Samling
(Krim Kram) 2xCD $18.00
Originally compiled as a two-cassette release by Archivio Diafònico in 2016, now reissued as a double CD for optimum playback at your next MRI scan, Samling documents the earlier, “noisier” years of Arv & Miljö, collecting all compilation appearances from the project’s inception in 2010 up to 2015. Gritty, claustrophobic sound that includes environmental recordings, primitive melodic synth tones, and fragile failing electronics.
Most Of The World Is Empty Space
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
On the live recording from pre-pandemic Vilnius, Lithuania, buzzing concrète sound events evolve slowly with percussive elements, cassette tape pause-button screech, and cheap microphones used as filters to channel the tape deck ghost drones, while the post-pandemic live recording from Leipzig, Germany, is a bit more of performance-based with tapes, cheap synthesizers swooshing in and out of the dictaphone sound palette, and the percussive sound of objects thrown around the room.
Text Pieces + Compositions for Prepared Strings and Objects
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Exposing the absurdities of everyday life,” summarizes MJE, “knowing of the cynicism that could ensue, and taking a complete 180 from that — joyous deconstruction.”
Blondie - Thanks For Sharing
(Krim Kram) CD $12.75
You know Andy Heck Boyd: wanted to write but typing caused too much pain (tendonitis), and so began to experiment with tape recording after getting into it around early 2017. Has never performed live, but has exhibited paintings at galleries in Seattle, Maine, NYC. Coupla comics to his name. Yeah, that’s the guy. He goes out on the daily with a tape recorder all the time, sometimes switches it up with Super-8 or drawing or collage work. You know how it is. Some tracks here were made using an amp, SK-1 keyboard, and microphone, lyrics composed on the spot. On another, the blood of a woodpecker caught by a friend’s cat is the muse. For others, a short dead-end road and a hiking trail in the Red River Gorge area are the stages where Heck “recorded my thoughts and improvised ideas, I like to perform in a sense, embellish or exaggerate things I see and observe, and I like to analyze layers wherever I go, layers of things that require looking at one thing or area slowly for a little bit, in the supermarket that day I was looking around the produce section at people smiling and some gathered in small groups talking and stuff, and saw glittery, cheap USA flags adorned everywhere around the bread and donuts near the bakery.”
Hand Signals
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
The debut release on this Ireland-based label is the first Mark-Knopfler-approved “real” CD by Bren’t Lewiis. Eleven disorienting tracks: heavily edited sound collage; Orchid-Spangiafora-style word play; malfunctioning, sputtering machines; instruments and objects that are blown, shaken, scraped, and generally sabotaged in various ways. You won’t know whether it’s intestines, brains, or macaroni salad. If the CIA had access to this kind of arsenal during MKUltra, who knows what kind of damage they could have inflicted.
Dumb Tangerine Dream
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
Extended snart-scapes where loops. distressed scroichles, outsider guitar improv, and electronic pasta (al dente) converge in the back of the bus, with the animals and prisoners. Four tracks, all previously released as limited edition 3-inch CDRs. With inserts.
Play Drums
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
All acoustic follow-up to Passenger (tsss tapes, 2023), dedicated to Tim Barnes.
Roads
(Krim Kram) CD $13.00
Solo percussion by this noted resident of the worlds of free improvisation, new music, electro-acoustic music, and noise, described by Decy as “subtle, generous, extremely dexterous and keeps showing up some new layer with each listen.”
ANTOINE CHESSEX / DAVE PHILLIPS
Vrhältnis
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
Originally recorded in Switzerland, filed away, and then reworked, manipulated, layered and decomposed in Zürich and in Thailand 20 years later, the obvious point of entry is musique concrète with strong noise and heavy electronics elements, yet the strange ritual unfolding here possesses a particular distant quality — the creators’ specific gravity and distinct compositional traits concealed behind accumulating densities. Running through both pieces is a haunting vocal presence drawn from the Silvesterchlausen tradition of northeastern Switzerland — an ancient Alpine ritual of winter processions — raw and untethered, arriving from no fixed point, eerie and unmoored. Deep in the forest, spectral voices surface and dissolve.
Virgin Brood
(Krim Kram) LP $30.00
In which Thomas LaRoche complements his side hustles (insect breeder and secondhand book seller).
