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(Medama) Paperback book + DVD $35.00
In the book: 100 pages of otherwise unpublished photos and interviews in Japanese and English. On the DVD: all 178 minutes of the quintet’s final performance with Yasushi Ozawa, who passed away in 2008. This collective improvisation project of former Kosugi pupils also includes Kazuo Imai (who studied guitar with Takayanagi from 1972 to 1985), tape music master Tomonao Koshikawa, designer of sensor-centric installations and sound systems Kei Shii, and founder of late ’70s improv group Gap Masami Tada. Preview the DVD here: https://youtu.be/eDyMJIkFd7g
Inspired By Actual Events
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette + 3 x 3in CDR $26.00 (Out-of-stock)
A modest treasure box of audio oddities and WTF constructions. The 3-inch CDR Lobster Dildos contains four new blithers that could easily pass for the soundtrack to scary parts of a TV show about the paranormal. You know, with the distressed breathing and the uncanny metallic grinding, unnerving assurances, 1930s melodrama, unnatural chittering, left-handed shredding and distortion ejaculate, bio-mechanical threat blurts, and clusters of passion-damaged voices competing to get their bizarre assertions heard. A second 3-inch CDR extracts the audio from footage of a Bren’t Lewiis live show in 1984 in support of the so-called Mad Bombers. Viewers of Tusk TV from the golden era of Covid lockdown might recall seeing resurrected VHF footage of this clatter-rich caterwaul. Minus the visuals and left with little more than the sound of ramshackle simian-grade percussion and an audience that is clearly more interested in their own conversations than the off-center thwacking of scruffy would-be surrealists, one can pinpoint the moment that obsolescence of grandeur became a manifesto. And then a third, “value-addled” 3-inch CDR uses the Mad Bombers audio as a foundation for wild additions, brute subtractions, and EQ shenanigans. Fresh into their trial separation from Usurper, Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson team up with Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos for the collaborative cassette Lewsurpiia. Eight tracks, 38 minutes, electroacoustic AF, tape cut-ups and plentiful narrative delirium, the Wizard of Oz staged in an antique mall. Also included is a 28pp comic book Many Hands Make Light Work, which re-purposes an old Jack Chick morality tract with all new BuFMS-centric text. It’s a bona fide Easter egg hunt where a disgruntled puritan storms through a methy suburb in search of coherence, buttressed at either end by a transcript of Tielens’s early ’80s doctrine chat with an unsuspecting evangelist knob. A real page-turner. To aid in keeping the Chocolate Monk customer’s consumption conspicuous, the box also includes a small enamel lapel pin. Follow-up selfies are your responsibility. There’s also a postcard adorned with eccentric art of a sort all returning champions would expect, plus miscellaneous scraps sourced from the lost-and-found box at a California public library. Hand-stamped edition of 75
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Background Noise For Eating Soup
(Chocolate Monk) Magazine + CDR $12.75 (Out-of-stock)
Demented audio and heavy tape cut-up with additional gadget malarky run wild on the disc, while visual collage in the 24-page full-color booklet turns old magazine scraps and such into new wonder for your peepers. All praise to the scissors. Edition of 54
Dritte Atombombe Auf Japan
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Almost 30 years on from his previous Chocolate Monk release, Kimihide Kusafuka returns with a blistering set of in-the-red noise goodness guaranteed to put the pep back in your step while clearing your mind of society’s gunk. Heavy huffing is recommended. Live sounds by modular synth and delay and reverb only. No distortion, fuzz, or overdrive pedals. Edition of 60