Rocker #5
(No Rent) Magazine $12.00
Interviews with The Rita, Agonal Breathing, and Xiu Xiu, plus a portrait of Alex Chesney by Renée Mendoza Haran, and Bryan Gilroy of Viodre on the early days of NY noise collective Red Light District. 76pp
Moonrise Over Legends Gym
(Chocolate Monk - choc.618) CDR $8.00
“Yes, yes, this gunk is gonna smear perfectly amongst all you Choco Monk lunkz,” weary Paul Magree assures us. “It’s a solo debut (sort of, if you exclude the self-released stuff) Mike Holland, one half of noise amateurs Wellness Regime and full-time aural dissolver. Skittish and heavy it is, Holland’s avant sniffer hoovering up all sorts of debris from his metropolitan surroundings. If these mournful yowls and gristly heaves seem initially to push molecular nihilism into your lobes, further exposure peels back these blistered surfaces to reveal a carnivalesque delight in the chaos of urban life. Madness, bro, but this Kinver Pond guy loves it, his antennae always set to the ‘on’ position, continually flipping the jostling carnage of our reality into deep cuts of topographical collage. Back in the day you’d need a room full of mainframes in a basement in Paris to get this kind of musique concrète jibber-jabber, but fortunately for us, Kinver Pond’s access to the means of production is far less arduous. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, babycakes. That’s what gets results.” Edition of 60
Harsh 70s Reality
(Siltbreeze - SB1112) 2xLP $30.00
Originally released in April 1992, Harsh 70s Reality conspired with Twin Infinitives and Lake to slaughter rock music in its sleep with a tremendous grinding thud. Described by one freelance poet as "a garbage truck backing over the abyss," this 2024 reissue is remastered by Josh Stevenson. Regular jacket with insert.
This Is Not A Tape
(Chocolate Monk - choc.621) CDR $8.00
Part split, part collaboration of audio diary gubbins, in which Spencer first turn their back on their usual “sound artsy” style and embrace the joy of a new tape player, framing everyday domestic nonsense with ferricobalt and asking us to come graze on the shrubbery of failure. Andy Heck Boyd responds with insights from his digs out west, including a rare appearance by Uncle Dog & The Sickos. The disc ends with a 12-minute collaboration that shines a spotlight on the “special relationship,” sweet Transatlantic hiss and wonk. God save the beans.
III
(Chocolate Monk - choc.619) CDR $8.00
Of the bucolic-uncanny / leaving things in the sun, Psanck III swings like an ADHD Necks. Careful listening but none too reverent. Horns, strings, electronic flotsam and, dare I say, jetsam. Psanck are an improvising band but more in the sense of sounding like field mice somehow tasked with making themes for children’s TV shows. Musicians, surely, but ones that have set their sights on wow and flutter amongst the melodic sprinkling. Edition of 60
Card Mango #3
(Chocolate Monk - choc.620) Magazine + CDR $13.00
“You may be wondering where your latest issue of card mango had got to,” says R R-S, “For it did not arrive through your letterbox during this past frightful winter. Fear not, as issue 3 is a special edition.” Full-color, bonus disc of the hottest video game of the year — Boxing Barnies. But whats so special about it? Well not only is it in full colour but it also comes with a bonus disc of the hottest video game of the year Boxing Barnies. Numbered edition of 60
Rocker #4
(No Rent) Magazine $12.00
Interviews with Kyle Flanagan, Karl Ekdahl, and the world's #1 Beavis and Butt-Head collector Sean Beard; Know Thyself, part two of Dan Timlin’s history of Hillbilly music, from Riley Puckett to Willie Nelson; Haters photo gallery courtesy of G.X. Jupitter-Larson; live performance reviews and photo gallery by Door. 68pp
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.”
The Key To The Seven Gates Of Heaven is Love
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Another relief cascade from this beloved mountain mystic who can atomize the ambiguity and hateful confusion that eat away at your psyche by a mere twitch of his eyebrow. If you’re not grateful, piss off. Emmert’s tremolo-ruffled drone-adjacent porch gaze favors episodic, self-contained constructs with little use for large, dramatic jumps and twists. Those of us who appreciate an all-consuming application of The Hard Soothe have known this since Dome covered “Flying” and replaced the pastel industrialism with the barn rock sound of the first Modern Lovers album. Join us. If Studio Ghibli would have a look at the Licensing Agreements page on Chocolate Monk’s website, they’d realize they could get Miyazaki’s upcoming anime about a justice-enforcing capybara soundtracked for the little more than the cost of a handful of shiny beads. The steady, micro-stated clunk of percussive objects here, what someone somewhere might refer to as drumming, backstop reverberations colored by the elusive mysticism of an Appalachian Gamelan appreciation society ploinking upstream. Each track glides into view, drifts across the panorama and exits into the blurry mosaic of silence without once making eye contact. Edition of 60
Arboreal Frippery
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Ohio-based tape manipulator Tynan Krakoff returns with over 60 minutes of memory-mulching sound stew. The main aural sources stem from a momentous summer 2009 train-hopping / hitchhiking trip around America’s West Coast with his brother Max, a seminal coming-of-age experience during which Tynan carried a microcassette pocket recorder and captured hours of raw audio. These memories are collaged and juxtaposed with found tapes and other family recordings, touching upon themes of altered states and trips; exploring the tension between paranoia, elation, and revelation, holding space for each. “The first song I made was actually the album closer,” he explains. “ ‘Trainwreck Tunnel’ is built around a sample of my brother telling a train story from earlier in that trip. After rediscovering that particular tape in my old shoebox from trips past, I realized it fits perfectly into the Meadow Argus universe, which is all about tapping into nostalgia and jumbled memories. An ethereal blending of the past, present, and future.” Edition of 60
Chimerism
(Adhuman) 2xCD $20.00
