Diaspora Brag
(Chocolate Monk - choc.566) CDR $8.00
“Him who was Wanda Group takes time off from flexing his guns and punching up at the twats,” explains our friend Corriander from Mutek PR,” To present more than 70 minutes of lurk-affirming tunes / no tunes. Four-foot-eight in heels, the grizzly man of Hudds (a dog’s hole) is the gift that keeps on seeping.” That same Hudds-based grizzly man chimes in, “I have become infatuated with this theory of the human clock system — each section or item inside and on your body having a built in time code; each particle, each piece of blood, having a tempo or a moving, self-regulated grasp on seconds; each lung being its own lung, and each bone or tongue being the king or queen of itself.” That all of Diaspora Bag was made on an iPhone 6 is of little consequence in the hands of a Hudds-based grizzly man who is naturally gifted at bending and crafting vibrations. Nevertheless. Edition of 60
Benny Does Jets
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.369) CDR $8.00
A sound agitation hoedown between the Australian wonder scruff (all sweat, blood and beers performing on glass) and Zealand’s best-trimmed beard (four years running) on electronics and voice. Recorded live at the Tempe Jets rugby club at the edge of Sydney International Airport. Visceral electronic fart tones stomp a happy jig and attempt to crack that code you have floating in your skull. Numbered edition of 60
The Rotten Opacity Of It All (All This Rot)
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.280) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Glasgow’s best-dressed hun Stuart Arnot and wee fireplug Susan Fitzpatrick continue the good fight for bizarre ear treats. Purposeful, primitive playing full of violin creaks and scrapes, which then morphs into seasick wooze. Vocals sputter, mumble and sing with Mogadon droop. Sprinkles of archaic tape manipulation. A musique brut take on a Harry Partch piece. Wallow in their inquisitive sound world.
ACRID LACTATIONS / GWILLY EDMONDEZ
You Have Not Learned To Play And Mock In The Psychic System
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.341) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Stuart Arnot and Susie Fitzpatrick stumble out good-foot-style with everyone’s favorite academic dunderhead Gwilly Edmondez for inspired avant jig, coming off at times like a more abstract John Gavanti or a peasant island take on Fatty Jubbo’s missing-in-action Ritualistic School Of Errors. This could be post-Brexit “Last of The Summer Wino” blues, as they trundle down the mind slide with a wheelbarrow full of string instruments, tapes, keyboards and other junk — sometimes arse over tit with plenty of yelps, gurgles and hollers, only to land upright again and blow your spinning skull with gentle creepy sway and yodel. Seriously munged magic. Edition of 60
Chin Spirits
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.293) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Sound collage, songs, instrumentals and more importantly insight from the Sun City Girl slaphead. Originally planned for a vinyl ten-inch release on some Belgian label, until the Reptilians got to them. Edition of 60.
Burmese Military Mandolin b/w Cadenza Freedom
(Chocolate Monk) 7-inch $12.00
Of interest to fans of SCG's mellower, ethno-forgered avant-psych material. From 1999. Semen colored vinyl.
Highland Park
(Chocolate Monk - choc.230) CDR $9.00
Nine tracks ranging from tranquility to ghostly static and voice mazes. Records, record players, montage flexi discs, electrical interference, cassete tape hiss, shortwave, and field recordings. A rather addictive and mesmerizing piece of work with contributions from Gen Ken Montgomery, Damion Romero, Bob Bellerue, Das, and Howard Stelzer.
Ark Drane
(Chocolate Monk - choc.587) CDR $8.00
“Ark Drane’s debut is a collaboration between Karen Constance and Kristafer Abplanalp. ‘Hangnail Persistence’ dips the listener to a loping gate that fords up through the swales and circles round the midden, like if Brothers Quay whittled dub music out of wooden blocks forging a beat of wet earth stirred in memory dimly carried to bed at night on rainy days. ‘Laugh like Midwestern Wind Chimes’ is the resonating afterimage of finding yourself in an unfamiliar neighborhood liquor store asking for a six-pack of Peroni, only to be told that Peroni used to live down the block but has been locked up for ten years. ‘Monks on a Train’ produces the aural translation of the following Cormac McCarthy sentence: ‘Wasps pass through the laddered light of barn slats in a succession of strobic moments, between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.’ Most of the source material to ‘Bloodline Stitches’ was reportedly recorded in a Kentucky hospital’s Cardiology Wing of an Intensive Care Unit, summer of 2021. From what this listener can discern, black husks of pupae swarm the purloined insurance agents rendering portraits of their noses, caked in enamel, framed in gold, with miniscule chains to fit under their clothes.” —Crozier Lathrop. Edition of 60
Yet More Warnings / Object Permanence
(Chocolate Monk - choc.606) CDR $8.00
This South London duo improvises micro pseudo-music in order to cope with the chaos of overwhelming information and Tory governments. They organise Cliff-Edge, a regular show of “improv for end-times” at Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton. The pieces presented here were recorded a week apart in November 2021, both with a Bastl Microgranny each. It is the sound of goon men gathering the electronic shrapnel of what was music and gluing it back together with all the huff and wheeze of spore-huffing delusionals. A no-let-up set of frothing pitter patter. Sonics which are ripe to dissipate the gloom. Do you want a shovel or a spoon? Edition of 60
Starballs
(Chocolate Monk - choc.574) CDR $8.00
Blown-out fuzzed-out ragged sister to the shortly forthcoming pro-lounge Occultics CD / machine flicker, celestial scrota, no mind / make-out music for hermaphrodite Venusians floating through the zero gravity pleasure palaces of Alpha Centauri / Tangerine Fucking Dream, more like / feedback, the only good thing ever to happen to guitars / The Return of The Electric Mistress / there’s probably a tune buried under there somewhere / pennine exotica bionica erectronica (sciatica). Edition of 60
Adversity And Marginalization
(Chocolate Monk - choc.494) CDR $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Let’s dream big for a moment, gonk: a silent Ray Harryhausen remake of that movie about roughnecks landing their rocketship on an asteroid heading for Earth so they can blow it up. And here’s the soundtrack. Hm, that was easier than anyone had a right to expect. So, yeah, Hiroshi Hasegawa — interstellar synth noise royalty, commander of the violent squad of loyalists protecting Sun Ra’s birth nugget on the surface of Prometheus, and your freak brother inside C.C.C.C. He’ll get you high, anoint you with a tap on the shoulder of his blight sabre, and take you for a terrifying joy ride in a glass coffin. Three long tracks, each turbulating through jagged disintegration and dense fields of toxic dust, well parallax’d fur judders, stir-fried collapsing howls, and jump cuts from acidic feedback into thick burning pools of all-contaminating rumble’n’screech that makes the GOMAD weight-builders from the ’90s lose consciousness. Edition of 60
Futile Phantoms
(Chocolate Monk - choc.597) CDR $8.00
Flout the floatation tank and the devouring of celestial orbs, lay down the pipe and lend your ears to the inimitable allure of sonic innovation of the two-headed nature. Atkins and Scott-Buccleuch seem to almost whisper out these transmissions of crisp psychedelic sound collage. Dictaphone scutter and vacillating tapes are folded into mellow drones and intoning loops deftly. Field recordings, electronic purr and gentle clatter infused with warm hiss. A sound paste that can be applied liberally to yr cracked case with rejuvenating effect. Edition of 60
Squash
(Chocolate Monk - choc.047) Cassette $75.00
Composed, mixed, recorded, and designed at Studio Mecca, Kyoto 1995, using only a can as source material. Packaged in a squashed can with two sets of nuts and bolts holding the package together. Inside the package is a paper strip insert. Hand-numbered edition of 100. C46 Includes a complimentary copy of Sound on Sound LP by Loop Circuit, Nakajima's mid-90s collaboration with Dub Murashita
Lucky Crystal Wave / Exit Generator
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.549) CDR $8.00
Chocolate Monk’s favorite living violin sorceress Samara Lubelski teams up with Werner Nötzel of Metabolismus for heady violin and electronics whatthefuckery that comes off like a tripped-out sibling to Kosugi’s Catch Wave (yes, it’s that good). Douse your chakras in this sonic sauce and embrace the cosmic quease. Recorded summer 2021 at Sumsilobatem, Germany, with next level adjustments taking place at Uniform Recording with Jeff Zeigler and Bill Nace.
International Dictaphone Relations
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.364) split CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two directions in contemporary Dictaphonix. Loops of slimy chaos from Argentina’s steaming tape underground, created in the same way birds swim and bees honk. Tight and vital, in-your-head meditations and reflections evoke heavy psych smoke and wild, wild painted eyes staring through the bushes. The essential tape control makes the listening passage easy, like swallowing soft lead pellets. Meanwhile that British lag serves a gentle riot of slow faze, cut-up speech patterns, and tape jaxx along with some seriously grievous organ wonk. Deceptively strong wrists whip an undertow of “cuh-vimp-curr...,” poking once again into the psychedelic domestic for inspiration. Numbered edition of 60
Dylan Thomas
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.330) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A wet and windy night at the end of January saw the first teaming up of Bench and Nyoukis, opening for the Bohman Brothers at Brighton’s Sallis Benney Theatre. Focused tape improvisations and electric whack! transpired, but if you think that was good enough for these worm-lovers, you can go eat aluminum foil, pal. The following month the two hacked up the crisp desk recording from that night. Shaped it into whole new world of wonk, they did. Nyoukis’s frantic cut-up, backed with Bench in full-on bonkers mode. Edition of 50.
Pinkfoot
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Intimate croak concrète from London based poet/musician Betteridge. Like a low key ear tonguing. Moist and at close quarters. “Pinkfoot’s fragments are cut from vocal improvisations done in the house while the baby slept — just a mic and a reel-to-reel tape emulator: there’s sound poetry, Ami Yoshida / Junko overidentification, some rattling on,” explains the artist. “Compression and EQ are instruments and also feature. I projected some of the snippets into different environments — it’s often good to drag withdrawn things outside — and populated others (my partner and daughter, my father-in-law, geese). Uncanny / on the cusp of too intimate / spectral but mucky — that’s the hope.” Edition of 60
Scchh...phh
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.387) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Quit saving pennies for that Embryonic Cell Fusion device. Forget about annoying questions that swirl around inside your dome (What part of the ear hears? Why do you have that strange thirst?) because Ireland's Natalia Beylis has answers, all hidden within a wonderfully weird sound collage that’s more intoxicating than a handful of seed vomit. Keep your face and feet open. Stay Alert. Numbered edition of 60
Unprecize Music
(Chocolate Monk - choc.422) CDR $8.00
Tapes, voice and rudimentary household objects are the main instruments of this shadowy outfit hailing from the South of Brussels. The ghost is a key feature, acting as the specter for the vitalist poet and the overt Romantic. This collection of cuts made over the last three years explores, in the most literal sense, possible forms, through pure sinus waves, boring repetition and raw randomness. Each piece is a materialization of a neuroscientist’s view of reality. Action precedes cause, and cause is nothing but a narrative to justify action. Numbered edition of 60
Bring Back Hanging
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.356) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
In these dispatches from the UK’s No Audience underground, former A Band beardy weirdy and mathematical Doctor dork Karl M V Waugh shoots the shit with poet gonkette and Mumsnet terrorist Verity Spott. They attempt to put some grit in your oyster with recordings made in their Brexit bunker which are then given a crude lubing from swivel-eyed scruff bag THF Drenching. Burble and wheeze, baby. Numbered edition of 48
Huffing The Semantic Smoke From The Deep Hum
(Chocolate Monk - choc.490) CDR $6.75
In the midst of it all, Sindre Bjerga escaped for a while through secret tunnel passages and met up with Tanto in his underground lab, where piles of tape machines oozed and buzzed, dozens simultaneously. He hooked up his stuff to the main frame, which made it overheat, creak, thump, and melt until the sounds were on fire and language combusted into a cloud of fog. Words and meaning went up in smoke and duo was cast into the big, deep hum of vapor. Edition of 60
Dig Your Own Hole
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.275) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Sound collages, gnarled-out microphone psych and the glorified magic of everyday rituals, filtered though shit-stained cassettes and over-cooked frequencies. One complete live recording from Oslo (including a section where a tower of chairs was pulled down from the stage) and a mobile phone recording of parts of a show at the Klinker Club in London.
SINDRE BJERGA / DUNCAN HARRISON / CLAUS POULSEN / PAUL WATSON
Blind Dates
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.294) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Pretty much fresh off the bus. Cosmic true head vibes. Bjerga and Watson scrape and scratch in gleeful unison. Norwegian ALF cassette. The kind of Happy Birthday drop that only The Baron can get away with. Edition of 66.
The Toadstool Millionaires
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.384) CDR $8.00
The unholy union follows 2016’s Pentecostal Gymnast Trapped In Lime Jello with further stabs at hobbling the mind. A two-course pig-out of time-distorting tape collage mangle and beady-eyed space bending sound processing by Gnarlos, Lucian Tielens, Karen Constance, Dylan Nyoukis, The City Councilman, Tom Chimpson, Lilly McBilllly, Elkka Reign Nyoukis, The Two Winnies and Lindy Lettuce. One section sounds like a melon-headed child fondling a dried umbilical stump. Includes I’m A Toadstool Millionare badge.
BLOOD STEREO / KOMMISSAR HJULER / MAMA BÄR
Blutige Polize
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC213) CDR $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
This three-way split for audio vérité aficionados. Hjuler's down the pub with his mates, laughing, singing, listening to old Anal Probe comps. Baer plugs in her guitar and hollers long-ass hymns to hysteria. A bit of me-time and all is rosy. Blood Stereo unfolds the first part of their digestive tract concept triptych with the sounds of Nyoukis's bowels rumbling, moving along with stalker-friendly imported bird-calls, concluding with a post-prandial take on the opener.
The Trachelin Huntiegowk
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC243) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
CDR reissue of limited edition LP (Tadpole / Chocolate Monk 2011). Above us, blizzards of fecal snow ravage the sky, dehydrated flakes leftover from the expunged waste of civilization's folly. Below, spasms of subterranean dyspepsia crisscross the globe, stalking nomadic malignancies to devour. These tape- and glottis-manipulators conduct their business beneath this noxious shit-rain and elude randomly appearing gaia dentata with nary a scratch or impurity tainting their tartans. Composed at home, part one wrangles recordings of friends and family, old tape letters, a drunk Canadian arguing with Daniel Spicer about microphones (apparently, his grasp of spatial relationships leaves Her Vagesty wanting), fair lasses from clan Spicer doing the hand-clap song "Miss Mary Mack," tape cut-ups of Karen Constance singing, wee Elkka Nyoukis on drums, the old man on piano, and Giant Tank comrades Ali Robertson and Collette Martin participating in team-building exercises at a work picnic for a company staffed by ogres, insect-bodybuilder hybrids, and baboon-hearted psychos. On part two, recorded live at Moderna Museet in Stockholm as part of the Sten Hanson festival, Nyoukis and Constance unravel the constituent elements of the event's namesake, eventually oxidizing delivery of instructions to the assembled Pee Wee Hermans on how to finesse a poison arrow out of his impaled cheeks without causing undue shredding of the flesh. Accompanied by typing lessons conducted in a burn ward and the tinkle of contaminated plasma and hemoglobin squirting into buckets underneath a poxy heifer, The Trachelin Huntiegowk wrestles across a landscape ruled by an inversion of signs, where irrational complaining is drama; despair is triumph; the haunted is droll; torture is delight; the mechanical wheeze of outdated machines is a function not of dehumanization but of Arcadian nostalgia; profundity resides within the inarticulate; virtuosity can be attained when the random happens to repeat; and speech, decimated into fragmented phonemes -- whether from internal mental agents compromising the intellect, or from intentionally adopted constructions and impairments, faulty reproduction and obstructions to enunciation -- is lyrical. Soulful even. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2012.
Where There’s Raw Grace in Garbage
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.363) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
While everything may seem terrible, Blood Stereo continue on their personal quest to become brain food mechanics. Their tape collage piece stitches together electronic chirps and blips with low tech keys: chair squeaks, manipulated mechanical groan, text recital by Mayuko Fujino; vocal drones; groggy horn bloot; field recordings; tones, tape loops and dissected voice by Elaine Kahn. High-scorers on The Hare psychopath test get to inflate their self-esteem. No reason you don’t deserve good grub, too. Numbered edition of 60
Spools & Frolics
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.370) 2xCDR $14.00 (Out-of-stock)
Hot guff from the previously released cassettes Into Aquatic Maze (Hanson 2011), The Creaking Thirst Alien Passenger 2013), and Hackit (Chocolate Monk 2016); tracks from the compilations Hip Hop Shop Sweepers (Be Saint 777), I Don't Think The Dirt Belongs to The Grass (Carbon 2006), George Ferguson McKeating (Belishill 2009), Songs About Dying (Pjorn 72 2011), and Fug Gum Volume 2 (Freakdom 2013); plus some random unreleased gunk. Each cover hand-collaged by Karen Constance, rubber-stamped, hand-numbered. With insert. Numbered edition of 50
Red Brut / Blood Stereo
(Chocolate Monk - choc.410) Split cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Containment of the shadow self is a pointless exercise, friend. After all shit is shadow and we are all full of it. Better out than in, right? Red Brut and Blood Stereo both understand and present a side each of tape manipulation, sound collage, etc. For fledglings of all ages. Numbered edition of 52
Two Drams
(Chocolate Monk - choc.437) Cassette $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Blood Stereo invite you to share two drams with them in a mere ten minutes, as they attempt to stretch time with two focused tape compositions. Violin drones, field recordings and mysterious distant percussion press ruddy cheeks with what sound like an underwater church organ, lo-fi muttering and various creaks, hiccups, sneezes and burbles. More sounds for your Jungian pipe. Pink cassette in card slip case with paste on art. Rubber stamped. Includes badge. Numbered edition of 50.
Palatine Arches / Tape Hiss For Brainwash / The Gither
(Chocolate Monk - choc.224) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Reissue of everything from Palatine Arches cassette (Beartown Records 2011), Tape Hiss For Brainwash cassette (Feeding Tube 2011) and the USA tour three-inch CD The Gither (Chocolate Monk 2011). Dumpster Diving describes the former as “Rabid short wave … elastic voices and rare rattletrap steel percussion…. [L]ittle naked people [pulled] out of the cinder[s] … shimmer and cry…. [P]hantasmagorical sound scheme. Absolutely freaky and very inspiring work.” About Tape Hiss, The Quietus says, “[E]verything feels born of mouth, spittle and groan. Even when [Constance and Nyoukis] move across the bows of great elegiac tones, there’s a meat-born Parkinson’s buzz of damage to it….”
Two Paths To An Outer Edge
(Chocolate Monk - choc.465) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Recordings of A Bedside Traveller were stashed away for ten months before a well infused listening session took place in November. Constance and Nyoukis retreated to their respective creative hovels and constructed new tracks, mixing the original recordings with ones made at the year's end. Both sets of tracks where then mixed one night in December. The borders became blurred and now we have one 30- minute collage that travels further down the Alice hole of non music / dream mulch. Each cover is handmade and unique. Edition of 50 with insert.
Poppies & Cocks
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC249) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Spittle from the underbelly of UK freakdom. Dictaphone choke and sputter stops, panic gasps and glossolalia gulpage, cracked-up breathing and cat purr, creaking and chirping spurts, deathbed wheeze and swollen throats, horse blow and smut panting by Fiona of The Hunter Gracchus Luke Poot.
Unmanned Vehicle
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.287) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Cody Brant and Shane McDonell serve up a bowl of bubbling sound befuddle through overlaid tape loops jammed on wonked-out four-track players. Field recordings are mixed in with tapes of bowed guitars and cymbals, door creaks, electronics and other smooch, and although there is much happening on these recordings it is always afforded time and space so the loop worm can burrow deep into your lugs. Imagine Rock n Roll Jackie passing a Jazz Cigarette to Dilloway after his whitey decides he would like to have a bash at covering Brown Supper’s “Quarantine The Aliens.”
The Suspicious String Quartet Plays Tape Guts At The Core Of The Coalman
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC225) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
These tracks were laid down on one of those hot nights, and the tracks were burning, man, burning. Most were destroyed instantly, in fact, upon entry. Others were partly rescued and reconstituted using an advanced avant-garde dietary cloning process involving transparent magnets whose fields can be read like musical notation, but vertically. No longer needing to scratch cats with horse parts, Boehringer instead utilizes here a gravitational horsefield, altering tempos fluidly to outrun the ever-changing winds of fashion and rescue the princess, whose harmonic tongue might resist definition, but is never short on other types of suggestion.
Hair Strings and Magnets
(Chocolate Monk - choc.537) CDR $7.00
A continuing viola-shaped entry under the Core of the Coalman category for the bureau of international mystery recordings of Chocolate Monks. Five pieces performed on solo viola with electronic things, and recorded in empty, disused, and leaking churches, warehouse spaces, and a dance studio, while Boehringer lived in Huddersfield from 2014 to 2020. Signals bowed, intercepted, and fed-back upon themselves until they become their own memories. Scores for tracks two and five are also available for anyone who wants to take a stab. Edition of 60
Munterated Merropity
(Chocolate Monk - choc.560) Magazine + CDR $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Whether or not you believe that the gloved mouse is pulling the levers to our reality, Kentucky curveball Andy Heck Boyd is here to bring more confusion to the seed swap. Priscilla Presley is watching Pinocchio on mute, someone decided to eat all Paul McCartney’s food, the mouse died three days in a row, there is a neon slime face-sit, and so much more to decipher. Just be sure to take a right at the end of Spalding Lane. Energize! Energize! Energize! 36 pages, color. Includes Parking Lot three-inch CDr featuring The Frankenberrys and The Gay Zorros, six-by-four photograph, and one-inch badge. Numbered edition of 54
BRANDSTIFTER / DIURNAL BURDENS
Fireabend
(Chocolate Monk - choc.512) CDR $8.00
Hey, boink, you want proof that Brexshit doesn’t have to totally sour the Kraut / Limey handhold? This wee document of whatthefuckery will put the rise in your mind dumplings. The mad man of Mainz, Mr. Stefan Brandstifter, supplies sporadic spurts made of toys, glossolalia, Casio, field recordings and stuck records which he documents on his cruddy yet well made German Dictaphone; Wigan walloper Ross Scott-Buccleuch mangles, chews, loops and assembles. Potential soul scurvy averted! Keep on the grass. Edition of 60
Don’t Call Me Dali, Darling!
