Live '418
(Holy Mountain - 17) LP $15.00
Controlled panic by this Tokyo trio who are sure to spike the tongues of all those who purport to talk about the rock. It is primal, punk, eerie, harsh, vicious psychedelic no wave from start to finish.
Fragments of the Marble Plan
(Holy Mountain - 1986) LP $17.00 (Out-of-stock)
Music as apocalyptic as Fragments of the Marble Plan has few peers, but some approximate touchstones are the most radically out and knotty moments of Norwegian post-jazz ensemble Supersilent, This Heat after realizing that Brise-Glace didn’t pay them a penny in royalties, or Farmers Manual after extensive immersion in Mainliner’s back catalog. Fragments of the Marble Plan is a terrifying force of nature, a Rube Goldberg machine run amok, the sound of civilization atomizing into controlled chaos. It’s so cold, it’s hellish. Although Aufgehoben feels your need for catharsis, they convince you that being ready to jump out of your skin is the new normal. Includes download coupon. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2012
Blues Control
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $8.00
A hazy, spaced world that exists between fuzzed distortion, jabbering electronics, and a lazy, stay-in-bed psychedelic glaze, with Leo Cho’s rhythmic keyboards pulsating below. Guitar player and manipulator of assorted junk-on-table Russ Waterhouse cuts through, whittles and lays waste. “It’s like the soundtrack to Rainbow Bridge” says Tobjörn Axelrod of Bus Rider, “If it were in the Caribbean.” From 2007
Crazy Dreams Band
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $5.00
Guitar-free “thug pop” dirge with creeping crooning and brassless horn blasts. As with the best Giallo films, you’ll be as turned on as you are terrified. The channeled inner voices of members of Religious Knives, Lexie Mountain, and Mouthus are expelled as cave anthems into neon text in Linear A, while bones poke through the skin atop a witch’s brew of venomous sludge. Crazy Dreams Band is the urban tribal music that survives whatever “end is nigh” theory you choose. They’re jamming this music outside the thunder dome, beneath the planet of the apes, and the day after tomorrow.
Ewige Blumenkraft
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $10.00
Six tracks (including an epic, eighteen-minute alpha state called “Plum Village”) by occasional Faust guitarist Steven Wray Lobdell. A new psychedelic chapter in the little known tradition of Karnatic rock (other entries being Ustad B. Khan, Clarke Hutchinson Band, and Sun City Girls). Sealed
The Mystical Path of the Number Eighty Six
(Holy Mountain - 8655) LP $20.00
Released in 1997, following Steven Wray Lobdell's release from a mental institution. Heavy psychedelic guitar compositions -- think Takayanagi Masayuki backed by a Crazy Horse-like force attempting Sun Ra's "The Invisible Shield" with organ, analog synth and various other electronics.
The Julie Mittens
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
This Dutch power trio specializes in extended improvisation at extreme volumes. Inspired by John Coltrane’s The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording and the knowledge that Fushitsusha has more to do with Thelonius Monk than Blue Cheer, guitarist Aart-Jan Schakenbos, bassist Michael van Dam, and drummer Leo Fabriek consistently wreak havoc with lavish, textural, speaker-blowing meltdown jams; they surge with psychedelic power and a stellar rhythm section on the four studio recordings here. They “walk a harrowing path between amplifier anarchy and balanced interaction, never failing to make the two meet,” says Dusted. “Schakenbos provides the skyscraping as he warps and mutilates single notes with the centrifugal force of massive feedback. Van Dam either drops terrifying bass bombs that fill the vacuum Schakenbos leaves in his wake, drones ominously, or dialogues. Fabriek, however, harnesses the others’ energy, as he resists the urge to flail away, and instead inserts a fill when it increases tension, thumps steadily when a groove is needed, or colors when space beckons.”
Automatic Writing By The Moon
(Holy Mountain - 777) Used CD $7.00
Melodic compositions for acoustic guitar and ring modulator from 1999 by the Baseball Astrologer collaborator, leader of Davis Redford Triad and of Sufi Mind Game, and string-wrangler for Faust. The whispery, fluffy-cloud dynamism of the thirteen tracks here mix massive overdubbing, wondrous cinematic composition, folksy improvisation and studio experimentation. The backwards feedback of “Astral Projection” is vibrantly illuminating, while the instrumental arrangement of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara’s “The Departure” evokes a cosmic western.
The Coast Explodes
(Holy Mountain - 8516) LP $15.00
Their second album straddles the line between psychedelia and hard rock while introducing more progressive aspects, influenced by both the power and complexity of the natural world and the ongoing battles of light and darkness.
