Wonderful eye and ear wonk from 2008. 7" vinyl + 60 pages offset booklet (with screen printed cover). Foreword by Byron Coley.

The first post-BUFMS-boxset disgorgement of ramshackle outsider clatter and howl from one of California’s many rural nowheres exposes previously hidden, 25-year-old whack-off (à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, Yximalloo, Gastric Female Reflex, Id M Theft Able, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk and Beniffer Editions). The murky “Take It Out And Kill It” whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner one critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks in the immediate vicinity, this recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience, guerrilla action recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. “[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird , befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow.” –Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

Combine XXIII-XXXV brings John Wiggins, Thomas Dimuzio, and RRRon Lessard back together, whose earlier efforts Option called “serious art damage that careens from ambient industrial to the astringent squonks, bleeps and clamor of ’60s avant-garde, to the angst-ridden sonic shards and noisy electronic reflections of the post-industrial mess….” Live recordings and Zanstones’ squeezebox ditties get squeezed through the ringer and agitated, and with help from their own brand of detergents and stripping agents. Edition of 500 copies.

Both versions of “People,” the aloof masterpiece by Mancunian iconoclasts Gods Gift, are covered simultaneously on the A Side, as Bren’t Lewiis shambles along on fuzz guitar, warped keyboards, and Colour Out Of Space field recordings, while the imperious Silvia Kastel intones her dispassionate but resolutely negative critique of mankind. The B Side continues with a severely bent cover of both versions of “O Jackie O,” itself a damaged charm song by Chicago trio ONO, here performed on messed-up kazoo, holiday wrapping paper tube, and tape-manipulated field recordings from the swamp where Annette Funicello’s head was buried by The Allman Bros. An unhealthy tape piece brings the record its queasy conclusion. Overall, totally appalling, but in a good way, like the talent show scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Edition of 100.

“Matt Wascovich’s voice … [has] an urgent angularity with the melodic sense of Jack Brewer and some of the rhythmic attack of Mayo Thompson,” notes Byron Coley. “[C]ombined with the great avant-garage thunk of the players (really beautifully recorded this time around by Paul Hamann at the legendary Suma Recording Studio), and the raw imagist power of the lyrics, the material approaches classic status from its own oblique angle.” Garford Mute is the eighth album from Scarcity Of Tanks and features: Dave Cintron - guitar (Terminal Lovers), Doug Gillard - guitar (Guided By Voices), Gnarlos - electronics (Bren't Lewiis Ensemble), Don Godwin - drums (Raya Brass Band), Tom Herman - guitar, bass, acoustic guitar (Pere Ubu), Elliott Hoffman - drums (Lawton Brothers), Andrew Klimeyk - guitar, bass (X-Blank-X), Scott Krauss - drums (Pere Ubu), Steve Mackay - saxophone (The Stooges), Rich Raponi - bass, guitar (Self Destruct Button), Weasel Walter - guitar, bass (The Flying Luttenbachers), Matthew Wascovich - vocals, and Mike Watt - bass (Minutemen). Artwork by Roger Ballen (South Africa).

With as many lop-sided bleats per minute as L. Ron Hubbard’s third annual vivisection of one of Anton Lavey’s goats of Christmas past in the parking lot of Dismaland, The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s cave noise conniptions get spinal-tapped by indelicate incursions of raw, untamed electronic thrusts and stabs. Toys, scratchy LPs of old Vietnamese showtunes, various nube-tubes, the forced laughter of a little person courtesy of Werner Herzog, and kitchen objects are some of the reassuring soundposts in this chiaroscuro dungeon, blinking between the cavernous scrape of dejected janitorial tasks, the feeble thuds of someone or something getting dragged across cobblestones caked with layer upon sickening layer of effluvia, and tiny metallic splats scurrying like immortal tapirs from one corner to the other. Disembodied voices speak not so much to communicate but to keep the creeping dread of the speaker at bay. The damaged soliloquy of the permanently distracted gets a thorough examination here, bolstered by the weirdly spirited yelps of the doomed and murmurs from a decomposing mule born under a wandering star. Throughout their patched-together network, spastic clunks engage in intimate congress with mechanical gasps, chokeholds, grunts, and the struggles of the restrained, rising and falling in parallel with irrational wheedle pulsations and hopeless density. Remote controlled drones buzz in and out of view, according to the trajectories of nonsensical flight-paths. Peculiar grinding from homemade spirit-breakers (known in the trade as aluminum maidens) morph from dispassionate sketches of abscess-befouled meadowlands to up-close chakra punctures and hi-sheen abscess pierce to collapsed thunder from failed Russian barge maneuvers. Includes industrial expressionist collage. 

Sun of the Seventh Sister’s debut CD -- a woolly mammoth of mushroom-fueled free-psych -- follows a 2007 New Zealand tour triple-lathe-LP and a septuple-cassette boxset on Breakdance The Dawn. The floating line-up ranges from ten to twenty-five players (with members of xNoBBQx, UnAustralians, Arse Lunch, Cock Up Shitting Whore, Rats With Wings, Stasis Duo and others): multiple drummers, multiple electrified chordophones, horns, vocals, oscillators, etc. Imagine half a dozen freak-folk ensembles congealing into a psychedelic din of Borbetomagan proportions. The CD consists of three immense tracks, taken from a three-hour session, lovingly recorded by the Pulled Out mobile unit, with mastering analysis by DJ Beefcurtains.

Two six-minute montages of reversed mitosis episodes, in which scaly pods, ruptured eggs, and clumps of partially digested hair smush through one another and glom together in unstable strains of S-Glass-spanktified dad-noise. 'Backlit Colander With Holes Shaped Like Numbers' crawls with bacteria from munched electronics, murmurs of a chimney-entrapped Frampton (plus camel, but that should go without saying), tape yoont teetering on the lip of a magnetic abyss, and piercing splats from tiny automatic paintball guns. “High” and “lonesome” are the operative descriptors of 'Bok Choy Festival': Barbara Manning’s guitar loops backfire and self-annihilate in private spritz-overdose orgies; avian-constructed effigies of Annie Hayworth curdle; narration on the topic of body dysmorphia is provided courtesy of thrift store cassettes and a Sister Rosetta Thorpe quotation.
Cover artwork by Karen Constance. 200 copies. Black vinyl, white cardboard sleeve with postcard attached, stamped white labels, insert. Plays at 33rpm.

