Failing Lights
(Intransitive - INT036) CD $15.00
(Intransitive - INT036) Used CD $6.00
Mike Connelly (Wolf Eyes, Hair Police) evokes bleak electronic atmospheres, suffocating dread, and sinewy horror with a fine-tuned beauty embedded in its darkness. Connelly’s self-released cassettes and CDRs of rough drones, detuned improvised grit, blown-out burl, and unstable acoustics tend to vanish quickly; Intransitive’s CD, the first one widely available, is sure to become a defining statement. The single piece -- in five sections -- begins with disquieting, barren negative space, creeps forward, steadily dispenses sheets of diffuse throat-scratch and skittering strings, and culminates in a blast of molten organ.
Sever
(Intransitive - INT032) Used CD $4.00
Evocative, highly visual drone music, layers upon organic layers in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still. On the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer Jim Haynes, the process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action.
Asylum Lunaticum
(Intransitive - INT033) Used CD $5.00
Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, the music of Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär is deceptively simple -- typically created using their voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone. Their astonishing suburban dramas are both charming and psychotic, sometimes at the same time. The husband-and-wife duo have self-published their dada-esque sound poetry experiments on small-edition lathe-cut LPs, tapes, and CDRs for years, usually adorning them with elaborate junk sculptures and paintings. Recommended if you'd rather spend the big bucks on food and rent and you're into Henri Chopin, Raymond Dijkstra, Ultra Eczema, Paul McCarthy, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Mike Kelley, LAFMS, Dylan Nyoukis, Aaron Dilloway.
Love Me Two Times
(Intransitive - INT026) 2xCD $19.50 (Out-of-stock)
This twenty-three-track double-CD is the result of six years of live and studio collaboration between the Boston improvising duo of Bhob Rainey (soprano sax) and Greg Kelley (trumpet) with tape-loop operator/electronics whiz of some renown Jason Lescalleet. Recorded at a wide range of venues with correspondingly varied attacks (not to mention degrees of fidelity), Love Me Two Times provides as comprehensive a picture as is likely feasible of these three, from the microscopically subtle to blood smeared yawps, from gorgeously woven drones to, well, Julia Child.
LIONEL MARCHETTI / SEIJIRO MURAYAMA
Hatali Atsalei (L’Echange des Yeux)
(Intransitive - INT031) CD $13.00
For his second album on Intransitive, Lionel Marchetti returns to his favorite subject: music as an essential element of ritual and ecstatic trance states. Unlike his Knud un Nom du Serpent CD (to be reissued in Spring 2008), which offers a critique of avant-garde and popular music as an extension of the transcendental impulse, Hatali Atsalei is more literally an experience of ritual. Using percussion, wind instruments, field recordings of natural sounds, and most importantly the voice of collaborator Seijiro Murayama, Marchetti once again gives us a multi-leveled engagement with the elemental urge to converse with nature and to use sound as a means to achieve altered states of consciousness. Referencing narrative radio art, musique concrete and acoustic ecology, Hatali Atsalei is a fascinating work that reveals more layers with each listen.
Knud un Nom de Serpent (Le Cercle des Entrailles)
(Intransitive - INT014) Used CD $4.00
Marchetti's classic album of harrowing tape music was originally released Intransitive in 1999, quickly sold out, and remains the most requested title in the label's catalog. This reissue boasts a new cover design and liner notes by Bhob Rainey (nmperign, The BSC). Knud un Nom de Serpent illustrates Marchetti's idea of popular music as shamanic ritual, a gateway to ecstatic altered states. Armed with fierce wit and a razor blade, he smashes together sounds from all over the world into a hallucinatory cyclone of Jamaican reggae, French chanson, American avant-garde vocalists, Thai pop songs, nature recordings, spoken text, and more. The result is a chilling work of furious, obliquely narrative tape-collage and tense, frightening scenes.
Wonders Never Cease
(Intransitive - INT027) CD $8.00
Big, beautiful, opiate drones by this Boston artist, vaguely in the same vein as Keith Fullerton Whitman, Birchville Cat Motel, Greg Davis, Jonathan Coleclough, but more melodic, assertive and rough than the stuff to which it seems similar. This is the first thing by Murray written to be a single statement (as opposed to a collection of tracks or quick experiments). It has a real epic quality that is pretty awesome.
Dark Garden
(Intransitive - INT029) CD $13.00
Idiosyncratic analog buzz by Hiroshi Kumakiri and Tagomago. This album of short, song-like home-made synthesizer pieces might take its cues from manga, science fiction, early electronic music, and minimal techno but the Tokyo duo is overall inexplicable. Dark Garden assimilates fractured beats, stuttering pulses, naked static, and impatient drones. Synth builder Kumakiri describes spirits that lurk in the shadows and watch people go about their lives, existing in a parallel world that brings to mind fairy tales and myth. Nerve Net Noise’s music is similarly just out of reach, present in the natural world but not quite a part of it. For fans of Klaus Schultze, Jessica Rylan, Henri Pousseur, or Pan Sonic. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2008
Ommatidia
(Intransitive - int035) Used CD $4.00
“The first studio album as an unaccompanied duo by Greg Kelley (trumpet) and Bhob Rainey (soprano sax) … is spare and peerlessly inventive as always, but the mood remains light and joyful, with a subtle undercurrent of absurd humor…. [G]usts of breath, percussive splatter, and controlled explosions form six succinct pieces that feel alive and vital, while still speaking in nmperign’s utterly unique … language.”
Exactly What You Lost
(Intransitive - INT028) CD $13.50
Seht is one of the post-Corpus Hermeticum bands whose peers are Birchville Cat Motel, Peter Wright, A.M., and folks like that. Stephen Clover and Boston artist Howard Stelzer first swapped recordings from their respective locales -- cars going by, planes overhead, birds in the bushes, just humdrum suburban stuff. Next, the recording of the NZ birds were played in Boston’s trees and re-recorded as the local birds sang along with the foreign tweets. Likewise, tapes of Boston cars going by were mixed with NZ cars going by. After it was all processed, scrambled and reassembled, it wound up having a certain melancholy feel. A cassette-blurp mess straightens out steadily until it’s just a flat line and the tap tap tap of a dying tape deck motor. A party record, basically.
Bond Inlets
(Intransitive - INT030) CD $13.00
Ten years after Stelzer’s debut CD, Stone Blind (Intransitive, 1997), Bond Inlets dissects the source sounds of that work and filters it through the lens of the interceding decade in order to build a piece that more accurately reflects what his intentions were then and what his aesthetic is today. His first widely available solo cassette-tape composition, Bond Inlets is a subtly emotional work of foreground drone that beats its head against the plastic walls of cassette-tape technology, laying bare the physicality of the process of its creation. The dying motors of cassette players, tape-saturated percussion, and blown-out condenser-mic wail mix with elements of new live improvisations and local field recordings. There is an implacable melancholy to Bond Inlets, with oceans full of no-fidelity murk, and evocative hiss, and fragments of distant melodies that surface only to be subsumed again into the grime.
1975
(Intransitive - INT037) CD $13.00
Debut solo album of unsettling electro-acoustic miniatures and tightly-coiled, crackling electronic ambience, more vertical than horizontal, a step away from Yeh's familiar violin-and-vocal improv, the rock/noise Burning Star Core, and recent forays into pop music. This is sensual abstract music with a light touch, a confident minimalism that reveals unsettling depth, sharp corners, and playful malevolence with repeat listens.