Chocolate Radio Band (The Golden Sceptre)
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.550) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Further evidence of Olive’s full skill for mishandling sound. He recorded hours of mono radio signals in a hovel in Kobe, Japan, through a simple chain of EQ, spring reverb, and preamp, which he then chopped, combined, layered, arranged, scrambled, juxtaposed, and quilted to just the right degree for brain tapenade. Warm and cozy!
No Jacket Allowed
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.551) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Raconteur, math whizz, fine thread dresser and psychedelic noise psychonaut Lewis Duffy follows up Tango Super Bock with a deep dive into his post-Covid brain drain. Shimmering electronics and repetitive glee pulse out euphoric ear worms. He has a mind boner for the impossible, like a more hirsute Neil Campbell with a skill for shitty pant throwing. Bow down.
KAREN CONSTANCE / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Day Music / Night Music
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.548) Split cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Constance the insomniac presents heavy, processed electronics, field recordings, mangled voices and tape wrangle constructed late at night in bed. Fend off the darkness fears with some Blackburn Academy of the Arts sun glow bloom insight. #pro-peasantmusic. On the flip, synth, tape players, loops and delay squelch and skitter into dream as early bird and morning whistler Nyoukis takes a wee stumble into a low T tower of crud. Recorded during the day live to tape. No nightmares allowed.
Lucky Crystal Wave / Exit Generator
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.549) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Chocolate Monk’s favorite living violin sorceress Samara Lubelski teams up with Werner Nötzel of Metabolismus for heady violin and electronics whatthefuckery that comes off like a tripped-out sibling to Kosugi’s Catch Wave (yes, it’s that good). Douse your chakras in this sonic sauce and embrace the cosmic quease. Recorded summer 2021 at Sumsilobatem, Germany, with next level adjustments taking place at Uniform Recording with Jeff Zeigler and Bill Nace.
Lost Teeth
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.552) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Here’s something that’ll keep your kitchen lit. (For you 20-year-olds, a “kitchen” is like the break room at work, but in your apartment.) From front to back, this disc hits like possessed plasmatic visitations happening in the middle of an otherwise silent instructional cooking program. You know that means metallic borborygmus and delicious lurching — the percussive collateral damage recognizable to anyone who has attended after-hours jousting with live but grievously unwell horses in a public library. Fear not, disdainers of randomized flail, Ypsmael + Eloine have done this before (because late fees). The duo maintains a delectable balance between electro fweep, tape fwip, and considered fwunk of the hit-it-or-quack ilk — without neglecting, as some of our peers are wont (let’s face it), sonic backdrops that enhance the ambient depth of field. The beautiful yet unprecious recording and the bounty of friction throughout Lost Teeth bring to mind a compact, super-portable Nuova Consonanza. Oh, yes they do. The homemade instrument, the field recording, the non-musical object, and the musical instrument manipulated outside the bounds of traditional propriety serve the needs of these two freedom-lickers, based respectively in Germany and San Francisco, a detail that should scream “secret tingle spoken here.”
Walk With Me
(Spoooor) LP $20.00
The multitrack renditions of chants on Walk With Me arose during hikes in the Oakland hills. The spike of endorphins, mantric mind loops, literal peaks and valleys, and fluctuation of available breath color Tholfsen’s chants with a natural dynamism. His tuneful mouth music, mostly non-lexical folk tunes with lots of lilting vocables and wild harmonizing that swirls up unusual patterns, could be reckoned as more of a text-sound performance deal for those who brain about in fancypants. Familiar melodies and song form keep things on the path, with craggy embellishments and curious tangles on the periphery that make Walk With Me not only interesting but unlike anything else. Tholfsen was the primary voice and songwriter of U.S. Saucer, an electric folk trio active in the 1990s who recorded three LPs and a seven-inch for Amarillo Records. In the two decades prior, he performed in many groups in Iowa, Arizona, and San Francisco, where his heavy art-rock outfit Blow reduced itself to the slow-drip syrup of his flagship endeavor. During this time, he also appeared on recordings by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and the Zip Code Revue. Post-Saucer, he released a split seven with Suzanne Langille on Road Cone’s Instress series.
Swell Maps 1972-1980
(Sounds On Paper) Hardcover book + 7-inch $30.00
Formed in band-member and co-founder Jowe Head’s home town of Solihull, England in 1972, the group featured the late Nikki Sudden and Nikki’s brother, the late Epic Soundtracks, along with Phones Sportsman, John Cockrill, and Richard Earl. In this 152-page biography of the band, Heads takes us to each members’ formative years and reveals what made them experiment with challenging music and eventually come together to form Swell Maps. Through his own recollections and utilizing interviews with former members, he explores the early days of the band, and details stories that bring the reader into the inner workings of the band as they traveled through the late ’70s cultural scene in Europe. The last section of the book updates the whereabouts of all the key players. The book includes dozens of full-color images of band memorabilia from the author's personal collection, including photos, posters, flyers, artwork, original lyrics, and more. Six exclusive, never-before-released tracks are on the seven-inch, culled from the archives. Edition of 1000
The Juice From Your Pen Is Running Down My Leg vol. 1
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.546) CDR $8.00
Celebrating all things word, throat, tongue, mind. Tracks from Malcy Duff, Natalia Beylis, Of Habit, Sophie Cooper, Neil Campbell, Roy Claire Potter, S. Glass, Andy Heck Boyd & Kasper Melted, Mark Groves, Angela Sawyer. Cover art by Andy Heck Boyd. Edition of 80
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.