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.391) CDR $8.00
German avant madman and all ’round groovy art hack Stefan Brand sports nothing but his crumpled Y-fronts, energy and a message that needs to bust out for broadcast to the outside world. Such intimate insight into the artist in his natural habitat includes a selection of his infamous Thursday morning bedroom recordings done on his favorite Casio SK1 and the SA-21 tonebank unplugged, with vocal ramblings sung directly into the recorder and a splattering of rough toy samples. Numbered edition of 60
Fuck Piss
(Chocolate Monk) Magazine + CDR $12.00
In which the Moustache of Mainz (Brandstifter) collages together a 12-page full-colour zine from lost-and-found scraps sent to him from the Portland Peasant (Brant) while the roles are flipped when Brant collages together a short album of sonic nonsense from recordings sent to him from Brandstifter. As delightful as you would expect and with enough random strangeness to send Q-Anon nutters into a froth with their eyes smarting. One person’s detritus is a another fool’s symbolism. Numbered edition of 67
Drop-Off Center
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.357) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Twenty-four short tracks by this visual and sound collage artist, smeared into one continuous, delightful ear wallop, sometimes sounding like a Puzzle Punk riding aback a Pork Queen. Recorded while destroying all breakables during their removal from the abandoned house of a hoarder, and at the donation area of a recycling center. Numbered edition of 60
Don’t Bump Your Head!
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.378) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Chocolate Monk’s favorite gutter level archivist splices and dices field recordings sourced from the streets of Philadelphia. Discordant happenings regurgitated into hypno-vignettes. Surprising musical textures and patterns emerge. Numbered edition of 60
Whether on the Ones
(Chocolate Monk - choc.584) CDR $8.00
Frantic yet focused sound collage work by two of The Stinking Republic's finest noise manglers. Many layers, peel to reveal. “In the winter of 2021 I started squatting at my friend’s art studio in Longview, Washington,” explain Brant. “Along the way I started an audio diary of the experiences I had in and around the thrift store. Quickly I became well acquainted with all the local miscreants and these characters also became part of the mix.” Kruger continues, “The collected source recordings for this project themselves ended up resembling a thrift shop: seemingly haphazard but treasure-filled for the patient digger. Collaging them resulted in 40 minutes of junk-drawer memory-shard channel-surfing.” Edition of 60
Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut
(Chocolate Monk - choc.507) CDR $7.50
Even though no Vietnamese pop music was harmed in the making of Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut, be careful not to choke on bones during your travels throughout the westernmost quadrant of The Stinking Empire, that wasteland of mass-comm eavesdropping, loop hypnosis, burgled field recordings, and fracture-scapes that’ll clamp down on your skull like a Gorilla Glue nutcracker. Chocolate Monk’s in-house Clint Eastwood, Jr. (Brant) and Joanne Worley gender reassignment disaster (Glass) have taken every possible precaution to ensure no one exits their hour-long clatter-and-clunk buffet with blood on their hankies. Still, gnaw judiciously, you lion-hearted gonk. Edition of 60
Scratch Music
(Chocolate Monk - choc.467) CDR $8.00
“Recorded while laying low in Las Vegas,” according to the man with the golden ears about his strange brew of musical noises and non-musical aural fritterings, “using homemade spring boards, hair buzzer, Fukuoku 9000, radio, cicada drones, two-stringed electric guitar, prepared lap steel guitar, found microcassettes, voice, field recordings and DJ mixer feedbacker.” Numbered edition of 50
BREN’T LEWIIS ENSEMBLE / THE TENSES
Daughter Of The Boot
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.352) CDR $6.00
On a gorgeous spring afternoon in the PacNW, there is no better way to spend it than inside a 420-square-foot windowless room rattling sleigh bells with your foot, dropping rubber balls onto a broken old bongo drum, spinning scratchy records backward by hand, and sputtering into a shenai steadily and slowly so that it sounds like you’re pushing a desk across the floor. Here is sixty-five minutes of spontaneous sound collage, bent improv, non-musical weirdness that resembles injured mammals on the verge of giving up, surprisingly delicate noise, and general quasi-cinematic clatter by LAFMS royalty The Tenses (aka Oblivia and Ju Suk Reet Meate of Smegma) and two of the many goons (Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos) from the BUFMS spazolopolis Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, with field recordings contributed astrally by Silvia Kastel and Leroy Tick. The two pieces delivered here by these clunkmeisters -- recording together for the first time -- are rusty, crusty, dusty and musty epics in the tradition of groups such as Morphogenesis, Solid Eye, Taj Mahal Travellers, and early Zoviet-France. Cover art by Ace Farren Ford. Numbered edition of 80
Time Lady Rangoon
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC241) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second volume in Chocolate Monk’s Well Spliced Breath series of “sound-tape collage, text-sound, radiophonic, horspiel-type muck.” Above a hazy razzle dazzle of simultaneous background music and spoken word records typical of The Sidney Africa Safari (the KCSC radio show where the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble were regular guests in the early 1980s), skull-crushed revelations about human anatomy and reproduction are expressed, interspliced with surreal texts, fractured word association and a climactic go-crazy. Peculiar sound effects and dusty music come and go amid an ancient Asian circus from the afterlife, a nonsense raga, spastic in-studio percussion, tape collage, loops and excerpts from damaged audio- and videotape, haphazard turntablism, and the unbridled yelps of milk-deprived semi-mechanical gargoyle pups. Edition of 60.
Rural Trash
(Chocolate Monk - choc.581) CDR $8.00
This sound diarist and crafty composer’s assemblage of scraps and bits were recorded in Pennsyltucky, London, Reykjavik and elsewhere. Far from a shuffling Xerox of sound blame, a most “meaty” yet “crispy” audio document takes you from a poor stand-up comedy show to waterfall-adjacent whistling in Gufufoss, not to mention looped Britten head scratch and log book scribble. If that doesn’t float your fancy, how about an entire track assembled and featuring English avant sound old head Rod Summers? Migrate the bingo hall and bring your soup bowl. Edition of 60
Turn it On Again - The Guitar Works of Timothy James Byrne
(Chocolate Monk - choc.482) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
This “Buckinghamshire-based musician, filmmaker, actor and photographer … has spent year upon year documenting life via a diverse array of mixed media in what would appear to be near total isolation,” explains Duncan Harrison. Byrne had been “creating and publishing multiple new works each day since at least late 2010, before stopping suddenly and without explanation in the summer of 2019. The result is an intimidatingly dense and difficult-to-comprehend archive filled with thousands of obscure artworks, the vast majority of which remain entirely undiscovered outside a tiny underground community of obsessive fans. Though he is best-described as a multi-instrumentalist and singer…, [this] selection of covers, improvisations, original numbers and outtakes focuse[s] on his work for acoustic and electric guitar. This … unauthorized, unoffical fan bootleg exist[s] primarily for documentary purposes and is to be understood as an abstract of Byrne’s wider body of work and artistic practice. With that said, this release represents perhaps the first and last instance of his work being made available outside his personal publishing efforts.” Edition of 50
Castle Two
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.382) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Samantha Flowers’s sweet, slow, burning clump of strangeness. Eleven live spliffs created at night deep in the 836 Ashland swamp hole. Keyboard burbles and vocal waver bob alongside creepy tape jams, all recorded in between the floods sopping up sog in the process before the electronics fizz out. Pardon her hiss. Or as SF says, “Fragmented nonlinear renaissance crude nonesuch peasant sound tapestry.” Numbered edition of 60
Potential WW3
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.371) CDR $8.00
Adam Cadell of Australia forcing Carter Thornton’s sounds through a wire into a small echo chamber hand-built from a fiddle. Numbered edition of 60
The Partial Obliteration of GMT
(Chocolate Monk - choc.444) CDR $6.25
Proof, as if any was needed, that working with Stefan Jaworzyn will drive ye bonkers. Some time ago, Mr. Tony Irving (of Ascension infamy) done a runner to the other side of our heating globe, rumored to have downed tools and taken a vow of silence in Oz backwaters. Next thing Chocolate Monk knew, a disc arrived with a scrawled note that read “In 1894, a mad French Anarchist attempted to blow up the Royal Greenwich Observatory to stop the enslavement of humanity by the regimentation of time. Since 2014 I have tried to finish the job from Brisbane with nowt but my drums and the fiest of a young fiddler.” It’s clock-smashing time. Numbered edition of 50
Enge Chaleur Telegraphique
(Chocolate Monk - choc.419) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two of Chocolate Monk’s favorite duffers got together for the label’s 25-year birthday bash at Cafe Oto for this long-distance psychic hook-up. These very old friends, one globetrotter involved in international espionage, the other a suburban West Yorkshire housewife, filled the venue with the sounds of far-flung places, piano, electronics, rambling, etc. Disorientation never felt or sounded so sweet. A Daktari for free sound adventurers. Numbered edition of 60
NEIL CAMPBELL / STUART CHALMERS
Frog Dreaming Skull
(Chocolate Monk - choc.433) CDR $8.00
Hurtling toward the horrors of their biological selves, these two aging Yorkshire-based freaks follow up In the Vicinity of the Reversing Pool with an altogether more organic, rolling affair. Chalmers ladles on his signature stuttering tape loops and even dusts off his old zither, while Campbell is in a definite Vibracathedral vibe zone on guitar, percussion, toy piano, violin, electronics and voice. A continuously evolving piece, from the opening strum and stroke that will get your chakra shimmering to a gurning sonic joy mess full stop. Listener, you must struggle with glorious reality! Edition of 60
Orange Emulsion Gush
(Chocolate Monk - choc.529) CDR $8.00
These two old heads were recently reunited when El Stickoid was granted a short break back to the Brexit Isles by his handlers after successfully sewing confusion in Tunisia. With his never-waning Protestant work ethic Campbell dragged our bedraggled Agent to Huddersfield’s Dai Hall on a Saturday afternoon in August for a short but savory jammer of sonic sourdough positivity. Praise the raise! “From a fine Calder nosebag we headed to the sandstone tones o’Hudd, Neil effusively introducing the jewelcase misery geyser, whose wares we browsed before hirsute sarnies and mauve sambuca coffee,” reports Foster, if the above seems to good to be true. “Vacated shop had space, signs of good goings on, hot beverage access. Deep, dark broom cupboard of bags of janglers, cables ’n’ footstomp extracted, and Neil applying suitable pluggings. Ebb ’n’ flow of harmonium lungs overstretched the retied strap and foot pedal duo down to one. Painted pedestals for swapping toys, alpini and no-lamb chanters, things fumbled out of parps to a scratchy throb, between mugs of tea. So long since I’d had a tinkle with anyone, but felt so good! I didn’t see it coming, but a gush of white emulsion appeared down my thighs as we deposited the clangers back in the broom cupboard. Glee turned to distress as we realized we’d tipped it into one of the few items not purchased in a Bradford poundshop, but teetering bows and floor rolls had a wind-down follow-up as we rubbed back the Superstition’s orange panels. ’Twas a guilty tale to confess at the well ventilated head of steam.” Edition of 50
NEIL CAMPBELL / HOWARD STELZER
Their Crowning Achievement
(Chocolate Monk - choc.480) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Stelzer got the ball rolling on this old-school transatlantic collab with the sounds of kids playing, bass guitar, and dozens upon dozens of layered cassette tapes played outdoors and in hallways — a pile of stuff from unrelated or subconsciously-related sources, basically, hung together by crossed fingers and willpower, to which Campbell, in the wilds of West Yorkshire, added electronics, guitar and percussion. The resulting near-hour-long piece is a Rorschach rumble that keeps your gravy wet for the forseeable. Edition of 60
Displacement Activity Terminal 2019
(Chocolate Monk - choc.466) CDR $8.00
Electronic plod and clang from an exclusive perv lair in West Yorksire, a secret location chosen as optimum for the recording of finely churned euphoric sonics. Numbered edition of 60
Lump Of Stuff
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.318) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Back in 2008, one-time Nipple Erector and The Pogues’ most handsome got together in North London with Vibracathedral’s dad about town and former A Band swing king. Result: heavy, private jam blowout. The walls were hung with heavy rugs, the censer was filled to bursting, and the duo took off — Campbell on charged and elated guitar, Stacy handling commotion with whistle and clarinet. Their fried alien brew centers around a cloud of electronic rust that prevents nervous collapse and steals you away. Edition of 50.
POTIONS!!!
(Chocolate Monk - choc.516) CDR $8.00
The beloved “Beard of Bristol” Owen Chambers spent several weeks trying to unlearn guitar but found that a toxic knot once tied is hard to undo. His resolve failed him. Well, not totally. While his splendid guitar playing would remain intact he decided he could at least add a smear of “whatthefuckery” to his belt by spending the next week listening only to a handful of Glands Of External Secretions and Karen Constance recordings. He then set about making POTIONS!!!, a self-described “soup of sounds made from old Russian sci-fi films, lo-fi synth improvisations, dueling radios…, choral vocals,” and suchlike. It is better to travel well than to arrive. Artwork by Karen Constance. Edition of 60
Loop Phantasy No. 4
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.367) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Mind altering tape-loops for clogged heads, mental chatter and drunken monkeys. Ingredients: junk cassette samples, synths and effects. May also contain small traces of Steve Reich, Sufi Trance, Terry Riley and Tom Recchion. Dosage: one or two listens until symptoms ease. Headphones recommended. Warning: do not listen when repairing rare antiques, entertaining family relatives or operating dental equipment. Numbered edition of 60
juicy output
(Chocolate Monk - choc.576) CDR $8.00
The life’s aspirations of Shang Ren — vocalist, audio programmer, electronic musician — no one’s gonna check her ID and ticket. Numbered edition of 50
Ultra Fluff
(Chocolate Monk - choc.477) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
In the late summer of 2019, Graeme Hopper and Joe Murray met up on Saturday afternoons to jam. After a few sessions, a pattern emerged. Chlorine’s deconstructed percussion / electronics set up and Posset’s Dictaphones, megaphone, and vocal jaxx started in a hectic, everything-playing-at-once ecstasy, an overload of sensory information with the emphasis on texture and rhythm. After some time, busy layers sloped off, colors became clearer, and the vigorous back-and-forth of frantic improvisation settled into a steady psychic pulse. These raw jams were further messed with, looped, sliced and taped back together. Expect lightning-quick “v- vas-h” and elongated “whumm.” Climb inside a seashell to appreciate the tight, creamy crenulations. Feel the air get sucked out the room by the electric pressure blowing out your speakers. This marriage of real live-room jam and abstracted studio-sweat is not unique. But the light hand on the tiller and hurling the moral compass into the frothing waves just might be. Edition of 60
Be Somebody Else, It’s Fine
(Chocolate Monk - choc.513) CDR $8.00
They say repetition is the key to unlocking the lizard brain. Yup. Chlorine’s scabby fingers needle the lock, hinges and front piece. Feel the nimble fumbling in your head. Graeme Hopper scoops time into small piles and sets a direction like iron fillings clustering round a magic magnet. The multiple click-click of metallic pegs acts as a lubricant. I’m willing and ready. Surreptitiously-captured voices plough fever-drenched narratives. Make room for glottal beat-boxing, Lear-esque nonsense and hummed tunes to self. I smile at the shuffle of some rattling shells or the pale blue Farfisa mood. Some machine whirrs as an owl flutters wildly in the gears; then our poor feathery professor gets snaffled by a bigger (yet unseen) beast. I tidy out the shed, one ill-judged elbow starts a cascade of paint tins to bounce playfully off the shins and forehead. Edition of 60
Waggon
(Chocolate Monk - choc.456) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Recently observed at Supernormal festival applying salve to hungover Sunday brains, two-thirds of Food People beam in spoken word, spooling tapes, loops, violin, percussion, accordion, and wind instruments. Only the headstrong and foolish would refuse the soothing effect these intimate broadcasts bring. “Lila Matsumoto and Matthew Hamblin make sounds and words from cloth for layering or peddling piecemeal. A rouleau of songs, a bluster of raw sedge scuffed and hemmed. Or maybe a sylvan tableau in merit bone weave.” Don’t be a lunkhead. Edition of 60
Present Cracks
(Chocolate Monk - choc.539) CDR $6.75
Hot in the house, hot outside, hot sweaty hands poking things. Sounds of the Nottingham neighborhood of Matthew Hamblin and Lila Matsumoto of Food People. Cars barking like dogs. Voices of friends and voices from the TV. Flute, radio, tape, violin, guitar. Numbered edition of 50
Midnight Winds
(Chocolate Monk) Used CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Meditative drone to solid noise from 2009
KAREN CONSTANCE / ELKKA NYOUKIS
Bicker Sweet
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.355) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Mother and daughter Monk keep the crude and tripped-out tape jams super queasy with a healthy dollop of echo and delay. Loops and manipulation go from crinkled, hissing ear wobble to more in-the-red what-the-fuckery (à la Polly Shang Kuan Band). Numbered edition of 30.
Gudgeon-Snout
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.360) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Blood Stereo’s better half lurches out of the Shed of Dread to present us peasants with a solo disc of tape and loop damage, recorded ten years apart (one half laid down in the shit basket that is 2017, the other during the rosy days of 2007 when the Doomsday clock was a comfy five minutes to midnight. Take a heavy sniff of this doink. Numbered edition of 50
The Junk Merchant
(Chocolate Monk - choc.497) CDR $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Further tape and electronic zoink broadcast from the unfettered mind of Covid Karen. Unlike the recent shorter tracks on Still Awake (Beartown) and Still Asleep (More Mars), here we get many sections meshed into one long collage that has that satisfying cut-up yet fluid feel to give you the burbles. If you get giddy on the cool hum of autumn then this click clacker is for you. Hand danglers should approach with caution. Edition of 60
Old Scar For New Nose
(Chocolate Monk - choc.509) CDR $8.00
Processed surreal appeal from Wino Lodge’s hardest working dweller. The words are garbled, but the tapes and gadgets are in enough oscillation to keep your ass anodic. It’s hard to believe Miss Constance’s craft graft wasn’t always so strong but chance meetings at an early age set her on the path of prevalence: First meeting the Tartan Lads in Blackburn Chemists at the age of seven where “Scotland’s top performing duo” informed her “even a wee lassie can wear a skirt of many colors,” and then just a few years later a caged mynah bird in a Coldingham pub told her “the life of an artist is a fucktard’s waddle!” Numbered edition of 60
Positively Susan
(Chocolate Monk - choc.601) CDR $8.00
“The more I come to consume work by Karen Constance, the less I find it helpful to think of in terms such as ‘sound work’, ‘film work’ or ‘painting’. At this point I consider what she does as an ever-living, ever-growing ecosystem of audiovisual dream logic; one that may express itself in the shape of the above media yet exists in an essence far less tangible. Positively Susan is another prime instance of the great arc of images, motifs and obsessions that live via the now-buckling shelves of Constance’s zero-filler back catalogue. Such is the profundity of this gesture toward the abstract infinite that I can no longer tell whether I am listening to a reinterpreted, reanimated take on materials previously encountered in older jams / films or if this is an entirely virgin experience for my lugs and bonce. Maybe it’s both. Like getting to read a missing page from a beloved novel or finding out an action figure you’ve had for years has a gun you didn’t know about hidden in its arse. Fresh perches from which to angle your head whilst gazing at the aesthetic biosphere. But to concede to categorical thinking a moment; what am I actually talking about vis à vis the lived tasting experience of this disc? Pearls dropping from wet cave roofs, as seen from a static-y television? Shattered memories of hearing a piano glued purposely into the wrong shape? Spoken word tracts detailing dreams (probably) amidst deep larynx level non-verbal utterances? Sampled and stitched with a calm, delicate poise then gently warped and looped into heaving inhaling / exhaling living organs? Maybe so. But much like a decent plate of Chongqing Xiao Mian, the proof can only ever be in one’s own tasting. Whether you’ve had the prior pleasure of a toe’s dip in similar culinary waters or find yourself a first time diner, ready your mouth and heart for an earful of the most auditory numbing chilli oil to be found this side of Preston St.” —Mr Duncan Harrison
KAREN CONSTANCE / LUCIAN TIELENS
...And The Antique African Neck Parts
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.297) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
On this companion tape to ...And The German Pillow Menu (Chocolate Monk 2013), a Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble stalwart trades blows with Blood Stereo’s mean queen. “Tarzan Knows We Kidnapped The Baby” is just the kind of audio glurph slathered with loops and cut-ups you’d expect from the Left Coast loon, while “Tied To A Tree In Bankkop” is loop-heavy head-scratcher with fine passages of drony drump and disorienting voices. Get far from monochrome, ya freak. C20. Edition of 40.
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Therapeutic Effects
(Chocolate Monk - choc.533) Magazine + CDR $13.25 (Out-of-stock)
Solo works and collaborations cooked up in both the audio and visual realms. The full-color stapled A5 booklet features paintings, collages and life pointers. The accompanying disc comes in a one-off hand-collaged cover and gives you a solo track from each Wino Lodge dweller and a spun-out hand hold. Remain prescribed to the outer edge. Includes stickers, badge. Numbered edition of 50
KAREN CONSTANCE / JOSEPH HAMMER / JOHN WIESE
Live At Colour Out Of Space 2009
(Chocolate Monk - choc.233) split CDR $9.00
Split release recorded live in Brighton 2009. Solid Eye’s gloved maestro of live tape manipulation conjures up amazing, smoked-out loop wobble. If you cut the guy, he would bleed Ferric Oxide. Constance and Wiese twist knobs and deliver spectral head scratch of marble-losing proportions. A sweet ear pickle all round.
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
??????
(Chocolate Monk - choc.543) CDR $8.00
Who does what? Well, put these in your pantheist pipe and have a guess, dummy. Huff 1: The dreaded yet joyous satsuma nightmare. You have never heard of it, but you know it. That pulse and burp and craw that leads to the electric scuttle. In a movie, it is protein farmed from a peat bog with a dollop of silver acrylic paint. Wheeze. Omit the atmosphere. Huff 2: Set deep in a dank boot. Crumpled birds bent into figure eights in woozy frame. Cave people recorded straight to paper. A crooning lothario slipped a healthy dose of something good/bad. A pot of ooze poured upon any negations. A broken laser as your friend. Huff 3: Boomers straight to walkman give good song and life advice. Edition of 50
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Day Music / Night Music
(Amerige - Choc.548) LP $27.00
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.548) Split cassette $7.50
Constance the insomniac presents heavy, processed electronics, field recordings, mangled voices and tape wrangle constructed late at night in bed. Fend off the darkness fears with some Blackburn Academy of the Arts sun glow bloom insight. #pro-peasantmusic. On the flip, synth, tape players, loops and delay squelch and skitter into dream as early bird and morning whistler Nyoukis takes a wee stumble into a low T tower of crud. Recorded during the day live to tape. No nightmares allowed.
LP reissue, edition of 330.
