GABBY FLUKE-MOGUL / JACOB FELIX HEULE / KANOKO NISHI-SMITH
Non Dweller
(Humbler) CD $12.00
Violinist Nishi-Smith and Heule on bass drum, together as a duo since 2007, recorded two long-form free improvisations with violinist Fluke-Mogul in 2019, traversing the uncharted depths, hand in hand, inch by inch. “Thorny, gnarly, and excellently paced,” says Brian Olewnick, while Alex Tripp of Endaural observes that the trio’s “creaks and groans fill the walls,” as if placing the listener “in an old building that struggles under its own weight. But the music also allows the walls to come down, to make the activity plainly visible.”
KYLE BRUCKMANN / TOM DJLL / JACOB FELIX HEULE / KANOKO NISHI-SMITH
Brittle Feebling
(Humbler) CD $12.00
Brittle Feebling prickles and bleats, an abrasive delicacy. Fricative rasp and withheld breath seethe together in a discomfiting cuddle. Perfectly respectable instruments (oboe, English horn, trumpet, floor tom, and koto) born of classicisms both European and Nihongo are recast and glanced at askance, as the misbegotten miscreants of imperialisms they (also) are.
Acid For Babies
(Psychic Liberation) LP $17.00
A glistening invitation from Jeronimo Jimenez to an environment of minimal complexities, with textures and repetition fine-tuned to soothe or delight a baby’s ear — specifically, that of his new daughter. The playful, unassuming tracks are one-take tape recordings from hardware instruments. The album is bookended with an interpretation of Raymond Scott’s little-known final composition: a piece for MIDI titled “Beautiful Little Butterfly.”
JETT HOTCOMB AND THE TALENTED HAIRDOS
Give Us This Day Our Swingin' Bread
(Butte County Free Music Society - 31) 7-inch (one-sided) $8.00
Homemade Christian lounge music from the late ’70s, previously available as a free cassette (self-released via the Jett 3:16 label) for guests at a now-defunct rural motel in Butte County. Two tracks with a full band ("Jesus Digs Me" and "The Lord's Prayer") and two recorded a cappella in the shower ("Live and Let Die" and "Shampoo Bottle"). Includes reproductions of four period handbills and business cards, as well as a Butte County Free Music Society pink flamingo swizzle stick. Edition of 200.
Shocking Early Works, Vol. 1
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS47) 7-inch $10.00
Three raw living room and live recordings from 1985, documenting the first three months of the group’s existence, imbued with decadence and vitriol. Repetitive profanity, spartan adornment, outward-looking disgust and contempt take centerstage on “Swelling Admiration,” a tune with less dance groove than a riderless bike getting hit by a car. Honest, a skipping Suicide album sounds like “Bohemian Rhapsody” in comparison. The oblivion-embracing ode to defeatism “The Only Way Is Down” conveys, with flourishes such as impatient sighs, blasé moans and flickering drum machine, distaste for the ubiquitous, neon-colored optimism of mid-’80s fratboy / sorority girl airheads. Overdriven and sloppy in places, its pulse is insistent yet dire. Flipper’s signature tune “Sex Bomb” is stripped of all its properties, pretty much, thanks in no small part to the hand-held condenser mic recording; most of what remains is the noise of the audience in the room and the only thing potent enough to slice though it — singer Patricia Rowland’s psychotic screaming. Deep-end bonkers. Includes vintage liner notes by Lindy Lettuce.
Backlit Colander With Holes Shaped Like Numbers / Bok Choy Festival
(I Dischi Del Barone - IDDB017) 7-inch $10.00
Two six-minute montages of reversed mitosis episodes, in which scaly pods, ruptured eggs, and clumps of partially digested hair smush through one another and glom together in unstable strains of Glass-spanktified dad-noise. “Backlit Colander With Holes Shaped Like Numbers” crawls with bacteria from munched electronics, murmurs of a chimney-entrapped Frampton (plus camel, but that should go without saying), tape yoont teetering on the lip of a magnetic abyss, and piercing splats from tiny automatic paintball guns. “High” and “lonesome” are the operative descriptors of “Bok Choy Festival”: Barbara Manning’s guitar loops backfire and self-annihilate in private spritz-overdose orgies; avian-constructed effigies of Annie Hayworth curdle; narration on the topic of body dysmorphia is provided courtesy of thrift store cassettes and a Sister Rosetta Thorpe quotation. Cover artwork by Karen Constance. With insert. Edition of 200.
Refreshing Hemorrhage
(Butte County Free Music Society - 44) 7-inch $8.00
Both versions of “People,” the aloof masterpiece by Mancunian iconoclasts Gods Gift, are covered simultaneously on the A Side, as Bren’t Lewiis shambles along on fuzz guitar, warped keyboards, and Colour Out Of Space field recordings, while the imperious Silvia Kastel intones her dispassionate but resolutely negative critique of mankind. The B Side continues with a severely bent cover of both versions of “O Jackie O,” itself a damaged charm song by Chicago trio ONO, here performed on messed-up kazoo, holiday wrapping paper tube, and tape-manipulated field recordings from the swamp where Annette Funicello’s head was buried by The Allman Bros. An unhealthy tape piece brings the record its queasy conclusion. Overall, totally appalling, but in a good way, like the talent show scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Edition of 100.
Slide Thrombosis
(Steep Gloss) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING MAY 7. If the only thing with which the twelve tracks on Slide Thrombosis were imbued was a degree of malevolent steadiness we usually encounter when getting stared down by giant mechanical lizards copulating under a rain of electric crust, hot bone shards, and blobs of paste made of shredded motherboard, we’d have to admit that grunts of “meh, forgettable” from dismissive critics might contain some merit. But the Conduits, two reclusive characters residing in the American south, assemble their loop-dominated tracks with more complicated and nuanced bad feelz. About a third of the sound sources on the album are field recordings captured while traveling on public transportation, where they eavesdrop on and surreptitiously record other passengers talking, streaming music, and watching videos. Another large chunk of the content, also field recordings, comes from anomalous weather and atmospheric activities (some mundane, some assumed to be paranormal environmental events caused by experiments going awry due to sloppy and/or indifferent adherence to protocols by underpaid employees of nefarious corporations). Sterility and lack of feeling are definitely present, but the Conduits’ sound processing and additional electronics decimate their sources into terse fragments. The tracks are bent, damaged, frozen in a state of oxidation, undermining their own sense of predictable drone-ishness with clouds of unease, revulsion, and discomfort. Innards are gorged upon. Old timey footage of buildings collapsing is reassembled in the wrong order. Itches are scratched until they become lesions. No course-correcting is needed when the destination is oblivion. Includes download card. C60 One-minute video here: https://youtu.be/XWzdff9zdIc
Pier
(SDZ) 7-inch $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. CIA Debutante has been cultivating its brain fog for years, stashing away in places that consistently experience connectivity issues. Grey humor is a basis for life and the therapy of homemade electronic chaos, the nature of which is yet to be determined, as a reflective blanket. In this techno-cocoon like no other woven by Paul Bonnet (Disposition Matrix), Nathan Roche (Le Villejuif Underground) develops thoughts-counter-brains, his lobes like pet iguanas surfing on the essential vibrations of the useless. The images are there, those of countless extremophilic organisms, fractured cosmic debris, the ocean floor cracking, the international station stalling and a general instability that spreads tirelessly like the devil’s worm in the oldest gold mines. Perpetually reachable on a number that doesn’t exist yet, the duo is once again working wonders with stellar musical foam. Handmade sleeve. Edition of 200
FENWICK ADDISON / SEYMOUR GLASS
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History of The Butte County Free Music Society [MC]
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS36) Hardcover book + cassette $30.00
