Pond Life Noir
(Chocolate Monk - choc.562) Magazine + CDR $12.00
“Time and logic totally fly out the window as soon as this stuff starts to spool,” admires Neil Campbell, who would know and is not prone to exaggerate. Godbert himself explains the genesis of his wonderful lo-fi reed / fog blare, I was stuck in Edinburgh for five days due to a mammoth snow storm. Fortunately, I had at hand a copy of the Ladybird classic Pondlife, published in 1966, and decided to alter it and make it enjoyable for the people who more interested in guns and murder. As the original preface to the book says, ‘A pond might look like just another patch of water, but beneath the green scum, many interesting things are happening’.” With 36pp full-color A5 book of collages. Edition of 50
Indicate Damge Area
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Live recordings from Philadelphia Record Exchange, Temescal Arts Center, Canessa Gallery, and Red Gate Arts Society, admired by Burning Star Core's C. Spencer Yeh for its rampant “parking garage logic.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Make Yourself Useless
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Electroacoustics, tape music, field recordings, loops, objects, non-musical music, and like that. As C. Lavender says, “There’s more than one way to play a piano with knives.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Neck Pillow
(Siltbreeze) LP $20.00
At a marathon four-day recording session at Safe At Home in Long Beach, California in April 2022, Barbara Manning played lapsteel, glass table top, metal grating, conga drums, guitar and trombone-kazoo. Seymour spent a few minutes extracting smooth oompah-loompah from a Lowrey organ, and running his noise boinger through a GT-1. Field recordings aplenty were captured, including Ptolemy eating lettuce and Dan Vargas assembling a swinging loveseat. Tongs, spatulas, and knives were played by Tom Lax, his second appearance at a Glands recording session on his chosen axes. As an added bonus there are not one but two guest vocalists on The Spandau Ballet Medley. Everyone present was under the influence of Woody Guthrie novelty tunes, a documentary about Brisbane punk, Diamond Jim Brady’s eating habits, The Art of Walking, THUMS Islands, pure eucalyptus honey, and the side-long track on We Shoot For The Moon. Early reports that “Everything sounds like Tusk outtakes” have proved to be accurate AF. Whether this makes you feel like Bugs Bunny floating through the air nose first, following an aroma toward the witch’s cauldron, or like doing an Exorcist-style crab-walk, you are not alone. Larry Tate is by your side.
Len Deficiency
(Sham Repro) LP $25.00
Lens Deficiency works as a story intentionally withholding several of its components (dialogue, music), requiring the listener’s individual pattern recognition development to determine how the phantom linearity of Pete Cann’s half-hour construction is “viewed,” processed and evaluated. But it’s even better as pure musique concrète sound collage. Aspiring game-show contestants could feel provoked into trying to recognize what movies the hundreds of sounds here are appropriated from; thoughts and prayers they’ll become bored by such meaningless, dead-end cochlea-flexing and instead discern the new, unique path Cann has machete’d out of the darkness for their benefit. He leaves impenetrable saturation to career edgelords, cartoon-y kitsch to pie-throwing idiots, and dialogue to the French. The favored strategy here is measured placement of audio events that are complex enough on their own; which is not to say moments of sublime layering are absent. On the contrary, one’s imagination might linger on John Cage’s sound-effects-only score for The City Wears A Slouch Hat, the original 250-pager that CBS balked at and is gone forever, or perhaps the blunt force trauma style of the Lanz / Eb.er radio show Psychic Rally. The range of genres and eras represented is wide, which accounts for the dynamics and contrast, while at the same time Cann’s ear leans heavily on compatibility. Neither random nor composed, Lens Deficiency’s heavy lifting is done by intuition and the joy of a perfect coincidence.
