MICHAEL MORLEY / MY CAT IS AN ALIEN / RAMONA PONZINI / LEE RANALDO
Live @ Sensational Fix
(Starlight Furniture Company - *25) LP $15.00
As part of the 2008 exhibition Sensational Fix, with a focus on Sonic Youth’s multi-disciplinary activities since 1981, My Cat Is An Alien performed live with long-time collaborator Ramona Ponzini, Michael Morley of Dead C, and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Side B features solo pieces by each of the five members of this extemporaneous ensemble. Stills from the live footage shot by curator Roland Groenenboom appear on the color insert.
Call Back Your Dogs
(Precious Metals - PM98) LP $75.00
Music for bowed steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Cut at 45 rpm, playable at any speed. Hand-painted and drawn jacket. With obi. Edition of 163
Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand
(CMR) paperback book $40.00
Bruce Russell-edited survey of how a bunch of antipodean misfits and malcontents have forged new ways and new reasons to make noise -- the full range of “non-standard” audio practices in contemporary NZ culture, from the borders of composed art music, through improvised noise, to deconstructed “rock’n pop filth,” and everything in-between. While not comprehensive (nor aiming to be), Erewhon Calling surpasses what anyone else has even attempted before. Artists and informed commentators mainly tell their own stories, describe their own work, and outline their own goals in working on the fringes of audio culture. Text / page works by Branden W. Joseph, Phil Dadson, Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, Byron Coley, Alastair Galbraith, Empirical, White Saucer, Clayton Noone, Andrew Clifford, Jeff Henderson, Daniel Beban and Nell Thomas, Su Ballard, Jon Bywater, Dan Vallor, Clinton Watkins, Witcyst, Andrew Scott, Campbell Kneale and Antony Milton, Vitamin S, Jon Dale, Mark Williams, Lee Noyes, Nathan Thompson, Beth Dawson, Sean O’Reilly, Kraus, Sean Kerr, Peter Stapleton, Stephen Clover, Dugal McKinnon, Omit, Peter Wright, Jo Burzynska, Ian-John Hutchinson, Kim Pieters, Paul Winstanley, Gentle Persuasion, Zoe Drayton, Simon Cuming, Stevie Kaye, Rachel Shearer, Richard Francis, Rosy Parlane, Kiran Dass, None Gallery, Zita Joyce, Mr. Sterile Assembly, Ben Spiers. 192 pages. Edition of 900.
The Toadstool Millionaires
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.384) CDR $8.00
The unholy union follows 2016’s Pentecostal Gymnast Trapped In Lime Jello with further stabs at hobbling the mind. A two-course pig-out of time-distorting tape collage mangle and beady-eyed space bending sound processing by Gnarlos, Lucian Tielens, Karen Constance, Dylan Nyoukis, The City Councilman, Tom Chimpson, Lilly McBilllly, Elkka Reign Nyoukis, The Two Winnies and Lindy Lettuce. One section sounds like a melon-headed child fondling a dried umbilical stump. Includes I’m A Toadstool Millionare badge.
Soap Opera Suite / Snake Oil Symphony
(Lutra) LP $18.00
Original copies of this pioneering cut-up work from 1982 by self-taught legend. One side is a plunderphonic montage that contrasts hysterical dialogue from early 1980s soap operas with quieter, bland remarks, punctuated by library music jingles and short enigmas that appeal to one’s sense of paranoia. The other side-long track also traffics in found sound, this time snatched from instructional salesmanship LPs and television programs, edited into a depiction of people as merchandise living lives that oscillate between buying and selling. All copies are unplayed, but there is no shrinkwrap and slight wear on the jackets.
Soiled Gas Mask
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS84) CDR $8.00
“Sugar brings nice sweetness to the sauce” says an accented voice a few minutes into the group’s third album of 2019, one heavy on the fevered claustrophobia. Disturbing froth and gothic Mommie Dearest shame dissolve in a dark woont piece named after Alan Wagner’s legendary milk-bath poster (a Freakdom meme-of-the-year finalist). Joan Of Art — in surgery recovery mode, deluded and paranoid from the opioid painkillers — wanders out into traffic muttering the words to The Fall’s tale of sinister government agencies. Turntables and contact mics scrape layers of hardened parrot mucus for nearly twelve minutes in an epic examination of the difference between phlegm and sputum. There are two field recordings from The Dome in Scappoose, Oregon, made at the end of BLE’s August 2018 tour (one piece came about when The City Councilman’s phone was accidentally recording while stuffed into his pocket, and the other documents Gnarlos throwing balls of goat dung at a poster hung above the dumpster by the garage depicting President Shiklgruber cradling a baby dinosaur rescued from the twin towers on 9/11). Lucian Tielens dodges golfball-sized blobs of toxins and revelations that flicker across the bottom of an apocalyptic bucket, propelled only by grunting and orally expressed distress. A freeway execution narrated by a helicopter-bound ghoul. A jaunty celebration of urushiol. Cthulhu crèpe. Hemotoma. “The Funky Chicken” as fetishist’s instruction manual. So much dirty. So much unclean.
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $40.00
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.
BUTTE COUNTY FREE MUSIC SOCIETY
T-Shirt
(Butte County Free Music Society) Size L $20.00
(Butte County Free Music Society) Size XL $20.00
White text, magenta flamingo printed on black 100% cotton. Short-sleeve only.