Megabus To Clubland
(Chocolate Monk - choc.505) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Daz Adcock and Luke Poot (with the occasional guest appearance from Ken): trapped in the flat, sometimes feeling fucking terrible, often being successfully daft, permanently kicked out of society for riding a carpet. Numbered edition of 60
Selections From Bands 1985 - 2001
(Chocolate Monk - choc.508) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. The Left Coast’s number-one Hagar huffer and outsider art wonker delivers an A5 booklet of posters and flyers of his numerous brain-shattering bands, plus a disk of tunes by National Disgrace, The Bringdownzz, The Framptons, The Oswald, The Sentimentals and The Patchkordzz. Painter, clothing-defiler, visionary of hilarious takes on the conventions of wretched pop culture and the metastasizing celebrity of public figures, Rinne is best known as the vocalist and lyricist for a gooey mound of Bay Area bands that have been spreading their indelible stains and demented approaches since the 1980s. His unmistakable tone-deaf warble is half overripe takedown, half sado-masochistic simian yelp. And he absolutely despises eucalyptus trees. “We wound up in a dirty garage surrounded by shredded wood, paint cans, old records,” recalls the meat puppet of the hour. “Tortured by years of fad pop, all we could do was fight it off, banging on empty cans and screaming, vomiting all the pop music back into the aether. By sanding, grinding or melting old farty records we could gain a new truth from them. The old farts were always going to be supplanted by new farts but the struggle for sonic truth lives on.” Numbered edition of 75
Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut
(Chocolate Monk - choc.507) CDR $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Even though no Vietnamese pop music was harmed in the making of Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut, be careful not to choke on bones during your travels throughout the westernmost quadrant of The Stinking Empire, that wasteland of mass-comm eavesdropping, loop hypnosis, burgled field recordings, and fracture-scapes that’ll clamp down on your skull like a Gorilla Glue nutcracker. Chocolate Monk’s in-house Clint Eastwood, Jr. (Brant) and Joanne Worley gender reassignment disaster (Glass) have taken every possible precaution to ensure no one exits their hour-long clatter-and-clunk buffet with blood on their hankies. Still, gnaw judiciously, you lion-hearted gonk. Edition of 60
Legend Trip
(Chocolate Monk - choc.506) CDR $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. These two, illicit camping on Mt St. Helens, Greek ferry discotheques, do you know where your CD player is? the Acropolis ’til dawn, free float boat in the ragged islands with call from Lax, alien lights coming from Texada, the reward is in the adventure, do you really want an explanation? Theo Angell (Hall of Fame, JOMF) and Joshua Stevenson (Staked Plain, Von Bingen, Magneticring, and JOMF) recognize that the welt on your forehead used to see. Worry not, they have the sonic third eye drops to get you blinking again. Edition of 60
Birdsong From The Lower Branches
(Hypnagogic Tapes) 2xCassette $17.00
This international collection of work by what Noise Not Music refers to as “babble-stalwarts” is “wildly successful.” Highlights include “jarring tape-switch enjambments [on] a speech-only track from Eric Mingus, James King’s humbly introduced and spectacularly executed “distillations,” a duet for emergency services siren and a cappella Irish folk song by Mabel Chah, an anxiety-soaked onslaught of gasps and groans from Rising Damp, [and] a surreal, post-Super Saturday broadcast from Ali Robertson….” Also: Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Ludo Mich with Christophe Clebart, Seymour Glass, Id M Theft Able, Karen Constance, The Doll, Natalia Beylis, Jonida Prifti, Roy Clare Potter, Sharon Gal, Jennifer Walshe, and Fritz Welch. Cover art by Karen Constance
Wild America
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS99) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Atrocious as the name of the band may be — as the name is, no need to hedge — there is no denying its accuracy as a descriptor: two parts shrill, overblown, and longer than necessary; one part aberrant, oversaturated, and lacking in nutrients. The near-hour-long nature-show soundtrack recorded live on KALX in Berkeley, 1987, by a short-lived group consisting for this session of Scud Mandrill and Phil Smoot (The Whitefronts), Greg Freeman (Pell Mell), and Chas Nielsen (Idiot (The)), aims to singe whatever porthole of empirical data collection is chosen. No matter what, part of you will end up scarred by Day-Glo hues, unpleasant grit, overexposure to reptilian crunch, the hot mulch of regret, and untamed electric howl.