Side one features "Weerzin'" by Ankersmit on computer, saxophone, Serge & EMS synthesizer. Side two is O’Rourke from 1992 on oscillators and guitars. Edition of 750 copies. Cover photo by Alexandra Leykauf.

Amplified, pulsating sounds of cracked everyday-electronics by former member of Voice Crack, pioneers in the field of sound installation techniques usage in live improvised music. Rhythm is a primal foundation of fuzz_galopp’s texture, based solely on mechanical objects, and its density and powerful dynamics are thrillingly vivid. Recorded live at Espace Multimedia Gatner, Bourgogne, 2010.

Heavy, Sun-City-Girls-flavored dada deluxe, previously released on cassette (Chocolate Monk 2014). Crackling midgets and purist psychedelia from the spiritual wonderland within a cocoon of seven dirty pearls.

Produced under a pseudonym, presumably, this LP cannot be considered a soundtrack to the lost and fabled rumor of world cinema of the same name, but it is as close as we are likely to get to the thing itself, or to the truth of its stories, of which there are three distinct and curiously related. The first revolves around a mysterious early phonograph, produced by an eccentric inventor named Raglani, and purporting, by accompanying letter, to be a direct audio recording of the man's dreams and most precious memories. In the second part of the film, another man named Raglani (whose connection with his earlier namesake is not made clear), this time a composer of popular renown, whose talents, have been mostly squandered on commercial work, attempts to compose a piece of music in memory of his dead wife. He is driven mad by the pain of his efforts, and in the end kills himself by burning down his house, together with all traces of the piece (the titular “Web of Light”). Finally, the third story features a filmmaker (names are not mentioned), preoccupied with the spiteful task of documenting the disintegration of his marriage--piecing together a film from fragments of home movies, his own drunken commentary, and footage of his ex-wife and her new lover, surreptitiously filmed. Suicidal and obsessed, the man finds himself beset by strange dreams--filled with buried snatches of melody we can recognize from the first story--that seem to direct the failed auteur toward a rendezvous with a woman always only nearly-seen. The effect of the dreams is to shake our anonymous hero from the stupor of his sordid documentary efforts, and send him following those clues he jots down feverishly upon waking. It's unlikely that anyone will ever see the film -- truly "a film lost in space," to date an imaginary record of something that happened, but was never made, an idea evading the constraints of any plastic medium.

This is some Big Gurn, Ethel: a warm and twitching box of meat long-awaited (by someone somewhere, maybe) as a requisite for the passage of Blood Stereo and Bren’t Lewiis to the next stage in their mud-worshiping pupation. The bulk of the album consists of fried and munched decimations of recordings from live events in sunny Caledonia-Upon-Entrail, miscellaneous unincorporated villages throughout the backwoods of Lower Scotland’s Britain Minor region, and a handful of West Coast pear orchards in what is now known as California. Spookily hovering objects gently clang against one another in arenas of witchy ambience. Lo-fi reproductions of crushing rumbles hiss through passages of spastic regurgitation. Voices and mouth-hole-sourced noise-type audio jiggle and whither between swirling montages of home-made fweent, bent found sound, loops, and tape-manipulated jiggery-pokery. The gorp-meisters also disrobe for “Conversation With Bicycle Horn,” a graphic score composed in the early 1980s by Richard Sterling Streeter, who hails the first-ever recording of his work thus: “Exactly as annoying and monotonous as intended.”

The founder of Tape Op magazine and Vomit Launch recorded and self-released numerous cassette-only albums throughout the ’80s, mostly passed around to friends and fellow noise-makers, consigned at local record shops, and traded with like-minded travelers through the mail. One reviewer wrote, “The echoing sounds, pulsating tones, and other space age noise creations melodically swim through the compositions, occasionally colliding in dissonant tones that pout over the rhythm, sometimes created by a fuzzy bass or Schroederesque toy piano rambling.” Six previously unreleased tracks plus thirteen selections from a half dozen self-released cassettes, with Steve Valin of Ziplok on three tracks, and Matt Mumper on the full version of “Beor’s Theme.” Cover art by Karen Constance. Edition of 100

While enduring his high school years (1976-1980) in Livermore, California, where the jocks were known to lift up a person without warning and deposit him in a public garbage can, Richard Streeter channeled his blossoming passion for the work of Jefferson Airplane, Timothy Leary, musique concrète, comix and all things counterculture into boombox recordings with his sister and a cross-section of the local freakdom. Sometimes the batteries were due for a refresher and the results ended up fuzzy and all heliumed out. Sometimes mom and her snack tray made a cameo in the middle of the session. Whether jamming on violin in a group or scrambling his playing with reel-to-reel experiments, banging on coffee cans or trying to conquer unrequited love Charlie Brown-style, importing a little bit of Haight Street to the flavorless suburbs or navigating good ol’ fashioned angst, The Viper never loses sight of the value of his own innate lyricism. Art For Pain’s Sake has plenty of humor but it is never insincere. As anyone who has heard his track “Cookies Shaped Like Kites” on Induced Musical Spasticity or the Blood Lewiis recording of his graphic score “Conversation With Bicycle Horn” can affirm, Streeter remains committed to craftsmanship, whether exploring his fatuous side or just sketching in the margins for no particular reason. Edition of 100

Tracks from between 2000 and 2003, both released in limited quantities and previously unreleased. Recorded entirely with a Yamaha Rm1x sequencer in a closet or crawlspace.

New publication of dream writings from 2013

Dutch maverick conceptualist Rinus van Alebeek interprets the music of the well-known French-Italian tape music composer. As van Alebeek says, he doesn’t make music, and is in fact a writer who abandoned traditional literature and its confines, in favor of “writing” with the cassette recorder. “It is an example of his unique sonic approach to documentary reportage,” supposes our friend at The Sound Projector, “A compelling suite ... which layers together several half-familiar domestic and everyday sounds, along with half-whispered narrating voices, suspending everything in a fluid and open-ended mix…. [C]learly … not ‘composed’ in any normal sense of the word … it unfolds [naturally] and you have no clear idea where it is going, or what to expect next.” The third release in Bôłt’s Populista series of radical reinterpretations of historical music, curated by Michał Libera.

Collaborative “Shamanic music in urban context” and “sounds for non-Euclidean geometry landscapes,” which start with the noisy, mystical drones of the Finnish Uton and continues with the Argentinean Courtis’s manipulations and extra noise. Thematically linked by flowers, mixed with Spanish and Finnish language.

