Faceless Kiss / Blut Mond
(Emerald Cocoon - EC008) 7-inch $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Cantu-Ledesma’s guitar beams directly down from Souvlaki Space Station and arrives gorgeously mangled via modular synthesizer. Romantically haloed chorus guitar floats widescreen across relentless static drum machines until the sky splits open in the final movement, spilling burning guitar fragments over everything. The pink-out bliss explored on Love Is A Stream (Type Records, 2010) is unapologetically pop here, and more aggressive. The B-side is a bass-heavy covert floater – night sky music this member of Tarental and The Alps, a regular collaborator with filmmaker Paul Clipson and founder of the Root Strata label. Volume six in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.
L’Etoile de Mer
(Emerald Cocoon - EC012) LP $17.50 (Out-of-stock)
Unlike Man Ray’s dreamlike 1928 surrealist film of the same name, her score for it is severely in focus: carefully placed single notes of electric guitar hang in a space made so tense by expectation that the air feels like glass under pressure. Buckling under the weight of their own naked intensity and the film’s obscure ritual logic, both takes end with a sudden descent into a seasick pitch-shifted blur. On the flip, seven etude-like songs recorded in an Austin hallway, were inspired by solo saxophone exercises. These pieces are meditations on sound rather than words. Tongue and throat animate the air, unconstrained by lyrical concerns; vocal shapes are carved, probed, turned over, and discarded. Previously released on cassette (Freedom From 2000). Sillscreened jackets. Edition of 300
Obelisk / Tholos
(Emerald Cocoon - EC003) 7-inch $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
A lone voice, tangled bells, the caw of a crow, a plane passing overhead… A fortuitous overlapping of sound moments, trapped in amber an act of white witchcraft, a healing spell that defines time with the merest of tools. Volume one in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.
Soft Erase
(Emerald Cocoon - EC010) LP $14.25 (Out-of-stock)
(Emerald Cocoon - EC010) Used LP $9.00
Now that protest music exists only as a form of personal ritual, hedonism is the only exorcism, and artists stifle internal impulses in pursuit of career mobility, Metal Rouge solemnly meditates on contemporary society’s willingness to accept what many before fought to stop. Soft Erase is a collection of monochromatic machine-pulses ridden into the blank heart of single-take live excursions, a haze of modulated delay and de-synchronized loops, of strings hit endlessly in the hope that meaning may appear. Ritual chants give way to berserk guitar overload. Dark vamping leads from nowhere to nowhere, burning negation and dismissal as righteous fuel. Hazy prayers for rain spill out in the merciless desert heat, unspooling into an extended fake-kraut meditation featuring Giles Miller on a beautifully unhurried alto sax. Cover art based on the censored art of Italian street artist Blu. Edition of 300.
Broke In
(Emerald Cocoon - EC013) LP $30.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first of two companion albums recorded by jet-lagged and delirious Helga Fassonaki and Andrew Scott following a month-long European tour in 2013. A dark energy pervaded the session, their first in a legitimate studio. Mourning brass sprayed with guitar hail. Brut raga possession, dark strings chime the universal moment, unconscious sermons delivered in a warm skull. Not conversation, but glossolalia. Not language, but meaning. Cover art by Dan Melchoir, né Melchior. Jackets silkscreened by Alan Sherry at Siwa. Numbered edition of 100.
Broke Out
(Emerald Cocoon - EC014) LP $30.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second of two companion albums recorded by jet-lagged and delirious Helga Fassonaki and Andrew Scott following a month-long European tour in 2013. A dark energy pervaded the session, their first in a legitimate studio. Mourning brass sprayed with guitar hail. Brut raga possession, dark strings chime the universal moment, unconscious sermons delivered in a warm skull. Not conversation, but glossolalia. Not language, but meaning. Cover art by Dan Melchoir, né Melchior. Jackets silkscreened by Alan Sherry at Siwa. Numbered edition of 100.