No One Bull Left Behind
(Krim Kram) CD $13.50
Belfast-born, Swiss-based artist, Stuart McCune expands upon techniques explored in previous releases, offering a wide palette of sounds and compositional approaches. The album opens with what Krim Kram’s grandmother, a lifelong harsh noise aficionado, would have described as an absolute banger, a roaring behemoth of joyous blasting, before subtly shifting gear to more experimental ground. There is a very singular musical quality to each of the tracks, each containing its own distinctive character. And while the album as a whole certainly falls within the harsh noise realm, the lines between noise and musicality are continuously blurred.
Dinosaurs WIth Horns
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
The woozy magic of this first-time CD reissue combines musical qualities with discombobulated weirdness. Spontaneous synchronicities emerge as plunderphonic vinyl meets loops and Optigan rhythms. Dinosaurs with Horns crawled out of this surreal swamp, galumphing into the hazy LA smog, and have been bombastically wandering since 1984. Includes color pics from the recording sessions.
DIURNAL BURDENS / ANDREW M. JARVIS
Precedes
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
Precedes commingles, splices, folds, hacks, jolts, and smears blank dictaphone, cassette, reel-to-reel, and magnetic sheets into a rather sprawling and dynamic 40-minute album.
Dressing
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
After about a decade of activity in the visual arts, Dublin-based Kevin Kirwan jumps into experimental sound using field recordings, found objects, feedback and tape manipulation. His noise is restrained and textural with occasional melodic undercurrents. Krim Kram’s CD reissues two cassettes originally self-released in editions of 15 in 2021, described by S. Grey as “concise explorations of materiality and physicality via hard-panned, lumbering slow-burn buzz and cut up blasts of spidery frequencies [with] an exquisite sense of timing.”
Nest
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
“NEST is an expression of how I feel about home as refuge, of which everyone is deserving, but it’s also an expression of my deep sadness about the seizure of home, occupation of land, and the violence of colonization,” explains Amanda Feery. “NEST is a Mass for the Tenant, not a Mass in the traditional sense, but I see the piece as a Mass for the tenants of the past and the present. NEST is also a critical response to the theme of home in Éamon de Valera’s 1943 radio address, ‘On Language and the Irish Nation.’ With a libretto by Eimear Walshe, the line, ‘they come to make a ruin’ repeats throughout the piece like a congregational response. A line that traverses periods and regions, it conjures different scenarios, from landlords to military forces to hired goons. The piece went in an unconscious musical direction of a Mass, channeling de Valera’s sermon-like delivery of his 1943 broadcast, but I have realized I was getting at something else. Our relationships with where we live and where we call home, our ‘nest,’ can embody a certain sacredness, even when those who have powers over where we live do not treat it as such. NEST carries a double meaning for this reason; it can be a place of total refuge and comfort, but it can also represent the seizure of property, of illegal occupation, and colonization. The critical relationship with de Valera’s antiquated, idealistic notion of the home is placed in stark contrast with the inherent violence of the privatization of shelter and the disruption of the nest.”
Breaks
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
Debut solo CD by Wuhan-born, London-based artist who also performs in the duos Oishi (with Ren Shang) and ecm (with Joseph Khan). Four lean and sinewy improvisations —tightly controlled buzzing and rippling electric currents; pointillistic, splintering rhythms and textures; sparse, jagged incursions; and wiry, static blasts — that explore “rhythmic patterns from dusty potentiometers and dirty electronic circuits in modular synthesis improvisation.”
Discon
(Krim Kram) CD $12.00
One thing that has been a constant factor for Kapotte Muziek since its formation in 1984 is the recycling of sound. In the first phase, Christian Nijs recorded sounds and instruments, and Frans de Waard created collages using these recordings. Each of the 13 pieces here is created by cutting, pasting, superimposing, and editing one concert. No other electronic treatments were used, no granular synthesis, etc. The cover is a collage from the booklet that came with Kapotte Muziek’s Columbus, Ohio, CDR (Gameboy 2004), which was created from a black and white painting for which de Waard exchanged merchandise with an unknown painter at that concert.
Obtain By Sacrifice
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
The Montréal monster completes another chapter and verse in the life Godzilla would choose for him. Alan Bloor’s nauseating feedback and bio-volcanic growls are abominations to the natural world, with raw electricity spraying damage and sickness across plateaus and into valleys, and of course the saturated clang of pulverized metal grinding jagged holes into your neck like the most sarcastic tracheotomy lesson ever.