Six tracks that mix the noise experimentation of Stéphane Récrosio with Sébastien Borgo’s field recordings and short waves in Sydney and Tasmania. Digital precision, lo-fi fog, junk sounds, clean noise, kitchen utensils. Cover is hand-stamped on heavy cardboard. Includes postcard. Clear vinyl. Edition of 200.

Three tracks of frenetic cut-up rhythm coming from treated feedback and overdriven saxophones, recorded live at Olga’s Laundry in Athens, Greece. Includes two inserts. Edition of 287.

Fusiller's side: France. Electronic passion. Electronic romance. Lowered fist. Balinese Beast's side: Greece. Electric wires. Cartoon saxophone. Feedback loops. Dead mix table. Secret rhythms

Six micro-compositions by Caroline Ehretique (Ondes Martenot, voice, piano, analog synth, electronics, and whip) and Ogrob (analog synth, wind, chiropteran echolocation, railway signal, screams, electronics), oscillating between musique brut, musique concrete and captured nightmares. Hand-made sleeve, linocut on both sides. Edition of 300.

Grainy loop tracks, vocal tracks (which may or may not also be from tape), and surrealist music which isn't miles away from early Nurse With Wound. Richard Vergez (Drowning the Virgin Silence, Gray Girls, Mothersky), Duane Hosein (A Jealousy Issue, Hand Carved Gentleman, ex-Poison the Well). Brandon Samdahl (Mr Entertainment and the Pookie Smackers) and Anthony Mangicapra bathe the entire thing in foggy reverb and mysterious scratching and shifting, which pulls it all together. It makes sense only as a dream transcribed onto recording equipment. The A side contains material previously released on The Huntington Chapters three-inch CDR (Small-Doses) and the B side is all previously unreleased recordings from the same sessions. Mastered by James Plotkin.

On this unique and unexpected collaboration by the mad doctor Kimihide Kusafuka and the piano-and-sax duo Takayuki Hashimoto and Sara, mineral-like noise coalescences around improv pulsations. Chimeras and human machinery, organic and inorganic matter fuse, and sudden strange creatures made of space probes and skin induce panic with their harsh, dystopic sound.

The first volume in Phase! Records’ Bedroom Solitary series is a numb-feel exploration of isolation and singularity through space and darkness. Neuter beats, crawling vibratos, synesthetic repetitions and robotic ambiances form a two-piece electronic work, a hymn to the loneliness of the artistic existence. The title track features synthetic chatter on Dylan Thomas’s “Poem 39,” while “Subtract, ”flirts with disorientation through distortion and low sparse kicks. Edition of 99

Exceptional wailing and burning garage psych-rock grounded in heart-breaking, melancholic intensity are guitar monster Kawaguchi’s trademarks; bassist Akira Kikuchi and drummer Nao Shibata (Hijokaidan, Doodles) are primo enablers. Forty minutes of instantly hummable, head-nodding, toe-tapping riffs and melodies, and unavoidable white-light-white-heat guitar solos by this trio of vets from PSF’s Tokyo Flashback vol. 6. White vinyl. Edition of 500. Imported from New Zealand. Cover art by Sandra Schmidt.

Joining Maurizio and Roberto Opalio on their fourth album for Starlight Furniture Co., legendary French-Corsican guitarist and co-founder of Groupe de Recherche et d’Improvisation Musicales brings his noisy lyricism to three long tracks of oddly sensual and animalistic space howl. As their past collaborations attest, My Cat Is An Alien’s self-sustaining biosphere is an environment where the surreal dreamscapes of mavericks and eccentrics flourish. On this live recording, Jean-Marc Montera’s home-made guitar table, objects, and electronics forge metallic ribbons that twitch between the distant clangs of gigantic spores, while Maurizio (on home-made double-bodied string instrument and effects) and Roberto (on alientronics, effects, and modified electronic devices) set worms adrift in a zero-gravity aviary stocked with narcotized satsuma fowl. Roberto adds disorientation to the trio’s fog-blurred horizon with wordless vocalizations that could pass for billowing laments hooted by mutant sea mammals with enoki mushrooms growing on their larynxes.

 “Since the late 1990s My Cat Is An Alien have successfully renewed a commitment to psychedelia as a revealing factor of the soul," says French critic and writer Philippe Robert. "Brothers Roberto and Maurizio Opalio’s interest in John Cage’s thought and in free improvisation is hardly a secret; hence the attraction toward architectures based on the concept of instantaneous composition, created from extended practices. In March 2015, serendipity brought together My Cat Is An Alien and guitarist Jean-Marc Montera in Marseille, for a concert where complicity manifested itself immediately, thanks to simpatico affinities (Montera in France is a pioneer of non-idiomatic improvisation) and encounters. The trio set out for the beyond, in search of the Harmony of the Spheres, as they have, again and again.”

"So successful is this split-LP at hoovering up every last atom of vitamin B12 from the listening parlor, it really oughta come with vouchers for a cobalt patch. Not that eerily smooth and slightly red tongues are totally lacking in merit — rule thirty-four and all that — but there are occasions when a person needs to stand up without fear of keeling over.

Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis’s “Six Soddened Scenes” effortlessly ushers believers through their funhouse hexagon like a couple of one-armed juggler docents. A plastic bottle rattles inside a lettuce spinner, maybe, and it’s more refreshing than a tumbler full of iced bees (docile when served chilled, but they wake up in your mouth); machinery grinds during upper respiratory trials in a sitting room, not to be outdone by the beauteous overdriven shred of Ali MacKinnon’s amplified foghorn blarf; scratchy Brillo remnants and snippets of Bollywood soundtrack hover above scenes of escape pods about to sink during the systematic decay of the mothership hull, each rivet popping one at a time. Murky woont, fractured lost-life howls, and tiny screechlets define the slow-mo suffocation of an audience of easily spooked walruses who can create a stampede of fat with the slightest provocation (you do not wanna get in front of that, seriously); monologues worthy of Jodorowsky make their presence known among passages of ivory tickling, typically judgmental chickens, and equine asthma demonstrations. The mockery of swooping ducks requires a heads-up, what with their air-bending wing extensions that emit gnarly death cries appropriate to WWI myths, digital feedback, bass amps, and the heavy condensation of anxiety into hard, hairy, sweaty balls. Lady Clackarella and her magnetic sisters pick at the metal washers under their skin and leave trails of ooze everywhere they go. One section, seemingly designed to resemble evacuation from the digestive system of a sentient cabbage, should convince some listeners that they are, in fact, Crohn’s Disease with shoes. Looped and cut-up piano slip through the haze of a recital hall filled with addicts vaping carolina reapers.

