Trash Staging
(New Forces - NF058) LP $16.50
The 45-rpm A-Side “unleashes a noisy grindcore assault,” say our friends at Brain Tangle, “The drums blending with the electronics into a massive wall of sound. Feedback, blast beats, and screeching vocals pummel the listener for five perfect minutes.” The 33rpm B-Side is “dynamic and free flowing…, the sort of noise that can induce a trance-like state at high volumes. For those of you who always want your music louder, faster, and more intense, look no further.”
Issue 9
(New Forces) Magazine $4.75
One long interview with Sissy Spacek in honor of their twentieth anniversary, plus reviews. Twenty pages.
2018: Recent Amelioration of Lingering Proprioceptive Issues, Elimination of Winter Coat Improves Muscle Tension
(Regional Bears - RB08) Cassette $7.50
“My original approach,” explains the professor himself, “Was that of a fairly standard concrète bricolage that has characterized my previous work. I found upon listening back that the resulting semiotic content of the sounds used were not far from suggesting the type of peripheral agitations that buttress a well-hidden fragility of temperament at any given time: respiratory tics, the surfacing of unbecoming affectations, possibly born of circadian disturbances and their unconscious dream residue, and others. I had then decided that the most fitting lens through which to view these works is that of these physiological aberrations being logged, as in aural data entries, as the main determinants of these formal particularities. ‘Corporo-material conditions’ may perhaps precede my supposed choices in providing a means to navigate these recordings and place them within a scope of intent. Perhaps a more succinct title for this release would have simply been ‘Physiology Music’. In any case, one could listen in search of entertaining terminals, as one would skim a TV guide while waiting at the pharmacy or veterinarian’s office.” Totally up to you. C30
Red Brut / Blood Stereo
(Chocolate Monk - choc.410) Split cassette $9.00
Containment of the shadow self is a pointless exercise, friend. After all shit is shadow and we are all full of it. Better out than in, right? Red Brut and Blood Stereo both understand and present a side each of tape manipulation, sound collage, etc. For fledglings of all ages. Numbered edition of 52
Benzedrine Bonanza
(Regional Bears - RB07) Cassette $7.50
Where Omelette Of Disease (Förlag För Fri Musik 2018) is an orgy in painfully hard-driven feedback, and Overdrive (Team Boro Tapes 2018) focuses on rumbling low-end, Benzedrine Bonanza brings a live all-at-once approach, not unlike Schakalens Bror’s earliest cassette excretions, yet now more refined and with the later live energy successfully transferred to tape. Fully fledged free form guitar noise in a league of its own. C18
Can We Win
(Regional Bears - RB09) Cassette $7.50
Shots Bring It In. Due to weather, noise complaints, lack of time, artistic choice, or some combination thereof, Shots’ instrumentation moves indoors. Can We Win replaces the characteristic outdoor resonance of previous releases with tighter, more enclosed environment. The sound sources remain varied as ever, but the running water, somnambulistic percussion, and rupturing metal in play are enfolded in an intimate domestic acoustic space, making for a considered and engaging listen. C32
Wilson Schmilsson
(Chocolate Monk - choc.417) CDR $8.00
Brighton’s very own “Yogi Bear” (to his nearest and dearest) follows up last year’s brilliant The Unstruck Sound Centre (Ikuisuus 2017) with further treks into the mind meld zone. Exotic electronics and warm swiggle nurture your sagging chakras. Musical chirps and sonic pulse cleanse your psychic stink eye. This is the Chew Age. Numbered edition of 60
Scally Nike Leather Glove Smoke
(Chocolate Monk - choc.416) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.416) CDR $8.00
Claire Potter’s collaboration with Bridget Hayden Mother To No Swimming Laughing Child (Fort Evil Fruit 2015) was a corker. Always an amazing performer and reader, she reads unaccompanied here. Sure to get your thinking juices flowing. Numbered edition of 60
CDR contains one bonus track.