NOW ACCEPTING PRE-ORDERS ONLY. Oh, how the dots do connect! Recollections, opinions, confessions, revelations, quips, anecdotes, and analyses by, for, and about the art mutants and other creative weirdos working in a rural Northern California college town in the early 1980s. It's like a Philip K Dick short story meets contagious polythelia. Answering questions no one is asking -- it's the BuFMS way. There's no salacious gossip here, no long-festering resentments litigated, no tell-all humiliation porn. If that's your thing, you'll have to content yourself with living to clutch your pearls another day. Not that it's wall-to-wall good manners. Characters and oddballs abound. Some shit-talking, but nothing scandalous like we're used to nowadays. Still, the content of this Encyclopedia Spastica is slanted toward making music, listening to music, making connections because of music: tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, punk, psychedelic rock, non-music, and general WTF. Not at the exclusion of film and video, though, and radio shows, radio plays, guerilla theater, stand-up comedy, art installations, zines, collages, poetry and fiction, television shows. Activities, projects, experiences, learning, creating, obsessing, giving up, all that, the whole wad. Every page is adorned with supporting visuals — flyers and posters, paintings and drawings, newspaper clippings, photos and stills from film, television and video production, prints, personal correspondence, interview transcriptions, and autobiography excerpts. 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Under Glass, KCSC, Beor The Friendly Thing, Jett Hotcomb, The Conduits, Daily Planet, Unlikely Modernists, Man Overboard, The Viper, EL&C, The Protons, Glands of External Secretion, Chaplain Addington, Doug Roberts, and Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, 140 pages, hardcover, color throughout. Tons of stuff you've never seen or heard of, guaranteed.
THIS IS A PRE-ORDER SELECTION, SCHEDULED TO SHIP AROUND JUNE 1st. The first 50 pre-orders include Various Artists, My Blue Piano, a 30-track cassette of previously unreleased and rare material by Serious Problmz, Vomit Launch, Barbara Manning, Lawrence Crane, Hallucinatory Companion, The Conduits, The Viper, Idiot (The), Felix Mace, Maria Estevez, Dawn Davenport, The Skull Farmers, Saria Farr, Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, and Glands of External Secretion, along with excerpts from Under Glass, The Shattered Future, and Marionette From Hell. C60
Toupée Made Of Weather
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS98) CDR $8.00
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.
BUTTE COUNTY FREE MUSIC SOCIETY
Induced Musical Spasticity
(Butte County Free Music Society - 25) 4xLP + CD $65.00
Induced Musical Spasticity commemorates the nascent pollination — in the musty shadows of the real ersatz Sherwood Forest, a couple hundred miles north of San Francisco — of the Buttecounty Free Music Society, an apocryphal institution that encouraged anything and nothing, in musical and amusical contexts, sometimes intentionally, sometimes because no one knew any better or cared. Highbrow concept tracks by The Marques (brothers Cole and Steve Marquis) and the dramaturgical Unlikely Modernists, along with Ambivalent Dosage’s pre-Vomit Launch nihilism, mutter and howl next to mad paisley destructo by Dilwhip and the quartet edition of 28th Day, Hypnagogic Jerk’s overmodulated roar, and sweet, YMG-influenced instrumentals by Hallucinatory Companion (aka Barbara Manning and Cole Marquis). Ripe dementia by Experimental Artists, Lawrence Crane and John Young, and Tops Inc. stops rational people in their tracks, while turntable experiments, tape yoink, and high-lonesome electro-twarnk by Rory Lyons, Ziplok, Sidney Afrika, The Conduits, Lucian Tielens, and Richard Streeter shuffle the consciousness. And then you’ve got primitard rock dunt by The Flamboyant Offals, Walking Jock, Dead Boy 3, and shockingly raw 28th Day material that predates most anyone’s idea of the original line-up of that influential band. Four episodes of Matt Mumper’s serial radio play Beor The Friendly Thing appear, in all its inscrutable, deadpan glory. The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble pollutes the lion’s share of real estate with a side-long tape cut-up a la Faust Tapes called “Goat Embryo (Covered With Glue),” and their entire live set from the Industrial Barbecue. Also here are the spot-on country lament “Plastic Jesus”; the electronic damage of “Mid-Range Phase/Link 3"Dome”; the Smegma-influenced “Lightbulb Incident,” infamous for its live, on-air sodomy; a KCSC radio interview that includes the group’s first recordings; and a handful of previously unreleased tracks. Two-thirds of the material here was previously released (translation: a few dozen cassettes were dubbed one at time and passed through the hands of people in the same rural Northern California area code 25 years ago). All the relics in this boxset are likely unheard by anyone not specifically mentioned above.
