KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Background Noise For Eating Soup
(Chocolate Monk) Magazine + CDR $12.75 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Demented audio and heavy tape cut-up with additional gadget malarky run wild on the disc, while visual collage in the 24-page full-color booklet turns old magazine scraps and such into new wonder for your peepers. All praise to the scissors. Edition of 54
Inspired By Actual Events
(Chocolate Monk) Cassette + 3 x 3in CDR $26.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. A modest treasure box of audio oddities and WTF constructions. The 3-inch CDR Lobster Dildos contains four new blithers that could easily pass for the soundtrack to scary parts of a TV show about the paranormal. You know, with the distressed breathing and the uncanny metallic grinding, unnerving assurances, 1930s melodrama, unnatural chittering, left-handed shredding and distortion ejaculate, bio-mechanical threat blurts, and clusters of passion-damaged voices competing to get their bizarre assertions heard. A second 3-inch CDR extracts the audio from footage of a Bren’t Lewiis live show in 1984 in support of the so-called Mad Bombers. Viewers of Tusk TV from the golden era of Covid lockdown might recall seeing resurrected VHF footage of this clatter-rich caterwaul. Minus the visuals and left with little more than the sound of ramshackle simian-grade percussion and an audience that is clearly more interested in their own conversations than the off-center thwacking of scruffy would-be surrealists, one can pinpoint the moment that obsolescence of grandeur became a manifesto. And then a third, “value-addled” 3-inch CDR uses the Mad Bombers audio as a foundation for wild additions, brute subtractions, and EQ shenanigans. Fresh into their trial separation from Usurper, Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson team up with Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos for the collaborative cassette Lewsurpiia. Eight tracks, 38 minutes, electroacoustic AF, tape cut-ups and plentiful narrative delirium, the Wizard of Oz staged in an antique mall. Also included is a 28pp comic book Many Hands Make Light Work, which re-purposes an old Jack Chick morality tract with all new BuFMS-centric text. It’s a bona fide Easter egg hunt where a disgruntled puritan storms through a methy suburb in search of coherence, buttressed at either end by a transcript of Tielens’s early ’80s doctrine chat with an unsuspecting evangelist knob. A real page-turner. To aid in keeping the Chocolate Monk customer’s consumption conspicuous, the box also includes a small enamel lapel pin. Follow-up selfies are your responsibility. There’s also a postcard adorned with eccentric art of a sort all returning champions would expect, plus miscellaneous scraps sourced from the lost-and-found box at a California public library. Hand-stamped edition of 75
Dritte Atombomde Auf Japan
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Almost 30 years on from his previous Chocolate Monk release, Kimihide Kusafuka returns with a blistering set of in-the-red noise goodness guaranteed to put the pep back in your step while clearing your mind of society’s gunk. Heavy huffing is recommended. Live sounds by modular synth and delay and reverb only. No distortion, fuzz, or overdrive pedals. Edition of 60
Trans-Pigmentational Slit
(Duplications de Ange de la Morte) DVD $15.00
According to the liner notes and all contemporary databases with proven reliability, this is the only extant video of Jim Shepard’s jaw-dropping band in any form. Running around 30 minutes or so, filmmaker David Kerr’s footage is very much a DIY affair, steeped in gloriously primitive, narrative experimentalism. The single free-form jam explodes visually into a psychedelic miasma, and there are dystopian cameos from all your favorite monsters.
G.X. JUPITTER-LARSEN / NEW BLOCKADERS / JOHN WIESE
Rip Off
(Helicopter - H60) 7-inch $12.75
Collaboration from 2011 exclusively using the sounds of tearing paper. Edition of 150.
Gradient
(Destijl - IND099) 7-inch $5.00
In service to Wada's ongoing work with sound perception as a basis for direct modes of listening, he and Marc Sabat produce two sustained tones, a fourth apart, positioned along a wall, one at each end -- a very slow glissando from one pitch to the other while moving accordingly. In other words, the string players' physical locations in space correspond with pitches of the sounds. One of his adapted violas of Harry Partch, who often worked with this type of harmony, was used for the recording of Gradient. The result is a sculpture-like presence shifting through all the blue notes.
Live At Brown’s
(Siltbreeze) LP $20.00
Rare live & unreleased tracks from 1979. Second edition with orange radioactive man on front cover.
