Fear Of Music / Berlin, With Love
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE01) 7-inch $10.00
The stamina-defying screamer of Japanese noise and longtime vocalist for Hijo Kaidan joins wrecker of civilization and one-third of The Dustbreeders for two sides of very pleasant unpleasantness. Henritzi’s improvised guitar-playing is the real surprise here, with its curiously cinema-conscious restraint, hovering around the perplexing intersection of an imaginary Giallo scored by Morricone and the calm brunch entertainment at a grim eastern European café. Quite a deviation from the “glorious, unholy racket” of his vinyl-noise trio. Junko, meanwhile, colors the foreground with her trademark bird-getting-strangled-by-a-dentist-on-a-chalkboard vocals (say whatever you want, comedian, she’s heard it all before) but here shrieks with almost zero adornment, to the point where she achieves an unusual variation on repetitive minimalism. The sublime tension between the two players forms a rarely heard, abject desperation that seems impossible to satisfy. Edition of 100.
Son of Drib Against the Wind
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING FEBRUARY 3. The twelve songs of scuzzed-out garage pop on the second LP from this trio (now expanded to a quartet) take you from Beat Happening to the Warsaw demos to the first Strokes LP, then right back home to Columbus, OH, where they hold their own with like-minded predecessors like Cheater Slicks, Times New Viking, Great Plains, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and so on. Two songs were included in the soundtrack to Poser (which made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival).
VOGELSCHEISS UND SEINE VERRÜCKTEN KRÖTEN
Vogelscheiß Und Seine Verrückten Kröten
(Art Into Life) CD $22.00
(Art Into Life) LP $37.00
This barely premeditated collaboration from the late 1980s by Strength Thru Joy's John Hubbard and Christoph Heeman and Andreas Martin of HNAS would make a perfect soundtrack to a paranormal thriller in which the living aren’t exactly haunted by ghosts and apparitions and poltergeists so much as fucked with. Not even pranked, just pointlessly confused for the poker-faced amusement of the quasi-dead. You know how it is in eternity — lotta time to kill. Records skip and wobble off center. Self-tuning radios pogo in and out frame. Violin, banjo and recorder slip across corrupted harmonic grids. A piano piece, oh my god, a piano piece. Plus: toads. You’re welcome. LP includes download code and insert. Edition of 300. Each CD comes in a handcrafted paper jacket, differing in color and texture. Edition 200
Moi Non Plus / Shibari
(AnarchoFreaks) 7-inch $10.00
Guitar and voice, recorded during the same sessions as Fear Of Music / Berlin, With Love. Screen-printed cover. Red vinyl. Edition of 200. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2013
Sift
(Horn Of Plenty) LP $25.00
Debut LP from this new Philadelphia four-piece with one sought-after tape behind them, whose surreal approximation of nice music was captured in recordings over a few chance family dinners, with general merriment and creative fervor getting channeled through poorly tuned instruments and detritus. Songs collapse into abstraction, and vagueness unites in melody. The exact moments when one thing ends and another begins. Teen girlfriends’ mumbled bedroom jams striking the secret chord. Alchemy from the ashes. The sound of ideas and ideals. Although conceptually akin to fellow Philadelphian Sun Ra’s Strange Strings, Sift likens to sounds from the early 4AD catalogue, Flying Nun’s slowest hitmakers, or Förlag För Fri Musik’s stock-in-trade. Black vinyl, printed disco bag with an A4 riso insert, obi band.
Skull
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING FEBRUARY 17. “Originally released as a cassette on the Japanese tape label Vanilla in 1993,” explains Tom Lax, “Skull has been floating around the sub-underground for years. ZBZ was the brainchild of the late noise legend Hirohito Taneguchi (Seed Mouth) and the equally legendary Junko Hiroshige (Hijokaidan, Genbakukaidan). Much like Michio Kadotani’s Rotting Telepathies recordings, Skull’s great tremors of blurred clamber come directly at you, sometimes sideways. It’s hard to know how much is premeditated or just what’s driven by organic impulse, which is what makes it such a great attestation of its era. In an instant, the album movse from a psychotic whoosh not unlike Twin Infinitives to an eerie gait similar to Dadamah’s. Plus, there's everything in between. A true blue-blood of disparate vision, ranking right up there in the masterpiece department with un’s self-titled album, New Zealand’s Ziggy Stardust Band, and those two solo albums from Eric Hysteric.” Edition of 300
Mommy Close The Door
(Starlight Furniture Company) CD $7.00
Recorded live in France in late 2002 by Japanese vocalist Junko Hiroshige — whose murderous wail hypercubes Patty Waters, Yoko Ono, and the titular victim in Olivia de Havilland’s 1972 crime flick The Screaming Woman — in collaboration with Yves Botz, Thierry Delles, Michel Henritzi, who extend the trad power trio into a Marclay mash with brutal rock’n’roll energies. Extremely nasty, unholy screaming that’d peel paint mixed with maniacs destroying the history of popular western music one record at a time.