On the flip, Hair And Treasure’s stingers throughout “Juno Lake Loop(s)” remain sharp enough to deface one’s concept of space. Vestibular heat radiates from the mirrored walls of Alex Jones and Gonçalo F. Cardoso’s wobbling honeycomb — indeed, the contrast and activity of their montage rivals a newborn infant’s takeaway from baby’s first episode of Spongebob. Colored vinegar fountains immortalize the sacred gurgle; death snorts commemorate distant string ploink; an organ dirge is jauntified and reimagined as a drained-pond shanty; the flutter of rubber swimfin on facemask and the crackle of cattails getting snapped off provide the necessary dinner theater overture. Gag-and-raspberry cut-ups are peppered with Mirounga ululations; contestants joust blind-folded; volunteers regret having agreed to high-speed bandage removal; pizzicato ploink bouquets flourish like the bursting blood vessels in a drunkard’s last remaining bits of uncorrupted cartilage. Top-shelf grunts provide deep satisfaction; the appetite for deep-fried breaded chainlink fence is whetted by the scraping of the barrel; virtuoso paddle boing elicits titters and giggles easier than two nudists scooping cloudy oil out of a vat; the reed-abusive whine of oblique wind / brass / licorice protocols mimics advanced inhalation strategies for newly mono-nostrilled scotoplanes. The league of refrigerator-trapped amphibians assemble (heralded by encoded somnambulant chirps and sci-fi bleep bloop passed along via networks of malfunctioning baby monitors), and drift isolated in a gelatin cube where accordion–harmonica woont bends and refracts in delicate intersections of tropical weather anomalies; imploding treefrogs remain calm during their noble self-sacrifice for the greater good; the anal growls of a twenty-one-duck salute morph into pronunciation guides for… something (it’s encrypted, so who knows). The sound of Zugly keyboards rippling through corrugated tunnels indicates closing time at the Nystagmus deficiency theme park.

Whether you’re struggling with a touch of anhedonia or just feeling dumbfounded and angry, these two collages will knock the desire back into you. The blissful wooze of aneurysms proliferates inside crystal balls until they pop, scattering into stammer-inducing arrangements where you can’t tell what’s facing up and what facing down. If nothing else, Discrepant’s release of this pair of masterpieces of maniacally telescoped Scheherazadian novellas proves that freak-scrambled history is one worth living for." - Seymour Glass

In abundance here are excerpts from a March 2016 appearance in the Creative Music Guild’s Outset Series at Turn Turn Turn in Portland, Oregon -- plastic egg stomps and solitary hockey ape by Gnarlos; ecto-synchronous screech from cassette players left under chairs and tables, pre-recorded by Babuna Virus, Lindy Lettuce, and The Viper; and Lucian Tielens in DJ Bruce Haack mode with his gigantic all-in-one toy console. Highlights from No Spray 205 sessions include a marvelous solo by Tielens on popcorn box, bent Memorial Day ragas with mammoth curls, and a cut-up of a clutzy failure’s stammering death spirals sourced from a found self-help cassette. But it’s the 26-minute storage closet recording “Erika’s Last Day” that is the centerpiece of the album. From Tom Timpson on the credit card machines to newest ensemble member Count Darkula raking a window to nowhere and working cardboard tubes like Paul Lynde dry heaving into a didgeridoo, the only other source for such extended anxiety and astonished dread would be a psychic battle between a levitating junior high school shop class and a home-ec class rolling around the kitchen blind-folded. One part guerilla confinement test, one part circular firing squad, the no-instruments track boasts the wince-inducing weeent of metal clothes hangers getting dragged across a metal dowel, old doors opening and closing, the hoarse scrape of porcelain mugs and bowls grinding on a nail sticking out of the wall, the brittle clink of jars and vases rotating against one another, and the insane helium whine of sticks making frantic scribbling gestures on cardboard boxes. Slats on doors of wooden cabinets and plastic hangers are clacked; boxes of nails and screws are shaken; cans of paint, vacuum cleaner tube, metal rods and anything else that could be held onto are dropped on the floor and kicked back and forth. So, yeah, it’s a very percussive odyssey, in the same sense that a hornet’s nest thwacked moments ago with a tennis racket could also be considered percussive. Using enhanced cross- pollination techniques such as running the water in the sink and molesting components of half-built mannequins, the group passes an important milestone in their self-imposed primal grunt therapy.

The first of two warm-up prequels to the group’s upcoming reimagining of Live at Pompeii, “Squat And Elevate The Perforated Cylinder” sweeps swatches of ring modulator grit across expansive Herbertian wastelands like second-hand, moose-befouled flying carpets. Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos attack the fetid void by cacking together spritz mosaics sourced from an interstellar vinegar bath. The newest member of the group, Count Darkula draws on previous experiences within the cold hard swamp and fires off volleys of epic woont, diseased mastication struggles, and mechanical flutters. Picking up on the intrusion of turd-nourished car alarms (because Bren’t Lewiis always records with the windows open), The City Councilman counter-attacks with fractured yelps from bio-chimerical slaughterhouses and a black yoga move known as “upward oozing glue gun.” Fragments of his electric guitar fwa-garnk seep into the obstacle course from all corners, deflecting mushy roars as they deep-throat throbbing and discordant echo. The second one “Plummeting Blobs Of Unguent” is slightly more low key but every bit the exercise in weightless, animalistic flailing. Pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape yoink passes through layers and layers of distressed transmissions. The edges of unidentified blocks of congealed fluids crackle and crumble. Fur-choked warbles pulsate from the intestines of a lunatic grizzly sickened by the irresistible sweetness of blood berries and lead paint. The distant screeches of metallic fruitflies gnawing the mold off the sides of a dumpster become the sickening threat-assessment howls of cats with telephone abdomens. Bracketing the twin epics are: a sullen invocation by gargoyles forced to navigate insectoid percussion, the luminescent yawp of Babuna Virus, belligerent gurgitations, and acid reassurances; and Limphoma’s impromptu, heckle-based “My Down Booties Were Eaten By Pat’s Dog,” recorded live opening for The Tenses, ending the album in a mangle of stomped-upon slurry.

