CHRISTINA CARTER / LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS
Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death Vol One
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $35.00
Somber and shadowy guitar and piano duets
The Hated Music
(Ecstatic Yod - E#1B) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Flaherty’s impassioned overblowing and legato style recall Noah Howard and early-70s Joe McPhee, and his chord outlines, sheets-of-sound-era Coltrane. The Hated Music is raucous but well-crafted: the visceral and incendiary duo captures the spirit of the wildest, most hectic, most flamboyant free improvisation without blowing themselves into monotony.
1974—1976
(Ecstatic Yod) Used 3xCD $50.00 (Out-of-stock)
Early lo-fi vintage recordings by Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw when they lived and performed at God’s Oasis in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The almost-too-good-to-be-true cream of the crop of pre-punk American Midwest weirdness.
ARTHUR DOYLE ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC ENSEMBLE
Plays The African Love Call
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two performances from 1999 at The Bug Jar and Astrocade, released 2001. Dave Cross, Tim Poland, Ed Wilcox, John Schoen and R. Nuuja. Magic beauty from the darkness. Sticker cover, bumpersticker inside.
A Long Losing Battle With Eloquence And Intimance
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $4.00
Seven songs from 2005 by Dan Ireton on vocals and acoustic guitar.
The Whys of Fire
(Ecstatic Yod) Used CD $5.00
“An overlooked 2003 album that features fretwork from Thurston Moore, percussion by Chris Corsano, and additional backing from Patrick Best, Mike Gangloff, and Jack Rose of Pelt,” notes Tiny Mix Tapes, “Produced and mastered by Jim O'Rourke with vocals, drums, and any other incidental backing instrumentation buried way down in the mix. Dan Ireton’s lyrics are almost entirely incomprehensible and constitute, in essence, an eerie howling and wailing. Buried under heavy feedback, dense bursts of overlapping, overdriven guitar skronk, extraordinarily liberal use of reverb, bowed and scraped guitar strings, prepared and treated instruments.”
LSD
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $12.00
DJ Farraginous feels it needs to be pointed out that “This isn’t an educational record, it’s an album of music” from 1993, “primarily guitars, bass, drums, and voices. These few elements are far from sparse, as there are a lot of them, going on at the same time. Which probably makes it sound more chaotic than it is… it’s actually quite coherent, compelling, easy on the ears, brain, nose, throat, what have you. There is no centrally defined singer, but multiple ones coming in from here and there.”
El Saturn
(Ecstatic Yod) LP $10.00
Second LP by this Kent, Ohio, psych collective who collapse the universe-as-known-by-Sun-Ra into a shape that fits neatly into a two-car garage and create an amazing fever acid swamp of sound. Volume 7 in the Center Of The Ass Run series. Gatefold jacket, insert.
GREG GOODMAN / HENRY KAISER / LUKAS LIGETI
Heavy Meta
(Ecstatic Yod - E#76/FYPC22) Used CD $15.00
Pianist Goodman, protean guitar improvisor Kaiser and powerful, cross-cultural drummer Ligeti maintain structurally complex and taut inter-relationships as they shift between different paired settings and in and out of trio formation. “Logical Types” is “a bravuro performance from all hands,” according to Byron Coley. “From the strumbly, Magic Band-like opening cadences by Ligeti and Kaiser, through the sequences of equally whacked piano … the piece spurts and blurts with everything from a broken lyricism that recalls Paul Bley to squabbling crescendos that have a density approaching Nancarrow’s machine cycles. This is a ferocious and lyrical bastard of an album.” Sealed.
Unique Ancient Tavern
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $8.00
Much of this 1997 material harkens back to the earliest collaborations of Chasse (on drums) and Labelle (on bass), who align their arrangements with “garbled lo-fi murk that was coming out of New Zealand at the time,” observe our friends at Aquarius, “[F]alling-down-the-stairs drum clatter and atonal thwacking on the bass with plenty of choking atmospherics [fill] in the gaps. Chasse and Labelle splice … grimy improvisational recordings with thrumming drones of equally lo-fi quality as various looping techniques [amass] the sounds into deep bellows, pocked with skittering texture and corroded noises.” With glove in envelope.
Tudor City
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $25.00
Guitarist Alan Licht and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, with percussionist Tom Surgal and keyboardist Lin Culbertson on the sidelong title track. Volume five in the Ass Run series. From 1995. Sealed
Recorded In Public And Private
(Ecstatic Yod) LP $40.00
From 1994. ''This is the kind of thing you do in a basement in SoHo, not in a public park where people are trying to enjoy their food.... They had a permit to play jazz, but this isn't jazz.'' --Mike O'Neal, O'Neal's Restaurant on 64th Street opposite Lincoln Center.
A Stone For Angus Maclise
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $15.00
Recorded during the same home blasts that produced Dauphin Elegies (VHF Records, 2008), this 2007 trio session for harmonium, singing bowl, gong and esraj is one of Pelt’s most ecstatic. Like the legendary poet / musician for whom it is named, Pelt are not hung up on the epistemology of drones. The generation of meditative trance states is as valid produced by Roscoe Holcomb’s banjo as it is by La Monte Young’s well-tuned piano. Hints of both lurk deep within the two side-long slabs here. Stickered cover, insert. Edition of 500
No Dolby No DBX
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $8.00
Psych / art-rock from 1995 by Rob Thomas, Rich Pontius and John Moloney, later of Sunburned Hand of the Man.
Mu Third Part / Uncensored
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $25.00
The original version of No Dolby No DBX containing seven extra minutes of music. Plain white jacket with centerhole and two stickers, poster and a sheet explaining the history of the release. Edition of 50
Brighter Than Life
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $40.00
Test pressing of the cancelled album from the Actuel Ass Run series. Edition of 50 with press release explaining the cancellation.
Glorious Group Therapy
(Ecstatic Yod) Used LP $8.00
On this 2003 reissue of a 1990s Polyamory cassette, “Feel The Music” starts off [with] barking dogs, picked six-string and … Tim Barnes’s clattering percussion. As the tune spirals onward, a bass voice adds echoing, wordless chants as a spine-tingling falsetto repeats the title phrase. The percussion grows into a deep, subsonic dub, filling the spaces with a chest-denting whomp. MV’s guitar continues to peel off twangy licks, as if unaware of the madness growing around it. “Cocola’s Chronic Journey” is a journey where guitars slowly nudge one another, meandering along at a lackadaisical pace, backed by some free-jazz tinkering by Barnes on “chopstick cymbals.” “Riverboat Au Go Go” recalls the awe-inspiring lyricism of John Fahey. “Moonshine Raga” starts quietly with a whispering, autumnal dance. The players are in no rush, and they let notes hang, allowing percussive hits to dissipate into nothing. After a lengthy wait, Barnes begins to awaken things by settling into a stuttering tabla groove. Valentine follows suit on guitar, raising volume carefully, before letting it slide back to silence. “Ceremony Without” adds the hovering drone of harmonium to MV’s up-tempo guitar figure. The rhythmic breaths of the harmonium bring a warm buzz, rubbing against the quickly picked guitar and loud, staccato percussion. Amid looped drones “Psychic 78 Sound”, the album’s strangest track, the group creates a multi-layered percussive stomp that coheres into a lulling tribal groove.