LEONARD, SKROWCZEWSKI, ZAPPA TRIO
Visions
(Archive / Edition) CD $10.00
The debut recording from the trio of bassist Mark Leonard, percussionist Nick Skrowczewski, and saxophonist Stanley Zappa released by Bill Dixon on his Archive/ Edition imprint. Twelve tracks -- seven of which were recorded by Steven Lobdell of Davis Redford Triad and Faust -- influenced by the warm and tasteful tone of bebop pioneer Dexter Gordon, sympathetic to Dixon’s willingness to explore the limits of expression, and tempered by a Satie-like adherence to brevity and avoidance of tiresome, interminable pyrotechnics. Leonard and Zappa have worked as occasional sidemen in groups led by Rashid Bakr (Cecil Taylor’s longtime drummer), Zappa has also played with Lawrence Cook.
Regret Everything
(No Rent) Cassette + Poster $15.00
Without uttering a single syllable, Darksmith Of California sketches a solid case that everyone has been replaced with replicants. Metaphorically, let’s say, if that’s what it takes to accept the premise. Throughout Regret Everything’s thirty-minute capgras-adjacent mood-kill, corrupted and near-stillborn modulations groom themselves against the bristles of truncated fidelity. Here then is No Rent’s apt herald for the invariably bright-with-optimism mornings on the West Coast, with its instances of damaged tape transforming bird-coop piano into anti-erotic asphyxiation, and croaking plank frottage distilled from five-hundred pounds of bird guts pushed out of a trombone. It is a drily disturbing landscape, to be sure, where pock-marked eggs the size of a kidnapper’s van grind against cement walls, raining down flakes and calcium shards. On this slightly reworked reissue of Mom Costume’s 2018 edition of 10, fumes of diesel fuel rise from the surfaces of amorphous chunks of scorched Styrofoam scattered in sugary puddles of avian placenta. Newborn chicks, writhing in balls of discomfort and dread, stretch to puncture the constricting membrane of disorientation, unaware they’ve been blinded by mercury leaked from ruptured polyps bearing down on them. All the machines have tumors. Hello and welcome.
Muster Point
(We Jazz) CD $12.00
(We Jazz) LP $20.00
American sax-player Stanley J. Zappa and Finnish percussionist Simo Laihonen, students of Milford Graves both, captured live and in the studio while Zappa was touring in Finland with the Black Motor musicians. This is a set full of fire and thunder, but also features some more meditative spiritual jazz. With bassist Ville Rauhala on a couple of tracks. Liner notes by the man himself. Violet vinyl.
Hirrnkopter Hellikranck
(Harbinger Sound) LP $22.50
Early destructive outbursts by Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant) and Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn Und Gurgelstock). Previously released on cassette (Schimpfluch 1989), this fusion of “audio snippets, moments of eerie keyboard hypnosis, cartoon effects, amplified body sounds, animals, song, etc., into dense jump-cutting compositions,” note our friends at Volcanic Tongue, comes across “as the aural equivalent of tuning across radio frequencies, occasionally settling on sources for long seconds before exploding into life and activity. The set has some of the constant content-exploding power of classic noise ... while turning the incessant sensory / information bombardment into an eviscerated form that ... empt[ies] it of ‘meaning’ and re-birth[s] it as a form of pure sensory wuh.”
Unroof The House Of The Fishes
(Harbinger Sound - 114) LP $20.00
First-time vinyl reissue of this cryptic cassette (G.R.O.S.S. 1993), noted by our friends at Volcanic Tongue for its “rigorous, eerie compositional feel … with inchoate shapes and odd, grating sonorities inserted into the two side long tracks in a way that is quite uncomfortable, undermining the piece’s sense of space and somehow constantly forcing you to re-think or re-process your perspective…. [T]ranscendentally odd and strangely moving…, blurring the line between classic noise, timbrally aggressive improvisation, laminal tape work and homemade minimalist ritual….”
Supercharge
(Harbinger Sound) 2xLP $30.00
“Prime mid-’90s noise muck” is how our comrades at Idwal Fisher describe this short-lived collaboration between Andy Bolus (aka Evil Moisture) and Mark Durgan (aka Putrifier and participator in Nihilist Assault Group). Originally released on cassette in 1995 by Macronympha’s Mother Savage imprint, Harbinger Sound’s vinyl reissue adds live recordings from 1994 and 2006. “Bizarre as it sounds, Durgan’s well oiled noise gadgets do indeed feel as one with Bolus’s layout of v-techs abortions, toy guns, and broken things that go kkkkrrrrrkkkk, but it’s the 2006 show in Antwerp that hits the spot…. Supercharge meanwhile is alive with TV and film samples, angular noise farts, socket abuse, dustbin torture, unidentified scrape, eruptions of speaker distortion, shortwave whine, high pitched skree. The onslaught is incessant but at times gaps do appear, presumably these being when Bolus’s equipment breaks down and Durgan carries on in his own manly fashion…. To add to the all ’round madness ... you also get a decent-sized magazine of Bolus-drawn insanity….” Edition of 250.