Based in Hamilton, Ontario, and operating with scant regard for the cultivation of listenership or exposure, Nathan Ivanco bears similarities to the mid-00s era of grimy USA basement noise and home taping, interpreted perhaps by the lo-fi obscurantism of fellow countrymen Korea Undok Group or the equally murky Makade Star outfit. Mangled, stripped-back samples are subjected to the crudest of electronic processing, while washed-out ambience saturated with tape hiss and eerie recurring motifs gently propel themselves across multiple tracks. Elsewhere more outwardly experimental and freeform works appear in the mix. Quiet sophistication is evident in the arrangements and pacing, which evoking the most classical instincts of concrete sound obsession even within such deeply homemade sonic environs. Presented in free-flowing sequence across both discs, the formerly distinct tracks play out in a longer form which lends new shape and context to the music. Despite sitting firmly in ‘reissue’ territory, Chimerism offers a refreshing angle from which to indulge in Shadow Pattern’s rough beauty and may well highlight areas of the project’s vision which have until now gone unnoticed. All music originally recorded during 2019-2023 and previously released on Hamilton Tapes and Radiant Clay Records
Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs
(Adhuman) CD $15.00
As if to kick the existing ideas of Syed Kamran Ali’s Harappian Night Recordings work into all new orbits of singularity, Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs wrenches a dense throng of voices, electronics and busted instrumentation thrashing and wailing through filters of avant-psychedelic glimmer, mock exotica and atrophied, fusion-esque sheen. A dry, mysterious spoken prose underpins the sonics, appearing to speak in terms of daunting geopolitical allusions in one breath, then glib, tongue-in-cheek piss-taking sarcasm the next. These narratives pull you immediately into what feels like an entire universe of vivid though scarcely penetrable imagery, begging to be decoded and explored in detail. Yet even through repeat listens of this enticing work it is difficult to fathom exactly the type of thinking this music has sprung from. Far too crude and homespun to be the product of arch cultural strategy, the blown-out fidelity is indicative of untarnished, DIY spontaneity and the willingness to let things emerge as they will. Clear as day from the moment of playback, however, is a confident, fully realized other-worldliness to this music that is anything but accidental.
You Are Not Alone
(Adhuman) CD $15.00
Even within an already microscopic community of oddballs resident among Brighton’s experimental art and music underground, Teignmouth Electron has continually stood way out on its own through deceptively crafted, conceptually guided works drenched in fun, bizarre and often profound sentimental atmosphere. With You Are Not Alone, Maureen Hallomas — otherwise known for involvement in projects like Polly Shang Kuan Band, Rubber Demon, Leopard Leg, Men Oh Pause and more — takes us back in time via two archival pieces derived from tape recordings predating the official existence of the project. Material from a cassette made in 2001 is presented here as “From Beyond the Attic,” a pair of tracks in which a single possessed tape walkman acts as conduit for a symphony of broken electromagnetic noise and interference. Punctuating the murk are snatches of barely discernible radio broadcasts and, shockingly, nearby phone conversations somehow picked up and voyeuristically captured on the tape unbeknownst to the callers. Where these tracks are presented largely unedited and unadorned, “Science TAC” sees a more compositional strategy put to work, with Hallomas pulling apart, processing and rearranging a 1999 recording of herself and a friend improvising surreal skits and zero-competence musical performance.
Jasu Jest
(Krim Kram) Cassette $10.00
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
Trail of White Lies
(No Label New Zealand) 8-inch (lathe cut) $40.00
Backed with "Painting of Trial Medicine." Edition of 40.
The Instrumentalest
(Giant Tank) 2xCDR $10.00
“Mildly frazzled in the valley of the real instruments” is how Euan Andrews reacts to these improvisations, recorded as the families of Ali Robertson and Firas Khnaisser gathered in the warming glow of a winter Saturday night, and witnessed the duo paring back their sound to “basic components of rhythm’n’squall. Robertson, in his debut behind drum kit, pelts out syncopated abstractions regurgitating in upon themselves as Khnaisser veers from darkest parasomniac blues on guitar to trombone moan and throb, suggesting an agnostic union between the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Smegma. Hoarsely sucked trumpet curls its way around trombone splats before percussive clamor and scrape breaks out in a heat rash. Voices babble and scrunch while plastic horns emit gastric juices and the whole experience feels like a loving tongues-first kiss from a flatulent scrapyard.”
Étude in Black
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Bent bleak monochrome “music” for misery guts. “Some significant personal events occurred,” admits l’artiste, “and I made some inept ‘faulk’ music in response (so emo). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the work fails to convey much of anything about those events. After making stuff which was intentionally devoid of emotional resonance for years, this way of working felt pretty revealing and somewhat pathetic. Which is probably why, by the time I was done with it, I think I ended up burying most, if not all sentiment that might have been there.” Edition of 60
Nomad Souls - Tribal Warning Shot - The Harvest
(S/M Operations) 3xLP $45.00
Nomad Souls LP was released when Hunting Lodge was nearing the peak of its fertile tribal period (S/M Operations, 1984). The four-track Tribal Warning Shot EP was released early 1985, also on S/M Operations. A remixed version of the title track (with drums added for Normal Records’ edition from the same year) appears here. A new remix of the 1983 seven-inch “Night From Night” b/w “Untitled” is included, along with two compilation tracks and one previously unreleased track. All tracks here from the 1984 cassette The Harvest have not appeared on LP before; recorded live in Chicago and in Detroit, where Roselle Williams sings with the band on “The Wolf Hour.” Two previously unreleased Harvest tracks are also included.
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.