Withered Foot
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE10) CDR $10.00
Commissioned by Dylan Nyoukis for his monthly Resonance Extra radio show Fae Ma Bit to Ur Bit, "Please Return to Your Seat" is an audio journal using material sourced from San Francisco, Australia, and New Zealand during Glass’s solo tour in October 2023 with People Skills. The 30-minute edit of the original 50-minute collage sutures together field recordings, noise improvised on found objects, processed fragments of live shows and other artists’ soundchecks, raw material, loops, treatments, and sounds prepared but not used for the shows. The ambience of air travel, tourism, nature, broadcast media, and chuffa dialogue are consistent background beds throughout. Snatches of candid conversations can be heard (with Michael Zulicki of the Alberts Basement label and with Messrs Russell, Yeats, and Morley of the Dead C), as well as montages of a studio interview with radio host Pat O’Brien of 3RRR in Melbourne and a workshop tour by electronics legend Nigel Bunn in Dunedin. Deconstructed versions of "Cane Toad Euthanasia" and "Spine Found in a Ditch Near Uluru" were first presented on the radio during the same tour — the former on O'Brien's 3RRR program The O'Tomorrow Show, and the latter on Hamish MacKenzie's 2BOB program Lost And Found Sounds.
Flying Squid Alert b/w I Swallowed A Guinea Pig
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) 7-inch $15.00
Found voices, appropriated music, and noise combos that'll give you the squeam. Fragments, loops, layers – two sound montages of disembodied everything. Released as a tour item for the June 2024 tour by Lara Allen (Heavenly Ten Stems, Caroliner, Manwich) and S. Glass (Bananafish, Glands of External Secretion, Bren't Lewiis). Includes postcard and insert. Edition of 300.
Indicate Damage Area
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Live recordings from Philadelphia Record Exchange (2017), Temescal Arts Center (2019), Canessa Gallery (2021), and Red Gate Arts Society (2018). Admired by Burning Star Core's C. Spencer Yeh for its rampant “parking garage logic.” Joe Murray of Posset values the “super subtle quivering and very arresting vocal pieces. It’s everything I wanted to be wrapped up during the nog fog.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Make Yourself Useless
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Electroacoustics, tape music, field recordings, loops, objects, non-musical music, and like that. As C. Lavender says, “There’s more than one way to play a piano with knives.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Motion To Vacate
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00
No special protection is required during exposure to the particle waves expelled by Glass from the inverted forehead of James Dean, counter-intuitive as that may seem. Loops, field recordings both found and provoked, media snippets, the dispassionate mashing of the moving parts of musical instruments, amplified objects, and electronic blobs throbbing and crackling under green moonlight all find their stripe in diffusions more splayed than whatever’s coming out of a lighthouse that doesn’t understand the assignment. With pacing quite comfortable for a lard-ass composer who flirts with incoherence but prefers the term “indefatigable,” Motion To Vacate rarely approaches the keeko-bleeko cut-up orgies of our Adderall nieces and nephews, settling instead into environments with suitably squishy platforms upon which to erect recitations of vocabulary words from a third-grader’s pop quiz, the butchered lyrics to “Impossible Dream,” and mosaic-style speeches suited to Antarctic statue dedications. The 24-minute “The Cost Of Parsimony Is Starvation” is presented here, a deconstructed version of which was first heard in Port Chalmers, New Zealand, at Lines of Flight in October 2023. Don’t be surprised that Glass was the only one at the festival to play amplified cabbage and drop tuned cockle shells into a metal bowl.
Thinking Of You, Naked
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Aiming for the tonality brut of something like Morton Feldman’s For Samuel Becket, S. Glass hits the bullseye of unintended targets such as Eleanor Parker’s malfunctioning electric wheelchair scene in Eye of the Cat, birds squawking as if getting crushed to death, and the rhythmically stunted remixes of “You Are My Love Angle” by ’80s Quebecois dubmeister Tad Quanphieu as Felix Nappledab. Which is about all one can realistically expect from electroacoustic sound collage after a sensuous night of Morris dancing. Seven new studio recordings — scraping, screeching, moaning, howling, recitations, voices, collages, loops, clunks, thuds, fwips, and reeeeeeeeer.