Recorded in Portland, Oregon, under the influence of King Tubby, The Frogs, and shared fantasies about a 30th Century interpretation of Grey Gardens, the foundational spwahaohao of Casino Sordide could easily pass as the soundtrack for a demented, Justice-Schanfarber-hosted straight-to-public-access travelogue. The ingredients manifest includes: jumbush; damaged sitar; shamisen-type thing; kalimba seemingly custom-made for Richard Keel; suitcase zipper; messed-up log with big lead bolts, wire, and sounding gourd attached (like a Gambian ko that could double as a cudgel for a midget Viking); metal lid from tea canister; ScratchBox; air mattress pump; acoustic guitar; toy ukulele; flutish wind-instrument made of wood; Velcro; big exercise ball; bells; lychee-shaped keychain; metal ruler; plastic lid from a bottle of hot flash pills; homemade zither; cat toy; aloe vera gel; mild dyspepsia; and wood scraped with pushpins. These quiet, understated recordings are considerably gilded by overdubs of loops, tape manipulation, found noises, remote individual performances by farflung members of the group. Two mid-’80s tracks previously released on their debut cassette Make It Stop, along with new collage pieces, cast this album as the red-headed stepchild of Pork Queen’s Strang geeking the sort of quasi-shaman visions present on Buffy Saint-Marie’s Illuminations, covertly harassed by parasitic sociopaths, temple desecrators, and a language-impaired tribe locked in a basement long after the tornado has passed.

A dream-like motion from distant drones of vaguely defined shape toward totally disembodied sound, by this Australian musician who has worked with Oren Ambarchi in the Menstruation Sisters, Greg Turkington, Mirror, Daisuke Suzuki and others.

“Aide-memoire is the first vinyl album release from Rats With Wings, the noise project for William Lemnell of Sydney, Australia. Compiling tracks previously scattered across the globe via CD-R format, it’s a great introduction to his jack-knife approach to modern noise. It’s also perfectly presented, as self-released fetish objects of collector desire often are. Lemnell has fixed a scratched and worn CD to the front cover, data side up. It looks like the very format itself has grown mould, backsliding into disrepair through natural weathering. The cover works as metaphor for Lemnell’s compositional process. He’s obsessed with the frayed edges of noise stretched to breaking point, whether via analogue or digital means. The sidelong opening cut is scratchy and crabby, almost diffident, with harsh digital distortion and noise-gating building an uncertain architecture from hard disk detritus. Elsewhere, Lemnell unleashes great bee-swarms of unruly noise that melt into birdsong just before they reach saturation point, while church organ drones sing from beneath percolating buzzes and clicks. The final side is a traditional noise blowout, cutting from manipulated spoken word samples to sandpaper-grit walls of sound. What pushes Lemnell far beyond cookie-cutter noise machinations, though, is the deftness of his touch. This is perfectly exemplified by the second side, a stunning work for elevated drones, with buzzing guitars ringing out an insect symphony while bubbling electronics glaze the desktop. As with much of Aide-memoire, the development and deployment is leisurely – it feels as if it could, and should, go on forever.” – Jon Dale

It has been said that Billy Bao doesn't believe in hypnagogia because he always sleeps with one eye open, and when he dreams, all he sees is AIDS deniers, German shepherds, and soldiers disguised as UN peacekeepers. Before Mattin and anarchism ruined his life, Billy was a bit of a troubadour who accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and warbled wild songs of protest in his native Nigerian patois. This new album, his third on vinyl, is a transitional one dating from late 2006. The gaztetxes of Bilbao hadn't yet burrowed into his marrow, Mattin was still plotting his moves for acting as Merle to Billy's G.G., and the herpes sores in the mouth of global capitalism revealed no visible symptoms. What began as a relaxing session in which Billy conducted a pickup band of itinerant improvisers through a song-by-song cover of Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground got fucked up by Taku Unami. Likewise, Margarida Garcia lends astounding skill and highly personal idiom on the electric double-bass (in her hands an instrument with the tension of string on wood and the disruptive potential of a crackle box); Barry Weisblat, meanwhile, teases out a century of drone from a Cornell lunchbox of filament and circuitry; the sainted Tim Barnes plays drums and percussion with a saintly touch; Mattin, thumb and forefinger compulsively pinching (or stroking) his Hitler mustache after every take, funnels Billy's malaise through laptop, percussion, and folk instrumentation; and a women's choir eerily fills out the atmosphere with wordless vocals and incantations. The result is a fragmentary, extremely loud hippie jam session punctuated by stretches of uneasy silence and scrape. Cover artwork by Henry Flynt.

Beautiful musique concrete and analog synth that explores the interaction between field recordings and simple sine waves. In Meyers's balanced suite, individual elements lose their origins in favor of composition. Edition of 150.

Originally released by Japan’s G.R.O.S.S. label as a cassette in a limited edition of 88 copies in late 1994, Loop Circuit’s Sound on Sound joins Akifumi Nakajima (also known as prolific noise artist Aube) with Dub Murashita together in an all-electronic self-hypnosis seminar. The duo limits their source materials to purely electronic sounds, loops and effects, creating a mesmerizing, constantly shifting mosaic. Slight creasing on the top right corner of the cover.

To plagiarize Volcanic Tongue, this solo effort by John Olson (Wolf Eyes) encompasses abstruse sonic strategies (almost Sick Llama-esque in their inscrutability) and avant garde miniatures consisting of electrified balls of steel wire, stuck-groove drone epics, and primitive hobbyist hi-fi experiments. Olson wads up 20th century sound art practice (as documented by Alga Marghen, Revue Ou, et al.) with the home-burned aesthetic of the Chocolate Monk / Fag Tapes / American Tapes axis. Artwork by Jonas Delaborde.

Based around the Argentinean mythology of the Werewolf, or “the blue dog” that lives on the “land without evil” of Mbya-Guarani, the first collaboration by Menche and Courtis whips up primal and natural noise. Menche draws out the sound and resonances found lying in snow and rocks while Courtis bewitches pizza sauce cans and his guitar, creating this mind flaying homage to the mythical wolf.

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 colour insert.

Improvisation tinged with humor and humility, a rare approach. From the strangely nerdy harpsichord to the spirit of serenity and clusters of small noises and explosions, from the male vocals competing without meaning, trying to scream higher and higher, to the supervisor berating students for smoking, Couper les tchou-tchou delivers new ideas and much-needed rawness to a frequently fixed and ossified genre.

Debut album recorded in part during a 2006 European tour and in Quebec. Philemon, A_dontigny, and Erick Orion are joined by Erikm, Arnaud Rivière, and Erik Minkinnen whose wax footprints are noted for their delicacy, subtlety, and unorthodox approaches to improv. Edition of 181.

