with Chris Hladowski, Peter Nicholson and Aby Vulliamy…, “is not difficult to swallow; its complex palette is cleverly disguised with beautiful melodies and a healthy dose of hopefulness.” Handmade digipack
Five Score Six Bicycle
(Catsup Plate) Used LP $12.00
The third album from Canadian electronic duo Scott August of French Paddleboat and Kevin Rivard continues of their hazy and homemade electronic blend of manipulated melodies, crackles, murk, warm tones performed with cut-up and re-spliced magnetic tape, hand-cut records, modified turntables, and assorted deconstructed and reconfigured synthesizers. Silkscreened jacket. Edition of 300.