The Butcher Of Valencia
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Field recordings, guitar, voice, loops, sound processing, objects, excerpts from fails videos, radio, sulfur box, and synthesizer converging in a vortex of mutant ambience.
Ruined Again
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE04) split LP $20.00
Two tape pieces by The Dead C / A Handful of Dust gentleman on one side, using excerpts from texts on urbanism, recorded instrumental interludes, and electronics. On the flip, the side-long track by one of the mutants from Bren't Lewiis Ensemble combines fragments of keyboard drone, spastic violin, field recordings by Silvia Kastel and Joan Of Art, turntables, and diabolically uncooperative reel-to-reel tape. Insert includes companion texts “No: Your City” — Formulary For A New Christchurch” and “The Organ Courier And The Chinese Billionaire.” Cover art by Kate McRae. Edition of 200.
Fear Of Music / Berlin, With Love
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE01) 7-inch $10.00
The stamina-defying screamer of Japanese noise and longtime vocalist for Hijo Kaidan joins wrecker of civilization and one-third of The Dustbreeders for two sides of very pleasant unpleasantness. Henritzi’s improvised guitar-playing is the real surprise here, with its curiously cinema-conscious restraint, hovering around the perplexing intersection of an imaginary Giallo scored by Morricone and the calm brunch entertainment at a grim eastern European café. Quite a deviation from the “glorious, unholy racket” of his vinyl-noise trio. Junko, meanwhile, colors the foreground with her trademark bird-getting-strangled-by-a-dentist-on-a-chalkboard vocals (say whatever you want, comedian, she’s heard it all before) but here shrieks with almost zero adornment, to the point where she achieves an unusual variation on repetitive minimalism. The sublime tension between the two players forms a rarely heard, abject desperation that seems impossible to satisfy. Edition of 100.
SILVIA KASTEL / NINNI MORGIA / GARY SMITH
Brand II
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE03) LP $20.00
Free improv by two guitarists renowned for their extended technique work and consistently inventive experimentation, and female electronics vocalist who explores the outer reaches of the voice. Seven rustling matches of self-containment, as if imprisoned inside a Styrofoam-insulated sleeping bag. Electro-chitters and micro-fweent form semi-transparent mosaics on top of the high-res screech of glass tchochtkes melting from the inside out, nth generation birdsong bending in on itself along an event horizon, color-blocked abstractions of mechanical squirrels playing a kalimba, and wolf fetuses horking into a trumpet. With master percussionist sound sculptor Marcello Magliocchi. Includes insert. Edition of 175
At Home With The Lloyd Pack
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE02) LP $20.00
Dan Melchior, Pheromoans vocalist Russell Walker, Letha Rodman Melchior (ex-Ruby Falls, on keys, guitar, clarinet, viola), Anthony Allman (El Jesus De Magico, on tapes), and Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr (on ethereal vocalizations) seep into tapestries woven from Third And Final Report, chamber ensemble tuning strategies, reenactments of the minutes from staff meetings of The East Village Other, and Davey Williams dreaming of robots counting electric sheep. The debut full-length by Lloyd Pack, which follows up a most evolved seven-inch on Siltbreeze, is a total musical collage, built entirely from prerecorded contributions from the principals, who had no idea how their recordings would end up. The results by the unorthodox, Robitussin-y garage band, guided by heir traffic controller Melchior — inspired by Graham Lambkin, Luc Ferrari, Luc Marrianni, Prominent Disturbance, Yuzo Iwata, The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, Frank Bedal, Gus Coma, and many others — enable pulsating yet unresolved tangents to return from a walkabout bearing promises of increased salience of articulation. Includes a booklet of short stories by Melchior. Edition of 175. Scope out the foxy magic here: http://youtu.be/K1Cfohrxd-E
I’ll Judge You Later
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00
Cut-ups, assemblages, found voices and music loops, household pet karaoke, deadpan recitations of Queen, Beefheart, and the Buzzcocks, fondled and nuzzled into sound collages oozing fresher sauce than a failed samba lesson. Includes the five Decapitatío tracks released via Bandcamp in 2020 by the Italian label My Dance The Skull. “This reminds me of the monologues in the GTOs.” —WFMU listener Ridonkulous