“Informed by ecstatic jazz, but Poisson's roots are in pragmatic sonic experimentalism,” notes Bruce Russell, “You can almost smell the witch trials in this,” while Foxy Digitalis marvels at Part Wild Horses’ “whirling eastern tones, primal playing and dusty, dismal grain…. [A] sludging mess, but coherent and beautiful all the same,” and Volcanic Tongue can’t escape Poisson’s claustrophobia: “Creaking percussion and dooms of gong tone conjure … ghost galleon in distress … while mutated vocals, voids of breath and Jones’s fantastic flute playing carve halos in the air.” Includes “Seven Season Of Weeping,” a bonus track not included on the original cassette (Rayon 2009). 180g vinyl. Edition of 500

"A year in the making and largely informed by the Ensemble’s roots and experiences in the level of DIY broadcasting that SCTV once lovingly parodied, this 56-track bucket of stovies is Bren’t Lewiis’s most thorough homage yet to vox populi media: call-in AM radio, YouTube, public access TV, infomercial fails, obsolete instructionals, and amateur self-help cassettes that offer guidance of dubious utility. You get several meanings in the blink of an eye (to paraphrase Olivia Tremor Control) in this 69-minute rationality-flouting obstacle course. Assertions and their opposites contain veracity and patent untruth. Cyclical repetition meets the deliberately deployed and the gloriously arbitrary. Electric guitars and toy instruments and maniacal grunts careen across layers of grinding reel-to-reel noise and compromised cellphone transmissions. Looped fweeps and saturated hornk keep time throughout stretches of impromptu stress tests, insect percussion, anonymous background rumbles and rustles, pizza cutter schwing, and the crackle of scratchy old thrift store records. Sing-song chirps from skewed pop and cult memories meet hacked and damaged recordings of insufficient improv and anthropomorphized household objects. With two inserts. Edition of 100"

The first solo vinyl release by this South England multimedia artist who has been active in the field of radical sound and performance art for 20+ years. Twelve-page full-color booklet. Edition of 150. Listen to a two-minute edit of side one: https://soundcloud.com/germseed/alice-kemp-harbinger112-1

"Having rattled the hinges with last year’s “In the Blink of an Eye” seven-inch, C S Yeh flings open the door and steps inside. The startling songs on Transitions flit between sculpted guitar riffs and measured, just-shy-of-lush synth-pop with wry lyrics delivered in guileless tones. Ardent fans will have little trouble understanding the move away from handsomely carved drones or speckled and serrated noise; Transitions is simply a different form ‬of Yeh’s unmediated expression, of a spirit with Slapp Happy, but which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Magnetic Fields record."

Formed in 1997 by guitarist G.E. Stinson with bassist Steuart Liebig and guitarist Nels Cline, L.Stinkbug consciously chose to complete their line-up with a drummer who could groove -- percussionist Scott Amendola. Both Stinson and Cline prepare their guitars with an assortment of springs, toys, paint brushes, an electric drink stirrer, enough clips to make a beautician queasy, an egg whisk (that’s right, an egg whisk) and numerous other custom-made objects, and run them through a variety of effects, harmonizers and looping devices; same goes for Liebig -- chopsticks between the strings, looping devices, extended technique, the works.

Nasty rock screech that sacrifices not an ounce of the grace and finesse required of tamers of gigantic, wild sandworms. The Dead C’s improvised noise rock verges on disintegration with a trademark hazy disorientation, invariably evoking hypnotic and heavy moods. But The Dead C are no bummer. They have always sought liberation from shallow and easy rock conventions; amid the murk of cardboard box guitars, underwater vocals, and ramshackle drumming, a new consciousness emerges. The recognizable, sullen strumming, mumbling and lyrical ennui of Michael Morley, anchored by percussionist Robbie Yeats and punctuated by Bruce Russell’s atonal bursts coalesce in a solid front that mocks the efforts of schmaltz-peddling hacks.

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.

A surreal scrapbook collage of songs, sounds, and manipulated noise by singer–songwriter Barbara Manning and founder of Bananafish magazine S. Glass. With many excerpts from Glass’s early ’80s radio show, and guest appearances by members of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, CCCC, Masonna, The Dead C., U.S. Saucer, The Double U, Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, and many of Manning’s bands.

Oddly distorted guitars, mangled erhu, manipulated violas, unrecognizable African percussion, bouncy Hagemanizer™, bizarre noises, and found nonsense looped, stretched, chopped, sped up, and warped by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 guitarist.

Sonic Youth’s left-minded and soft-spoken lead guitarist wields a big stick with a solo outing of the highest sonic magnitude. The title track is a 34-minute live recording from 1994 with after-the-fact wave-shaping and spectral improvement by Rafael Toral, followed by an instrumental “Anagrama” type frolic with Steve Shelley and Thurston Moore. Plus, a couple of soundtrack excerpts and a John Lennon cover featuring the late Epic Soundtracks.

Five early ’90s tracks by one of the original lords of howling, including a Sebadoh cover. With cover art by Michael Morley (of The Dead C. and Gate), this is the flailing ultimate in rubberized, flatline wawaaarph.

Text of Light was formed in 1999 to perform improvised music during screenings of films by Stan Brakhage and other American avant-garde filmmakers from the 1950s and ’60s. These should not be considered soundtracks for Brakhage’s works, which are intended to be screened silently. Rather, the group uses the films as an element to stimulate improvisation, like an additional player, juxtaposing film and music in a real-time performance mixed-media collage. On this CD the group, in various combinations, includes: Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht on guitars and devices; Christian Marclay and DJ Olive on turntables; William Hooker on drums and percussion, and Ulrich Krieger of Zeitkratzer on sax and electronics.

The first release by the reissue-only label Eabla Records fetches an offbeat masterpiece back from the grave in search of the audience it was denied 33 years ago. Construction worker and stock car racer by day, polyester-clad musical powerhouse by night, Joe E. Neubauer risked everything to create Love Got In My Way, originally released in 1975 on an enigmatic, ill-fated vanity label from South Florida. A profusely illustrated 16-page booklet tells the shocking story of the $20,000 gamble that gave birth to this lounge-pop Pet Sounds for the middle-aged melancholic. Joe E.’s brooding music sounds more sensational than ever, having been lovingly remastered from the original tapes that Neubauer himself pulled out of his label’s dumpster in 1976.