Vile Insect
(Minimum Table Stacks) 12-inch $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING FEBRUARY 3. One of the rarest and largely unknown documents of 1980s UK DIY post-punk. Touching on the same sounds as Scritti Politti, the Raincoats and the Pop Group, the Wales-based quartet existed for a short time, played a few shows, and recorded and self-released one two-song seven-inch on their own Cheek to Cheek label. After four decades of evading Kugelberg’s Top 100, Messthetics compilations, and 45 Revolutions, bassist Steve Walker dug up the perfectly preserved original quarter-inch studio tapes with both songs from the seven plus two more recorded at the same session but never released. Presented here for the first time, digitally remastered, are all four songs along with a fold-out insert with Walker’s liner notes, photos and ephemera from his archive, and a reprint of a 1981 fanzine interview with the band. Edition of 300
#16
(Tedium House - BF16) Magazine + CD $11.00
With Oren Ambarchi (Bill Burston interviews the founder of the Australian Noise Users’ Society, who has made ultrarefined space-station scree with AMM’s Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide, out-of-control spazzassins Phlegm, The Menstruation Sisters, Robbie Avenaim, et al.), Leif Elggren (interview with Swedish electroacoustic musician, letter-writing prankster, dream theorist, national monarch of Elgaland-Vargaland, and conceptual artist whose work ranges from oblique performances to near-static installations), Robert Dayton (Earl Kuck interviews one of Canada’s most notorious extroverts [imagine Nardwuar as a real human being] about comics and diaries in the self-published Bunyon and his hilarious karaoke duo Canned Hamm), Jason Kahn (interview with quiet percussionist in which onkyo is debunked, and his electronic duo with Toshi Nakamura is discussed, as well as work with Arnold Dreyblatt, Universal Congress Of, and Sainkho Namtchylak), Parmentier (Dylan Nyoukis interviews hyper-relaxed New Zealand expats Rosy Parlane and Dion Workman about their bi-continental “work” as psychotropic electronic musicians; includes sidebar by Marcel Bear about a Parmentier-induced out-of-body experience), Halim El-Dabh (selected excerpts from Denise Seachrist’s biography of the Egyptian-born composer whose pioneering musique concrète predates that of Pierre Schaeffer, and is also noteworthy for an unusual Native American musical influence), Paul Winstanley (another New Zealander interviewed by Dylan Nyoukis, about his time in Texas performing electroacoustic improv/noise with Dave Dove Paul Duo, crashing Lone Star bohemian enclaves, and cruising with Pauline Oliveros’s mother), Lateral Agriculture Order (overview of mysterious, acronym-damaged Italian organization, including discography, particulars about performances, roster of artists (eighty different ones!) and other inexplicabilia).
