Tin WIndows
(Heart Of Glue - HOG001) 7-inch $4.00
Decontextualized public voices cut-up and repeated. Addictive, funny, oddly rhythmic, obsessive-compulsive. C'mon, your brain is at least twenty-five percent worms by now, surely you can tolerate a couple more.
Zero Return
(Chocolate Monk - choc.432) CDR $8.00
Francesco Calandrino lives and works way down in Alcamo in the fields of research music, net-art, language and wine — no doubt guzzling down the good grape while he generates hyper lo-fi sounds from sputtering mechanical systems like his beloved old radio-cassette stereos and wonky Walkmans — while Cristiano Deison has his lab way up in Varmo, where he can usually be found frothing over his Tascam 404, turntable guts and objects churning out skillful tape loop burbles, electronic skittering and field recordings. The whole thing has a great eavesdropping throb that feels like it’s beaming in from afar. Both are part of the ferment of ideas here but Zero Return is a real whodunit. Better get out your ear magnifier, Sherlock. Edition of 60
Squirrel II (The Sequel)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.434) CDR $8.00
Surrey’s favorite expat’s fourth solo disc for the label (not to mention his two collaborations with both halves of Blood Stereo) follows up his Chocolate Monk debut A Squirrel Could Never Be A Disappointment To Me. Most was recorded during a very brown period in his life when he was lived in northeast Ohio. So, computerized commentary on the Cuyahoga River is here, along with other weighty subjects that haunt this particular area of the great Satan. He also makes a primitive attempt, Presque-Rien-like at a recreation of the Fairlawn’s infamous Giant Eagle supermarket, which was forward-thinking enough to employ a bearded lady, and a woman with the exact same haircut as the lead singer of Journey. “If you have never visited The Rubber City,” warns the man himself, “Take this musical tour as a good reason to avoid it on your future itineraries.” Edition of 60
Bad Words
(Chocolate Monk - choc.436) CDR $8.00
Richard “The Riddim” Youngs returns to Chocolate Monk and he is none too pleased. Launched at Colour Out of Space 2019, this is 69 minutes of pitch corrected vocal, in the modern style. High concept derives from a conversation with Dylan Nyoukis concerning some popular musical tastes, and the collection’s title is an elusive reference to the lyrical content. Numbered edition of 75, with button.
NEIL CAMPBELL / STUART CHALMERS
Frog Dreaming Skull
(Chocolate Monk - choc.433) CDR $8.00
Hurtling toward the horrors of their biological selves, these two aging Yorkshire-based freaks follow up In the Vicinity of the Reversing Pool with an altogether more organic, rolling affair. Chalmers ladles on his signature stuttering tape loops and even dusts off his old zither, while Campbell is in a definite Vibracathedral vibe zone on guitar, percussion, toy piano, violin, electronics and voice. A continuously evolving piece, from the opening strum and stroke that will get your chakra shimmering to a gurning sonic joy mess full stop. Listener, you must struggle with glorious reality! Edition of 60
Poverty Of Will
(Chocolate Monk - choc.435) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With many Darksmith recordings, one’s imagination doesn’t immediately conjure a person creating or manipulating sound, but rather drifts toward visions of depopulated areas getting damaged by alien weather events — choked by toxic dust, pelted by freeze-dried rocks of ooze, ruptured by shrieking subterranean trauma. Human agency, when its presence is unmistakable, occupies a position of forced abandonment, like cinematic ghosts unwilling to quit the material plane or an individual dehumanized by efficient banality. Through grit-flecked remnants of grainy field recordings from environs luscious and bleak. Weighed down by cackles and croaks blurred by humidity and contact mics. Tangled in rusted-over playgrounds dominated by geese and tumors. Molested by magnetic tape instability, truncated fidelity, and corrupted modulation fur. As the companion book demonstrates, the lad has an eye for evoking from bland and wholesome portraiture the incipient horror unknowingly embedded within. Darksmith’s stark, high-contrast line art dispenses with gradation, a nice echo of the flatness of the subjects’ lives immortalized by disposable time-killing entertainment magazines ubiquitous throughout medical waiting rooms. 44 pages.