When Points of Friction formed in January of 1981, they had no formal musical training (or even knowledge of freely improvised music) and relied on their voices and whatever else was at hand -- wire mesh, sheet plastic, an old guitar, etc. Gradually the group acquired electric instruments, toy keyboards, multi-track tape recorders, and pedal effects, and moved toward a more processed sound, informed by groups such as Faust, Cluster, Nurse with Wound, Dome, This Heat, Can, AMM, Fripp and Eno, and Negitivland. After a 20-year hiatus Joseph Hammer, Damian Bisciglia (Agog), Tim Alexander, and Kenny Ryman reformed with Mitchell Brown and dropped this, their third official release.

"In 1968, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire strapped on their instruments and declared themselves The Shaggs. At that moment begun a peculiar tale that would last far beyond the group's five-year run. Dot, Betty and Helen (and occasionally Rachel, the fourth sister) played in the group on the insistence of their father, Austin Wiggin Jr., who was convinced they were going to be big. Years earlier, Austin's mother gave him a palm reading, predicting that her son would marry a strawberry blonde woman, that he would have two sons after his mother died, and that his daughters would form a popular music outfit. The first two became reality, so Austin was certain the third would follow suit. With pure confidence and his mother's bold prediction, Austin decided that his daughters would forgo attending the local high school in favor of home schooling interspersed with a strict regiment of instrumental and vocal practice, along with jumping jacks and sit-ups. Soon after The Shaggs would enter Fleetwood Recording studios in Revere, Massachusetts to record their sole album, Philosophy Of The World, a collection of garage rock tunes that balanced charm and discordance in equal measure. Austin would spend most of his savings not only on the session but also on the manufacturing costs to press up 1,000 copies of the album (900 of which mysteriously vanished upon completion). Throughout Philosophy Of The World simple truths are revealed through the pen of sister Dot, the songwriter of the band. The rich people want what the poor people got, just as the poor people want what the rich people got. Your parents love you. There is happiness in nearness and sadness in the farness."

A document of the spellbinding chants, call-and-response decrees, hypnotic invocations and prayers performed against the demon rock’n’roll by the ultra-conservative New Age Church Universal and Triumphant, led by charismatic, gun-hoarding nutjob Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Humorous for its damnation of seemingly harmless rock stars like Billy Joel (which explains why Negativland and other culture-jammers would sample it), this mesmerizing, all-vocal performance should fascinate listeners interested in La Monte Young’s drones and that kind of party music. Guru Ma, RIP, 10/17/09

"Seht is one of the post-Corpus Hermeticum bands whose peers are Birchville Cat Motel, Peter Wright, A.M., and folks like that. Stephen Clover and Boston artist Howard Stelzer first swapped recordings from their respective locales -- cars going by, planes overhead, birds in the bushes, just humdrum suburban stuff. Next, the recording of the NZ birds were played in Boston’s trees and re-recorded as the local birds sang along with the foreign tweets. Likewise, tapes of Boston cars going by were mixed with NZ cars going by. After it was all processed, scrambled and reassembled, it wound up having a certain melancholy feel. A cassette-blurp mess straightens out steadily until it’s just a flat line and the tap tap tap of a dying tape deck motor. A party record, basically."

Fourth anniversary comp with twelve exclusive, unreleased tracks by former, present and future artists and friends of the label: Joachim Montessuis, AMK, Aaron Dilloway, Philip Marshall, Krube, Michael Barthel, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Michael Muennich, Giuseppe Ielasi, Leif Elggren, Michael & Basil Esposito. Seventy-seven minutes. Double-sided insert and hand-assembled cover. Edition of 300.

Sixty-eight tracks in twenty-two minutes -- a plausible incarnation of some sort of harsh folk, like a French rogue and degenerate cousin of Bill Orcutt, or a Loren Mazzacane Connors on Temesta. The new project from Romain Perrot, aka Vomir, obsessive head-bagged Harsh Noise Wall icon. Edition of 500.

Heavyweight improviser, stereo guitar pioneer, and Aufgehoben guitarist Gary Smith has you covered in the multiple layering, complex grainy textures, dense counterpoint, influences of birdsong department. Fused with this is the guitar of free improv innovator Ninni Morgia, which floats between minimal movements of primordial electronics, pre-war slide blues and Hendrix-esque feedback. La Barbara and Torchia protégé Silvia Kastel’s moaning, screaming and howling alternates with her delayed, bubbling, glitchy or round bass synth. It’s a dense sound for three people -- not just visceral and intense, but articulate and defined, and in some instances very delicate. It’s got the deep taste of fearlessness of tempo, pulse, more conventional musical devices, or pushing to unpredictable extremes. Includes free download card.

Surreal collage and engaging avant creep-core from a Toronto sextet led by William A. Davison (who has worked with Stephen Stapleton and Gastric Female Reflex). Found sound field-recordings, cut-ups, circuit-bent electronics, and homemade instruments are the tools of these sci-fi induced, satanic backwoods Ozark jams housed inside two-color sleeves screen-printed by GFR's Andrew Zukerman on old LP jackets and spray-painted by Disguises' Kevin Crump on cardboard flats. Hand-stamped labels. Numbered edition of 300.

A fusion of musique concrete, avant-garde, tropical psychedelia, moaning, screaming, free jazz and lots of raw synths recorded by German NO!artists / performers in collaboration with Italian musicians Ninni Morgia (guitar) and Silvia Kastel (synth and voice). Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer are known for their provocative and extreme neo-dada. Ninni Morgia moves in NYC’s improv and free jazz circles, has been heard in psychedelic rock outfit La Otracina, and started the noise rock band White Tornado. Silvia Kastel has studied sound engineering, electronic music, and singing (with Lee Torchia and Joan La Barbara). All four killed it on a UK tour, where they played and recorded at historical sound poetry venue The Morden Tower in Newcastle. Edition of 300. "Tropical... screaming... sounds good. I totally need an eleventh record from these nuts." --Darksmith.

The two-part “Jericho” uses a backing tape group-prerecorded in a big theater-like room, a version of the lyrics spoken live onstage, and Mama Bär’s video projections of the four standing against a wall. Hjuler manipulates tape, Mama Bär and Kastel sing the lyrics, Morgia bends, buffs and brushes guitar, and Kastel’s synthesizer growls from within the monster’s belly. Tension, discomfort, love, pain, theater, music, art -- four people immolating themselves for the cause. Silkscreened sleeve. Edition of 200

Minimal and tense recordings from 2004 by the man behind Burning Star Core. Made up of ten unprocessed live-to-tape violin experiments edited from original sources previously issued as limited edition CDRs on Yeh’s Drone Disco imprint, the sounds on this record range from tense scrapes to minimal textural drones. Silkscreened jacket. Edition of 400.