Bijou Bastard Box Room Suite
(Chocolate Monk - choc.415) CDR $8.00
The mystery duo has added a third member and invites you into their brown study for more contemplative probing that sometimes sounds like Solid Eye twanging and rippling underneath a radio broadcast by a crunked-up Lexie Mountain. “An artist arrives to paint a portrait of the royal family, but Trinket is unable to get her mane to stay in place and chaos ensues when a bird flies off with her hairgrip,” according to TV Guide. “Starring: Gonçalo F Cardoso, Alex Jones, Phil Lane — three sensitive gits, tight as a piss purse. This shiny disc is better than your last 27 purchases. Dust ain’t randy no more. (Subtitles) (Repeat) Rating: 6.6” Numbered edition of 60
Tindegger
(Chocolate Monk - choc.412) CDR $8.00
Tina Krekels and Grant Smith go hurling ’round a gnarled crack and show us that German-Scots relations have never been fruitier. They do a fine job of blending and blurring Krekel’s wonderful skittering and burbling saxophone with Smith’s hyperactive and intoxicated electronics; no-fi text pieces are followed by crunked-up tape whirr that eventually tramples ear remnants into the rug. Add in serious dashes of yelps, spits and sputters and even some fried guitar strum; it all helps dishonor spiritual mentors. Numbered edition of 60
Vetch
(Chocolate Monk - choc.411) CDR $8.00
Lila Matsumoto, Matthew Hamblin and Greg Thomas’s engrossing follow-up to their Animal Work cassette (Beartown Records 2017) pulses, drones, scrapes and baffles — a strange sedative to help you cover that attitude of cynical indifference. Somebody once said, “Vetch is a food made out of flowers. The violin is made of mouths. The computer is also eating the food. Hens roused and goaded to tumors, the monk is known to write nonsense. Moping at doofus, the violent node of edam is shut for maintenance. Everything will be played backwards. Sprawling peyote limbs and bees. There will be a guitar, pills and bream enacting Cnut. Everything will be played at once. Chocolate slipping into pugs, spume of rats. Tunnocks cantering at veal. There will be a sampler. Shy and numb, the tulips and goats eloped.” So keep that in mind. Numbered edition of 60
T. Penn Collections
(Saga House - SH03) Cassette $6.00
Eight rarities from the archives of this centerpiece of New Jersey gunk. With a mirror bent to the spirit of Subterranean Records-era Flipper, T. Penn’s outsider haze and destabilized psych visions are implacable and humorous, not at all mystical, but still complex. The album stands as a vestige of carefully manicured messthetics, an unshakeable vision of decrepitude as fortitude. The 46-minute A-side transmutes into an even more alien prayer the familiar elements of the B-side in reverse. “Music Is Not My Religion But This Is My Prayer” opens the B-side with violent, tectonic low-end shifts. The collection proceeds fearlessly and enigmatically, from solo dirge to guitar rock squall, to subdued bedroom renditions of Marc Bolan and R. Stevie Moore. Includes free download. C92
Listen here: https://sagahouse.bandcamp.com/album/t-penn-collections
They Will Burn Us To Ashes
(Saga House - SH02) Cassette $6.00
Mike Mangino’s diligence with pioneer basement industrial duo SMERSH set the scene for Futurist irradiation, so it should come as no surprise They Will Burn Us To Ashes harkens back to the collapsed rhythm of cassette culture’s golden age: body-rhythmic static; curious, plaintive reckonings; static wash; hiss; suggestions of system breach; tensile and rhythmic ambience that summons dark premonitions; isolationist electronics, as if Shinichi Atobe has processed Basinski in an ominous ode to inertia. Includes free download. C92
Listen here: https://sagahouse.bandcamp.com/album/they-will-burn-us-to-ashes
Light From Another Light
(Humbler) CD $12.00
The instrumentation on Light From Another Light differs from the Song Cycle album (Humbler 2015) with Danishta Rivero of Las Sucias making extensive use of modular electronics, and Jacob Felix Heule (Sult, Bill Orcutt) expanding to a full drum kit. The improvised pieces here, representative of Voicehandler’s live sets from the past couple years, are loose and exploratory, at various times energetic and meditative. Rivero’s voice embraces noise and blurs the lines blurred between electronic processing and extended vocal techniques. Heule’s drumming maintains its typical ear for timbre within the context of driving percussive intensity.