Lalo Mendy
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
Cinematic molecules from another era, having seeped through fissures in the timeline, arrive on Lalo Mendy disguised as neurological pulsations and astrally projected trailers from a drive-in theater. Does this mean La Constance is here to willy Enter The Dragon and Cool Hand Luke samples all over your nilly? You deserve a slap for even asking, Bun-Bun. The repetitions here feel compulsive and hypnotic, yes, but also off-kilter and Just Not Right, away from which one is loathe to look. Areas rumble like boats traveling where they oughtn’t, shot through with the kazoo-like quack of bleeps and voice fragments and shadows of transmissions intercepted from intercoms at Business Goose HQ. A recurring tempo recalls quasi-synchronous swingsets rocking back and forth as enjoyed by the surreal children often depicted frolicking and assuming recognizably-Constance postures in her paintings and collages. It is also, however, a bit more complicated. Orders from the Supreme Honk simultaneously ooze over and whiz toward an all-femme Space Force, destabilizing civilians like us with Doppler Effect howls that leave us feeling pushed out of an airplane and descending through a hailstorm of whistling meat rocks. Destination: Unarius picnic overtaken by groundskeepers scooping up damaged mechanical heads with shovels. Edition of 50
Nothing To See, Hear
(Chocolate Monk - choc.474) CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Using the same set up, Little Sister presents a companion release to the Dylan Nyoukis disc of the same name, recorded inside Wino Lodge. Further dollops of loop damage which aim to disorient and frazzle in the nicest possible way. Numbered edition of 50
Oto Live
(Chocolate Monk - choc.244) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ninni Morgia and Silvia Kastel get delirious in the premier London jive joint and showcase the sound of catatonic Italy with all the quiver of a love sick robot. Their sound is always a mix of wieldy, tactile, smart and sleazy. Plenty of vocals, aquatic synth bloot and six-stringed gutter wail. Do your big ham-hock of a face a favor and let them pervade.
CRANK STURGEON / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Dulles Unt Huso
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
According to Crank Sturgeon himself (or itself (your call)): We recall the tactic: trundle off to visit the Scottish branch of our international cult, make a pile of recordings using a handy dandy Aiwa cassette recorder featuring the retractable mic, remix the sounds a couple months later on the pink boombox at BBF in Harpsie, Maine; then, finally, dash it off into the mail, maybe circa 1997, and wait a few decades for it to re-emerge from the lichen curds of memetic cardboard and bubblewrap. Edition of 60
Geronticus Eremita
(Chocolate Monk - choc.445) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Mysterious south-coast outsider tape wonk that tries to convince you that our normal waking consciousness — rational consciousness as we call it — is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. It’s made of “PsyOps anti-hypnosis tapes Thomas stole. No idea where,” according to Andy Bolus. “Featuring a cyborg Mrs. Mills soundalike. Used for unbrainwashing or ‘brain dirtying’.” Numbered edition of 40
Cooh-Choh-Choh-Cook
(Chocolate Monk - choc.487) CDR $6.75
Two simple kids who learned their passive-aggressive vernacular at the corner shop — not the same lingo, however — dreamt of a bigger bookcase, both with the wickedness of da’ sweet doing hee haw. Neither of them were on the Malibu beach party’s guestlist. Not Pernod-hound Olivier Di Placido abusing a p-petrol broken guitar. Not positive-stepper Renato Grieco, the handlecrackradio-surfer with at least twenty voices in his n-notebook. Together they stitch their spaghetti eyebrows to the crest of a playground nag, bake leftover viennoiserie and sshmptufflin’ down the block. Something’s bending there. It’s clicking. It is boingin’. Edition of 60
Plummet Sound
(Chocolate Monk - choc.493) CDR $6.75
One-time neighbors in that hotbed of commie anarchism / hipster hops known as Portland, Oregon, Cody Brant and Bob Desaulniers started Crude Mirage back in 2016, meeting up for live jams of tape muck and sputter in Desaulniers’s swanky shack. Brant upped sticks to Philly before finally landing in Dougie Jones country for his sins. In the meantime, cassette tapes were exchanged via the post and finally big fat WAVs got wizzed via web until this hard punch of cut-up crud came to pass. A stinking diamond of collage whattheactualfuckery. Edition of 60
Northeastern
(Chocolate Monk - choc.559) CDR $6.75
An album about vacationing in the American northeast when the autumn trees are at or near their most psychedelic. Herein is incidental life, baked into new ambers: laughing strangers, enthusiastic tour guides, restaurants and airports, a fountain, two young twentysomethings on a street corner staging a lonely action for reproductive rights, the world’s most mesmerizing hotel refrigerator, and more besides. Edition of 60
The Grape That Takes No Prisoners
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.358) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Living legend Adam Bohman with fellow London Improv Orchestra member Adrian Northover and Sue Lynch, recorded at OXO studios in 2015. The trio combines the putter and wheeze of saxophones with home-made strings, objects, tapes and text cut-ups to great effect.
Pterodactyl Bunker
(Chocolate Monk - choc.451) CDR $8.00
For twenty years Dai Coelacanth has been masquerading as a Graveyard Alligator, or a Radio Alligator. Hanging around bus stops. Shouting the odds. Hear him now: “Cannibal King and her friend The Colonel shook loose in an imaginary dream. Whatever the situation, there could be no suspension of broadcast. Suzi handed out nose-plugs. Don’t touch my legs, you creep. I don’t have to tell you anything.” Don’t cheat yourself by not listening to Pterodactyl Bunker in its entirety. Cheaters never win. Numbered edition of 60
Poverty Of Will
(Chocolate Monk - choc.435) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With many Darksmith recordings, one’s imagination doesn’t immediately conjure a person creating or manipulating sound, but rather drifts toward visions of depopulated areas getting damaged by alien weather events — choked by toxic dust, pelted by freeze-dried rocks of ooze, ruptured by shrieking subterranean trauma. Human agency, when its presence is unmistakable, occupies a position of forced abandonment, like cinematic ghosts unwilling to quit the material plane or an individual dehumanized by efficient banality. Through grit-flecked remnants of grainy field recordings from environs luscious and bleak. Weighed down by cackles and croaks blurred by humidity and contact mics. Tangled in rusted-over playgrounds dominated by geese and tumors. Molested by magnetic tape instability, truncated fidelity, and corrupted modulation fur. As the companion book demonstrates, the lad has an eye for evoking from bland and wholesome portraiture the incipient horror unknowingly embedded within. Darksmith’s stark, high-contrast line art dispenses with gradation, a nice echo of the flatness of the subjects’ lives immortalized by disposable time-killing entertainment magazines ubiquitous throughout medical waiting rooms. 44 pages.
DAVE + ERICK / DAVE MIKO / TWOTHIRDS
We Were Where
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
1990s primitive SoundEdit collage alongside the two-man live jam band, supplemented with leftover interview snippets from an oral history tome about New York City graffiti writers and a new live acapella lament. Edition of 60
DAYGLOW EXPLODING SUPER INFINITE
The Clingfilm Survival Diaries
(Chocolate Monk - choc.496) CDR $6.75
Karl M V Waugh doesn’t let his day job as software developer sour him —far from it. Big Hairy has used his work-from-home schedule to put in the obligatory Zoom meetings, do the minimum amount required, and then set about developing his own noise-making apps. Priorities, people! One of which is a crude looper with manual varispeed control per loop with a very tactile approach, albeit a tad chaotic, like Pierre-André Arcand’s Macchina Ricordi for the Tik Tok generation. This album is made up of four shards from improvisations where Waugh runs various live sources into his phone and from phone to handheld recorder. All via the lens of exhaustion, parenthood, home working, and lockdown 2020. Edition of 60
Exorcist Blues
(Chocolate Monk - choc.585) CDR $8.00
An invitation to take a deep dive into the intergalactic mycelial network of Teonanacatl — the sacrament of Teotl — the totality, the pulsing, undulating wave of Time ~ Space ~ Becoming ~ Unbecoming. The two a cappella vocal songs were received by ancestors while wearing an upside down trash can mask in rural Scandinavia. The more electro-acoustic pieces do their best to replicate some of the various sounds received during the Ceremony of the Deified Heart in which one BECOMES the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. Sacred mushrooms optional. Edition of 60
Unreliable Narrative
(Chocolate Monk - choc.420) CDR $8.00
Cody Brant and Shane McDonell bust out their warped musical minds for this doozy. Strung-out toe-tapping tunes and creeped-out paranoid shuffle to make your third eye twitch. Imagine the Puzzle Punks got slipped a roofie by a young, pimple-faced Rick Potts. Kill voice to skull. Sometimes good things fall apart, putting the pieces back together. Kill voice to skull. Chewing off the insides of your cheeks. Very suspicious. Numbered edition of 60
BOB DESAULNIERS / TRANSLUCENT ENVELOPE
Grimly Forming
(Chocolate Monk - choc.515) Magazine + CDR $15.00
Yet more sweet eye-and-ear yolk in the Lunk Headed Library series and further recordings from the under-documented tape-mangling sound wizard whose use of tapes, sampler, electronics, phone recordings, contact mics, and objects render “a fairly accurate … depiction of my brain turning to mush over the last eight months or so.” The 20-page A5 color booklet is a selection of collages made between 2015 and 2021. Nothing soothes mush brain like magazines, scissors, paper, and glue stick. Balance, dear Bozos. Numbered edition of 69
AARON DILLOWAY / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Dropout Elements
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.328) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.328) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Dilloway turns tapes of Nyoukis singing, playing violin, pogo stick and other junk into four tracks of heavy loop madness. Saltier than a mumified German sailor. Edition of 50
Pink Cow
(Chocolate Monk - choc.510) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Master loopist and audio hypnotist Joseph Hammer and loopy sonic magician Rick Potts are the “antique brass holes” who have been plundering phonics since the pre-MIDI era of the LA Free Music heyday. Their chunks of discombobulated ear worm wax are still circling around heads like stars and birdies after a mallet blow to the frontal lobe. This slice of kaleidoscopic audio fruitcake was recently discovered in their jewel-encrusted archive treasure chest. Milk the Pink Cow’s psychoactive soda pop and go for a swirl with floating fragments of dolled-up cartoonery and prismatic rigamarole bouncing off rubber walls of repurposed Exotica malarkey in a sauce of dreamy semi-gelatinous electro-stoolage. The eye-dazzling 16-page full-color booklet of Potts’s tainted surrealism is included for purusal while submerged in the Dinosaurs’ sound swamp.
Future For The Body
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.361) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Further nocturnal transmissions from Mike Collino, who eases the burbling in your sick head with a collection of short pieces that utilize electronics, indefinable strings, piano, violin, electrical hum, modified tape / voice, music boxes and who knows what else. Eerie and beautiful as ever. “These are closed systems,” says Collino. “Inexplicable failures and therefore shareable. I’m able to make it and keep it because I don't understand it.” Numbered edition of 60
Dead Souls
(Chocolate Monk - choc.226) CDR $9.00
Violin feedback bloom from Mike Collino, whose spirit of scrape triturates tiny minds. Suitably ajar tape swashbuckle with dollops of bent spooned electronic glup and soured bass harmonic preserve whispers “let’s get mysterious.” Doglady truly represents the crude with lots of style, like a spleen tarantula running roughways, educating the peasants. Let the muscle be heard.
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - choc.577) CDR $8.00
These Southampton sound gibberers have brought many a face-bursting smile to those lucky enough to see and hear them in all their live glory. Life affirmation through noises and prance is their bread and butter, while recordings have been scant over the years. Be grateful that Chocolate Monk is here to present this egg of Fluxus-level blubber and bent class. All hail that damn goose and these noise joy masters. Edition of 60
Try To Put Your Hand Right Through Me
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.269) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
LAFMS-esque gloop by Southampton’s finest duo of non-musicians cranking out disorienting sound collage. Broken instruments, dictaphone wheeze, mouth gurgles, electronic puff and pant. Cover art by Miss Constance.
The Orange Teeth Of The Beaver
(Chocolate Monk - choc.450) Magazine $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Scotland’s very own comic book absurdist and all ’round weird walker finally delivers a full-blown book — a mind-melting compilation of his comic strips from 2012 through 2019. Black and white with color cover, 44 pages.
Ego Derpz
(Chocolate Monk - choc.462) CDR $8.00
Fritz Welch and Adam Campbell’s system of hyperextended rumblings is designed to break a hole through invisible or undetectable barriers. It goes for the mind, ear, leg, heart, hand and scalp. Its first impulse is subtracted from the overall net of intentions beyond an overflowing golden toilet. For example, the sound is produced for the sole purpose of abseiling clogged and crystallized hierarchies before finally putting it all to rest. Speakers and surfaces are thoroughly interrogated, yielding a steady diet of perpetual come down. Guests are Lucy Duncombe and Tony Bevan. Edition of 60
Zero Return
(Chocolate Monk - choc.432) CDR $8.00
Francesco Calandrino lives and works way down in Alcamo in the fields of research music, net-art, language and wine — no doubt guzzling down the good grape while he generates hyper lo-fi sounds from sputtering mechanical systems like his beloved old radio-cassette stereos and wonky Walkmans — while Cristiano Deison has his lab way up in Varmo, where he can usually be found frothing over his Tascam 404, turntable guts and objects churning out skillful tape loop burbles, electronic skittering and field recordings. The whole thing has a great eavesdropping throb that feels like it’s beaming in from afar. Both are part of the ferment of ideas here but Zero Return is a real whodunit. Better get out your ear magnifier, Sherlock. Edition of 60
Third Parties
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
Most of the sounds that Wilcox and Ellul make come from close-to-hand, everyday, tactile objects, accidents, or routines. And from the body as it rubs, carries, plays, waits, dawdles with its surroundings. The voices are chatting, syncopating, trying to change position, getting in a mess. Edition of 60
A Kind Of Air
(Chocolate Monk - choc.468) CDR $8.00
A slightly different edit of the Glasgow-based writer and artist’s beautiful and strange piece recorded for Mark Vernon and Barry Burns’s Radiophrenia in 2019. A slow moving thing that seems to stretch out time. “If I were to tell you how I arrived here, I would have to explain the voicemails,” says Ms. Ellul. “The voicemails have been in the back of my mind for some time. They had accumulated over several years, in fits and starts. A waxing and waning of words spoken into the void. For months, I watched them arrive but I did not listen to them. When I eventually did hear the messages, certain things were immediately clear. The condition of his lungs was deteriorating. His breathing was labured. The messages had never been easy to follow. They were often slurred, because of the drink. But now when he spoke his words were interrupted by coughing fits, more and more so as time went on. By groans and gasps. Belly-speech. Gurgles of outflow.” Edition of 50
Unintentionally Marginalized
(Chocolate Monk - choc.480) CDR $6.25
The return of one of Chocolate Monk’s more musical family members who, as always, brings strumming and sonorous sound to ease the pain. “These days,” says the man himself, “Being marginalized is like getting a gold star in some segments of society. It’s a social boost that gives some people more clout in some circles. People want attention. So much so that everyone is scrambling to out-marginalize each other…. And I know I am insignificant in the greater scheme of things. I wish more people realized this about all of us…. Unintentionally Marginalized is an instrumental album of songs recorded by myself at home about living with extreme mental illness. A lot of people claim marginalization just for social bonus points, but I just want to be normal….” Edition of 50
Everything’s Coming Up Roses
(Chocolate Monk - choc.580) CDR $8.00
The eternal golden braid that Todd W Emmert twists from strands of ectoplasm (seldom accessible to likes of you, me, or the cleaning lady wearing a gas mask) pulses like a healthy body. But this time, the tobacco haze is illuminated a little differently; the aura shimmers a little harder than usual, for a simple reason: Emmert Has Gone Electric. Instead of acoustic guitar molding the character of his songs — which are more than sketches or demos, though referring to them as compositions feels gross and flashy — here electric bass is the generative force, followed by electric guitar, electric keyboards, and (non-electric) tambourine with a drum head on it. Visions of instrumentals from Pink Floyd’s More / La Vallée era drift through the lobes. Migrating birds pass by, thunder reverberates across the valley, bleating sheep navigate the fields out back. The man understands and feels the cycles. He doesn’t seek to dazzle you, or really to entertain you at all, and probably cringes at the mere thought of your existence, to be honest. Maybe not. You seem like one of the good ones. But Everything’s Coming Up Roses is an album that invites you to immobilize yourself for a bit. Allow its languid mini-anthems to prick you with a micro-dose of perfect ratios. Nine tracks or nine variations on a theme, you don’t need to know for sure. Stop fussin’ over everything. Just sit and vibrate there like a miracle of nature for 25 minutes, whydoncha.
Talking To Yourself Is Better Than Talking To No One
(Chocolate Monk - choc.502) CDR $7.25
Emmert’s 14th and final full-length album of 2020 is a paperback pandemic romance novel without words, completely instrumental. Feel the warm themes, if you can. True pandemic romance isn’t dead, it’s just taken another form, again. Do your current pandemic lifestyles got you down? Well, just try and remember the time before time, when it was slightly more enjoyable to be alive and the clock wasn’t weighing on your back like an albatross. Let your worries slip away into the ether. Remember the fun before time existed. Edition of 60
A Summer’s Day And Night
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.390) CDR $8.00
No one makes being a visionary seem like an attractive career more than Todd W. Emmert. His beguilingly unassuming compositions slip through the cracks between the cosmic binaries — your yings and your yangs, the bottom of the aboves and the tops of the belows, the magic hours of twilight and dusk. A Summer’s Day And Night oozes with sacred perspiration wrung from the garments of the children of the supreme hypno-void getting dizzy on an interstellar merry-go-round. Four opening tracks lull you into a false sense of New Age security, better than any vegan restaurant hold muzak, before Emmert goes full ghost story and bakes your head into a wax unagi pie replica in the galley of a Unarius UFO with a series of heavy, scalp-striating distorto drones that have every right to take up entire album sides. A fine, fine distillation of “splashing” and “down.” Huff it. Numbered edition of 60
A New Normal
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.401) CDR $7.00
Part hot shot of life-affirming glimmer, part wounds-cleanser, and, in the words of Emmert himself, part “quick postcard to people who are suffering from traumas and there is no way out. That’s what the title means: finding a new place to rest inside yourself, because all previous normalcy was destroyed by trauma…. There is no fixing things….” Numbered edition of 60.
Open Doors, Open Graves
(Chocolate Monk - choc.525) CDR $8.00
North Carolina’s number one porch lounger returns to the microphone and the craft of song after spending 2020 singing not a single note (too busy blowing cigar smoke in the face of the cardboard God). He repents nothing and knows not to mourn this mess of a world as we are all just sea-monkeys observed from afar. You want a monk’s cell with a ceiling fan? Sorry, all we have is the mellow sound in which to drown, covering, according to the Tarheel Troubadour, “themes of death, mental illness, loneliness and solitude, and mysterious bohemian bloodlines.” Edition of 60
A Serpentine Summer
(Chocolate Monk - choc.440) CDR $6.25
Brother Todd’s third ChocoMo is his sixteenth full-length album since 2015. It’s an instrumental album. “Isn’t that good?” he asks rhetorically. “Enough with my voice…. If you don’t like vaguely minimal experimental home recorded music, you’re not gonna like this either. But I do think it’s good. This one is kinda twinkly in parts and it’s built for the heat.” Edition of 60
Rooby
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.339) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Glen Galloway, master glumpf from (g)olden days Trumans Water and current mung mind of Octagrape, creaks out solo guitar on all tracks except “Andromedae,” where he mangles keys. Small bits of sporadic drum crunch are thrown in, and one song, “Leveled Sea,” begged so hard for a bristling vocal it was finally granted. That said, spidery worm guitars really do gnaw up most of the screen as would so many yling-yling-soaked digits re-engaging vertebrae in a dreamhaze day spa. The concept: pitting no-wave against protein sprawl. High ceilings, bare walls, wire-infested floors. Branca’s Lesson No. 1 served as monolithic diving board, alongside things like Jack Ruby and Rosa Yemen. Small and mutating on-the-fly loops are improvised and mixed live with generous panning and pitching to approximate a transparent single-member guitar army. Sprawl then reveals itself either with more flickering numbers or when mismatched single takes resemble Parable Of Arable Land or Twin Infinitives or Hairdryer Peace. O stark splurge. Ice bath in sauna room, then at least several hundred heavy towels. Best of luck on the drive home. Edition of 54
Drool Freezers
(Chocolate Monk - choc.430) Magazine + CDR $16.00 (Out-of-stock)
Thirty-six full-color pages packed with insight into the bizarre mind of Andy Bolus who “spent endless nights, fortified with Chinese bath salt smoothies made from polystyrene packaging materials and shredded pages of Ohayo Chinpo magazine, condensing this stuff down on the trusty Bruel & Kjaer, reducing any surplus baroque residue and streamlining the information flow to ensure only the finest and most essential neon worms and Day-Glo green dog chew toys are highlighted in LSD-sharp-focus-wide-stereo-panorama for maximum ear goops.” Listen to the disc as you stare and marvel at its pages, created and presented “in the tradition of those terrible cod-surrealist chess-board landscape cover-paintings on early Klaus Schulze albums like Timewind.” Edition of 69
Melt / Surround
(Chocolate Monk - choc.605) CDR $8.00
The fourth album of insidiously immersive headphonic haze by alliteration-loving living legends Brian Grainger (Milieu, Coppice Halifax) and Howard Stelzer sculpts sensuous, vivid drone music out of steamrolled cassette tapes, mountains of modular synthesizers and repurposed suburban ephemera. In this deeply serene, time-defying expanse, all participants hover several feet above safe ground. And so on. Edition of 60
Wilson Schmilsson
(Chocolate Monk - choc.417) CDR $8.00
Brighton’s very own “Yogi Bear” (to his nearest and dearest) follows up last year’s brilliant The Unstruck Sound Centre (Ikuisuus 2017) with further treks into the mind meld zone. Exotic electronics and warm swiggle nurture your sagging chakras. Musical chirps and sonic pulse cleanse your psychic stink eye. This is the Chew Age. Numbered edition of 60
Pattern Interrupt
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.286) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Martin Denny’s quiet village from a frog’s point of view, courtesy of Bolide’s Paul Wilson. Guitar, log bonking, bird peeping, electric marimba clunking, insect fwapping instrumentals that waft and meander through an enchanted bog.
At War With Windsor
(Chocolate Monk - choc.592) CDR $8.00
In which self-taught artist Hannah Walker (nee Salt) and rock’n’roll singer / lyricist Russell Walker (no relation) get inspired by cut up noise (NWW, Mixed Band Philanthropist, Gus Coma) and the British poetry revivial of the 1960s, as well as their own squalid and depraved domestic situation. Edition of 60
Half-Time 1916
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.406) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Hitchin’s finest scruff about the square Russell Walker (The Teleporters, Lloyd Pack, Pheromoans, etc.) reads from his upcoming novel, the follow-up to his poorly selling When New Towns Act Tough. James Tranmer adds tech yes/no beat crud and Tom James Scott more of a loopy drone mumph vibe. Come feel the mundane mumble, friend.
The Acetone Of Flowers
(Chocolate Monk - choc.608) CDR $8.00
At their D7 lair, a well loved hovel behind ten thousand layers of paint, Copenhagen’s finest purveyors of pulse, drone and general mind-float made tape loops which were then curled up and stomped on the floor, fed through an old plastic National reel-to-reel and combined with synths and guitar skree. The opening two tracks are performed by the classic duo of Sara Czerny (Buchla Easel, tape loops) and Nicolas Kauffmann (guitar, Moog), while the final two tracks introduces new member Matt Saporito, a NYC transplant whose manipulated tapes and keyboards create a new hive mind of smashed fragments and resonant strings. Buckle it up. Edition of 60
Artificial Stupidity
(Chocolate Monk - choc.588) CDR $8.00
Andrew Sharpley got busy during the lovely lockdowns of 2021/22. Robots wake up, go to sleep, new age, old age, a plague on all your houses, wellness, sickness, gloop or goop? William Shatner, the Dalai Lama, facemasks, COVID, conspiracy nonsense, bad jokes, live in a bubble, live outside a bubble, who cares? The whole nine yards in 38 minutes. With some added Valery Pasanau. Sharpley reckons it is “a not very weird record of a very weird time. A kind of relic.” But it surely lifted the spirits of all in Wino Lodge. A repeater for sure. Comes with sticker. Edition of 60
Dwindling Correspondence
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.381) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Pete Cann emerges from his mystical house of clocks in Leeds and shows us what he has been working on for the last year. Sounds like a suitcase full of strangely lacquered secretions, electronic feathers and little moments of truth put through the scurry man’s mind blender. He’s got what you want, when you want it: peculiar passages. He’s got what you need, when you need it: sonic calcification. Anton Bruhin would part a million, just to keep it. The Cann man is ready to debunk your mind. Numbered edition of 54
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - choc.478) CDR $6.25
Jameson Sweiger of Maths Balance Volumes beams forth further transmissions from his mysterious bunker out in Mankato, Minnesota. The weird warble of the tapes and the Chopinesque throat burbles are all present and correct, but is he telling us of the seven plagues of the petrochemical age or informing us of the fact that the internet is an alien life form? Whatever the answer, just be sure to keep your sick room windows closed while you try to decipher. Edition of 60
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.349) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Jameson Sweiger used to ride high in the saddle of mind mumble combo Maths Balance Volumes, then when that braw unit evaporated he disappeared into a dank hole to lay an egg somewhere in Ohio. Although off the radar for a few years he has kept his fingers jammed into tape machines and whatnot. Tthese recordings, made between 2009-2013 in Toledo and Memphis, will simonize the thought dome of the listener. Screen printed card slipcase with stuck on paper front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 40.
Firm Friends
(Chocolate Monk - choc.568) CDR $8.00
Materials from the distant end of a dim tunnel gathered in an inscrutable stack by Martin Greenwood and Kate Armitage out of Silver Dick. Iridescent mold, water-logged fibreboard, medium density clang-procession, irrational tablature, inching up the spout to the gutter: friendship, starboard. Point a flashlight at them. Point a couple. Edition of 60
Pacific Rim and Hastings
(Chocolate Monk - choc.418) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The wild man of the jaw harp went hiking with the sax gonk deep into the wilds of the rainforest of Tofino, British Columbia, where they stumbled upon a hermit hut and cooked up this weird, slobbery affair. Those six tracks are topped off with an improv piece recorded in squalid East Hastings, Vancouver. Numbered edition of 60
Area
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.283) CDR $7.00
Another hotpot of prime cut-up collage splut by Andrew Zukerman. Electronic zwonk expertly sewn together with life-affirming tape farts, plundered dialog mixed in with electric whizz and what sounds like ’80s doll burps vs. robotic cow groans. One especially zukadelic section sounds like Mayasa Nakahara teabagging Robert Ashley’s Wolfman.
FLESHTONE AURA / SEYMOUR GLASS
Amplified Teacup
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.316) CDR $8.00
On both the 20-minute tracks here, sounds that have been found, forcibly appropriated, and/or rendered unrecognizably alien ricochet off the guillotine blades operated by a couple of North American experimental wombats. Performed with no preparation or rehearsal in April 2015 at Second Act in San Francisco, accompanying a film by Winston Hacket, “Live” bends the skull with blaaps and fwunks hurled out of the Cocoquantus, a five-oscillators-and-two-delays device created by Pete Blasser that yields complex and often bewildering waveform switcheroos. “Not Live” is the product of three months swapping, editing, colliding, and intertwining mass media voices, field recordings, the ambiance from a variety of interior locations, animal noises, snippets of music both popular and obscure, sound effects and signal processing, unidentifiable gurgles and more.
Infinity Keystroke
(Chocolate Monk - choc.473) CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Andrew No C Zukerman busts out a fine, demented piece of tympanic membrane tickling. Recorded in 2014 and 2015 using tapes, turntable, sampler, modular and Buchla synthesizers, he slow-bakes the burble to a perfect blend of heady, psychedelic, paranoid, and warped, with a dose of abstract musicality for good measure. Edition of 60
God With Stripes
(Chocolate Monk - choc.492) CDR $6.75
Lila Matsumoto and Mathew Hamblin (aka Cloth) hook up once more with the reclusive guitarist Greg Thomas (Helhesten), last seen terrifying discombobulated tourists at the foot of Leith Walk with his “spare any change / pay me to stop” drone und strang meditations. This, their follow-up to their 2018 Monk disk Vetch, heads deeper into the wilds searching for their I AM Presence with musical ears attuned to deep listening. Get grounded, have empathy, enjoy the visuals. Edition of 60
Vetch
(Chocolate Monk - choc.411) CDR $8.00
Lila Matsumoto, Matthew Hamblin and Greg Thomas’s engrossing follow-up to their Animal Work cassette (Beartown Records 2017) pulses, drones, scrapes and baffles — a strange sedative to help you cover that attitude of cynical indifference. Somebody once said, “Vetch is a food made out of flowers. The violin is made of mouths. The computer is also eating the food. Hens roused and goaded to tumors, the monk is known to write nonsense. Moping at doofus, the violent node of edam is shut for maintenance. Everything will be played backwards. Sprawling peyote limbs and bees. There will be a guitar, pills and bream enacting Cnut. Everything will be played at once. Chocolate slipping into pugs, spume of rats. Tunnocks cantering at veal. There will be a sampler. Shy and numb, the tulips and goats eloped.” So keep that in mind. Numbered edition of 60
Octuary
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.380) CDR $8.00
Fraser Burnett is Oxgang’s only one-man discordant drone unit, sent here to expose your ears to everything they thought they didn’t want to hear. He rubs carpet in your face and adds a lump of charcoal tone, while rocking back and forth in “a moment” with one eye closed and a gurn on his puss. Sure, the Northern UK has a rich vein of bleak monochromatic head borers, conjuring up that weird cocktail of dour-tempered-with-joy head gorf, but none are huffed out on the spores from Sharnoth more than FRU. Numbered edition of 54 (but numbers add up to nothing)
untitled
(Chocolate Monk - choc.519) CDR $7.00
The Forrest Friends emerge from 2020 and show how the old passing-an-eight-track-back-and-forth can get you to some strange places. Imagine Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase doing some alien gas-huffing wangers or one of the dribblers from Caroliner getting their drool on to insectoid funk-a-gunk puzzle muzak. Devolving righteously into a mish mash of mood musics. There are plenty of little creepers, too, wee sonic plucks matured just right to deliver that all-important ear larva, so pull up a chair to the blown-out tables and let the psych-colored world seep through the window. “All’s I can say about it is that we had never done things this way before,” says Garrison Heck. “There’re hip-hop beats, maybe some alien dub. Not what I initially thought we’d be coming up with, but here we are. Blur your ears and it’s just cowboy soundtracks, dancefloor bangers, goth-industrial lullabies, rural land-lubber sea-shanties, ’80s sax-laden jams, etc. Or maybe that’s not what it is at all? Ugh, honestly, I’m really confused by this thing that we have birthed from our aural womb, and not the Wordy Rappinghood with describing this particular thing. But a straight-up pop album for sure, the closest we’ve come to such a thing, anyway.” Edition of 60
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - choc.429) CDR $8.00
In an old issue of a London-based porn mag, the one with Funko Geräte on the cover, an essay attempts to recast Esplendor Geometrico as a Massachusetts freak-folk band. With the appropriate dosage, anything’s possible. Probably. Maybe they changed their name and emigrated from Spain and due to a translation error ended up in Seattle. Who knows what’s real and what’s made-up with that publication. From Forrest Friends’ opening herald announcing the commencement of a marathon sweat lodge cotillion, where consensual flora gropings and various pagan engorgements run their respective courses until the inevitable dousing of the nethers with ritual electronic ooze, to the spent, post-credits vibe of a homemade horror movie, this album resembles little in the Chocolate Monk catalog. The duo’s debut release for the label was recorded by the side of the road in the middle of the night, naked but for banana-leaf loin cloths bound together with twine, crouching in the mud, staring intently at a nematomorph exiting the used-up husk that had been a typically happy-go-lucky praying mantis before the zombifying parasite took over its brain. This thirty-eight-minute disc’s high-primitive hoot coaxes spirit lizards out of a secluded northern-facing lichen shack and forces them to march on an infinity-symbol-shaped path, invoking visions of communion with First Nations spasticity. Patches of impaired fidelity, damaged by overdriven sound, smear the otherwise intimate recordings with heavy whiffs of opium cinders and Wiccan-roasted genetic structure that’s mustier than an old towel full of three-day-old phat si-io. Everybody loves the idea of a lost world. Well, here’s one with hypnotic yelping, otherworldly accordion, dreams of the pipe, and processions of re-animated wooden children invoking the great drillbit in the sky to exact vengeance on the new president of Brazil. Edition of 60
The Common Error Of Ordinary
(Chocolate Monk - choc.438) Magazine + CDR $12.50 (Out-of-stock)
After much arm-twisting and beard-tugging, the beloved artist /composer / sound wizard injects Swedish visual / aural magic into the pipeline. Get ready to get really, really sleepy. Book is full color, 24 pages
GLANDS OF EXTERNAL SECRETION / POSSET
Obedience To Authority
(Chocolate Monk - choc.452) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Huffed synth bubbles float over soapy tape? Language-collapse injected inside a plump proto-punk donut like so much unsavory butter? It’s them California goofballs Barbara Manning and S. Glass holding claws across the ocean with the bristly Joe Murray. Whatever the dance steps, this is one scatty reel; arms and legs flying, with the good whisky getting spilled all over the parquet floor. If you have a fancy, lie low in your scratcher and drink it all in. Yes, freak, gobble it down, this rich clotted draft. Leave sense at the door and wipe a flannel across your knotted brow. Layering (filo-like) ouch sounds becomes a universal “um.” It’s pure and simple. It’s dream weapon ammunition. Edition of 60
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.479) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
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. Edition of 60
SEYMOUR GLASS / STEFAN JAWORZYN / DYLAN NYOUKIS
My Disgusting Heart
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.353) CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
A live set of horrible noise recorded at Café Oto in 2014, a slurry of guitar, voice and other oozed junk, with prodigious post-application of tape loop lunacy and other audio tricks. Cover art by Karen Constance. Numbered edition of 80
... And The German Pillow Menu
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.278) Split cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a two-volume split tape gonk-off between The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble and Blood Stereo (to be followed, glob help us, by a Karen Constance / Lucian Tielens cassette) is a prologue to a full-blown Blood Lewiis collaboration. Glass spins short yarns using bottle cap, hairbrush, tapes, turntable, violin and voice, with guest clarinet by My Little Panda, while Nyoukis calls upon the forces of gravity and fermentation for his side-long trip to the bottom of a bottle via tapes, voice, piano, drums, trumpet, violin, reel-to-reel, Library Of Congress C1 tape player and objects. C20. Edition of 40.
Molasses
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.394) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Forty minutes of electronics and loops recorded during an impromptu session at No Spray 205 in San Francisco, named after the 1919 disaster that buried an entire neighborhood of Boston in deadly sweetened ooze. Numbered Edition of 60.
If You Can't Be Good, Be Reasonable
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.393) Magazine + CDR $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
An alarming, detailed travelogue by The Fourth Chinz-man Of The Apocalypse about his November 2017 trip to witch-trial country, where he played shows with Phil Milstein and Ariella Stok (aka Suppressive Persons) and on his own. CDR includes the trio’s entire set at Feeding Tube Records in Florence, Massachusetts. “The only thing weirder than what comes out of this motherfucker’s mouth is what goes in,” says Roland Woodbe. “Seriously, is there anything S. Glass won’t eat?” Forty-eight pages. The first in Chocolate Monk’s Lunkhead Library series. Numbered Edition of 100.
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.520) 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 Butte County Free Music Society. Edition of 150
Donut Oil
(Chocolate Monk - choc.518) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
When Ali Robertson witnessed Seymour Glass tell Joe “Posset” Murray that he was the “only guy in the UK whose writing is worth a damn,” Robertson knew exactly who he was going to rope in for a future journalistic favor. Clearly, the Yankee behemoth knows which side of his scone is buttered. Nothing happens without fealty to the institutions of butchery and bakery, after all. “Sprinkle, crinkle, pit of mud, how I wonder who’s yer fud.” So began the silent incantation that protected the lesser half of Usurper and the decrepit 1/40th of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble in their completion of this magenta-cloud hallucination. From what, one might ask. Hard to say, as they overcame all obstacles and nefarious phenomena seen and unseen attempting to keep them from their appointed sounds. Emboldened by bullshit sorcery, the reckless pair of hobbits dove into a shared dreamstate, thrashed around inside pink cubes for a while, where disembodied voices and conveyor belts stacked high with body parts and vegan substitutes ensorcelled and nauseated, and slid back out with nary a grease stain on their Brunello Cucinelli perforated, suede-panelled, cashmere gloves. That’s all we know. Rest assured, friend, Robertson and Glass have packed all 48 minutes of this disc with primo slurps, throttled puckers, fairytale calisthenics, fading electronics, tape manipulation, intimate congress with inanimate objects, naïve instrument prowess, and the finest crackle that can be derived from stale peat loaves. Edition of 60
The Sealed Container
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.396) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Three absolute mind-melders from the dusty archives, hand-picked by Yorkshire’s favorite bear-hugger Neil Campbell. Vast aching tableaux where Godbert wails on the reeds and causes irreparable damage to guitars and keyboards borrowed from Matthew Bower — your key to understanding of Northern English heavy liquid infinite blah third eye whatever. Numbered Edition of 60.
Pond Life Noir
(Chocolate Monk - choc.562) Magazine + CDR $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Time and logic totally fly out the window as soon as this stuff starts to spool,” admires Neil Campbell, who would know and is not prone to exaggerate. Godbert himself explains the genesis of his wonderful lo-fi reed / fog blare, “I was stuck in Edinburgh for five days due to a mammoth snow storm. Fortunately, I had at hand a copy of the Ladybird classic Pondlife, published in 1966, and decided to alter it and make it enjoyable for the people who are more interested in guns and murder. As the original preface to the book says, ‘A pond might look like just another patch of water, but beneath the green scum, many interesting things are happening’.” With 36pp full-color A5 book of collages. Edition of 50
Frog Soil
(Chocolate Monk - choc.591) CDR $8.00
Another offering congealed and solidified from the amorphous GP Kids technicolor quasi-song noise deluge. Leeds oiks Hils (Yakkida!, Cowtown) and Theo (Territorial Gobbing) whittle cheapo keyboards, janky cassette loops, toys and bells into spontaneous slop-pop rituals while all singing together. Honky tonk country lurches, synth pop sweetness and mumbled abstraction all fed through the one tube into the one Tupperware. Numbered edition of 50
ABRACUJO
(Chocolate Monk - choc.593) CDR $8.00
Abracujo was glued together with stream of consciousness poetry, field drip and mouldy lab manipulation. This part of a trilogy (the other two consisting of Barnie Bewail, A Film Soundtrack cassette (Half A Million / Belltower Records) and Churn Clockburner Ace cassette (Torn Light) was recorded at Lincoln Shoppe and other parts of Brighton, UK, then performed live (with visuals by Karen Constance) shortly thereafter at the Bees Mouth in Hove, UK. early summer 2023. Edition of 60
Bijou Bastard Box Room Suite
(Chocolate Monk - choc.415) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The mystery duo has added a third member and invites you into their brown study for more contemplative probing that sometimes sounds like Solid Eye twanging and rippling underneath a radio broadcast by a crunked-up Lexie Mountain. “An artist arrives to paint a portrait of the royal family, but Trinket is unable to get her mane to stay in place and chaos ensues when a bird flies off with her hairgrip,” according to TV Guide. “Starring: Gonçalo F Cardoso, Alex Jones, Phil Lane — three sensitive gits, tight as a piss purse. This shiny disc is better than your last 27 purchases. Dust ain’t randy no more. (Subtitles) (Repeat) Rating: 6.6” Numbered edition of 60
Eight Knots Bathing
(Chocolate Monk - choc.573) CDR $8.00
Glistening Examples recording star and British Library good egg Tom Bench finally gives in to Chocolate Monk pestering. Recordings of significant and insignificant situations from 2021 and 2022, mostly. Tightly tangled up together and left to marinate. Not so fast. A fine set of simmering lower case noise and field recordings utilizing electronics, tapes, loops, Dictaphone, spring reverb, broken violin / guitar, phone, feedbacker and whatnot. Cover art from our man Malcy Duff. Edition of 60
A Horse In Your Head When You Made That Horse
(Chocolate Monk - choc.557) CDR $8.00
The work by this little-heard duo Fiona Kennedy and Jon Marshall (the couple behind shared projects including The Hunter Gracchus and Singing Knives Records, and individual projects such as Roman Nose, Blue Yodel and Papal Bull) draws on their professional and personal experiences of mental health as manifested in the individual and the family, set against contemporary depoliticized, pathologizing and commodified interventions, playfully disrupting attempts to determine sound sources, attribution and intent. Edition of 60
HEART OF GLUE / ORCHID SPANGIAFORA
Calm Down
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.342) split CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
With delicate hands Robert Carey and June Price fudge up your brain and send it spinning across the room in a colorful smear of whodunnit confusion. Your ears will be all hopped up and out of joint via serious loop damage, smart-ass edits and pulverizing radio talk-show gibberings, advertisements (fungal infections, anyone?), religious and political gonks, etc. Two tracks apiece from these maestros, concluding with “Half Life,” where Carey mixes a junky thirty-dollar Japanese synth drone with a Matt Krefting sampler duet performed to harass attendees at a shindig in Byron Coley’s barn. It will have you turning to the loony juice. Edition of 75
Guitarded
(Chocolate Monk - choc.596) CDR $8.00
This scruff really wants to put rock’n’roll in the ground. If you soak the ego in whisky long enough, it becomes a dissonant crank. Individually made collage covers, no two alike. Numbered edition of 50
Guitar Solos
(Chocolate Monk - choc.541) CDR $8.00
Michigan mangled guitar extemporizations from one half of slow-moving weirdos Creode. Empty the fridge of thoughts and fill the cauldron with shrugs and flutter. Hicks resists ball-dangling collision course tactics and instead deals in concentrated alien farts for the hushed and humbled. There are no words, just hunched-shoulder meditation. Toenail gaze. Feel the mind cigar bloom and the malfunction get greasy. Not a single Van Halen or Nace were hurt during the making of these recordings. Edition of 60
Twisted Nerve
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.403) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ferric bruxism by the lowlife behind Clam Bake (Chocolate Monk 2014) and one half of the mysterious Occult Hand. Don’t let the Hawaiian shirt fool you; this album leaves your integrity in a pool of jellied crumbs on the floor. Like a three-day chemical chew with no additional hydration. Let the Prince of Dorkness help get your ass on that dissecting table, baby. Numbered edition of 50.
Clam Bake
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.289) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Throughout Holmes’s multi-tiered assemblage of showtune tape-loops, crushed signals thrash around in the background, tangled in a pasty murk of decaying black saliva and corrupted magnetism, while the violently cornball nature of the source material (Rogers and Hammerstein’s vision of pre-bohemian utopia Carousel) gets the scrambled semaphore treatment up front. Fragments of orchestral schmaltz, melodramatic vocalizations, and snippets of dialogue with anachronistic cadences are the building blocks of this deranged spazolopolis. If your idea of heavenly reward is Flee Past’s Ape Elf, Color Him Coma, Acnode One, or I Love You, Please Love Me Too, you’ll find Clam Bake drool-inducing. Edition of 40.
Megabus To Clubland
(Chocolate Monk - choc.505) Cassette $7.50
Daz Adcock and Luke Poot (with the occasional guest appearance from Ken): trapped in the flat, sometimes feeling fucking terrible, often being successfully daft, permanently kicked out of society for riding a carpet. Numbered edition of 60
If You Can Hear This You’re Too Close
(Chocolate Monk - choc.531) CDR $8.00
Hey, poser, forget the much-vaunted cardiovascular workout and let masterful triumvirs Sindre Bjerga, Max Nordile, and Theo Gowans ratify your brain and ears with their beyond-crunked cut-up music. A heavy session of scrambled listening awaits if you are ripe for said ratification. Breathe deeply. Says Bjerga, “The tracks are packed dense with cut-ups and synth-boggle and shredded microphonie — split open wide with slowed-down stories from the subterranean ditches dripping icicles, mad locusts swarming.” Edition of 60
Mona Cost Returns To Canton
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.402) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Continuing the fine family tradition of euphoric ear shred, Miss Howland gives Brother Skin Graft a run for his bitcoins with a heavy dose of hot gruel, guaranteed to singe the inner lughole hairs. The four tracks were recorded live in the practice space while Howland was working on her novel Don’t Fear the Night Duende, much of which takes place in Canton, Ohio, where she grew up. The listener is encouraged to find his or her own inner Monument Park and get woke. Artwork by Karen Constance. Numbered edition of 60.
Popsicles, Icicles, Baseball And Fancy Clothes
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC260) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Having emerged a smiling (somehow chubby) skeleton from the hot bubbly tar bath of the endless blooper, with an invisible wince he flips bittersweetly through old disintegrating photo albums, trying to laugh, but sneezing instead, just a bit before sprouting himself a wicked flaccid lilac in the nethers.
ID M THEFT ABLE / WAX MAGNETIC
Wax Magnetic / ID M Theft Able
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.327) split CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The Newcastle duo gets fruity with turntable, devices, dictaphone and mouth, while the mung master of Portland, Maine, stuffs the ears with imaginary dough and pulls it off using hunks of metal, a pastry blender, gob and his ample frame. The whole ruckus is guaranteed to put some pepper in your pipe. Cover art by Karen Constance. Edition of 60
Pterodactyl B&B
(Chocolate Monk - choc.514) CDR $8.00
Do you remember Colonel Dai from Graveyard Graveyard? Suspend your tears — the creep took cannibal odds shouting Suzi with twenty on to win, so what’s all this nonsense about? Friendly coffins. Love voltage. Death fictions. Familiar alligators. The Pterodactyl. The bed and breakfast. A lot of words. Words repeated. Repeated words. Worms worms worms. It goes on and on and on and on and on forever but it’s over in thirty minutes. Edition of 60
Trans Fat
(Chocolate Monk) Used CDR $11.00 (Out-of-stock)
Great, mulched “new age” synth bliss from 2008 by a Black Egg goon and one of the gonks from Astronaut. Feel Taylor Richardson and Dan Lopatin’s cloud envelope your head as their creeper moments of giallo / porn keys blossom into a full-card wrestling match with a 6000-armed guitar-cable sea creature. your car tires vibrate right off the pavement.
INSECT FACTORY / HOWARD STELZER
Title One
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.359) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Massachusetts tape crud maestro gets into a heady hoo-ha with processed guitar gonk Jeff Barsky. Together they excrete over 40 minutes of slow-moving electric trickle for your tickle spot. This foggy acid test hints at something unsavory under the floorboards. Those in need of a head filter look no further. Numbered edition of 60
Nature
(Chocolate Monk - choc.594) CDR $8.00
Guitar and tape maestro Jeff Barsky wants you to talk to the trees. Talk to yourself when you’re around the trees. Let the sun devour you and bake your skin. Lie under the stars and let the constellations cool you down. Know that you belong to them. Perceive that the grass is even greener at night. Let the impossible light touch your internal organs. Peel off your old skin. And breathe. Again, a little slower. Surrender to everything. A few years in the making, Nature is beautiful meditative throb of Frippy guitar and cassette scuttle that blossoms and stays ripe. Howard Stelzer contributes his ferric finery to a couple of tracks for added whumpf. Numbered edition of 50
Pace-Delve
(Chocolate Monk - choc.599) CDR $8.00
A frenetic collage of domestic recordings, crumbling tapes and cheap electronics that smudge together quite a few sonic ideas with which Paul Merger has been playing for the past few months. Cack-handed minimalism, amateur improvisation, barely passable sound art. Some of these things have been ripening for a while. Others are new flowerings. Somewhere between points of departure and dead end streets. Edition of 60
Pterodactyl Graveyard
(Chocolate Monk - choc.540) CDR $8.00
Dai Coelacanth Ida Coelacanth Ida Koelacanth Ida K agitation confusion paranoia wigs worms the bunker the B&B the Graveyard. The Pterodactyl. The Pterodactyl trilogy. The final part of the Pterodactyl trilogy. Over fifty minutes of shouting whispering mumbling jumbled up sounds and incessant banging. Bovril smeared on an aching skull can evaporate and cause oily plumes in shafts of light. No prisoners taken or required. A small pie hug given. Make lard not war. Edition of 60
Vaporous Clamor
(Chocolate Monk - choc.528) CDR $8.00
Cody Brant (objects, feedback, tapes, and voice) and Ian Mckenzie (synthesizers) know you never asked to be born. They have just the right soundtrack for your last hurtle toward the finishing line. Let’s see what Angela Sawyer has to say: “The sound of the electric other has been here for 65 years, and while it changes a little depending on which technology is cheap, or whether or not you’re American, it never progresses per se. And I don’t think it should. Because we’re all trapped. Round tones hang like a heat, and then are slowly punctuated by the ugly gallop of some somethings plugged back into themselves. Give yourself over to this sound, and you can intuit the heartbeat of a Boston Dynamics robot — a mechanical cop that will keep coming until everybody that isn’t rich is eradicated from existence. There is no foreground on this record, no depth. Sometimes the electronics are juicy, and sometimes flat. Sometimes a snorg has a fuzzy edge, and sometimes it’s metallic. But be certain, you’re always inside the robot and the robot can’t feel. It has no head to feel with. It can only do backflips and open doors while it endlessly patrols. You know it’s looking for you.” Edition of 60
The Tattooed Date of the Earthquake Across the Abdomen
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Crozier Lathrop at the controls: “Do you remember the first gasp of air you ever sucked down, abjectly sensing that things outside you can go inside you, as you crawled out from inside into the outside unknown: still-born at the still-lodge reflecting still-waters, perpetually distilling your daily boils, bils, dungs, romans, and countryfolk throughout the last half of adolescence, more-or-less mute, and then those who didn’t already live there all migrated down river to a Kentucky city-town and blurred into the salon-saloon weekly-gatherings held in foreign-tongues, obliterating toward no-known-object, only, for those who survived, to wake up decades later to a set of Pappy Van Winkle-wrinkles, and a good-enough smile? The two general rules for Kark— and what distinguishes Kark from their sibling-limb Sapat—are that there are no amps and no guitars allowed. The 19 tracks and 79 minutes of sound on this album were recorded over a 21-year period and co-created between 47 people in Louisville, Kentucky. Membership overlaps with too many bands to list here, but some highlights include The Cherry Blossoms, The Magik Markers and Ron Pate, big band leader of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s 1970’s Dada-heavies Rev. Fred Lane. Arkestrial Moondogs soak Kenny G’s jazz-concrète saxophone reeds in a Xenakis-Joujouka urinal cake. Secret agreements between past and present selves flash-form into a joyful body of outsider music.” Edition of 60
Temple
(Chocolate Monk - choc.535) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
After a much needed drop off the radar when she got with a UFO cult and huffed it up to preserve her mind from the outer-mush and swerve of the sanitorium, Keffer reemerges with a gentle, soothing throb of spew-age music. Recorded deep in Toad Holler, Chesterhill, Ohio. Edition of 60
FIRAS KHNAISSER / ALI ROBERTSON
Midlife Pandemics
(Chocolate Monk - choc.495) CDR $6.75
As worrying times might be leading to welts of mind and soul, Edinburgh based Khnaisser & Robertson invite you to rest your eyes and dream. Presenting two audio flashcards of meager movements and top-drawer wee letter improvisations. Dullards might call it non-music, but the smart money is on “tunes for goons.” According to the duo’s official statement, “Firas puts nae garlic in his hummus and it turns out that’s great. It’s buttery like the sort that you’d spread on yr paws to show you the way hame fae yrs to theirs to the park to the loch to the woods, for a pish, to the dirt, build a ganghut and back to yrs fr yr daily bread with a smile. And it was all just round the corner waiting for ye all this time! Ali is ready to eat.”
Much Like Yourself
(Chocolate Monk - choc.526) Cassette $8.00
At one of the last Crazy Doberman shows before the dreaded Covid jaws clamped down, a twitchy gent sporting a fine skullet and rocking a Heart Of The Congos t-shirt approached the ensemble — nothing unusual there — and talked excitedly about his “plastic & mystic art,” and how through the power of the voice he could “prove that social graces are but a side dish of deceit.” The players got edgy as Mr. Quick Talk rummaged in his bag. A tape was gifted and then off he went into the night. As soon as they jammed the tape, they knew where its natural home was and kindly proceeded to post it on to Wino Lodge. Here you’ll find the sound of Kiekes letting it all go, speaking in tongues, mumbling, singing, maybe even losing his mind. Multi-layered voice and tape crud scurry back and forth, looping and lopping, garbling and gurning. The only credits on the tape read “voice, dictaphone, microphones, cassettes, tape loops, voice memos, 4-track, moisturizer, mixer.” Hard to tell if this is the work of a student of sound poetry and text sound composition, or just a loner with a vision. Either way he is speaking our language and it is life-affirming stuff. C24. Edition of 50
Yume No Kippuuri No KMR
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.265) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The fourth album of right-on failings from everyone’s favorite acid-enka freak-out band delivers more broken avant-garde blues / garage rock. Edition of 100.
MARIJA KOVAČEVIĆ / RORO PERROT
Push Broken Duet
(Chocolate Monk - choc.598) CDR $8.00
A duo birthed by chance at one of Perrot’s Broken Impro soirées at Le Chair de Poule in Paris quickly entered the PUSH studio to capture their broken music for broken times. “Crafted from the fervid echoes of broken violins and the crude energy of improvised guitar,” explains the very self-assured Capucine Bonenfrant, “this album is a unique testament to the compelling beauty that resides in unexpected corners of composition. New life into forgotten fragments, using the cracked, splintered, and cast-aside that promises the unfamiliar yet resonates with a primordial musical instinct we all carry. Both players splayed out on the concrete floor teasing out their spontaneous sound, showing us that music can bloom in the most unsuspected environments.” Edition of 60
Krabas Musique de Ultrá
(Chocolate Monk - choc.475) CDR $7.00
Odie ji Ghast and Thomas Tyler use dictaphones, voice, guitar, mountain dulcimer, bells, electronics, tapes, miscellaneous objects and baby to tear a sizeable chunk out of your clue hole. “Pre-language hoffs and quacks spin out of control,” chimes in our friend Joe Posset. “Instruments (whatever they are) become worried with hectic rubbings and coated in a sort of headache-y varnish…. There’s a canny intertwining going on somehow. Voices whittle like electric kettles, rubber birds sing to high heaven while the neighbors clank about looking for the good frying pan. Occasional electronics mean a finger is jammed deeper into your sense-lobe and the grey matter stirred like a cocktail. Behold! Mitten-enrobed hands rustle various stringed contraptions. Later I dream of Django, Paris in the 1930’s with pelican-throated hoofers warbling to the wee small hours.” Edition of 60
Gaze Into The Drain
(Chocolate Monk - choc.441) CDR $6.25
Lock up your grandparents. Cody Brant and Jonnie Prey are on the prowl. Two of the Monk family’s scruffiest, most colorful siblings deliver more fun than a knees-up at the crack shack. Numbered edition of 60
Cup Queen
(Chocolate Monk - choc.558) CDR $8.00
“The energy of the Queen is situated between the 4 (security) and 5 (appeal of an ideal). She rests upon something that has been established, all the while knowing a new point of view exists. She is a pragmatic and active figure who knows her symbol well. She can become excessive, submerged by her element. Sea, shower, rain water hit the edges of their boundary spaces — shore, bath, polythene roof — and LDSN speaks variously on the subject of the water element, receptivity, fluidity and time, care and recovery. These are spare, playful compositions with vocal loops, field recordings, wind, strings, bells, birdsong, breath, claps, slaps, percussion and a mesmerizing quote from Ursula le Guin: ‘Neither grief nor pride had so much truth in them as did joy.’ ” Edition of 60
In Each Act Processing Grief and Longing
(Chocolate Monk - choc.469) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
These transmissions from the weird and wet Upper Calder Valley follow on from releases by Roy Claire Potter, The Singing Isle, and Embla Quickbeam). Here Todmorden-based poet, writer, teacher, barkeep, dogsbody, collector of dreams, occasional performing artist presents lo-fi spoken word pieces peppered with the sound of home and countryside. Use words to get your weary arse out the ditch, pal. Numbered edition of 40
Legend Trip
(Chocolate Monk - choc.506) CDR $7.50
These two, illicit camping on Mt St. Helens, Greek ferry discotheques, do you know where your CD player is? the Acropolis ’til dawn, free float boat in the ragged islands with call from Lax, alien lights coming from Texada, the reward is in the adventure, do you really want an explanation? Theo Angell (Hall of Fame, JOMF) and Joshua Stevenson (Staked Plain, Von Bingen, Magneticring, and JOMF) recognize that the welt on your forehead used to see. Worry not, they have the sonic third eye drops to get you blinking again. Edition of 60
TOBY LLOYD / POSSET / YOL
Basement Tapes
(Chocolate Monk - choc.428) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Using Toby Lloyd’s art project Between Eating And Sleeping as a starting point, Yol (bottled rust), Joe Murray (tape gasbag), and Mr. Lloyd himself (energy positive) tear new holes in the Dictaphone / metallic junk / throat-war scene. Recorded live at Bradford’s Fuse and Basement Arts Project in Leeds, three heads nod in total concrete hardcore improv mode. Switches are slipped as eyes roll back in heads. Numbered edition of 60
The Poacher
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.304) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Delights from the hutongs and parks of Beijing and from Vietnam — binaural field recordings, pick-up coil, contact mics, reel to reel, and piano crafted by Ben Morris (Chora, Akke Phallus Duo, Le Drapeau Noir) into something in the vein of Jacques Lejuene or Alvin Curran’s Natural History. Lewd worms be gone! Edition of 60
Completely Wastes Your Time
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.348) CDR $6.00
Luke Poot’s long-time-coming solo disk doesn’t disappoint. It lays out his brain bake in usual chaotic style; bedroom tape warble and vocal gurps, readings about Hull’s seedy underbelly, and no fidelity squelch are all scrubbed and buttered up for easy insertion into any No Audience Underground orifice of choice. Numbered edition of 40
Displacement Records: Escapism
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.319) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Collage of field recordings by this Brighton-based sound artist, in which mysterious artifacts, voices, and environments clash with sounds of transit, evoking the intensity and magic of foreign places, and to some extent, the frustration of geographical limitations. Originally commissioned as a sound installation as part of Diep~Haven Festival Transmanche d'Art Contemporain. Hand stamped card sleeve with insert. Edition of 50
Hospital Dubs From 128 Satanical Square
(Chocolate Monk) Used CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
More complex ear debris from these Minnesota heathens, going back to 2006. Out-in-the-woods weirdness with dirty hands put to all types of eerie jobs. Narcotic basement yammerin’, violin and guitar stutterin’, reed wailin’ and general tape damage.
l’Oeil Ecclatante
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.276) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Concrète sound-poetry that digs deep into the Henri Chopin tradition of mining raw and visceral sounds from the manipulation of voice. Herr Institut Fuer Feinmotorik uses records of his own vocals and manipulates them on turntable; his sources are based on the original Lettrist alphabet of voice-noises, coughs, sighs and hisses.
The Night Watch
(Chocolate Monk - choc.511) CDR $8.00
He of Core Of The Coalman, she of The Slowest Lift, and him of Inca Eyeball serve up blossoming drones to clear the fug. Edition of 60
A Squirrel Could Never Be A Disappointment To Me
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC263) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Scattered and haunted sounds, ethereal nonsense.
Squirrel II (The Sequel)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.434) CDR $8.00
Surrey’s favorite expat’s fourth solo disc for the label (not to mention his two collaborations with both halves of Blood Stereo) follows up his Chocolate Monk debut A Squirrel Could Never Be A Disappointment To Me. Most was recorded during a very brown period in his life when he was lived in northeast Ohio. So, computerized commentary on the Cuyahoga River is here, along with other weighty subjects that haunt this particular area of the great Satan. He also makes a primitive attempt, Presque-Rien-like at a recreation of the Fairlawn’s infamous Giant Eagle supermarket, which was forward-thinking enough to employ a bearded lady, and a woman with the exact same haircut as the lead singer of Journey. “If you have never visited The Rubber City,” warns the man himself, “Take this musical tour as a good reason to avoid it on your future itineraries.” Edition of 60
Seaslime
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.336) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
In-the-red guitar froth, vocal cut-ups, floundering electronic pulse, junk and clunk all come together to put barnacles on your brain, “an attempt,” says the man himself “to replicate the ebb, flow and convergence of sound / noise / information that the human receptor experiences when passing through the urban (specifically) grotto.” You bet it’s wild shit.
Rock And Roll
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.288) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
A concept album about the fundamental naffness of popular culture — the force that molds an androgynous threat to society into a fat comedian in a rhinestone jumpsuit waffling on about being a narcotics officer while high on Demerol. It’s about people in jean leggings saying “In this country jesus is our king.” It’s about “the yankee preppers — who want you to believe their poo doesn’t stink!” It’s about Steven Segal’s reply to a corrupt senator who dares to tell him to “take that to the bank.” It’s about the fantasy of rebellion in a culture that’s turned your means of expression into a Broadway play enjoyed heartily by unwitting fascists longing for the good old days. It’s about Carl Lewis refusing to accept he can’t sing. It’s about using the word “freedom” a lot. It’s about inappropriate use of pathetic sound effects. It’s all these things, and so much less.
Süra Wald
(Chocolate Monk - choc.565) CDR $9.00
Hey, free improv fan, fancy a forest stroll with France’s finest music brut weirdos? Come hear their yelps, grunts, gurgles and horns. Marvel at the clatters, electronics, small percussion and more. It is all very considered and strangely soothing. A deep listen, recorded in the Blackforest on April 17 and 18, 2010, at exactly the same two places (near Aufen and at the Schwarzenbachtalsperre lake) where Bennink and Brötzmann recorded their Schwarzwaldfahrt album in May 1977. In loving memory of the late, great Thierry Monnier. In half-size DVD case with 12-page color booklet. Edition of 75
Der Trompten Sauber
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.268) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Horrid gronk by these Tedium House faves, more twisted than a gut full of leeches and salt. Two long tracks by this quartet of French skull-benders slather fine confusion grease on pungent, garbled distortion, ill-advised sex music, electronic fumblings, red-hot plastic trombone poot. Numbing and enlightening.
Rising Sunset
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.386) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The master of Matsudo delivers his infamous demented electronics with a healthy wallop of wild yips, yurps and other mouth madness, coating your cochlea in joy grease, which is guaranteed to deflect all New Age hookum. It is time to let your skull glow. Numbered edition of 100
Crumpled Cloud Café
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.365) CDR $8.00
No worries of quadragenarian mellowing for this New-York-based artist and all-round “sound as a pound” gonk whose singular art is not for the muted of mind. Numbered edition of 60
Harmony Hollywood
(Chocolate Monk - choc.602) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
He of Climax Golden Twins, Idol Ko Si, Sublime Frequencies etc., comes good with a beautiful tape to soothe and confuse. “All sounds created [were] with or recorded through a 1960 Harmony Hollywood H39 arch top hollow body electric guitar in improvisational bursts throughout 2022,” explains Millis. “More than 20 years ago, I traded my first ever acoustic guitar to Patric Barber from the band Blowhole for this Harmony guitar and a copy of the Sun City Girls Grotto of Miracles LP. Not sure who got the better end of the deal. I love playing that Harmony. I even like listening to Grotto of Miracles. So I guess it was me.” Uncle Jim, on the other hand, “was groping for a little more rhumba and calypso from this goblin smirker with his Lomax-molded spin pipe-drool but I suppose a Truman Capote underwater soundtrack’ll have to do, although I’m not sure how many seahorses he can stuff in his Honduran fishbowl.” So now you know.
Original Home Magick
(Chocolate Monk - choc.499) CDR $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
A joyous sonic adventure, from the suburban anti-dream to the commercial drag of the modern shopping center. Food, furniture, fitness routines and pharmaceuticals — they’re all in this modern trip for sick people. Edition of 60
New Fun
(Chocolate Monk - choc.570) CDR $8.00
More Fun. More Fun they said. The Molar Crime is afoot. These two young dukes play the percussion and objects (Chlorine) and the Dictaphone and objects (Posset). That’s clear. That’s naturally obvious. But sweep away the soot, brush away the leaves, and there is something breathing down there. What’s breathing? What’s huffing in the Oxygene? It’s a system of tubes and levers, rubbery and sweating. The tubes pulse, they wriggle with a cumin-scented gas. If you lean in you can smell the dusty fumes. Grab a lever and pull. What’s released? A fine sound. A sound sizzling like a greasy grill. A sound as fresh as autumn mornings, ripe with both promise and decay. Old worlds hum into life, ferns unfold. The saturated color of a de-tuned TV blitz each eyeball making it fizz.... Horns swoop up and around into dry cotton-mouthed clouds. Sherbet crackles in the Kool Aid.... A piano is detuned via mouldy fingers. Gears lock and then miss-fire — the machine delicately malfunctions. It’s a Jazz thing if your Jazz is heard though soil-clogged earholes, worms crawling between your lips and teeth. That’s more fun, eh? Edition of 60
Voice Clippings
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.274) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The seventh volume in Chocolate Monk’s Well Spliced Breath series of “sound-tape collage, text-sound, radiophonic, horspiel-type muck.” More than sixty minutes of audio adventure that collages voices and other sounds, serving Montgomery’s aim of maximizing one’s “focus on the experience of listening” via “enduring impressions arising out of transitory moments.” Edition of 60.
Thrown For Two Loops
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.284) Cassette $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
While trying to squeeze magic out of a dying Bee Gees 8-track tape during Colour Out Of Space 2013, a minor disaster befell Gen Ken Montgomery: the tape jammed. Before allowing the carcass to be hauled from the premises, he tore out chunks of mangled tape and later gave them to Tom White and Sean Julian. Edition of 60.
Electricity Vs. Insects
(Chocolate Monk) Used Split 7-inch $8.00
After abandoning Moore’s suggested title Sunday Sport for this collaboration and opting instead for the more titillating, Vollmann-derived moniker, Nyoukis leads the trio through a score based on a simple grid-and-dice scam requiring Moore to record a randomly selected album from his collection for a set amount of time, to which more sherry-fueled voodoo would be applied upon arrival in the UK. On the flip-side, a more smoked-out octagonal score is used to replace as much content created by Prick Decay and Moore with sounds boosted from Glands Of External Secretion. Everyone involved agrees the record is a colossal pain-in-the-ass.