"This supplementary hit of the dark, bad acid that birthed Bren’t Lewiis’s Hard Molt (via elagabalusian section, according to the doula) wallows in a comparably jagged dead-end of monolithic schmutz. Skull-bending free improv waterlogged by tape manipulation, body-snatched sound collage, and gaseous disorientation; off-center guitar wobble impaled on spikes of fuzz; relatively meditative spaz-outs, household objects, tape noise, waves of fweemp; apocalyptic, maniacally saturated and self-engorged Echoplex; lascivious caliph vocals, the moist fwapping of a bicyle-powered chicken-plucking machine, field recordings, and disturbing phlegm loops; murky, impaired fidelity. More inscrutable than a murder at an old-fashioned smorgasbord. Includes industrial expressionist collage insert. Edition of 100"

"Minimalist industrial from this process-obsessed duo who are so committed to understatement and simplicity, it seems almost spiteful. Loops of noise, synthetic screech, dumpster field recordings, and a general feeling of disembodiment make up the twelve tracks on their only non-cassette release aside from the CDR reissue of Repetition Is The Sincerest Form Of Repetition (BUFMS 2011)."

"Allan Kaprow lays out eleven rules on how, and how not, to participate in the art movement he began in the late 1950s and which became known for its unpredictability, open scores, and constantly-evolving form. On Primary Information’s CD — reissued with the cooperation of the Estate of Allan Kaprow and the Getty Research Institute — he speaks plainly into a microphone, delivering private cut-to-the-chase style instruction on Happenings that is both informative and contradictory, both a practical and theoretical how-to with frequent dead-pan humor. He also reads the program and notes of three Happenings (“Soap,” “Calling,” and “Raining”), which serve as loose instruction, as they involve improvisation and forces beyond human control, such as acts of nature and other environmental forces. This spoken word recording, which reflects and informs on a movement that fifty years ago jump-started a seminal shift in postwar contemporary art and performance, was made without the advantage of hindsight and naturally lacks sentimentality and a sense of its relevance within this history. In fact, Kaprow shrugs off its place in the arts. As he declares in rule number one: “Forget all the standard art forms — don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above all don’t think you’ll get a happening by putting all these together.” Hand-silkscreened jewelcase that replicates the laminated 1968 edition by Alison Knowles and Something Else Press while preserving Mass Art’s original artwork from the 1966 edition. Listen to an excerpt here: https://soundcloud.com/primaryinformation/allan "

Together in one noisological bed (so to speak), Barbara Manning, S. Glass, and Dylan and Lisa Nyoukis donate an hour of full-on collapsing noise and tape loops of junk. Sweet, sweet bounty. With Doug Pierson on electronics. Produced by Tom Smith.

36 page A5 full colour zine

"First all colour zine featuring some of our favourite artists. Amazing quality works from these multi discipline artists on high quality, thick glossy pages for maximum eye saturation! Featuring Karen Constance, DANGER, Dan Dlugosielski, Randy Grskovic, Monica René Rochester, Rob Thurtle"

"Final Seed is the solo project of Jameson Sweiger of the group Maths Balance Volumes. This split is his 6th cassette tape release since 2010 and was recorded in Mankato, Minnesota, USA. Using tape, ukulele, voice & synthesizer, Final Seed explores the dark realms of consciousness once thoughts are rendered meaningless."

"Dylan's Encephalon Cracks volumes 1-3 were a set of very limited cassettes that each came with a screen printed poster.This piece is a remix of all 6 sides of those volumes, taking bits and pieces and mixing them together, cuting them up, processing them. Organ, voice, tapes, electronics, violin, a school band all make an appearance."

"On the duskiest and murkiest album so far by this group of noise hillbillies, looped excerpts from studio improvisations form the congealed muck where chunky ashes of cacophonous live recordings embed and dissolve like wilted arugula paste. The album’s opening and closing tracks tear off their own feathers and hurl themselves down an embankment, choreographed by Tom Timpson’s eBay-worthy 45s on the turntable. Corrupted technique is on fine display here — a cross between Aufgehoben with lobotomies, a tourist hotel band attempting to cover The Starfuckers, and the Christian folk trio Jandek once played accordion with during his days in the military. Defeated-sounding whine’n’wheeze is the order of the day, as are Nyoukis/Constance-influenced collisions of the preordained and the spontaneously erupting, in which cut-up, looped noises and purposeful soliloquies compete with one another and sickeningly abstracted content. Lucian Tielens, wielding guitar and antique potato masher, wreaks King Guillotine-like depuration upon the unclean. Among the dark guitar extrapolations, dense processing, no-instruments montages, field recordings, live performances, and zero tolerance for finesse, warmth, or stylishness, highlights include “Baked Alaska,’’ the score for immobilist filmmaker Melvin John Addington’s Vast Expanse Of Rock And Snow, performed live by Tielens and Gnarlos at Colour Out Of Space in 2011, using nothing but toys and objects purchased at 99p shops in Brighton, England; and a centrally located duet by Tielens on Fisher-Price turntable and Silvia Kastel on electronics and voice, burbling like a mudpit underneath a crimson haze with more grace than typically dared by BuFMS mutants. With three inserts, including flyer reproductions and an industrial expressionist collage. Edition of 100"

"Two tape pieces by The Dead C / Handful of Dust gentleman on one side, using excerpts from texts on urbanism, recorded instrumental interludes, and electronics. On the flip the side-long track by one of the mutants from Bren't Lewiis Ensemble combines fragments of keyboard drone, spastic violin, field recordings by Silvia Kastel and Joan Of Art, turntables, and diabolically uncooperative reel-to-reel tape. Insert includes companion texts “No: Your City” — Formulary For A New Christchurch” and “The Organ Courier And The Chinese Billionaire.” Cover art by Kate McRae. Edition of 200."

CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED MASTERPIECE!!

"Barbara Manning and S. Glass lead a small army of guest readers and musicians through barely musical versions of tunes, texts, and tracts. Barely faithful cover versions (XTC, Gods Gift, Hank Williams, The Osmonds, Edgar Winter, The Birthday Party, New Creation), with varying degrees of overhaul, mangling and looseness of interpretation, emerge like seared remnants of a torched London happening from 1966. Texts by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Dan Ashwander, Wayne Bent, John F. Kennedy, Flannery O’Connor, