The Meta Mega
(Melon Expander - ME007) CD $13.50
In January 2007, seven-year-old Sienna Sol hosted a jam at her family's Three Kings Day party. Sienna and her friends explored the tickly extra-terrestrial voices of Old Mr. Grassi (an electronic instrument designed by Ciat-Lonbarde's Peter Blasser); an active six months followed during which Sienna and her nine-year-old friend Valentin partook of free jams on analog electronics, rock instruments, amplified bicycle, microphones, and surreal stream-of-consciousness storytelling that is image-inducing, playful, and at times, haunting. Experimenting with most of these instruments and organized-sound concepts for the first time, the duo's raw intuitive creativity surpasses the outer limits of what is usually heard in “children's music.”
Celadonia
(Melon Expander - ME008) CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Selected from hundreds of hours of solo material and collaborations with Petra Haden (That Dog, Decemberists, Foo Fighters), Rick Potts (Solid Eye, Dinosaurs With Horns, LAFMS) and Leticia Castaneda, Bryan Eubanks, and Joe Foster (Seoul, Korea), Celadonia is the first substantial release of Brown's electronic and electro-acoustic music. Working primarily with magnetic tape, analog synthesizers, organ, contact microphones, various resonant objects and signal processors, these extended improvisations were recorded and sculpted into compositions between 2002 and 2006. At times the magnetic tape loop techniques employed seem to stem from seeds planted by pioneering tape manipulator and Zen-humorist Henry Jacobs, Terry Riley and his time-lag-accumulator method or the one-man Melon Expander house-band, Joseph Hammer. Fused with other electronic systems created to exist as sustainable yet pliable sound fields, these sprawling cinemas-for-the-ear embody anything from ghostly distant memories to funhouse mirror refraction to enveloping shimmering cyclones. Brown has also recorded and/or performed with Points of Friction, Paramecial Wedding, Joe Potts, Joseph Hammer, G.E. Stinson, Tom Recchion, Albert Ortega, Loachfillet, John Wiese / Sissy Spacek, Johannes Bergmark, Smegma, Ezra Buchla, Leticia Castaneda, Lionel Marchetti, Giussepe Ilasi, Jerome Noetinger, Barry Conley, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Shields, Los Cincos/ Syncopation, Martian Mellows and Gasp among many others.
Shining Path
(Melon Expander) CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Live sampling pioneer Thomas Dimuzio and tape-loop maestro Joseph Hammer (Solid Eye) swallow audiences with dark explorations of sound. They specialize in a symbiotic sound process as they continually loop, reloop, sample and resample within an interactive feedback circuit linking both artists. Nearly every aspect of Dimmer's live performances grace The Shining Path, yet this is not a live document, but rather a pastiche and reworking of everything Dimmer has accomplished in their years of performing as a duo. Recursive circuits meld into rich and seething sonic masses with subtle waves pulsing sound within sound. The Shining Path suspends the listener over dim and dank planes on an aural trip spanning and scanning from a celestial vista.
Return of the Disco-Aristo-Sarcophagus
(Melon Expander - ME006) CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Since 1983's self-titled cassette release on The Solid Eye label, Rick Potts and Joseph Hammer have delicately dispensed laughing-gas-balloon-animals-go-pop music as Dinosaurs With Horns. This cryptic LAFMS-related group occurred during and in between periods of playing with Points of Friction, Steaming Coils and Solid Eye. Spencer Savage and/or Tom Recchion played with them in the mid-'80s and continue intermittently since. A smattering of Dinosaurs With Horns material appears on various compilations and limited cassettes and CDRs, but Return of the Disco-Aristo-Sarcophagus is the first full length CD, recorded November 2000 on KXLU and January 2007 at the LACE Gallery in Hollywood. It is the perfect soundtrack to a snorkeling dream or stumbling down the stairs with berries and cream. Obviously. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2008.
Dynasty Suites
(Melon Expander) CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Solid Eye's Joseph Hammer cites receiving more than one AM radio station at the same time and an episode of '70s TV show Land of the Giants, the one where astronauts use tape loops to thwart alien tyrants, as a couple of his musical influences. His unique utilization of consumer audio technology, tape loops, samplers and analog synthesizers yilelds compelling and varied musical expressions. Since 1980, he has performed and recorded with Points of Friction, Dinosaurs With Horns, Solid Eye, Blue Daisies, Steaming Coils, Debt of Nature (which became Medicine), Vector 3 Niner, Paramecial Wedding, Kitten Sparkles and Dimmer. Dynasty Suites is Hammer’s first solo CD, 51 minutes of real-time tape loops certain to scramble your eggs.
Totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973
(Melon Expander) 2xCD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Warner Jepson filled over 200 reels of quarter-inch tape with electronic sounds at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, Mills College and The National Center for Experiments in Television. Some were used as soundtracks for theater productions and art films, some were heard ephemerally at art galleries, parties and happenings in the late '60s and early '70s, but only the soundtrack to Totentanz, a theater work by Carlos Carvajal, was ever released (300 copies on LP in 1971). Melon Expander's 2xCD reissue of that LP includes plenty of other pieces unheard by anyone in the past thirty years -- late '50s musique concrete experiments; rhythmic, prepared-piano-and-tape pieces; and sprawling, meditative sound paintings done on the 100 and 200 series Buchla synthesizers. With liner notes by the composer. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2008
Afterlife DNA Fingerpainting
(Melon Expander - ME003) CD $13.50
When Points of Friction formed in January of 1981, they had no formal musical training (or even knowledge of freely improvised music) and relied on their voices and whatever else was at hand -- wire mesh, sheet plastic, an old guitar, etc. Gradually the group acquired electric instruments, toy keyboards, multi-track tape recorders, and pedal effects, and moved toward a more processed sound, informed by groups such as Faust, Cluster, Nurse with Wound, Dome, This Heat, Can, AMM, Fripp and Eno, and Negitivland. After a 20-year hiatus Joseph Hammer, Damian Bisciglia (Agog), Tim Alexander, and Kenny Ryman reformed with Mitchell Brown and dropped this, their third official release.
Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom
(Melon Expander) Used CD $13.50 (Out-of-stock)
Joseph Hammer, Rick Potts and Steve Thomsen have each spent 25+ years exploring various avenues of music described by their 1970s collective, the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) as "avant-schmaltz." With an ear for unsettling detail, Solid Eye suspends the listener in a lurching, oozing, hallucinatory river of sound that unfolds with its own peculiar sense of internal logic. Neither fish nor fowl, their aesthetic impulses bear scant resemblance to the dominant modes and methods that govern the domain of much contemporary experimental music. This surrealist cabal immerses itself in the creation of a pata-physical metaphysic, a slippery, elusive territory where the profound is coaxed from the ludicrous and the seemingly innocuous is inverted into the preternaturally haunting... a cosmology where the absurd, the uncanny and the unsettling coalesce, the result distilled into a sense-deforming, reality-eroding, alchemical elixir. Sealed