The Point Of The Equator
(Chocolate Monk - choc.458) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Musical eccentricity from the fine mind of him from Volcano The Bear, Wizards of Oi, Gospels Of Mars, who indirectly affirms that brain-damaged aliens disguised as avant garde percussionists rule the earth. This collection utilizes archive recordings, homemade instruments, a 21-year-old nephew (whatever the hell that’s supposed to be code for) and some stolen Chinese. Edition of 60
The Burning House
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.317) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Little Lord Corduroy unplugged! Believe it, purist, Morley has pulled a reverse Dylan and gone acoustic. “Warm, mid-range string scramble” is how Byron Coley describes it, and that dude never pulls it out of the rear quadrant. Edition of 60
Scintilla
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.408) CDR $8.00
Life-affirming sound wonk by Tim Alexander of LAFMS and Points Of Friction. Burbling and oozing broadcasts from the mind flap of a madman / maestro. Alexander tries “to find just the right perfume for each robot…, to allow the ghosts in the instruments to haunt the soundscape,” and “balance … intentional and unintentional elements.... The sounds are generated by the improvised playing of objects and mostly broken or prepared instruments, field recordings, and other sources…. Multi-track looping, digital tape effects, sampling and pedal effects add new sounds, and take us into their cobbly worlds.” With guest appearance by the late Damian Bisciglia. Numbered edition of 75
Haus Record
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.561) CDR $6.75
The proof is in the recordings, friends.... We are living in the Middle Ages. Forget about Get Back and hear two munt minds meeting in Koln for a domestic sit down / session of liquids, smoke and keyboard gronk. They attempt to stave off serfdom with Yamaha hoodoo and get into it with the Quantius vocal lo-jinx which, if cranked loud enough, is sure to suck the color from any nearby tie-dye shirts. Ten happy fingers, two throbbing brains. Edition of 60
Stone Shit Unicorn
(Chocolate Monk) Used CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Baltimore’s queen of tape hiss and swagger squats down and lays another fine egg of head-scratch. Lowbrow tape collage from 2008 showcase all her chops, from backyard jam band to psychic a capella damage, to ear / soul laceration, and further still — executed in her own street-level avant-thug style. Like the sacred mushroom, this will take you beyond mangled.
The Bicycle Eaters
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.282) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Post-concrète, psychedelic bad trip by free improv duo of Tom Nunn and Paul Winstanley, incorporating the former’s inventions: the percussive, hyper-chattering Skatchbox (made from combs and cardboard), and metal Resonance Plates played with his spooky-tone-generating Lukie Tubes (also made of cardboard).
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.350) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Heavy and considered collaboration between the six-string experimenter supreme from Body/Head, Ceylon Mange, etc., and master saxophone shrill-seeker (ex-Futshitsusha). One side recorded in the studio backed with a live brain bender from the Easthampton Flywheel. Screen printed card slipcase with rubber stamp front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 50.
An Evening with National Disgrace
(Chocolate Monk - choc.530) CDR $8.00
Paul Sturm famously observed in 1986 that “Times are bad” and here is proof, recorded live at Vis Club, San Francisco, California, July 3, 1986. Performing as a duo this night, instead of their usual quartet, the set is no less a caterwaul for the missing personnel. Hand-made sculptures produce their signature “waste sound.” Percussion is present and accounted for, courtesy of springs on metal, banging on scrap metal, rotating motor with objects whapping into metal. Industrial-sized shortening cans liberated from a restaurant and converted into amplified pseudo-guitars provide the strings. Vocals are by Fred Rinne, background vocals ably handled by melted records, harmonica, and an out-of-control audience. Edition of 60
Gone All To The Down
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.405) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
No-fi abstract crunk merchants Steve Clarke and Julian Bradley shuffled out of Birmingham in the 1990s before evaporating. Bradley resurfaced in Vibra Cathedral Orchestra etc., while Clarke teamed up with Sean Conway of Plastic Hooligans and UFO Antler Band to further confuse as The Gas Shepherds before disappearing again. He returns under The Negative kite moniker and serves up more than 40 minutes of solipsistic sound compost. Is he the only one here? Or is that you? Numbered edition of 75.
Hovering A Corner Into Carpet High Skies
(Chocolate Monk - choc.532) CDR $8.00
Birmingham’s mysterious The Negative Kite returns after a short three-year absence with 41minutes and 41 seconds of hard-to-pin-down lo-fidelity Xerox-like tape music. This thing wheezes, crackles and confuses. Bass rumbles and skittering cassettes float alongside distant resonating who-knows-what while unknown animal-ish sounds burble up into earshot. Feels like you’re floating over a monochromatic landscape. Astral projection music for all you ferric oxide animists. Edition of 60
Gukuruguh
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.362) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Vocal gurpings performed at the Nefertiti Jazz Club as part of the Gothenburg Art Sounds festival, later put through the wringer by Ralf Wehowsky. The alchemical sound transformer processes, cuts up, sprinkles liberally with electronics and other sounds, and adds healthy dollops of noise and silence. Numbered edition of 69
Life Is But A Smear
(Chocolate Monk - choc.431) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Part of this recording started life as the opening for Fae Ma Bit Tae Ur Bit’s year-end Festering Season episode on Resonance Extra. During the ensuing Dionysian haze the Scots gurp realized it was the start of a companion piece for his I Found A Photocopy Of A Dream On The Street & It Sent Me To Sleep cassette. A necessary bleak December / January sound collage purge (with some regurgitation) which may help the listener cast off his or her rank and rotten ruminations, originally titled Are The Voices In Your Head Weeping Or Singing?, it should be listened to as slumber is attempted. Featuring cameos from Crank Sturgeon, Ezio Piermattei, Ludo Mich, This is Yvonne Lovejoy, The Plastic Containers Of Nothing, Joe Possett, Karen Constance, Elkka, Grant Smith, Tina Kerkels, Jonnie Prey, Angela Sawyer and others. No Sting covers. Hand-stamped cardboard cover with insert. Numbered edition of 60
The Failing Chase
(Chocolate Monk - choc.446) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Further stumblings in the direction of dreams / mind gout. Life is a failing chase and we are all living on the frontline, but music is everywhere and if you just take a minute to pinch your nose, blow real hard, and pop your ears, you can get anchored to your surroundings and hear it appear within the smear. Nyoukis grew up among a communication of barks and angry gestures so pardon the lad, willya? Features contributions from Mayuko Fujino, Seymour Glass, Natalia Beylis, and Catherine Plenevaux. Numbered edition of 60
The Flood Wants Silence Of Tongue
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.290) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Tape mulch cassette mess recorded inside Wino Lodge one Thursday afternoon in April. Edition of 26.
Perpetual Ear Brew
(Chocolate Monk - choc.536) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Almost 60 minutes of lo-fidelity tape warble and crug. “A box of cracked tapes are easy to shape” uses some equally limited tape releases as source material, while “A bowl full of crystal cabbage” contains recent recordings with added mystery twang. Numbered edition of 30
An Unripe Preoccupation With Nonagenarian Moroseness
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.305) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Recordings from their duo show at the Train Of Thought Emporium in the wilds of Worthing, with additional cuts, splices, sonic burps, and wheeze. Almost half an hour of ferric tomfoolery that gently slips in and out of focus. Magnets at the ready. Edition of 50
Scunnered At Breakfast
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.299) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
All the hot audio gorlins of an imaginary wintertime breakfast, cooked up with nowt but accordion, tapes and voice. Guest orators include Hitomi Arimoto, Marco Cazzella, Seymour Glass, Paul Kirk, Ludo Mich, Angela Sawyer, Norman Shaw and Erkki Sinnemaki. With four text inserts. Edition of 50.
I Am Falling Down
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.547) split CDR $8.00
Recorded in his infamous Kamo Road wack shack way down in Whangarei, Mykl Veet presents 35 minutes of wheezing computer music and hyperactive whir. 0s and 1s fall in dollops of noise, twitching. Meanwhile, the Moistest Scotsman gives you a 25-minute tape loop meditation recorded at 6am inside Wino Lodge one dreich April morning. Sit still and feel yourself slowly drifting upwards or sideways. More hiss than you can shake a snake at, pentecost. Numbered edition of 50
Nothing To See, Hear
(Chocolate Monk - choc.470) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Full-on loop damage recorded direct to the Wino Lodge hard-drive one afternoon in January. The World’s Toughest Milkman was armed with tape players for the blind, Boss DD20, and a small stack of random tapes nabbed from the cluttered and sagging shelves. Numbered edition of 50.
Mind Yon Time?
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.343) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
First-person memories, reminiscences, accounts, and experiences of the gifts bestowed by narcotics upon users. The orators are Angela Sawyer, Fraser Burnett, Tom Timpson, Gnarlos, Louise Donoghue, Irene Siragusa, Mayuko Fujino, Aonghus McEvoy, Catherine Plenevaux, I’D M Thfftable, Andy Bolus, Stuart Cartland, Maureen Bourne, Simon Morris, Helen McBride, Silvia Kastel, Ben Jones, Bod Teare, Yoni Silver, Dave Miko, Malcy Duff and Bryan Lewis Saunders. Edition of 60
Bab
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.332) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ben Jones (of Jazzfinger, Moon, etc.) is joined by the mysterious Dick Bass for further gem unearthings from the North East England “no audience” underground. As the crud seed that would later blossom into Moon, where Jones and Bass are joined by various other creative riff-raff layabouts, the Ob sound is made with Dictaphone, saz, mandolin, cymbal, keyboard and tape, all channeled through a karaoke machine. Super quiet front-room action, with mid-track cuts caused by in-room obstacle recovery and stereo effects from room flailing. Proper tit-to-mouth brain damage for budding perception blenders. Edition of 50.
Phantom Cupboard
(Chocolate Monk - choc.524) CDR $8.00
“Phantom Cupboard occupies a homemade spaceship the components of which are outmoded appliances that need regular adjustments and deglitching,” explains Rick Potts. “After docking onto a decommissioned communications satellite, the newly plundered obsolete hardware is cobbled into a charity store kitchen cabinet. Lost voices find a home in this makeshift rocket. Calm chaos ensues as the machines talk among themselves. Outside, beyond the repurposed microwave oven door, the vastly jaded cosmos has a bad dream.” Edition of 60
Twilight Immunity
(Chocolate Monk - choc.447) CDR $6.25
Shane McDonell’s first solo ride for the label is two 31-minute collages in traditional sound diary style. Sounds of voice, viola, feedback, drums, drum stick, bowed cymbal recorded through an old karaoke machine combined with radio, rental car radio feedback, river sounds, contact mic’d Broadway Bridge, keyboard/synth, voice sounds, drunken wedding orators and general party chit chat. Slickles captured all this on his trusty handheld tape machine and then, for your pleasure, cut stuff into loops, collaged it, fed some of it into his psychoacoustic computer to provide a sense of specific sound direction and panning. A stud. A gent. Numbered edition of 60
DOMESTIC recordings
(Chocolate Monk - choc.522) CDR $7.00
Another snapshot of lockdown life on the Brexit Isles — “2020 summer full of domesticity that’s soaked in time,” says Odie ji Ghast aka Greta Buitkute (Labas Krabas, Historically Fucked, etc.), “slow moving back and forth between arising direction and reflections on past crumbles.” Multi-tracked vocals (both gibber and song) get mixed in with dictaphone, home appliances, keyboards and “loud thoughts.” An intimate insight into the clutter revolution. Edition of 60
Angy Is You
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.321) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Odie ji Ghast (voice) and THF Drenching (dictaphones, whistles) are caught in the grid of a decelerated alarm bent down into human hearing. They carry out an hallucinatory conversation in a cloud, in a smoke. And you be like — what is that for? Misty as it is, cut through the chatter into ramparts of permeable car-chase; the sound is an inch from your eye, primary-colored and primary-processed in blocks of dancing nodes. They are on your eyeball. Fact is, now you can’t get them off. Edition of 50
Chocolate Radio Band (The Golden Sceptre)
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.550) CDR $8.00
Further evidence of Olive’s full skill for mishandling sound. He recorded hours of mono radio signals in a hovel in Kobe, Japan, through a simple chain of EQ, spring reverb, and preamp, which he then chopped, combined, layered, arranged, scrambled, juxtaposed, and quilted to just the right degree for brain tapenade. Warm and cozy!
Pure Genius
(Chocolate Monk - choc.491) Cassette $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
If lockdown has you mulling impending neo-feudalism, then spare a thought for poor William The Bearded, stuck on the left coast surrounded by braying tech bros, coming to terms with the unavoidable truth that we plebes will survive only to serve the machines. Recorded in August 2020 in San Francisco using his own Cracked app. Very few copies in stock, so prepare to be disappointed (if that’s not stating the obvious). Edition of 75
Live At Constellation
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.385) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Great live set from February 2017. Full-on electric guitar crack-pottery that blooms up into a glorious brain scrub, which will have you either shitting in your hat or clambering for the drool bucket. Come commune with a higher power. Swaddling optional. Numbered edition of 75
Daddy’s Got A Spice Rack
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.291) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Raw, wild and beautiful guitar grunk previously released on cassette in 2014, with several pieces of text-based vocal gibber interspersed. Edition of 60.
Boiling A Frog
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.281) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
A mellow beginning becomes a torrent of head-scrambling noise skronk and scrape, delivered with the usual love and tenderness by this one-time Noggin and King Frog.
OUTRÉCHESTRA / BRYAN LEWIS SAUNDERS
Sewing Party
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.383) CDR $8.00
“Three nights in a row I had dreams about parties and/or sewing,” explains Bryan Lewis Saunders. “Also, the batteries in my recorder were dying and I did not know. So when I went to transcribe the recordings I threw the batteries away. But then after hearing the content (the dreams) I thought this would be perfect in subject and tone for Princess Haultaine III! So then I asked him if he wanted to work with me on these parties. When he said yes, I thought, shoot, I should get those mostly dead batteries out of the trash and use them to their fullest potential because I thought that might complement the tone and noisy party style of the great duo Outréchestra. So then I milked those batteries for every electron in them. Hundreds of false starts trying to capture every word of the dreams in the state of death. It was a challenging task. And then Princess Haultaine III took those recordings and stitched them together with the music.” Numbered edition of 60
In Ceres A Pig With Human Hands And Feet Was Born
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC253) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Rabid clusters of sound from the UK’s unhinged underground courtesy of Ashley devotees Jon Marshall (The Hunter Gracchus) and Joe Murray (Posset). Dictaphone work that would give Gwilly Edmondez the horn, harmonica reeds, harmonium, sheng, particularly out-to-lunch drones and wails, vocals that veer from mussel-mouthed to a more caffeine-infused Euro-academic vibe to private language gurgle. Guest appearance by Stephen Chase on erhu.
Gran Trotto
(Chocolate Monk - choc.424) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Beautiful meandering collage piece from Italian sound artist using tapes, field recordings, voice, harmonica, organ, bells, objects, piano, etc., to weave a weird auditory place full of head scratch, voices, chimes, sing song and distant sounds, almost like a murder mystery that replays scenes from different perspectives. Numbered edition of 60
Turismo Dentale
(Chocolate Monk - choc.284) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Great sound collage from Pescara, Italy. The march of a mechanical army, far-off violin quiver, street accordion roly poly, pause button tom foolery, clanking and chiming, frantic gibbering, organ tones, trumpet bloot, guest vocals by the cover stars (Piermattei’s mother and grandmother), and a ton more.
Mud Hen, Prick And Green Belt
(Chocolate Monk - choc.442) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
As far as unsolicited demos go, this head healer has to be near the top of the Wino Lodge pile, arriving as it did in a pastel purple envelope that reeked of Old Spice with nowt but a note reading “Take Back Your Mind!” hand-scrawled in green ink, of course. It goes without saying that the mysterious Mr. Duke Pinch performing Engelbert Humperdinck songs on zither — with such somnolent mellowness that it makes Korla Pandit seem like an utter spaz in comparison — is another fine entry in Chocolate Monk’s Brain Salve canon. So don’t tell anyone. Numbered edition of 60
How Do We Come Out A Cosmetic Front And Go Where
(Chocolate Monk - choc.488) CDR $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Twenty-seven years after setting foot upon the spoiled carpets of the original Chocolate Monk HQ in Norfolk Square, Mr Julian Bradley beams in somnolent warmth. Many little repeating sections in twirl. In twirl. “What gives with this marvel?” demands the CEO. “Recorded over two afternoons in May,” comes the reply, “Hit by a desire to make weedy, thin songs. Bass and fogged rumble: OUT. Amp buzz and whiney riffs: IN. For now, anyway.” Feel the wheeze of minimal / maximal hypnoid. Edition of 60
Plastic Hooligans
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.344) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Former stumble-bum of The Gas Shepherds and last heard as the navigational honcho of The UFO Antler Band, Sean Conway compiled this sweet grot at home in Birmingham. The opening track “January Is Telepathic” burbles like lo-fi Basil Kirchin with a terrible eye twitch. “Môr-Forwyn” jaunts down a Moroccan alleyway and emerges into “Where Are You,” a strange street scene augmented by a hypnotic tape loop and acid burble. The closing track “Bronze” conjures up the spirit of Chrome with all the rock’n’roll extracted and replaced with aquatic jelly. Beautiful, desolate brain ooze. Edition of 54
Plastic Hooligans
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.389) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Sean Conway emerges once more from his dank Brum environs to follow up last year’s untitled debut with another untitled beauty of hiss and warble. Like some kind of mythical hash peasant, he cooks up weird sounds that are both musical and abstract, all recorded straight to his dying three track tape recorder. A gentle throbbing thing of dreamlike confusion. Highly recommended for all you garbage-eaters out there. Get smart, get saved! Numbered edition of 60
Lay-by Fantasy
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette $10.50
More solo weirdness from Sean Conway (formerly of UFO Antler Band and Gas Shepherds), here serving up three tracks of burbling sounds to ease the quease. Zonked and soothing “in the pink” lo-fi analog electronics all laid down direct to tape which the man himself says is “for lay-bys and fetish gatherings and telepathic others.” So you can modulate your mung mind any which way. Numbered edition of 60
Sprinkle Of Blunder
(Chocolate Monk - choc.600) CD $14.00
“Even on occasions absent slide dissolves and the multiple super-8 projections that ornament their live shows, Points of Friction have remained an audio-visual group since their inception. Listen to Sprinkle of Blunder in complete darkness, and notice if your sponge doesn’t require a good firm squeeze by the end. Is anyone else seeing the mad flashes of painted film, hand-scratched emulsions, layers of transparent material, and magnified vegetation? Good, so we agree, then. The late 2011 session that gives us this album progressed from dark energy to its current state on the material plane much as others before it: Joseph Hammer, Mitchell Brown, Tim Alexander and Damian Bisciglia gathered informally in remote locations where acoustical situations were presumed to exist, waiting and ever-welcoming to seekers and freaks, like a tunnel or an abandoned bakery once owned by a crab-faced character actor from the 1940s. They did a bit of recording together, saved the results to their respective devices, and then played them at various moments during the recording session proper — in this case at Brown’s Los Angeles studio. Around these and other field recordings each had made on his own, Sprinkle of Blunder pulsates at every intersection of Brown’s synth, Hammer’s tape loops, and the hoarder’s paradise of objects, prepared instruments, toys, hot-wired and damaged goods that Alexander and Bisciglia considered their axes. But let’s not forget that the seamlessness of their entangled montages makes accounting for precisely what is being done by whom at any given moment superfluous. Curiosity might not kill the cat but it’s not going to clean its puke off the carpet, either. However we diagnose the root cause of our cognitive maladies, we know they need to be cured with a nuance-rich antidote free of side effects. Points of Friction’s model of the subconscious flows and jars with sublime finesse. It has a life-force all its own, flickering back and forth between the primal states identified in Goethe’s Theory of Gunk (gooey, gaseous and gelatinous) — one big thing ready to be absorbed. But, fair enough, knowing the constituent parts of what’s going into our bodies is an overriding concern of the times. How about this: metal sculptures, bristles, vocalizations, banjo, harmonica, effects processing, sampling, loops, zither, rubber trumpet, badge reel with clock spring, Speak’n’Math, spin whistle, synthesizers, keyboards, drums, field recordings, loops, tape loops, and tape loop manipulation. Mmmmmm, information…. so enlightening. At 12 tracks in 57 minutes, it’s more of a holistic, live-in-the-studio recording than a pharmaceutical confection (though just as sinfully rich as your Aunt Twiggy’s figgy pudding). As with any 600-piece jigsaw puzzle, once assembled in the correct combination, the mosaic is complete. Bisciglia in particular was certain right away that these recordings were suitable for release, and as such it has been in the works for a decade since his passing. It arrives not without a bit of after-the-fact touch up, minor editing, crafting, tailoring — sure. Listening to the master recordings of the jams, Alexander, Brown, and Jay Morales pinpointed certain themes or modalities, not all of which moved in a straight line. They didn’t hesitate to relocate bits and pieces that made sense elsewhere as a transition between two parts of a completely different track. Ultimately it’s the overall mood that connects everything, accounts for the continuity and internal logic, keeps it all related.” Order this item from from Tedium House and receive a complimentary copy of Bananafish #15, which includes an interview with Damian Bisciglia.
Monotony Of The Veil
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC258) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Velocipedic hoo-ha and freeform click’n’whirrr by this decade-long ever-changing collective of gonks whose sounds are contact-mic’d and amplified implements touching bicycles. They’re a quartet this time: Pat Maher (Glamorous Pat, DJ Yo Yo Dieting, Indignant Senility), Lala Rinera (Diamond Catalog), Derek Monypeny (Freak Of Araby Ensemble) and Cody Brant (Toning).
My Hungry Holes
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC262) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Intricate tales woven in lurid tape, recounted in swatches of multi-sonic flaws, a deeply resonant harmoniousness which answers the surfaces of second nature while guzzling minerals in the first. Melodic ornamentation squirreled into unforgiven cassettes, tonguing spatial magnetics, ribbony skirmish.
Scally Nike Leather Glove Smoke
(Chocolate Monk - choc.416) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.416) CDR $8.00
Claire Potter’s collaboration with Bridget Hayden Mother To No Swimming Laughing Child (Fort Evil Fruit 2015) was a corker. Always an amazing performer and reader, she reads unaccompanied here. Sure to get your thinking juices flowing. Numbered edition of 60
CDR contains one bonus track.
Advanced Auto Body
(Chocolate Monk - choc.534) Magazine $10.75 (Out-of-stock)
LAFMS legend cracks out the art supplies in this 40-page, full-color, perfect-bound pocket book depicting his hybrid semi-bionic personal mobility units. Although none are rejects, the plausibility of some models needs time to ripen. Then they will drive into the future without brakes. Inclues stickers. Edition of 75
Lillies (Of The Uncanny Valley)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.239) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Fruity gargoyles made of orphaned parts. A crazy quilt of misfires, misfits, dusty Chinese gangster soundtracks and wannabe disco hits that almost sound like music. Flights of fancy, airborne clowns, a fear of beans (featuring Dennis Duck’s drumming), turntable woozy, Appletalk gibberish, tributes to Nancarrow’s player pianos, whining dolls and air tank gongs.