Zero Tolerance For Silence
(Coq au Vinyl) LP $25.00
2022 reissue of the 1994 “jazz Metal Machine Music.” Loud, dissonant layers of electric guitars and overdriven amplifiers are in stark contrast to the smooth, melodic jazz upon which the Metheny legend is built. At the time, some theorized it was a contract-ending “fuck you” to his label, while others in-the-know swear it’s a pure expression of sounds Metheny had dreamt of making for some time. The man himself describes it as “a 2-D view of a world in which I am usually functioning in a more 3-D way. It is entirely flat music, and that was exactly what it was intended to be.” Knowing who to believe is the first hurdle with any masterpiece of free improvisation, so lace up them running shoes, Pierre. 140-gram vinyl. Paste-on cover with obi. Hand-stamped edition of 333
Diaspora Brag
(Chocolate Monk - choc.566) CDR $8.00
“Him who was Wanda Group takes time off from flexing his guns and punching up at the twats,” explains our friend Corriander from Mutek PR,” To present more than 70 minutes of lurk-affirming tunes / no tunes. Four-foot-eight in heels, the grizzly man of Hudds (a dog’s hole) is the gift that keeps on seeping.” That same Hudds-based grizzly man chimes in, “I have become infatuated with this theory of the human clock system — each section or item inside and on your body having a built in time code; each particle, each piece of blood, having a tempo or a moving, self-regulated grasp on seconds; each lung being its own lung, and each bone or tongue being the king or queen of itself.” That all of Diaspora Bag was made on an iPhone 6 is of little consequence in the hands of a Hudds-based grizzly man who is naturally gifted at bending and crafting vibrations. Nevertheless. Edition of 60
Ouster Crawling
(Chocolate Monk - choc.563) CDR $8.00
The artists formerly known as Miracle Wheat, Pinked Eruptions, Unspoken Tide, Dumbluck Cycle, Artist Tonks, The No Concept People, Ear Making, Ignored Oven, Yellow Ponces, Wine 6000, Top Fuckers, Incest Insects, Cum Palace, Glorious Throat, Paedo Eaters, Brown Sabbath, Blood Stereo, Path Of Glue, The Danny Greer Unit, Rubber Toast, Gravel Connection, Neck Tar, Muehl Flowers, Crumb People, Wedding Beet, Tory Gods, Cum Crisis, Thyroid Massage, Baby Abusers, Randy Ankle, and NHS have slowly morphed into Wino Lodge. They present Ouster Crawling for your consideration. Electronics, tapes, voice, field recordings, objects. You know the drill. Why change a failing formula? Edition of 60
Free Music On The Clock
(Chocolate Monk - choc.567) CDR $8.00
Chocolate Monk describes Free Music On The Clock thus: “Mr. Malvern Brume pulls a few skivers at Cafe Oto. Liminal music for vacant minds,” and the only word here that makes sense to us is “at.” Salter steps in with a bit more detail: “Music recorded using bits laying around at the day job, on the clock, at the start of the summer break when there were spare moments. Recordings were then cut up and arranged at home, on the bed,” a description that infuriates Ecka Mordecai, who feels such a “cringe,” “shit,” and “rubbish” blurb is an affront to all concerned. “All those breathing sounds right up close, distorting into the mic... Muttering and complaining about stuff, it’s so intimate.” Mordecai notes that Salter’s soundscape, made “from the noise expressing what it’s like to go to work everyday and constantly be pulled away from the thing you want to be doing,” creates a tension that “is exciting and potent.” Is Free Music On The Clock straightforward and non-emotional? Hell, no. Mordecai says this album is “sick.” She is not opposed to his cello-playing, too. Edition of 60
Smooth Sick Lights
(Zaius Tapes) LP $20.00
Mahogany Brain forged their unique audio dialect with their debut release, With (Junk-Saucepan) When (Spoon-Trigger) for the legendary Futura label in 1971. More avant-garde than prog, it speaks to the souls of the dedicated one percenters — such as the ESP Disk set — specifically patrons of The Godz and Cromagnon. But in early 1972, Mahogany Brain recorded Smooth Sick Lights, a follow-up release even more bewildering than its predecessor, yet this sat neglected until 1976 when it was issued by the Pole label. It’s hard to know what sort of impression it made on anyone beside Steven Stapleton (as his NWW list is how many have been informed of its existence). It had enough allure that the Tapioca label reissued a botched mispress in 1977, which seems to be the version that most latent hep-cats, whom knew not better, got fooled into owning. Zaius Tapes comes to the rescue once again with a stellar reissue of this exemplary diamond in the rough. For fans of the further out ’70s French prog, it goes beyond Red Noise and Fille Qui Mousse. You can see how the brain-beams emitted from this release were studied by Heratius, Gutura, and others. It’s possible Smooth Sick Lights even helped inform factions of the New York No Wave (lead guitarist Patrick Geoffois would go on to be a member of both The Contortions and James White & The Blacks). As the bard once penned, “conjecture is nine-tenths of the truth.” RIYL; Frolk Haven, Mars, Jandek, Sproton Layer. Edition of 300