Variations On A Theme
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $60.00
Cisneros and Hakius. Three long songs — rhythmic chants, textural drive conveying flight, lyrics as symbolist vehicles to a state outside the field of time and space. Clear vinyl. Sealed
Wicker Image
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $25.00
The recording debut of Ben Chasny (later of Comets On Fire, Six Organs Of Admittance) is a sludgy noise rock trio that also featured Brian Fulmer and Brandon Taylor. Mostly instrumental, The Wicker Image sounds like a hybrid of Blue Cheer, Japan’s Fushitsusha and the Dead C. Heavy, pummeling riffs disintegrate into washes of noise and feedback. Co-released with New World Of Sound. Sealed
Fields
(Holy Mountain - 1993) Used 2xLP $10.00
Seemingly under the spell of Terry Riley’s mesmerizing classic In C, eleven-year-old Plotnick engineers ingenious strategies for mental liftoff. It’s as if he’s absorbed the principles and techniques of the 20th-century American minimalist-composer pantheon and injected them with a zeal for greater instrumental complexity and melodic flamboyancy.
Phoenician Flu And Ancient Ocean
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $4.00
A seething mish-mash of psychedelia, krautrock and free-noise — absolutely staggering material that sounds like everything and nothing, baby.
Dust & Chimes
(Holy Mountain - HOLY1165) Used LP $13.00
Ben Chasny’s second underground folk-psych album from behind California’s redwood curtain, where heavy, acoustic guitar and mumbled vocalizations merge with out-there jamming, in a Takoma-meets-the-first-two-Tyrannosaurus-Rex-albums style. 2015 reissue on clear vinyl. Includes download card insert. Sealed
Dark Noontide
(Holy Mountain) LP $50.00
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $30.00
Ben Chasny’s third full length comes in a notch or two higher than his previous acid-folk genius with this spectacular merging of dreamy, hypnotic, finger-picked melodies and psychedelia concrète, not to mention very fine fuzz guitar. These eight incredible tracks from 2002 seamlessly blend powerful blues foot-stomp, backward interludes, strange string feedback, dark, tabla-infused vibrations and the amazing debut of Chasny’s electric guitar as a lead instrument.
Clear vinyl is $50. Sealed
Black vinyl is $30
Dust & Chimes
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $8.00
Ben Chasny’s second underground folk-psych album from behind California’s redwood curtain, where heavy, acoustic guitar and mumbled vocalizations merge with out-there jamming, in a Takoma-meets-the-first-two-Tyrannosaurus-Rex-albums style. Sealed
For Octavio Paz
(Holy Mountain) Used CD $12.00
Ben Chasny explores the guitar inside and out, solo and over-dubbed, steel and nylon string (in fact, For Octavio Paz is the first Six Organs album to feature the reverberations of a nylon string guitar). What really sets Chasny apart from the other modern Fahey worshipers is a willingness to accept a wider array of other guitarists into the pantheon — Peter Walker or Richard Youngs, for example. Sealed.
Metallic Diseases
(Holy Mountain - 1981) LP $14.50
Truly unhinged at times, dreamlike and understated at others , this reissue of Starfuckers' debut album from the late '80s fuses droning, hard rock with a gestalt that pushes it right over the cliff. Includes free download card with a bonus track, "Grade Zero."
Early Teeth
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Aggressive space from Finland. 2005 pressing with one track from Breathtaking Sounds Of Tivol (267 Lattajjaa 2003), two from Cyclobean Ways (Time-Lag Records 2004), and one from 267 Purkkia Liimaa (267 Lattajjaa 2003). Screen printed folder
Shoulda Zenith
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $18.00
Bypassing the lapsteel’s synonymy with lachrymose, innocuous rootzak, Shoulda Zenith goes on extragavant outward-bound tangents worthy of Sonny Sharrock
Wooden Shjips
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $20.00
“Tight-wound repeato psych guitar raunch” from 2007, says Siltblog, “With spoony (maybe even imaginary) percussion, surprisingly Rev-like keys, and vocals buried under burning driftwood.” Sealed
Megafauna
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $12.00
Sinister frailty, howling swells, and hissing static that combusts into crawling shock heaps, to the effect of Mayhem performing Twin Peaks incidentals in a prairie recorded by The KLF. A brief description casts them as black metal’s answer to Throbbing Gristle. The texture-based rendering of their compositions sails them on a strange sea between song and sound effect as it bobs along the waves like a dead man’s bottled message. Aspects of Goblin rehearsals in dead hills is interrupted as Monster Zero carves mountain sides with lightning breath. Oscillating leads pummel into churning riffs as if “Caledonia” was performed in an echo chamber near Lodi, New Jersey. The extrinsic properties of this work may result in disambiguation. Sealed
III
(Holy Mountain) Used LP $10.00
“Ornate sound-castles created with guitars, bass, drums, sax and Drew Adams’s inimitable vocals. The high point is Portland’s kings of angular progressive songcraft’s masterful take on the folk standard ‘Golden Ring Around the Susan Girl,’ which sounds like it was filtered through Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman.” Silkscreened folder. Insert. Edition of 350