Ghoul Town Tales Three
(Dai Coelacanth) Magazine $6.50 (Out-of-stock)
How does the final part of the trilogy end? The lives, loves and lost hope of the cast and crew of intergalactic soap opera “Pagan Satellites” come crashing down. Wigs get worn. Milk gets drunk. Is this the end for Sick Larry? Will Nancy continue wearing green till the final page? Thicker than other volumes. More words. Less white space. White space is a symbol of corporate fascism. Death to the minimalists.
Hand Signals
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
The debut release on this Ireland-based label is the first Mark-Knopfler-approved “real” CD by Bren’t Lewiis. Eleven disorienting tracks: heavily edited sound collage; Orchid-Spangiafora-style word play; malfunctioning, sputtering machines; instruments and objects that are blown, shaken, scraped, and generally sabotaged in various ways. You won’t know whether it’s intestines, brains, or macaroni salad. If the CIA had access to this kind of arsenal during MKUltra, who knows what kind of damage they could have inflicted.
Dives Headfirst Into Punk Rock 1978/79
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
Krim Kram’s expanded CD reissue of the cassette first issued on Pigface Records in 2015 documents the earliest recordings of Smegma performing live as part of the Portland punk rock / new wave scene (Myrtle Tickner, Jerry A. and Pig Champion from Poison Idea would all later go on to play with the band at various stages throughout the 80s and 90s). Included are the complete Flashcards and Disco Diarrhea 7s, both originally self-released on Pigface Records in 1979.
Dressing
(Krim Kram) CD $11.75
After about a decade of activity in the visual arts, Dublin-based Kevin Kirwan jumps into experimental sound using field recordings, found objects, feedback and tape manipulation. His noise is restrained and textural with occasional melodic undercurrents. Krim Kram’s CD reissues two cassettes originally self-released in editions of 15 in 2021, described by S. Grey as “concise explorations of materiality and physicality via hard-panned, lumbering slow-burn buzz and cut up blasts of spidery frequencies [with] an exquisite sense of timing.”
I Am Falling Down
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.547) split CDR $8.00
Recorded in his infamous Kamo Road wack shack way down in Whangarei, Mykl Veet presents 35 minutes of wheezing computer music and hyperactive whir. 0s and 1s fall in dollops of noise, twitching. Meanwhile, the Moistest Scotsman gives you a 25-minute tape loop meditation recorded at 6am inside Wino Lodge one dreich April morning. Sit still and feel yourself slowly drifting upwards or sideways. More hiss than you can shake a snake at, pentecost. Numbered edition of 50
Suffer For Succotash
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.544) CDR $8.00
Whether this manchild is an absurdist pin-up or the human embodiment of a dung beetle, Theo Gowans never lets up with his vision for a better world through sound and performance. Suffer For Succotash is a weird tour through a few different styles in which he has been dabbling for the past two years. Messy noise muckabout meets classy songsmithery — a sauce worth sampling. Numbered edition of 50
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.
36 Fibulae
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.545) Magazine + Cassette $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
This gnostic-horror song cycle by the visual and sound artist employs malfunctioning home-built instruments in a series of asynchronous dream-logic miniature plays. Each World is a Drop World, measured in fibulae. Most are without words and many will eventually be expressed as jewelry. Select fibulae include: 1fibulae, a small Pennsylvania suburb in which humans grow prehensile tails with a large eye at the end à la Charles Fourier’s theory of the Archibras; 9fibulae, an exploration of the erotic pleasures of botany in a world without sound; 17fibulae, an innocent game that allows the viewer to see invisible intelligences in residues of protein via various household devices; 23fibulae, The Police are here again; 28fibulae, on the manufacturing of psychoactive pharmaceuticals from a reliquary housing the preserved corpse of a child posthumously revered as a saint; and 32fibulae, against the diseases of civilization. Since the mid-’00s Strong has been developing an approach to improvisation, instrument-building, and applying material from daily life to psycho-devotional purposes. He has performed in groupings such as Melkings, Eyes of the Amaryllis and Weyesbluhd/ Weyesblood, to name a few. He also operates the tape imprint Cor Ardens. Includes badge. Numbered edition of 50