Much Like Yourself
(Chocolate Monk - choc.526) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. At one of the last Crazy Doberman shows before the dreaded Covid jaws clamped down, a twitchy gent sporting a fine skullet and rocking a Heart Of The Congos t-shirt approached the ensemble — nothing unusual there — and talked excitedly about his “plastic & mystic art,” and how through the power of the voice he could “prove that social graces are but a side dish of deceit.” The players got edgy as Mr. Quick Talk rummaged in his bag. A tape was gifted and then off he went into the night. As soon as they jammed the tape, they knew where its natural home was and kindly proceeded to post it on to Wino Lodge. Here you’ll find the sound of Kiekes letting it all go, speaking in tongues, mumbling, singing, maybe even losing his mind. Multi-layered voice and tape crud scurry back and forth, looping and lopping, garbling and gurning. The only credits on the tape read “voice, dictaphone, microphones, cassettes, tape loops, voice memos, 4-track, moisturizer, mixer.” Hard to tell if this is the work of a student of sound poetry and text sound composition, or just a loner with a vision. Either way he is speaking our language and it is life-affirming stuff. Edition of 50
Shaking Off The Metaphors (Suburban Observances Volume 1)
(Chocolate Monk - choc.527) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Sounds collected over many years, known very well to Stelzer, possibly so well he wasn’t truly hearing them any more. The first in a series of six volumes of collections of tracks to have passed through the hands of others and then back to the master incorporates processing by Theo Gowans (Territorial Gobbing), Andrew Zukerman (Fleshtone Aura), Theresa Smith (DeTrop), France Jobin, Ross Scott-Buccleuch (Diurnal Burdens), Frans de Waard (Modelbau), Joe Murray (Posset) and Stuart Chalmers. Tori Kuso sings on one track. Edition of 60
NONNAH
(Chocolate Monk - choc.523) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Thinking of your fate? Mired down in a mortality wobble? Deep breaths and audio hum can alleviate them shakes, while tapes and tones keep the lizards at bay. After a considerable bout of radio silence from Spoils & Relics, Johnny Scarr gets his thumb out of his arse and dusts down the old four-track. What starts off trying to fool you into thinking of this as just another miserable Spoils & Relics record morphs into something more mellow and almost musical, like the tipsy leader of a cult of one trying to reel in some starseed. “It’s just another mopey, shitty, synth record,” according to Chuckles himself, “Which obviously the world needs more of.” Cognition blurred. Ears pleased. Edition of 50
Phantom Cupboard
(Chocolate Monk - choc.524) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. “Phantom Cupboard occupies a homemade spaceship the components of which are outmoded appliances that need regular adjustments and deglitching,” explains Rick Potts. “After docking onto a decommissioned communications satellite, the newly plundered obsolete hardware is cobbled into a charity store kitchen cabinet. Lost voices find a home in this makeshift rocket. Calm chaos ensues as the machines talk among themselves. Outside, beyond the repurposed microwave oven door, the vastly jaded cosmos has a bad dream.” Edition of 60
Open Doors, Open Graves
(Chocolate Monk - choc.525) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. North Carolina’s number one porch lounger returns to the microphone and the craft of song after spending 2020 singing not a single note (too busy blowing cigar smoke in the face of the cardboard God). He repents nothing and knows not to mourn this mess of a world as we are all just sea-monkeys observed from afar. You want a monk’s cell with a ceiling fan? Sorry, all we have is the mellow sound in which to drown, covering, according to the Tarheel Troubadour, “themes of death, mental illness, loneliness and solitude, and mysterious bohemian bloodlines.” Edition of 60
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $32.00
This perfect-bound paperback book is a 76pp account of the August 2018 tour that took S. Glass with and without the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble to Los Angeles, Canada, Seattle, and Portland. Illustrated in color throughout with images from Lucian Tielens’s archive of objects and documents donated to and/or abandoned at the public library, photos and video stills shot along the way by The City Councilman, the book contains informal Q-and-As with many of the artists with whom the BLE shared stages (including Pulsating Cyst, Verge Bliss of Dendera Bloodbath, Rick Potts of Dinosaurs With Horns, Dinzu Artefacts recording artist Jack Taylor, Ace Farren-Ford of Hangar Quartet, Josh Stevenson of Magneticring, Joe Peg of Red Panda Death March, Jackie Stewart of The Tenses, and David Weinberg of Sic), along with kindred spirits Doug Harvey of Mannlicher Carcano and F, Bill Chen of Baby Huey and KSPC, Jesse Dewlow of People Skills, Stanley Zappa of Manzap, former editor / publisher of The Ongoing Dialogue Blossom Ahmad, and Barbara Manning. Ask your doctor if What’s Going To Happen To Us? is right for you. Side effects include: nausea; fever; mass transportation dread; vulgar dining options; attempted murder; exploitation flicks; nightmare-inducing bedtime stories; weird fuckers doing strange shit; bio-mechanical warfare; radio interviews; vile lodgings; neurological issues; hostile environments; face-palms; hallucinatory companions; shopping sprees; celebrity touchstones; bizarre acts of customer service; and the restroom-ification of public space. As a follow-up to If You Can’t Be Good, Be Reasonable (Chocolate Monk 2018), it’s exponentially more paranoid, delusional, cryptic, bleak, over-the-edge, and disgusting. You’ll love it. Cover by Stanley Zappa.
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 $30.00
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.