Don’t Let Me Be A Burden
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
“In Uptown Bogland things sound great ‘cardboard humans fall to pieces’ was top-forty and the money was rolling in I should not have trusted dad I knew his weakness for the horse god but I am Dan Koelacanth I am a simple man I do not use spell check auto-correct I don’t monitor levels or worry about excessive treble this CD from the Krim Kram label may bring trouble to your door so tool-up ready don’t let the unexpected topple your sanity be caring generous loving do not be swayed by the habits of monsters YES this audio recording contains one million edits shoved left shoved right YES it is an atrocity unlistenable noise how can someone shout so much when their gob is full of mud IS IT ALL A MISTAKE” —Dai K
The Root, The Interim
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
This tape composition in four parts draws on the influences of musique concrète, cinema, and dub. Constructed over 14 months in 2022-3, it is a tour of parks, hotels, kitchens, churches, utility rooms. Obstacles are encountered; objects tested, discarded or transported from one space to another; recordings endlessly played back and forth through different media; song fragments forgotten and remembered; voluntaries recorded on a Foley stage.
Can Yr Ysgol
(Krim Kram) Cassette $9.75
Rhythmic sounds both dissonant and harmonious by Lauren de Sá Naylor and Hilary Knott, who use voices, loops, field recordings, bells, drums and harmoniums. c60
FABIAN LÖWENBRÜCK / DANIEL LÖWENBRÜCK
Das Lebacher Orgelwerk - Weihnachtsoratorium (LWV 156)
(Krim Kram) CD $12.75
Performed December 26th, 2006 on the Hugo Meyer organ of the Evangelische Kirche in Lebach, Germany.
LUCIANO MAGGIORE / MICHAEL SPEERS
Necesse Est Numquam Revelare Stercorem Tuum
(Krim Kram) CD $13.00
Speers works with natural and synthetic sound material — drums, computer, microphones, feedback; the use of speakers and playback devices (samplers, CD players, walkmans, tape recorders) characterize the work of Maggiore, whose main interests include mechanisms of sound diffusion, performance, repetition, endurance, non-human animal languages, dance, and folklore. Together the duo’s music contemplates the kernel of black metal.
Jasu Jest
(Krim Kram) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
The debut release by Dressing and Uoerhe seamlessly blends broken textural tape noise, magnetic wobble, faint buried melodies, fragments of distant voices and incidental sounds, and obscured domestic and field recordings. This mysterious murky tape music is an incredibly accomplished first statement akin to Hands To, Yeast Culture, early Small Cruel Party. C20
A Merchant’s Nightmare
(Krim Kram) CD $15.00
The nine spontaneous explorations of decrepit and barren, post-industrial playgrounds (shabby and halfway burnt to the ground) by this Berlin trio vaguely align with 20th century Italian improv and Morricone’s more far-out soundtracks, while also bringing to mind a European variant of weird and deconstructed jazz, strong on melody, fuzzy surface work, and trance-inducing, half-dissociated dream logic. Ancient and sci-fi, soothing and abrasive.
Dives Headfirst Into Punk Rock 1978/79
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
Krim Kram’s expanded CD reissue of the cassette first issued on Pigface Records in 2015 documents the earliest recordings of Smegma performing live as part of the Portland punk rock / new wave scene (Myrtle Tickner, Jerry A. and Pig Champion from Poison Idea would all later go on to play with the band at various stages throughout the 80s and 90s). Included are the complete Flashcards and Disco Diarrhea 7s, both originally self-released on Pigface Records in 1979.
Everything Lost In The Image
(Krim Kram) Cassette $10.75
Analogue synthesizer-based music with an emphasis on low resonant bass tones and slow sound progressions, continuing threads explored by the Ireland native in previous solo works — subtlety rendered to near inertia, meditation on mundanity, intuitive composition in avoidance of stylistic models. It is sometimes austere, sometimes visceral, often beautiful.
The Big Two
(Krim Kram) CD $13.25
The final curtain on two decades of heroic toil by Ali Robertson and Malcy Duff in the experimental / noise / improv / no-audience underground combines elements of post-Fluxus performance art and absurdist theater with a thoroughly Luddite sound palette (via a flea market’s worth of dismantled instruments, household detritus, and recontextualized children’s toys). Their well-developed colloquial Gesamtkunstwerk blurs the lines between sound, performance, theater, and life.
Étreinte
(Krim Kram) CD $13.86
Jean-Baptiste Lévêque’s first CD follows a string of excellent tapes on Satatuhatta, Narcolepsia, and Bent Window Records. Meticulously executed harsh noise compositions made with tapes, effects, microphones, junk metal and computer. for-panel digisleeve with a color poster.