Hands On (Voidtronica Chapter Two)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.607) CDR $8.00
This duo’s method requires that they meet and record without either one knowing what instruments the other will bring. The resulting free improvisation with no overdubs or mixing by experimental musician Claus Poulsen from Denmark and Italian improviser and noise performer Michele Scariot (aka Nodolby), dubbed Voidtronica, is the opposite of emptiness: as if driven by a sonic “horror vacui,” the two create the pulses of their tracks by accumulating debris from self-made cassette loops and needle jumping the grooves of prepared vinyl. Voices enter, sighs and whispers blabber through hastily set-up filters and effects. Sounds come from the room, others are feedback from the electronics themselves. It is the emptiness that once again manages to feel musical. The recording session was held in Copenhagen during a break of the SUPERNOISE 2023 festival, where both musicians participated with their personal projects. Edition of 60
Life On Bob-Lo Island
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.407) CDR $8.00
Your man inside Coaxial Arts in Los Angeles remains an outsider lurking in the dreams of discarded mannequins. This concept album, about an abandoned amusement park outside of Detroit, Michigan — with its wooden rollercoasters, funhouse, drunk clowns, buzzing taffy machines, identical twins on the boardwalk, poisoned water slides — which became a hobo squat, a decrepit kingdom where strange men lurked, a sort of island of the dammed, cloaks Detroit darkness in a clown’s shroud. Holes puncture a laughing reality as a mask of spinning dice reveals the corroded dream: children playing in yellow haze, black corn swaying to the machines, families disappearing into the night like Polaroids developing in reverse, dogs conspiring with the shadows, machine laugher trapped in the bog, a UFO made of straw slowly crashing into a black swamp, abandoned vacations vacated by lost men. Give one an offering and maybe he’ll tell you a story.
Custic Witch Conflictory And In The Pols
(Chocolate Monk - choc.471) CDR $6.00
Take a moment to force yourself to forget that this junk-fi epic by Dora Doll, Mykl Veet, and Dylan Nyoukis was created during a time when, and on a globe where, air, food, and water weren’t classified as luxury poisons and it was easy to win an argument about whether fascism was bad or not. It’s not gonna hurt anyone to wonder at the gurgle of a cassette tape trying to move forward underneath the weight of someone sitting on the deck, at the flat-topped frequency range, at distortion eclipsed by its ever-present understudy overmodulation, at fist-filled mouths mimicking the slow death of a water-logged shack by the railroad tracks where teenagers huff glue. But these are 25-year-old recordings, no escaping that, and this recently unearthed, unreleased snail-mail collaboration made in 1996 snorfles on the very edges of the shadow cast by the influence of charred psychedelic hypermetropia. Crud fidelity bedroom recordings made straight to cassette. The Blackburn-Whangarei Freundschaft. Oh, the beauty and the damage. Obsolete tools like guitars and piano writhe and grind inside tubes of acidic digestion, decimated on arrival, congenitally defective, esprit-deprived. Very few existential howls from the abyss, plenty of shattered squeals from a mic too close to an amp in the carport. Jacked flutter vistas. Muffled turntable surrender. Wires that shouldn’t be touching. A big ol’ blur of electronic mud-scrape. No one forgets their first. Edition of 75
Psanck
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.374) CDR $8.00
Kev Nickells, Chis Parfitt and Al Strachan got so goosed up on the combination of scritchy violin, growling cornet, pingy toys, electronics and sop sax that they yodeled in unison “let’s record.” At some time down the line they pieced together a thing full of beautiful, otherworldly imaginings, like a less processed Biota with that soft creeping Af Ursin vibe. Numbered edition of 60
II
(Chocolate Monk - choc.453) CDR $8.00
Were the second ChocoMo album by Kev Nickells (violin voice, objects), Chris Parfitt (flute, clarinet, percussion, electronics), and Al Strachan (cornet, electronics, field recordings, found sound) presented to you, me, and the spastic Mennonite as the soundtrack to a film about a sleep-deprived desert castaway struggling with mixed feelings about a residual tail, no one would blame either of us for asking if the rescue UFO at the end seemed realistic. Which is something, given how condemnation of the other is one of our era’s most versatile social currencies. Not to oversell it, but the trio’s ten tracks here are kind of astounding in the consistent economy of their journeys from disparate zones such as distressed whining, daxophonic yoib, synthetic dream-theory, tense tribal curlicues, pizzeria tragedy, and crepuscular harmonics. Without a forced or unnatural move anywhere, Psanck II slips unscathed between the ribbons of razor wire that separate blue chip avant garde chamber ensembles from the nonmusical and unwashed ineptitudes who jostle household objects for a living. Personal experience allows me to assure anyone who may wonder whether residence in the latter is as comfortable a hometown as one could ask for (it is); still, Psanck’s epistles from the outside world are more welcome than guilt-free cinnamon rolls. Edition of 60
Time Vaccine
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.400) CDR $7.00
Philadelphia reprobate Cody Brant joined by Tim Alexander (LAFMS, Points of Friction, Moth) for a real ear-greaser. The duo – both of them collagists and multimedia-ists by nature — share a near-telepathic bond when it comes to organizing textures and colors, shaping primal meeting grounds, discovering soundscapes together by taking turns painting in the elements, making horizontal gestures while the other works out vertical contrasting marks, creating an atmosphere while the other counteracts with a chilling arrhythmia. Numbered edition of 60.
Stones That Move And Grow
(Chocolate Monk - choc.459) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Further excursions into Rowan Forestier-Walker’s hidden sound world. Field recordings, VLF radio, foil, sand, crystal singing bowl, motors, copycat, Aeolian harp, wood stove, frequenting animals, frozen lake. Edition of 60
Seven Is In Rhinog Crown
(Chocolate Monk - choc.229) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Brighton-based audio-investigator sends chewed postcards from the eldritch heart of England,” Herr Mustache explains. “Melted snapshots of tea-breaks in post-diluvian seaside cafes, fading playgrounds ascending to heaven as the radiation levels rise, and village bells dissolving into pure light. Like Terry Riley’s Music For The Gift, were the gift a box full of eggshell and moss. Illogical, yes, but she has the tapes to prove it.” Silkscreened jacket. Numbered edition of 50.
Turkish Coffee and Twice Baked Potatoes
(Chocolate Monk - choc.583) CDR $8.00
These days there’s usually 1618 kilometres between Samaan Fieck and Mark Groves. The distance between the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales and Greater Melbourne can be covered in around 17 hours. However, you’ll want to break that up with an overnight stay in Sydney or Newcastle to avoid driver fatigue. A flight’s probably a better option, but the closest regional airport to the Northern Rivers is Ballina. It’s privately owned and had a major upgrade a year ago. The updated building only allows for one security screening lane and one body scanner through which everyone must pass. Insufficient infrastructure means that the security queue is diabolically long and slow. In light of all this, Samaan and Mark tend to favor file transfers and conversations over Zoom to make Red Wine and Sugar music. Turkish Coffee and Twice Baked Potatoes was made slowly using this approach between 2018 and 2023. Edition of 60
Unbalanced Contraptions
(Chocolate Monk - choc.575) CDR $8.00
The label sewn into the back of Norwich-based weirdo Michael Ridge’s shirt reads “Michael creates work incorporating elements of sound, video, electronics, sculpture, performance, collage. Key areas investigation include utilizing non-musical materials in sound and composition works, employing elements of chance, pieces with an auto destructive element or that degrades over a set duration, the metaphysical / self-referential, awkwardness in live performance and relishing cacophony. Compact audio cassettes / tape loops, phonographic records and microphones are commonly featured in his practice and used as the basis for sculptural / installation pieces.” Edition of 60
Misc Loops #1-#3
(Chocolate Monk - choc.595) CDR $8.00
The first three installments in this series of meditative loop exploration, previously released released between 2017 – 2018, collected onto a single disc. Each one utilizes homemade / wobbly / crusty tape loops that blend elements of field recordings with distorted and stretched spa / ambient music. All tracks were recorded in one take onto semi-functional and poorly maintained gear for that additional background noise, hiss, and distortion to bathe in during a drizzly late afternoon. Edition of 60
Cardboard Sane
(Chocolate Monk - choc.476) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Our beloved Cardboard Prince returns with corrugated heart worn firmly on sleeve. Deep takes from an outsider looking in, who “wanted to make an album that was more specific about really suicidal mental health from my experience with it in the past,” admits RRS. “I wanted to crack fewer jokes in the first half and be honest about how bad it can get, but I also wanted part of it to be about how much of a party it can be when u have survived hell and u keep it card x.” Edition of 50
The Opera
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.368) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Further insight into the subtle, misshapen mind of The Cardboard Prince, whose disorienting bedroom odor and outsider vision conjure up quivering flashes of the spirit, yummy fud funk, noise, thought and dance. Numbered edition of 60
Snack A Delica
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.399) CDR $7.00
A fine selection of mostly live actions that capture the magnetic power of The Cardboard Prince. He works hard so you can get down. Numbered edition of 60.
Tupperwave
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.338) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
The shuffling, self-appointed Cardboard Prince gets down in post-Brexit Britain. With no wish to antagonize the “no audience” underground, he wants to wrap his arms around them, purple pleather jacket unzipped for their delight and comfort. As he notes himself, he isn’t an outsider, he can stay indoors for days, mind and body deep in his own little universe. Come take a peek through the crack of his bedroom door, try not to splutter. Edition of 42
The Best of RRS 2005-2019
(Chocolate Monk - choc.463) CDR $8.00
Just in time for the festering season, the Cardboard Prince finally bows to the demands of his avid fans and struts out this total stocking thriller. No filler here, just all the hits from between 2005 -2019. Edition of 60
Selections From Bands 1985 - 2001
(Chocolate Monk - choc.508) Magazine + CDR $15.00
Painter, clothing-defiler, visionary of hilarious takes on the conventions of wretched pop culture and the metastasizing celebrity of public figures, Rinne is best known as the vocalist and lyricist for a gooey mound of Bay Area bands that have been spreading their indelible stains and demented approaches since the 1980s. His unmistakable tone-deaf warble is half overripe takedown, half sado-masochistic simian yelp. And he absolutely despises eucalyptus trees. At last, the Left Coast’s number-one Hagar huffer and outsider art wonker delivers an A5 booklet of posters and flyers of his numerous brain-shattering bands, plus a disc of tunes by National Disgrace, The Bringdownzz, The Framptons, The Oswald, The Sentimentals and The Patchkordzz. “We wound up in a dirty garage surrounded by shredded wood, paint cans, old records,” recalls the meat puppet of the hour. “Tortured by years of fad pop, all we could do was fight it off, banging on empty cans and screaming, vomiting all the pop music back into the aether. By sanding, grinding or melting old farty records we could gain a new truth from them. The old farts were always going to be supplanted by new farts but the struggle for sonic truth lives on.” Numbered edition of 75
Christ’s Vipers
(Chocolate Monk) Used CDR $4.00 (Out-of-stock)
A blackened drone-drenched world of slime and knives and fire, dense clouds of distorted howls, a thick cloak of fuzz and buzz. From 2006
ALI ROBERTSON / NICHOLA SCRUTTON
The Longest Forty Miles
(Chocolate Monk - choc.589) CDR $8.00
“The last train is at 11:30pm and I wouldnae recommend the night bus. It’ll be full of Lothian troglodytes, Cumbernauld carbuncles and folks what like their improv idiomatic. Best hop in our taxi. It willnae be cheap and, with two drivers pulling in opposite directions on the same wheel, you’ll be unsure which way is up, let alone which is East or West. Ensure you’re wearing your seat belt on this tour of the Scottish Central Belt as your escorts are predisposed to unleashing belters for strings, gobs, and kerfuffle, and you’ll get pure pelters if you dinnae subscribe to their version of the Highway Code.” Edition of 60
12 Chairs for Chu Chu
(Chocolate Monk - choc.542) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Twelve tunes of harmonically broad non-universal guitar cut-up’n’crete, guaranteed to create disillusionment in any lover of the guitar, music in general, acousmatic music, etc. Spoiler alert: fairy does not take tooth. Music, not-really music, self-stimulation (head banging, dancing), joint locks, irreparable loss, questionable grounding practices… it’s all here. Flicking off the ear-brain system and interrupting any continuum you like, Ruryk calls the plays, and he takes the blame for ignoring various stereo panning laws and the 3:1 mic placement rule. Guests include bBomit, Id M Theft Able, Toshiji Mikawa, Daniel Gregory, Brian Turner, Rob Michalchuk, Cody Brant, Giblet Gusset, Fleshtone Aura, Stephen Boyle, Territorial Gobbing, and Fray Bentos. Edition of 75
Hardship Like A Fortune
(Chocolate Monk - choc.421) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two of northern England’s finest purveyors of head scratch, Joe Murray and Sturat Arnot, get together for some real wild brut stylings. Do the avant hunch. “We’re outsiders here, unworthy uitlanders, carbuncles even,” they admit, “We’re intruders on, about, over and in this Novocastrian soil. One of us is, at least, perseverant; of three decades standing, a good chunk of anyone’s life, worthy of some sort of respect, perverse though it may seem, but the other is painfully unripe, fresh off the boat, all flapping gills and shivering and shriveling innards. Brazenly, we attempt to appease the local wigs by paying homage as best we can to their rituals, even as we fail to read the native semiotics: we drink ourselves the wrong red and, betweeded and sweating, bray loudly but unconvincingly these half-thought half-songs, misbegotten paeans to their heroic generations; we fall out, trip and fall out onto the moor and down, through the town to the Tyne, garbed suddenly, sullenly and awkwardly in unseemly black, where we desperately expose the ferrous ribbons of our tattered fake books to the corrosive, salty sweep of the northerlies and wail.” Numbered edition of 60
Free Music On The Clock
(Chocolate Monk - choc.567) CDR $8.00
Chocolate Monk describes Free Music On The Clock thus: “Mr. Malvern Brume pulls a few skivers at Cafe Oto. Liminal music for vacant minds,” and the only word here that makes sense to us is “at.” Salter steps in with a bit more detail: “Music recorded using bits laying around at the day job, on the clock, at the start of the summer break when there were spare moments. Recordings were then cut up and arranged at home, on the bed,” a description that infuriates Ecka Mordecai, who feels such a “cringe,” “shit,” and “rubbish” blurb is an affront to all concerned. “All those breathing sounds right up close, distorting into the mic... Muttering and complaining about stuff, it’s so intimate.” Mordecai notes that Salter’s soundscape, made “from the noise expressing what it’s like to go to work everyday and constantly be pulled away from the thing you want to be doing,” creates a tension that “is exciting and potent.” Is Free Music On The Clock straightforward and non-emotional? Hell, no. Mordecai says this album is “sick.” She is not opposed to his cello-playing, too. Edition of 60
Taxi For Brahms
(Chocolate Monk - choc.486) CDR $6.75
ALERT: This harbors a lot of musically educated sensibilities, as hostage. They are barely let out, and when they are... it fucking kicks ass. Rock right up, folks! “I love the shape of my violin, It is sooo lushhhhhh / Where is also this sugarrr! It must be from the donut” are lyrics you will hear, obscured by more interestingly put-together noises by card-carrying degenerates who won’t ever be able to afford violins or doughnuts. Greeting the world online and off with as much “fuck-you-but-please-listen-to-what-I-have-to-say” as anyone else. Sad react. No asterisks, please. Artificially grafted2bits rock’n’roll exquisite corpse ft. Model Warship’s arms, Giblet Gusset’s mouth, and Terry T. Gubbin’s knees taking all three of thier bows. Edition of 60
NONNAH
(Chocolate Monk - choc.523) CDR $8.00
Thinking of your fate? Mired down in a mortality wobble? Deep breaths and audio hum can alleviate them shakes, while tapes and tones keep the lizards at bay. After a considerable bout of radio silence from Spoils & Relics, Johnny Scarr gets his thumb out of his arse and dusts down the old four-track. What starts off trying to fool you into thinking of this as just another miserable Spoils & Relics record morphs into something more mellow and almost musical, like the tipsy leader of a cult of one trying to reel in some starseed. “It’s just another mopey, shitty, synth record,” according to Chuckles himself, “Which obviously the world needs more of.” Cognition blurred. Ears pleased. Edition of 50
ROSS SCOTT-BUCCLEUCH / ANDREW SHARPLEY / SIGTRYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON
Ghost Of Dada
(Chocolate Monk - choc.481) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Announcing of invitation principles. In early 2020, Scott-Buccleuch asked Sharpley to edit his solo record. He sent over a lot of files (DIY circuit-bent improv, tape stuff, recordings of rugby club toilets, overt dregs of blank weather, streams, train stations, drones, all kinds of audio gunk and goof that he was supposed to edit into some kind of shape). Lasting streaks of veer. A collage record with Siggtrygur Berg Sigmarsson had been planned since 2019, so there on his desktop was a folder containing a lot of vocal improvisations and audio glitches. Sudden guest. Tongues well and truly bit. Mysteriously the contents of the two folders leaked into each other. When is a door not a jar? When it’s a door. So now there’s this trio record that preserves the integrity of the original material but also enjoys a fair amount of freehandedness, with a casual and light quality. Today ear. Tomorrow gone. Play by it. A chance meeting that was perhaps inevitable. Edition of 60
The Restless Desert
(Chocolate Monk - choc.569) CDR $8.00
With his happy-go-lucky new release Shareholder embraces the warm positivity of the 21st Century. Why not climb inside the mind of a deranged citizen as they negotiate waking from an anxiety nightmare? Or perhaps you’d like to join a drug-addicted aristo for breakfast, or listen to an abusive voice mail left on The Duke of York’s internal? But then you might be the type of person who’d prefer to ponder how the British colonial mindset remains active through leisure pursuits? Could it be you’re obsessed with the imminent collapse of society and the end of the world? Whatever your passion, you’ll find something to warm the cockles and tan the bones. Edition of 60
The Glass
(Chocolate Monk - choc.498) CDR $6.75 (Out-of-stock)
Edinburgh’s Shareholder retreats to the bedroom with hash pipe, free music software, and a very old laptop to bring the people musings on the cosmic feminine via Harold Pinter, midlife crisis ballroom dancing, and hallucinogenic Marxist inertia, Bowie-flavored internet entropy and field recordings of genuine public transport witchcraft, amongst other type things. Edition of 60
Tango Super Bock
(Chocolate Monk - choc.489) CDR $6.75
This Glasgow-based mystery merchant hatched in Holmfirth, before Bristol spritzed up their lugs. Here they serve slurries of audio ’shrooms for teetotalers while indulging in dry drunk sips from the wine hive of electric warble. Tape loops, violin, Yamaha keyboard, and a broken sequencer that a battery exploded in, (transforming it into a sound-mangler supreme), recorded in Lisbon, September 2019, mostly, then mangled and massaged a few months later up in the dreich. A woozy audio sip from the cracked glass of failure. Edition of 60
No Jacket Allowed
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.551) CDR $8.00
Raconteur, math whizz, fine thread dresser and psychedelic noise psychonaut Lewis Duffy follows up Tango Super Bock with a deep dive into his post-Covid brain drain. Shimmering electronics and repetitive glee pulse out euphoric ear worms. He has a mind boner for the impossible, like a more hirsute Neil Campbell with a skill for shitty pant throwing. Bow down.
Snake Code
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.404) CDR $8.00
Detroit’s demented noise chess-master lays his first cracked egg for Chocolate Monk and it is the out-and-out mind-melter you would hope for. Cracked electronics sit alongside blown out-tape damage. Electric insect skitter and life-affirming creep pulse also make appearances. A heavy-on-the-hiss classic that will scribble your mystic center. Strange zones await unexplored. Numbered edition of 75.
Operation From The Below
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC259) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
The sixth volume in Chocolate Monk’s Well Spliced Breath series of “sound-tape collage, text-sound, radiophonic, horspiel-type muck.” A little treatise on trust, standards, and self-preservation. Guest appearance by Leif Elggren.