Cured Pink / Penguins
(Vacant Valley - VV08) split 7-inch $13.00
Cured Pink’s effectively creepy side is a chain-rattling death march of single-chord electric guitar, mournfully strummed amid stormy ambiance and shouted vocals. Penguins’ militaristic drumming and formidable hedge wall of guitar are tough enough to withstand the start-stop chug of their track, along with menacing brass and shrieking. White vinyl. Austrialian import.
The Show That Never Starts
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS102) CDR $8.00
On this 40-minute live recording from 1987, seven guitarists chop the audio space into nuggets and hoard it like desperately stir-crazed fanatics in a cave. Twitching streams of bending amp shriek and atonal blats ricochet as if the guitars are getting repossessed in real time, which makes it seem like the set meanders; it does lack direction, but it’s not at all lost. EL&C knows where they are — “writhing in a filthy pile,” to quote Fred Rinne. Invert the ratios of a Peach Of Immortality / Stefan Jaworzyn collaboration and here you are: Nothing sounds like anything, and everything is louder than everything else. Grinding, churning, sharpness, nausea, a post-godly orgy of guitar noise stabbing itself in the head. Then the queasy side effects kick in and you can practically feel the octet deflating, wound-licking, seeping into the floorboards of the MCS like a bunch of doused witches. Unimpressed silence, four people slow-clapping. Pure victory. Includes bagged sample of inedible orange powder.
“A bizarro-world whack on vanilla prog heavies. Selten Gehörte Musik and Nitsch actions, check, but surely with more clothes on.” —Tom Lax
Mamo Waves
(Bulbous Monacle) LP $20.00
Named after a West Coast grocery store chain, this eccentric mid-’80s band drew on free jazz, The Velvet Underground, Caribbean music, and improv noise. Their sole self-released album Roast Belief (Bogden 1985) served up eclectic derangement on a par the Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, Tuxedomoon and Eugene Chadbourne. Originally planned for release by Camper Van Beethoven’s Pitch-A-Tent, Mamo Waves is every bit the mind-melting jumble of the unheralded genres that popped in and out of existence like subatomic particles, and belongs to the same 1980s Californian sub-underground aesthetic that nurtured mythical ’80s bands like Departmentstore Santas and Prominent Disturbance. It’s a real WTF m.o. that still sounds like the future.
Love Belch
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS110) CDR $8.00
Throughout the third album of recordings from the late 1980s by EL&C (congealed into a trio for this particular session), the bent scrapings just stop and go, because destinations are a myth. The hoity-toity can have their posh beginnings and endings. Thematic development — ew, gross. If you want a meaningful, satisfying arc, go buy opera tickets. These nine tracks do not fuss with making progress from one point to another on some big deal spectrum. Between guitarists Scud Mandrill and Phil Smoot’s heavy, bulldozed twang, damaged tape yoink streaks with more unhinged glee than nude exhibitionists, shoulder to shoulder with delay pedal jabs (and ’70s kitsch, and fragments from Bren’t Lewiis sessions). For 46 minutes, thick and rennetless improv gnaws on rock-infused, decibel-saturating garnk with a level of tunnel-vision determination that’d alarm your average neurologist. Includes bagged sample of inedible orange powder.
Misery Guests
(Siltbreeze - SB-197) LP $20.00
Katharine Daly, Leonie Brialey and their crew are assuredly zoned into what they’re laying down on the rural-like, rough hewn Misery Guests, which rollicks woozily and fetchingly out of step. Stitched in out-of-time folk ruggedness, these tracks seem plucked out of a mid-’70s time warp that contemporary alt/retro bands only dream of conceiving. Think Fairport Convention, Etchingham Steam Band, Desire / Rolling Thunder-era Dylan, Patti Smith Group, Garbage & The Flowers. And while its existence will forever remain bittersweet without Daly here to embrace its ultimate fruition, her spirit is forever locked into every nuance of this stone-cold masterpiece. Edition of 400.