Strip Ice Water To Listerine
(Nyahh) CD $14.00
In March 2020, Smith asked Turman to work on “a quick and dirty internet collab. It’s only six days old. A simple generative system. Why don’t we rework it together? Tear it apart, add your bits, then I can sprinkle some magic dust atop the rubble!” Turman was unable to get to it until after receiving the sad news that Smith had died in January 2022. By then he had developed new processes and began reworking Strip Ice Water To Listerine — cutting up, looping, and sampling Smith’s original, creating a series of rhythmic backdrops for his improvisations. In short, “an album’s worth of material that I could not stop listening to,” he says. “Unfortunately the rubble never got the magic dust but I think Tom would have liked it.” Liner notes by Thurston Moore. Cover art by Karen Constance
New Fun
(Chocolate Monk - choc.570) CDR $8.00
More Fun. More Fun they said. The Molar Crime is afoot. These two young dukes play the percussion and objects (Chlorine) and the Dictaphone and objects (Posset). That’s clear. That’s naturally obvious. But sweep away the soot, brush away the leaves, and there is something breathing down there. What’s breathing? What’s huffing in the Oxygene? It’s a system of tubes and levers, rubbery and sweating. The tubes pulse, they wriggle with a cumin-scented gas. If you lean in you can smell the dusty fumes. Grab a lever and pull. What’s released? A fine sound. A sound sizzling like a greasy grill. A sound as fresh as autumn mornings, ripe with both promise and decay. Old worlds hum into life, ferns unfold. The saturated color of a de-tuned TV blitz each eyeball making it fizz.... Horns swoop up and around into dry cotton-mouthed clouds. Sherbet crackles in the Kool Aid.... A piano is detuned via mouldy fingers. Gears lock and then miss-fire — the machine delicately malfunctions. It’s a Jazz thing if your Jazz is heard though soil-clogged earholes, worms crawling between your lips and teeth. That’s more fun, eh? Edition of 60
Giving Thanks b/w Thanks Giving
(Zaius Tapes) 12-inch $12.00
Unexpected reissue of this 80s obscurity that bears an uncanny resemblance to “an SST project from the Byzantine era, Painted Willie collapsing into a black hole of Turkish Barbarism. Or yourself, evaporating into the abyss of any Montrose album, shattered on Tuinals, chewing those solos.” Generic centerhole jacket, as was the original. Edition of 197
STAUBITZ AND WATERHOUSE AND SEAMUS
Gorgers
(Chocolate Monk - choc.571) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“On September 27th, 2021 Ms. Donna Parker and Messrs. TVE and Rhuem descended into Blackstone Gorge intending to capture the call of the Common Merganser,” explains Barrett Clark, Record Producer. “Although our allegedly ‘common’ feathered friend proved to be elusive that day, the expedition was not without event. The trio happened upon a clearing as dusk approached, and oddly enough, a well plated meal of fried Creek Chubsuckers worthy of Chaïm Soutine. Ravenous, our intrepid explorers made a feast of it before escaping nightfall and the penetrating gaze of the Castor Canadensis. This album documents their journey on ancestral lands of the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Nipmuc Nations.” Edition of 60
The Restless Desert
(Chocolate Monk - choc.569) CDR $8.00
With his happy-go-lucky new release Shareholder embraces the warm positivity of the 21st Century. Why not climb inside the mind of a deranged citizen as they negotiate waking from an anxiety nightmare? Or perhaps you’d like to join a drug-addicted aristo for breakfast, or listen to an abusive voice mail left on The Duke of York’s internal? But then you might be the type of person who’d prefer to ponder how the British colonial mindset remains active through leisure pursuits? Could it be you’re obsessed with the imminent collapse of society and the end of the world? Whatever your passion, you’ll find something to warm the cockles and tan the bones. Edition of 60
Firm Friends
(Chocolate Monk - choc.568) CDR $8.00
Materials from the distant end of a dim tunnel gathered in an inscrutable stack by Martin Greenwood and Kate Armitage out of Silver Dick. Iridescent mold, water-logged fibreboard, medium density clang-procession, irrational tablature, inching up the spout to the gutter: friendship, starboard. Point a flashlight at them. Point a couple. Edition of 60
Burselm Accomplice
(Burselm Crypt Recordings) CDR $8.00
The Burselm. Small market town in the middle of the Midlands. Usual mither. Nothing good. Houses where the curtains don’t open. The only way in is by accident. A stranger parks herself at a table in the Turks. Seconds pass. First appearance; stick-thin youth tugging cheese from his drawers. Special price. Second appearance; short lady, ancient and crumbling. DVDs. Stars of yesteryear. Three for a fiver. And then nothing. No one. Nobody. Block of cheddar and a small pile of Charley Sheen. What is there to do in this town. Scan the room. Poster behind the bar. Handwritten promise of Live action. Inept punk and esoteric experimentation. Esoteric punk and inept experimentation. It’s hard to make out. Deliberately obtuse. Shitty. Upstairs. So she walks upstairs. The DVD lady is on the door. Five quid. Give me five quid and you can come in. Cheese boy is at the back of the room with a contact mic. Some old people huddle round an amplifier that has no plug on it. She pays her money. Five small coins. Already working on the cheese. Gobfuls of it. Hard to breathe. Starts up a glam rock medley. Nothing obscure. Just the hits. The numbers one. She’s part of it. That horrible thing. Horrible Burselm thing. She’s an accomplice. Like the fools on the disc you hold in your hand. Indoor market. Open coffin. Sealed fate. Tracks by Posset, Dai Coelacanth, Lovely Honkey, and Andrew M Jarvis.