Chronic Pussyfooting
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS101) CDR $12.00
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 and dread, the duo’s two long, whirling tracks fling ropes of bright ooze this way, that way, and the other way. 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.
FENWICK ADDISON / SEYMOUR GLASS
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History of The Butte County Free Music Society
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS36) Hardcover book + CDR $30.00
NOW ACCEPTING PRE-ORDERS ONLY. Oh, how the dots do connect! Recollections, opinions, confessions, revelations, quips, anecdotes, and analyses by, for, and about the art mutants and other creative weirdos working in a rural Northern California college town in the early 1980s. It's like a Philip K Dick short story meets contagious polythelia. Answering questions no one is asking -- it's the BuFMS way. There's no salacious gossip here, no long-festering resentments litigated, no tell-all humiliation porn. If that's your thing, you'll have to content yourself with living to clutch your pearls another day. Not that it's wall-to-wall good manners. Characters and oddballs abound. Some shit-talking, but nothing scandalous like we're used to nowadays. Still, the content of this Encyclopedia Spastica is slanted toward making music, listening to music, making connections because of music: tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, punk, psychedelic rock, non-music, and general WTF. Not at the exclusion of film and video, though, and radio shows, radio plays, guerilla theater, stand-up comedy, art installations, zines, collages, poetry and fiction, television shows. Activities, projects, experiences, learning, creating, obsessing, giving up, all that, the whole wad. Every page is adorned with supporting visuals — flyers and posters, paintings and drawings, newspaper clippings, photos and stills from film, television and video production, prints, personal correspondence, interview transcriptions, and autobiography excerpts. 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Under Glass, KCSC, Beor The Friendly Thing, Jett Hotcomb, The Conduits, Daily Planet, Unlikely Modernists, Man Overboard, The Viper, EL&C, The Protons, Glands of External Secretion, Chaplain Addington, Doug Roberts, and Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, 140 pages, hardcover, color throughout. Tons of stuff you've never seen or heard of, guaranteed.
THIS IS A PRE-ORDER SELECTION, SCHEDULED TO SHIP AROUND JUNE 1st. The first 50 pre-orders include Various Artists, My Blue Piano, a 30-track CDR of previously unreleased and rare tracks by Serious Problmz, Vomit Launch, Barbara Manning, Lawrence Crane, Hallucinatory Companion, The Conduits, The Viper, Idiot (The), Felix Mace, Maria Estevez, Dawn Davenport, The Skull Farmers, Saria Farr, Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, and Glands of External Secretion, along with excerpts from Under Glass, The Shattered Future, and Marionette From Hell.
