Toon Mould
(Chocolate Monk - choc.461) CDR $8.00
“Many aspects of Toon Mould will crowd your diaper, Bubba, not the least of which is Theo Gowans’s deliciously spatial understatement. Don’t sweat it if the show doesn’t seem to stop at such a relatively humble revelation. It is, after all, competing with an aromatic bouquet of nonrepresentational squirts, fragments of lo-fi scrabbling and uncomfortably close gacque dans la bouche (what the slurp-prone Quebecois call fellating a contact mic), elusive fwips of manipulated tape, and equilibrium-hostile pulsations that’ll totally give you the squeam. Good luck finding another album that twitches with the unforced glee of a coupla goobers who’ve reanimated a mechanical witch from an old-time-y arcade in the woods. With the end of the year and the end of the decade on everyone’s mind (although the latter is debatable), the time is optimal for clacky noisemakers to morph into seagulls getting impaled on punji sticks embedded in sand castles. Plain and simple, this is top-shelf wait-what surrealism from the lower levels of the fidelity spectrum, where the resin is stickiest and sweet, from the expansion and contractions of an underdeveloped bladder covered in a polkadots and fur (see also: leopard fetus, an air pressure hose, rogered by) to the guilt-crippled squid indulging in a midnight snack, rendered from the point of view of doomed jellyfish. So bendy. So unstable. Edition of 60
Text Sound Snowflakes
(Sham Repro) CDR $7.25
One side of the sound poetry / musique concrete album Text Sound Compositions (Fylkingen 1978) by the Swedish experimental poet and composer at the same time as one side of the Japanese synth-player’s electronic-arrangements-of-Debussy album Snowflakes Are Dancing (RCA Red Seal 1974). Straight through with no manipulation.
Spicy Your Life
(Beartown) Cassette $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
A thirty-minute dreamscape that splatters the walls with spongiform sunshine. In this life-altering walkabout in the outback of the unconscious, messages from within to go straight to voicemail for the foreseeable. You’re on borrowed time. Imported from UK
Ego Derpz
(Chocolate Monk - choc.462) CDR $8.00
Fritz Welch and Adam Campbell’s system of hyperextended rumblings is designed to break a hole through invisible or undetectable barriers. It goes for the mind, ear, leg, heart, hand and scalp. Its first impulse is subtracted from the overall net of intentions beyond an overflowing golden toilet. For example, the sound is produced for the sole purpose of abseiling clogged and crystallized hierarchies before finally putting it all to rest. Speakers and surfaces are thoroughly interrogated, yielding a steady diet of perpetual come down. Guests are Lucy Duncombe and Tony Bevan. Edition of 60
We Are Hardcore
(Black Operations) 6xCDR + DVDR $40.00 (Out-of-stock)
Expanded reissue of Superman Cha Cha’s 2005 collection of rare early Condome Cassex cassette releases, collaboration cassette with Kyoakukyojindan, rare compilation tracks and “Cock Action” video. With twenty A4 inserts (cassette artworks, rare early interviews, articles, pictures, etc. from Japanese magazines such as Fool’s Mate, P.O.W, Gekko-Luna).
Nothing To See, Hear
(Chocolate Monk - choc.470) CDR $8.00
Full-on loop damage recorded direct to the Wino Lodge hard-drive one afternoon in January. The World’s Toughest Milkman was armed with tape players for the blind, Boss DD20, and a small stack of random tapes nabbed from the cluttered and sagging shelves. Numbered edition of 50.