The Door Is In The Valley
(Chocolate Monk - choc.455) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Andrew J. Jarvis fends off the aimlessness, indecision, lack of energy and mental torpor of the Upper Calder Valley and inscribes this audio postcard thus: “Bats in flight, steam and hiss, hammer on stone – a vertical roll. The floating lady, a cymbal sounds! Tape loops, rocks fall – the door is in the valley. Sticks and stones, a womb a warble – the valley is the mother. Time ticks, past and – centres. A gong, an owl – the ringing Island. Stone telling stone.” Moss malady be gone! Edition of 60
Sitting
(Chocolate Monk - choc.579) CDR $8.00
Begun as a synth-drone duo in 2016 to pursue an “unaccountable method of music-making,” Aubrey Hornor and Bob Desaulniers eventually out grew experimenting with their self-designed indeterminate graphic scores, though never let go of the idea of Sitting as a band, recording sporadically and spontaneously together using whatever was lying around — household objects mostly, along with contact mics and sometimes tape loops. “Though the texture and tools of the project have changed, we continued to think of it as essentially drone.” Their years-long sound diary was compiled using “source material from those sessions, live recordings of our old synth incarnation, and voice memos of interesting sounds that Aubrey sent to me, all looped and layered into something new.” Edition of 60
Live At Fort Process
(Chocolate Monk - choc.425) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Robin “Slim” Dickinson returns from hiatus with this live recording made at Newhaven’s 19th century fort — his first attempt at a site-specific set. Field recordings of the building breathing and wheezing in its old age mixed with imagined soldiers sitting there during the war listening to the radio and waiting. Numbered edition of 60
(Are You Taken) Aback
(Chocolate Monk - choc.578) CDR $8.00
Black Forest sound frazzler Norman Mueller can usually be found plying his trade under the Ypsmael moniker but with Smaely P, he branches out into even weirder atmospheric aural grease. Considered, composed pieces that are equal part soothing and discombobulating. Self-described by Mueller as “the zone where ‘it’ plays a moment of poetry wading through endless puke, anguish or slumber apparatus possibility. Unleashing only ruin to be there and arrange for the surrounding the ‘thing’ to happen up a pile of junk on a broth is not a job, more like an obsession to have another packet of Wheetabix else hungry the bug unnamed thing, it may not be when the feeling arises that roles are being swapped and being played by whatever floats around the room ‘antenna’ disSECTing explained missing the point entirely. Mindframe as guises or personae perhaps even something or ring out, rather, on the table, mostly.” Edition of 60
Sic In Se Sua Per Vestigia Volvitur
(Chocolate Monk - choc.564) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
The old sound explorer does not disappoint; side A leaves your headspace in a gnarled punch-drunk flashback state before side B envelops you in a warm gas of meditative murk (assuming you can get over to the deck to flip the tape). The maestro says, “Both pieces recently assembled, disassembled, prodded and chortled in the Perche in Basse Normandie. No. 1, to the personal attention of D. Menche, concerns a close-up investigation of cascading cascades of dripping audible elements of 100% sonic origin. Perfect for flying-carpet errand-running. No. 2 is obviously a Gregorian-Normand sea chanty for use while waiting for the Vikings to return.” Mastered by Scott “Chop Shop” Konzelmann. With two-color riso print cover. C30. Edition of 75
Greek Drama
(Chocolate Monk - choc.504) CDR $7.25
A collection of tracks investigating and researching some sort of “Greekness” within Tasos Stamou and in his music influences, recorded between COVID lockdowns in the summer at his father’s land in Agini Theodoroi, Greece. Using four-track digital handheld recorder, string instruments, abandoned albums of his Greek music collection, and homebrew synthesizers, the album is his first experiment using all the things he likes at the same time, aesthetically unfiltered, strictly transcendental in a very personal, non-Greek way. Edition of 60
STAUBITZ AND WATERHOUSE AND SEAMUS
Gorgers
(Chocolate Monk - choc.571) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“On September 27th, 2021 Ms. Donna Parker and Messrs. TVE and Rhuem descended into Blackstone Gorge intending to capture the call of the Common Merganser,” explains Barrett Clark, Record Producer. “Although our allegedly ‘common’ feathered friend proved to be elusive that day, the expedition was not without event. The trio happened upon a clearing as dusk approached, and oddly enough, a well plated meal of fried Creek Chubsuckers worthy of Chaïm Soutine. Ravenous, our intrepid explorers made a feast of it before escaping nightfall and the penetrating gaze of the Castor Canadensis. This album documents their journey on ancestral lands of the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Nipmuc Nations.” Edition of 60
Shaking Off The Metaphors (Suburban Observances Volume 1)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.527) CDR $8.00
Sounds collected over many years, known very well to Stelzer, possibly so well he wasn’t truly hearing them any more. The first in a series of six volumes of collections of tracks to have passed through the hands of others and then back to the master incorporates processing by Theo Gowans (Territorial Gobbing), Andrew Zukerman (Fleshtone Aura), Theresa Smith (DeTrop), France Jobin, Ross Scott-Buccleuch (Diurnal Burdens), Frans de Waard (Modelbau), Joe Murray (Posset) and Stuart Chalmers. Tori Kuso sings on one track. Edition of 60
Anathematization Of The World Is Not An Adequate Response to the World
(Chocolate Monk - choc.457) 2xCDR $9.10 (Out-of-stock)
Emphatically corporeal and just as human as a public school math teacher, reaching out with open arms, filling up a large space with a manifestation of expanding joy. With contributions from Richard Youngs, Pete Hope, Jesse Kudler, Le Quan Ninh, Jason Talbot and Frans de Waard. Edition of 60
Seriously Hot
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.366) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
New solo wonk by everyone’s favorite blaw bag, Ali Roberston of Usurper, whose take on a “summer album” is like a mouthful of hot pennies. Numbered edition of 60
36 Fibulae
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.545) Magazine + Cassette $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
This gnostic-horror song cycle by the visual and sound artist employs malfunctioning home-built instruments in a series of asynchronous dream-logic miniature plays. Each World is a Drop World, measured in fibulae. Most are without words and many will eventually be expressed as jewelry. Select fibulae include: 1fibulae, a small Pennsylvania suburb in which humans grow prehensile tails with a large eye at the end à la Charles Fourier’s theory of the Archibras; 9fibulae, an exploration of the erotic pleasures of botany in a world without sound; 17fibulae, an innocent game that allows the viewer to see invisible intelligences in residues of protein via various household devices; 23fibulae, The Police are here again; 28fibulae, on the manufacturing of psychoactive pharmaceuticals from a reliquary housing the preserved corpse of a child posthumously revered as a saint; and 32fibulae, against the diseases of civilization. Since the mid-’00s Strong has been developing an approach to improvisation, instrument-building, and applying material from daily life to psycho-devotional purposes. He has performed in groupings such as Melkings, Eyes of the Amaryllis and Weyesbluhd/ Weyesblood, to name a few. He also operates the tape imprint Cor Ardens. Includes badge. Numbered edition of 50
Terracotta Tributaries
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.375) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The product of several stream of consciousness recording sessions by Bob Desaulniers and Shane McDonell spanning the first half of 2017, who subject indoor and outdoor sound materials to primitive manipulation and collage in universally agreed upon real time. The voice of the Bicameral Mind. Numbered edition of 60
Organ 1
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.347) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Fylkingen old-timer (and acting chairman from 1994 to ’97), and one half of The Sons Of God with Leif Elggren, runs several components of a dismembered old organ into their own channels in a mixer, and pushes each until it misbehaves. If you missed his Colour Out Of Space performance where he used this same technique and blew out one of the sound system speakers, play it loud for your own personal recreation of same. Screen printed card slipcase with stuck on paper front and paper insert. Numbered edition of 40.
Blabber
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.333) CDR $7.00
One long improvisation for throat by Manchester’s Matt Dalby, who hits all the sweet spots just right. “The improvisation grew from my mother’s diagnosis of the cancer that later killed her,” he explains. “I created a textual score tracking different emotional responses to the diagnosis, propped my Zoom on a window-ledge and started. And as usual, closed my eyes, deviated from the script, and experienced whatever you call hypnagogic hallucinations when you’re not half-asleep or meditating. To me it now sounds like a collision of generations with bonus fart noises.” Edition of 40.
Underpath
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.296) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
“The result of a day trip to Bury with the dual intention of recording some short improvisations and getting lost,” says Matt Dalby. Underpath “reference[s] … Brötzmann / Bennink’s Schwarzwaldfahrt and images of The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker — though without the manliness and musical ability of the former, or the intellectual and structural rigor of the latter. What comes out is a kind of personal ritual, with an obsession about water.” Edition of 40.
Empty Shell
(Chocolate Monk - choc.443) CDR $6.25
This set of crud-fi experiments by Maureen Hollomas (Polly Shang Kuan Band, Jettatura, Structure, etc.) demonstrates the existence of remote viewing, a hitherto non-validated human capacity. “On first listen,” says a ChocoMo spokesgonk, “it was a feeling of a snake crawling out of something. A real vivid feeling, but on a second listen it was a cat’s tail. Go figure.” Numbered edition of 50
Buzzed In / Past These Herberts
(Chocolate Monk - choc.449) 2xCDR $8.75 (Out-of-stock)
This joint endeavor by The Pheremoans’ vulgarians Mad Headed Octogram and Russell Walker mixes spoken word and sound collage, as the pair depart on two separate voyages, both filtered through Octogram’s crude sound portals.
Songs Of Our Sceptred Isles
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.325) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Russell Walker and Octogram (of dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards-beat combo The Pheromoans) hit the winding B roads of England in an act of sauced-up anthropological hubris and return with cracking tunes of old and plenty of provincial prattle. Edition of 45
Suffer For Succotash
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.544) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Whether this manchild is an absurdist pin-up or the human embodiment of a dung beetle, Theo Gowans never lets up with his vision for a better world through sound and performance. Suffer For Succotash is a weird tour through a few different styles in which he has been dabbling for the past two years. Messy noise muckabout meets classy songsmithery — a sauce worth sampling. Numbered edition of 50
Toon Mould
(Chocolate Monk - choc.461) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Many aspects of Toon Mould will crowd your diaper, Bubba, not the least of which is Theo Gowans’s deliciously spatial understatement. Don’t sweat it if the show doesn’t seem to stop at such a relatively humble revelation. It is, after all, competing with an aromatic bouquet of nonrepresentational squirts, fragments of lo-fi scrabbling and uncomfortably close gacque dans la bouche (what the slurp-prone Quebecois call fellating a contact mic), elusive fwips of manipulated tape, and equilibrium-hostile pulsations that’ll totally give you the squeam. Good luck finding another album that twitches with the unforced glee of a coupla goobers who’ve reanimated a mechanical witch from an old-time-y arcade in the woods. With the end of the year and the end of the decade on everyone’s mind (although the latter is debatable), the time is optimal for clacky noisemakers to morph into seagulls getting impaled on punji sticks embedded in sand castles. Plain and simple, this is top-shelf wait-what surrealism from the lower levels of the fidelity spectrum, where the resin is stickiest and sweet, from the expansion and contractions of an underdeveloped bladder covered in a polkadots and fur (see also: leopard fetus, an air pressure hose, rogered by) to the guilt-crippled squid indulging in a midnight snack, rendered from the point of view of doomed jellyfish. So bendy. So unstable. Edition of 60
Tindegger
(Chocolate Monk - choc.412) CDR $8.00
Tina Krekels and Grant Smith go hurling ’round a gnarled crack and show us that German-Scots relations have never been fruitier. They do a fine job of blending and blurring Krekel’s wonderful skittering and burbling saxophone with Smith’s hyperactive and intoxicated electronics; no-fi text pieces are followed by crunked-up tape whirr that eventually tramples ear remnants into the rug. Add in serious dashes of yelps, spits and sputters and even some fried guitar strum; it all helps dishonor spiritual mentors. Numbered edition of 60
Wonder How It Left
(Chocolate Monk - choc.603) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Connecticut sound conjurers Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden prove that you can find God in a dead dog. One track of duo organ and one of cello / bagpipe to levitate your weary arse. “An enigmatic scuttering scores the fabric of this dimly lit séance,” says Adam Buffington.
A Slight Remove
(Chocolate Monk - choc.427) CDR $8.00
Low-tech cassette assemblages by Andy Bolus’s favorite tape wizard Bob Desaulniers, sourced from tapes and voice memos going back several years, like an audio junk drawer dumped out and arranged into neat little piles. Numbered edition of 60
Fishing For Tripe
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC261) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
A real charming affair featuring two men, a wife, a pregnant partner and the Duff family plughole. As Louise was doing her upholstery next door, hammering on a chair, the sink started to glug. “It was just one of those moments, you know, Jaques Tati’s paint pot in the sea,” muses the clan patriarch Malcy, “Louise and the plug jammed blindly together, not knowing the other was singing the same song.”
Cabin Fever Cleansed My Mind Vol. 2
(Chocolate Monk - choc.484) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Further forays into the hovels and studios of some of Chocolate Monk’s favorite sound-churners during lockdown. Featuring contributions from Food People, Ogrob, Sharon Gal, Ash Reid Neil Campbell & Sticky Foster, Plastic Hooligans, Embla Quickbeam, Amanda R Howland, Territorial Gobbing, Leif Elggren, The Burbling Mind, Rubber Demon and Dan Melchior. Artwork by Leif Elggren. Edition of 100. Order both volumes and get a Cabin Fever Cleansed My Mind one-inch badge
Cabin Fever Cleansed My Mind Vol. 1
(Chocolate Monk - choc.483) CDR $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
Has lockdown laid waste to creative minds? Or sown seeds of wild whack? Join Cody Brant, Glands Of External Secretion, rlw, Wild Rani, Giblet Gusset, Sick Llama, Fatty Jubbo & Dylan Nyoukis, T.Mikawa, Duncan Harrison, Mark Morgan, Sophie Cooper, Michael Zulicki and Final Seed to find out. Artwork by Leif Elggren. Edition of 100. Order both volumes and get a Cabin Fever Cleansed My Mind one-inch badge
Fug Gum Vol. 4
(Chocolate Monk - choc.501) CDR $7.25 (Out-of-stock)
You want to end the year on a wonk, right? Then here is the disc of audio spittle and vibe burble to get you there. Tracks by Karen Constance, The Occupant, Bill Nace, Hannah Ellul, DDAA, Translucent Envelope, Cloth, Dai Coelacanth, Kito-Mizukumi Rouber, Natalia Beylis, Odie Ji Ghast, Hair Stylistics, Sweat Tongue, Rick Potts, The Richard Youngs Foot Band and Mitchell Brown. Edition of 100
The Juice From Your Pen Is Running Down My Leg vol. 2
(Chocolate Monk - choc.586) CDR $8.00
Continuing the celebration of all things word, throat, tongue and mind. This time featuring tracks from Ali Robertson, Anna Peaker, Home Secretary, Gee Rams Ensemble, LDSN, Lucian Tielens, Luke Poot, Olivia Furey, Karen Constance & Catherine Plenevaux, Posset, Raymond Cummings, Rebecca Rani, Richard Youngs and The Bohman Brothers. Artwork by Ms Constance. Edition of 80
The Guiding Fever
(Chocolate Monk - choc.590) CDR $8.00
“Huffing in trilling devices and electrical crackle. Soothed by meditative crunk and mechanical whir. A feeling of paper scraps, lint and carpet debris stuck to feet and the infamous one-note pianist has Mod Podge slavered down his front. Prophetic glitching with accompanying echo throb is giving me a bad itch. The grunts and whelps of gobs repeating on themselves. What did the headshrinkers see? Static tone float trembles and there is a weird shuffler in the corner. Bedroom wheeze and half empty toner. Skittering tapes with warm warble. Is that dirty device mechanics or electronic sputs? A dank gutter man. I’ve got the groo.” This compilation celebrates that fever feeling, when cognitive processing is simmered to shit and, for better or worse, one idea, sentence, image or sound gets stuck in your delirious head. Tracks by Vitjist (aka Witcyst), Karen Constance, Ida K (aka D Coelacanth), The Daimon & The Sloth, Slums and Soft Migraine.” Edition of 50
Salvage Job
(Chocolate Monk - choc.517) CDR $8.00
If it’s broken, don’t fix it. Further recordings made during the mess of the past year, which you may hear as a shining pathway out of the shit, or a “back to the egg!” warning cry. Pour yrself a drink, put on those headphones and let the gamble commence. With tracks from Hobo Sonn, Muyassar Kurdi & Ka Baird, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, A.S, Raymond Cummings, Hardworking Families, Stone Cornelius, Dora Doll, Duncan Harrison, LDSN, Angela Sawyer & Ethan Marsh, Glands Of External Secretion, Tania Caroline Chen, Mark Groves, Staubitz & Waterhouse, Kraus, Kate Armitage, Constance/Nyoukis and RRS. Artwork by Bill Nace. Edition of 100
Fug Gum
(Chocolate Monk - choc.245) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Seventy-six minutes to tar and feather the inside of your cranium. With tracks by Tom Recchion, Andrew Coltrane, Crank Sturgeon, Glands Of External Secretion, Graham Lambkin & David Payne, I'dm Thfft Able, Dog Lady, Loachfillet, The Tenses, Phil Minton & Dylan Nyoukis, F Ampism, Kuupuu with Bamse, Tomutonttu, Glyphs, Smack Music 7, Pod Blotz, Steve Kenney, Preggy Peggy and Reijo Pami.
The Juice From Your Pen Is Running Down My Leg vol. 1
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.546) CDR $8.00
Celebrating all things word, throat, tongue, mind. Tracks from Malcy Duff, Natalia Beylis, Of Habit, Sophie Cooper, Neil Campbell, Roy Claire Potter, S. Glass, Andy Heck Boyd & Kasper Melted, Mark Groves, Angela Sawyer. Cover art by Andy Heck Boyd. Edition of 80
I’m With The Band Of Gurps
(Chocolate Monk - choc.472) CDR $6.00
Recordings of Band Of Gurps (a one-off quintet of Sharon Gal, Dylan Nyoukis, June Whitchurch, Yoni Silver and Ali Roberston) performing at Cafe Oto on 28th July 2018 as part of the Chocolate Monk 25th anniversary two-day event were passed onto Cody Brant, Ju Suk Reat Meate, Karen Constance, Hannah Ellul, Rust Ruus, Kenny Carstairs, Posset, and Seymour Glass, who each proceeded to remix and rework and do over. All the huffing, puffing and wheezing weirdness you could hope for. Maybe more. Definitely not less. Edition of 75
The Blue Shirt of Simon
(Chocolate Monk - choc.521) CDR $7.00
The Pheromoans’ main lunk and one half of The Teleporters was originally going to present a short chapbook of wanton sleaze, but felt the great unwashed were not quite ready for it yet, and instead submitted a piece of “noir crime fiction” in audio book fashion. It is set in a fictional West London town called Simon, taking place over two weeks in February 2021. All characters are fictional and any resemblance they have to persons alive or dead is coincidental. Aye, riiiiight. “I really liked it,” said someone somewhere at some point in time, “even though it sounds like a man of the edge of some sort of breakdown.” Edition of 60
Neither Of Me
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.266) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Slowly unraveling guitar improvisations, exploratory collages and noise drone panels sure to tweak the inner nipple of hedonists whose innocent pleasure centers around luxuriating in a cloud haze. Send a thank-you card to this UK improvisor, noise-maker, soundscapist, doctor of mathematics and computer programmer who is half of droners The Zero Map and industrialist Binnsclagg, and also performs regularly with the modern day incarnation of The A Band.
Crumbs On A Dumpster
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC257) CDR $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
The fifth volume in Chocolate Monk’s Well Spliced Breath series of “sound-tape collage, text-sound, radiophonic, horspiel-type muck.” A few years ago Welch was at a party in Miami listening to an amazing 82-year-old salsa singer called La Gata. “Halfway through her set,” reports Welch, “A large dark shape emerged from the swimming pool. It seemed like the water was growing. At first I was sure it was some kinda ancient ageless Ghatanothoa thing that squeaked its way backward through the drains but it soon became evident that it was an ATF agent covered in petrified sea cucumbers painted with gothic nail polish. The goon was there to interrogate me about the core structure of these works. He said Obama knew that I had ripped them from a bland reading of an important post-Situationist text about labor. Yes, of course, it was the reading that seemed flaccid, the content was solid and unyielding. He also pushed buttons regarding the integration of a random sequence of numbers that eased into a lenient refusal. I suggested he listen closely to the singer’s voice and consider the possibility of extended excavations. The stuff slipped out of old cassettes, field recordings and the dynamic and changing personalities of each Loa. I turned to head back to the bar for another margarita. The glistening speleothem tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and yelled right into its disembodied face, ‘Back off! I just don’t wanna go around with this turd in my pocket any longer!’” Fairly self-explanatory. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2013
Routine Happenings
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.267) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
An extended version of the four-channel sound piece installed in the Power Lunches bar in London during the May 2013 HAPPENING! Event. The source material was mostly recorded during the opening hours of the venue, including various mundane preparatory activity such as the unpacking of beer cans and bottles, tearing up cardboard packaging, bands and their sound-checking noise edited and collaged to an absurd extreme. The installation piece itself was played back in the space during the entire event until the party-hungry bar staff got irritated with the racket and chose to decorate their Friday evening environment with something more friendly. These edits were originally self-released on ten C20 cassette editions, each one different, to coincide with the event.
Their Faces Closed
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.395) Cassette $9.50 (Out-of-stock)
Live recordings from White’s fall 2017 trans-Canada express — a mix of comedy and confusion flowing through him in the moment. He was attuned to the jaw harps as well. Chrome cassette in recycled card sleeve with insert. Numbered Edition of 75.
Pocket Mutations
(Chocolate Monk - choc.582) Cassette + 2x3-inch CDR $28.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second communique with the outside world from the re-christened Constance / Nyoukis joint is a nattering and belching collection of weird for the eyes and ears. Packaged in a rubber stamped cardboard box (24cm x11.5cm x 2cm) and obi, with A6 color booklet of collages, fold out art print, button badge. Liner notes by S. Glass.
Ouster Crawling
(Chocolate Monk - choc.563) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The artists formerly known as Miracle Wheat, Pinked Eruptions, Unspoken Tide, Dumbluck Cycle, Artist Tonks, The No Concept People, Ear Making, Ignored Oven, Yellow Ponces, Wine 6000, Top Fuckers, Incest Insects, Cum Palace, Glorious Throat, Paedo Eaters, Brown Sabbath, Blood Stereo, Path Of Glue, The Danny Greer Unit, Rubber Toast, Gravel Connection, Neck Tar, Muehl Flowers, Crumb People, Wedding Beet, Tory Gods, Cum Crisis, Thyroid Massage, Baby Abusers, Randy Ankle, and NHS have slowly morphed into Wino Lodge. They present Ouster Crawling for your consideration. Electronics, tapes, voice, field recordings, objects. You know the drill. Why change a failing formula? Edition of 60
Wot It Is Not
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.379) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Spontaneous experimental abandon by Aaron Moore and Brandstifter utilizing whatever instruments and non-instruments are at hand. Numbered edition of 60
Pop Oil View
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.397) CDR $8.00
Brandstifter and Volcano The Bear’s Aaron Moore return for a second swig of poison. With full bellies they foray further into the forest of broken music, incorporating a wide selection of instruments and guff to create sweet swaggering tomfoolery with a distinct whiff of Paul McCarthy in their demented vocal ditties or Mike Kelley (à la The Poetics or early Destroy All Monsters). Be brave, you sack o’ meat, tie one on. Numbered Edition of 60.
Easy Listening For Nightingales
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.334) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
The creative mind juice spill of former A Band wonk officer Stewart Greenwood and his fellow A Band reprobate Neil “Lenty” Lent follows the piss trails of the finest UK underground gorf. But then, using clarinet, tabla, melodian, toy flute, glockenspiel, xylophone, keyboard, short wave radio, stainless steel bowl, guitar, toy drum and various objects to take a loving hatchet to the ancient concept of “music,” how could it not? Edition of 50.
Bad Words
(Chocolate Monk - choc.436) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Richard “The Riddim” Youngs returns to Chocolate Monk and he is none too pleased. Launched at Colour Out of Space 2019, this is 69 minutes of pitch corrected vocal, in the modern style. High concept derives from a conversation with Dylan Nyoukis concerning some popular musical tastes, and the collection’s title is an elusive reference to the lyrical content. Numbered edition of 75, with button.
Lost Teeth
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.552) CDR $8.00
Here’s something that’ll keep your kitchen lit. (For you 20-year-olds, a “kitchen” is like the break room at work, but in your apartment.) From front to back, this disc hits like possessed plasmatic visitations happening in the middle of an otherwise silent instructional cooking program. You know that means metallic borborygmus and delicious lurching — the percussive collateral damage recognizable to anyone who has attended after-hours jousting with live but grievously unwell horses in a public library. Fear not, disdainers of randomized flail, Ypsmael + Eloine have done this before (because late fees). The duo maintains a delectable balance between electro fweep, tape fwip, and considered fwunk of the hit-it-or-quack ilk — without neglecting, as some of our peers are wont (let’s face it), sonic backdrops that enhance the ambient depth of field. The beautiful yet unprecious recording and the bounty of friction throughout Lost Teeth bring to mind a compact, super-portable Nuova Consonanza. Oh, yes they do. The homemade instrument, the field recording, the non-musical object, and the musical instrument manipulated outside the bounds of traditional propriety serve the needs of these two freedom-lickers, based respectively in Germany and San Francisco, a detail that should scream “secret tingle spoken here.”