Underthought
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
The court jester of the new Canadian Confusion Sound, our man Nate is the master crafter of the disorienting, almost meditative experience. Lowkey field recordings and warm tape hiss lick lobes. Distorted, grainy, and slightly out of focus, yet undeniably present, Underthought has the same uncanny quality of a reproduction as a photocopy, where the original source feels just beyond reach, blurred and fragmented by the process of duplication, a distortion that holds you in a state of weird, suspended discomfort. Edition of 60
Cochon
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Heady blurt and saucy wheeze and heavy strangeness via glorious saxophone by Claude Spenlehauer of French weirdos micro_penis. Edition of 60
An Event In 4.75 Time
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Mystery noise from the always ripe Mr. Eastman, recorded live in the Garden State, originally broadcast on WFMU. Excerpts were previously released on The Glamorous Life cassette (Throne Heap, 2024), but the reworking here is guaranteed to puff green smoke out your ears. Edition of 60
Psychic Hygiene
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Mangled pop loops squirm in and out of the stereo field like a million thoughts drifting through your mind in the midst of a hot shower. Vocal chants greet you with the ethereal charm of a fine seaweed face mask. Synth textures possess a smooth quality that is not far off from a freshly shaven face. For a moment, pure bliss; the work day is over, the outside world no longer exists behind this closed door... Until you cut yourself shaving; blood drips from your face. The drums begin picking up. Horns that serenaded you earlier now blare at volumes far beyond “discomfort zone.” What Panic Boner presents here is no different from the age of self-care that envelops us all today. Equal parts ugly and transcendental, this is a record for the listener who understands the high risk / high reward nature of improvisational music. Edition of 60
Live In Japan
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
No script, no rhyme, no reason. When the audience doesn’t laugh or doesn’t understand him, he just speaks in tongues.Full-blown, sweaty, gibberish-heavy rants that come out in wild spurts, his voice rising and falling like a deranged revival meeting preacher. Half comedian, half performance art disaster, Gas Can doesn’t have an act so much as a vortex. A tornado of confusion, punctuated by nonsense about chili, Fritos, and “real” American comfort food. Edition of 60
Standard Pub Music
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Lovely anti-music from two of the UK’s most bent-out-of-shape gents. Tom Bench (Hardworking Famlies) brings guitar, coffee machine, electronics and ghosts, while Joe Baldwin (Hello Spiral) settles for guitar, data corruption, taking out the bins and Casio VL-Tone. Edition of 60
Text Pieces + Compositions for Prepared Strings and Objects
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
“Exposing the absurdities of everyday life,” summarizes MJE, “knowing of the cynicism that could ensue, and taking a complete 180 from that — joyous deconstruction.”
Dumb Tangerine Dream
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
Extended snart-scapes where loops. distressed scroichles, outsider guitar improv, and electronic pasta (al dente) converge in the back of the bus, with the animals and prisoners. Four tracks, all previously released as limited edition 3-inch CDRs. With inserts.
Obtain By Sacrifice
(Krim Kram) CD $14.00
The Montréal monster completes another chapter and verse in the life Godzilla would choose for him. Alan Bloor’s nauseating feedback and bio-volcanic growls are abominations to the natural world, with raw electricity spraying damage and sickness across plateaus and into valleys, and of course the saturated clang of pulverized metal grinding jagged holes into your neck like the most sarcastic tracheotomy lesson ever.
Demonstration Record
(Carbon) LP $23.00
Recorded on a mobile phone in the southern summer of 2023-24, this collection of live performances, collages, and solo improvisations dismisses stereo-imaged, mastered sound, yet reveals an expansiveness despite the minimal setup. “Quattro Pezzi Su Due Note” and “Holly Springs #2” appear sparse and guitar-centered, but open up with shimmering modulation pedals and scattering slide guitars that create synthetic textures with as much detail as a wavetable or granular synthesizer. The dirty, snarling “Metal Pedal” and “Modulationism” produce maximalist rhythmic growls and sweeps with just a distortion and modulation box. The “Climate Study” tracks provide a more laid-back window into Russell’s creative patchwork, the slowed down overlay of pans, door hinges, and machinery creating ecosystems of industrial sound. This is, as John Shoen of Uncomfortable Communications says, “the soundtrack of the last dinner party on the sinking ship of humanity.”
Picking Through The Wreckage With A Stick
(Zaius Tapes) LP $20.00
COMING SOON. Shepard’s dark, cathartic masterpiece, originally released by Siltbreeze in 1995, bears little to no resemblance to his proto metal-prog rock band, Vertical Slit. Like his debut solo LP Slit And Pre Slit, it was made in the midst of grievous personal trauma and plays out like Burroughsian cutups, with Shepard’s gallows wit interspersed against his distinctive sense of forboding. 2024 reissue. Edition of 300.