In Each Act Processing Grief and Longing
(Chocolate Monk - choc.469) CDR $8.00
These transmissions from the weird and wet Upper Calder Valley follow on from releases by Roy Claire Potter, The Singing Isle, and Embla Quickbeam). Here Todmorden-based poet, writer, teacher, barkeep, dogsbody, collector of dreams, occasional performing artist presents lo-fi spoken word pieces peppered with the sound of home and countryside. Use words to get your weary arse out the ditch, pal. Numbered edition of 40
A Kind Of Air
(Chocolate Monk - choc.468) CDR $8.00
A slightly different edit of the Glasgow-based writer and artist’s beautiful and strange piece recorded for Mark Vernon and Barry Burns’s Radiophrenia in 2019. A slow moving thing that seems to stretch out time. “If I were to tell you how I arrived here, I would have to explain the voicemails,” says Ms. Ellul. “The voicemails have been in the back of my mind for some time. They had accumulated over several years, in fits and starts. A waxing and waning of words spoken into the void. For months, I watched them arrive but I did not listen to them. When I eventually did hear the messages, certain things were immediately clear. The condition of his lungs was deteriorating. His breathing was labured. The messages had never been easy to follow. They were often slurred, because of the drink. But now when he spoke his words were interrupted by coughing fits, more and more so as time went on. By groans and gasps. Belly-speech. Gurgles of outflow.” Edition of 50
Scratch Music
(Chocolate Monk - choc.467) CDR $8.00
“Recorded while laying low in Las Vegas,” according to the man with the golden ears about his strange brew of musical noises and non-musical aural fritterings, “using homemade spring boards, hair buzzer, Fukuoku 9000, radio, cicada drones, two-stringed electric guitar, prepared lap steel guitar, found microcassettes, voice, field recordings and DJ mixer feedbacker.” Numbered edition of 50
Displacement Activity Terminal 2019
(Chocolate Monk - choc.466) CDR $8.00
Electronic plod and clang from an exclusive perv lair in West Yorksire, a secret location chosen as optimum for the recording of finely churned euphoric sonics. Numbered edition of 60
Two Paths To An Outer Edge
(Chocolate Monk - choc.465) CDR $8.00
Recordings of A Bedside Traveller were stashed away for ten months before a well infused listening session took place in November. Constance and Nyoukis retreated to their respective creative hovels and constructed new tracks, mixing the original recordings with ones made at the year's end. Both sets of tracks where then mixed one night in December. The borders became blurred and now we have one 30- minute collage that travels further down the Alice hole of non music / dream mulch. Each cover is handmade and unique. Edition of 50 with insert.
The Best of RRS 2005-2019
(Chocolate Monk - choc.463) CDR $8.00
Just in time for the festering season, the Cardboard Prince finally bows to the demands of his avid fans and struts out this total stocking thriller. No filler here, just all the hits from between 2005 -2019. Edition of 60
A Högwind Christmas
(Expulsion) 2xLP $16.00
Pour yourself a mug of hot-dog-water nog and toss another rat carcass on the fire — Christmas is back in style. And to herald the return of this obscure underappreciated holiday, a new generation gets old and in the way, just like their ancestors did, blaarting carols under the godless stars when everyone else just wants to get drunk and pass out. With Högwind as your abnormal yuletide mariachists, every night of the year can now be the longest one, for you, for your family and friends, for anyone within earshot. You’ll forget about the “war on Christmas” when Christmas itself is the standard-issue neurocysticercotic weapon of choice. Two platters of gloriously sour mush, off-brand screech, and harmonic gorkings way past their expiration dates — the perfect psychological immunization for a fevered take-over: “Here Comes Santa In A UFO,” “Glue Christmas,” “Jesus Was A Zygote,” “Christmas From Beneath The Earth’s Crust” and fifteen other interminable classics. Silkscreened jacket. Edition of 200.
Moose
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS86) CDR $8.00
Pointedly undignified improv is Bren’t Lewiis’s consistent tripping off point, the elements of which swap bacteria indiscriminately and form mutant heaps of questionable awareness. Fragments butchered from recording sessions — electronics, guitars, objects from kitchens and garages and toolsheds, turntables, loops, nonverbal vocalizations, and a variety of accidental and/or unintentional activities — spiced with nuggets plucked from the public domain (because any recipe with mayonnaise is not complete without raisins) are reconstituted with compositional prowess easiest described as unkempt; many of the tracks on Moose don’t fade out so much as wander at a leisurely pace toward silence. Highlights from the department of field recordings include the idiot neighbors playing their idiot drinking game, arguably gongable street musicians, and a time-lapse document of Warvette’s bullfight against the GPS in his pick-up truck. Gnarlos delivers the vocals on a cover of Peter Hammill’s “A Ritual Mask” with a level of passion rarely heard beyond a police scanner dispatch operator, while the reincarnation of Stentor himself, Lindy Lettuce, bellows and gurgles through a mash-up of words to the Christina Aguilera hit “Beautiful” and “The Light, The Sound, The Rhythm, The Noise” from Flipper’s second album. Lucian Tielens grins and bears it on a reading of execrable lyrics to an antique show-tune written to enhance the rich fantasy life of Coca-Cola salesmen. Thus, the end result is an album that’s one part stoned teenagers sloshing around the back of a station wagon taken off-road without permission, one part long-winded recollection of an erotic Tardigrade cosplay party, and one part endless loop of Linda McCartney’s synth solo on “Jet.” Artwork by Steve Marquis.