Chronic Pussyfooting
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS101) CDR $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. If this is not Barbara Manning and S. Glass’s post-apocalyptic homage to Fripp and Eno’s early ’70s monolith, the only other explanation is hermit crabs having brain seizures inside Tibetan singing bowls. Using loops and digital delay to enhance the steroidal calliope atmosphere with a touch of relentlessness, claustrophobia, and dread, the duo’s two long, whirling tracks fling ropes of bright ooze this way and that. Be on high alert for supernatural beings wobbling through a series of movements and gestures that make sense only to a black yogiraj lost in some unspecified realm where space and time are mashed into an origami-like lump. Thirty-eight minutes of symmetrical splats, crackling wheem, crystals made of congealed blood, and Tortuga silt. Includes reflective packaging.
Toupée Made Of Weather
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS98) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Eventually the spring-breakers who survive their pandemic-era bacchanals are going to discover nostalgia, and Toupée Made Of Weather hereby provides many options for the inevitable retrospective anthology Befuddled Goobers of Shartwave with which all Jersey Shore wannabes worth their anti-viral cream will soundtrack their fevered reminiscences. In addition to sentences from thrift store cassettes, near constant field recordings of indecipherable voices in the background, collages of suburban VHS psychosis, and fragments of guitar and electronic flubba dubba from Fluxus Enigma and Hazel’s ’Lectric Washhouse sessions, lots of processed loops grabbed from various coordinates within the audiosphere are present — an instructive percussive vamp from Art Blakey here, disco hits by KC & The Sunshine Band and Kool & The Gang there, a little fortune-telling from Jan & Dean’s inexhaustible supply of face-palmistry, bluesman Jimmie Revard’s alien doink, weird shit by Steely Dan, yogurt-slathered sitar from a Carnaby-era Marianne Faithfull, and glitches sourced from a Paul Bowles album uploaded to Spotify (proof that the death of quality control is the noisician’s librarian card). “Dead Mackerel and a Bucket of Flaming Housepaint” is a demo submitted for consideration as the band playing in the foyer at the ceremony when guitarist Brian Ruryk earns his Lifetime Achievement Award. The Ensemble’s cover of a French black metal song relies on a phonetic mistranslation of the lyrics of the original by a wiseguy YouTube user and is also loaded with enough backstory to fill an escape pod (“you get 3-D pictures of space porn!”); in the hands of Bren’t Lewiis, it now reads like a dystopian travelogue penned by an incel from the future visiting the past to impregnate baby Hitler. Other highlights include their transformation of lyrics lifted from Daffy Duck and The Groovie Ghoulies into pathos-rich nightmares, Lala Lu’s baby-doll-off-her-meds multi-track soliloquy, and the deliciously anticlimactic finale when Stanley Zappa and Glub Pasha spend some time between two ferns.