Be Somebody Else, It’s Fine
(Chocolate Monk - choc.513) CDR $8.00
They say repetition is the key to unlocking the lizard brain. Yup. Chlorine’s scabby fingers needle the lock, hinges and front piece. Feel the nimble fumbling in your head. Graeme Hopper scoops time into small piles and sets a direction like iron fillings clustering round a magic magnet. The multiple click-click of metallic pegs acts as a lubricant. I’m willing and ready. Surreptitiously-captured voices plough fever-drenched narratives. Make room for glottal beat-boxing, Lear-esque nonsense and hummed tunes to self. I smile at the shuffle of some rattling shells or the pale blue Farfisa mood. Some machine whirrs as an owl flutters wildly in the gears; then our poor feathery professor gets snaffled by a bigger (yet unseen) beast. I tidy out the shed, one ill-judged elbow starts a cascade of paint tins to bounce playfully off the shins and forehead. Edition of 60
BRANDSTIFTER / DIURNAL BURDENS
Fireabend
(Chocolate Monk - choc.512) CDR $8.00
Hey, boink, you want proof that Brexshit doesn’t have to totally sour the Kraut / Limey handhold? This wee document of whatthefuckery will put the rise in your mind dumplings. The mad man of Mainz, Mr. Stefan Brandstifter, supplies sporadic spurts made of toys, glossolalia, Casio, field recordings and stuck records which he documents on his cruddy yet well made German Dictaphone; Wigan walloper Ross Scott-Buccleuch mangles, chews, loops and assembles. Potential soul scurvy averted! Keep on the grass. Edition of 60
The Night Watch
(Chocolate Monk - choc.511) CDR $8.00
He of Core Of The Coalman, she of The Slowest Lift, and him of Inca Eyeball serve up blossoming drones to clear the fug. Edition of 60
Old Scar For New Nose
(Chocolate Monk - choc.509) CDR $8.00
Processed surreal appeal from Wino Lodge’s hardest working dweller. The words are garbled, but the tapes and gadgets are in enough oscillation to keep your ass anodic. It’s hard to believe Miss Constance’s craft graft wasn’t always so strong but chance meetings at an early age set her on the path of prevalence: First meeting the Tartan Lads in Blackburn Chemists at the age of seven where “Scotland’s top performing duo” informed her “even a wee lassie can wear a skirt of many colors,” and then just a few years later a caged mynah bird in a Coldingham pub told her “the life of an artist is a fucktard’s waddle!” Numbered edition of 60
Pterodactyl Bunker
(Chocolate Monk - choc.451) CDR $8.00
For twenty years Dai Coelacanth has been masquerading as a Graveyard Alligator, or a Radio Alligator. Hanging around bus stops. Shouting the odds. Hear him now: “Cannibal King and her friend The Colonel shook loose in an imaginary dream. Whatever the situation, there could be no suspension of broadcast. Suzi handed out nose-plugs. Don’t touch my legs, you creep. I don’t have to tell you anything.” Don’t cheat yourself by not listening to Pterodactyl Bunker in its entirety. Cheaters never win. Numbered edition of 60
Pink Cow
(Chocolate Monk - choc.510) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Master loopist and audio hypnotist Joseph Hammer and loopy sonic magician Rick Potts are the “antique brass holes” who have been plundering phonics since the pre-MIDI era of the LA Free Music heyday. Their chunks of discombobulated ear worm wax are still circling around heads like stars and birdies after a mallet blow to the frontal lobe. This slice of kaleidoscopic audio fruitcake was recently discovered in their jewel-encrusted archive treasure chest. Milk the Pink Cow’s psychoactive soda pop and go for a swirl with floating fragments of dolled-up cartoonery and prismatic rigamarole bouncing off rubber walls of repurposed Exotica malarkey in a sauce of dreamy semi-gelatinous electro-stoolage. The eye-dazzling 16-page full-color booklet of Potts’s tainted surrealism is included for purusal while submerged in the Dinosaurs’ sound swamp.
Selections From Bands 1985 - 2001
(Chocolate Monk - choc.508) Magazine + CDR $15.00
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. At last, 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 disc of tunes by National Disgrace, The Bringdownzz, The Framptons, The Oswald, The Sentimentals and The Patchkordzz. “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
Pterodactyl B&B
(Chocolate Monk - choc.514) CDR $8.00
Do you remember Colonel Dai from Graveyard Graveyard? Suspend your tears — the creep took cannibal odds shouting Suzi with twenty on to win, so what’s all this nonsense about? Friendly coffins. Love voltage. Death fictions. Familiar alligators. The Pterodactyl. The bed and breakfast. A lot of words. Words repeated. Repeated words. Worms worms worms. It goes on and on and on and on and on forever but it’s over in thirty minutes. Edition of 60