The Grey Lynn Homeless Set
(Emerald Cocoon - EC006) 7-inch $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
New Zealand-born Tokyo-based physicist Mark Sadgrove uses site-specific recordings, lyrical domesticity, systematically illogical recording choices, completely brutalized fragments of bone-dry pointillist acoustic guitar strung only with low Es, invented instruments, real-time Linux C-sound programming, obsessively repeated lyrical fragments, an almost Buddhist sense of sound-as-object, and seemingly random electronic beats jumping across the stereo spectrum to deliver two sub-sub-sub lo-fi acoustic folk songs saturated in haze. Volume four in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.
Hidden Face / Leave Mine
(Emerald Cocoon - EC004) 7-inch $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
At an intersection of late 20th-century art music by one half of Aster and of Paul and Maurey — modern composition, Euro free clatter and textural psychedelia — stilted song forms almost career off the very face of form on thin lines of carefully controlled reed-skree. Hand-crafted and warm, Paul’s tracks stitch together guitar, vocals, crotales and saxophone, and move in a constant, slow peristalsis, never quite coalescing, never quite drifting apart. Equal parts alien unease and folkish charm, these slowly tangled tones drift prismatic and high in the late afternoon light. Volume two in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.
New Zealand Eels
(Emerald Cocoon - EC002) Used LP $8.00
Antony Milton (The Nether Dawn, Glory Fckn Sun) and Stefan Neville (Pumice) posit Sunken as sea-shanties sung by sailors lost to Cthulhu at the bottom of the ocean; their surging, reed-driven organs and vocal streams broadcast via cracked electronics suggest sailors breaking free of the weeds and swimming toward the light, and even, occasionally, breaking the surface. This tentacle shot from the abyss, however, drag the sailors back down into the service of the lurker in the deep. Bleak, black and completely drowned, New Zealand Eels beams five submarine tracks from the lost to the lost through the milky darkness, with the vocal melodies pushed to the foreground and the instrumental origins of the music obscured as never before by damaged baby monitors, power starved dictaphones, tape saturation and spring reverb. Include free download. Edition of 300.
High Time / Trees
(Emerald Cocoon - EC007) 7-inch $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Sparkling acoustic guitar, audible vocals, audible room tone — a Pete Swanson no one has ever heard before — although his signature degradation systems are still in place (both sides end with a blown-out acoustic guitar emulating dirty-needled distortion). Acoustic strings, four walls and a voice dominate dusty interpretations of Dadamah’s “High Time,” and Gate’s “Trees,” both redolent of the darkest, coldest Dunedin winter as imagined from half a world away. Volume five in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.
Love Song For The Dead C
(Emerald Cocoon - EC009) LP $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Bookended by two renditions of a Persian love song (one sung in Farsi, one in English) that trade in the same echoing confusion, Love Song For The Dead C is some epic outsider hornk, originally released to coincide with an installation at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles. Dissonant chiming slowly unfurls into a vast chasm of mesmerizing sound; disoriented guitar wafts through a wah-wah swirl of delay and distant Dead C samples; parts are harrowing slow-motion crawls through alleys and sewers of room tone as captured by the tunnel-vision fidelity of a Dictaphone. Handmade bootleg-style paste-on covers. Edition of 288.
Desolation Peak
(Emerald Cocoon - E011) LP $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
The intimately confrontational vocal deconstructions rapping inside raw distortions of emotive gut on Desolation Peak owe something to East African ritual chants, which is not underestimate its illumination by the same electricity as A Handful Of Dust, Heather Leigh Murray, Jandek, or Gate’s Metric LP. Vocals multiply and fall back into themselves, guitars bloom like flowers of grit, the whole record collapses into groaning gleaming feedback. Edition of 259
Oh Woman / Flame Creation
(Emerald Cocoon - EC005) 7-inch $7.25 (Out-of-stock)
Gone are the horizontal string-sprawl epics of past, replaced by a new density and compositional focus. Dictaphone guitar-swirl and declamatory vocal preaching atop loping nod-out rhythm samples, you could almost say Helga Fassonaki (of Metal Rouge) has gone pop. But then there’s B-side: a sheet of live industrial slamming recorded at the Echo Curio in Los Angeles that sounds like a realtime channeling of Kali. Confusing, enticing, nuanced and brutal. Volume three in Emerald Cocoon’s Alone Together series. Edition of 300.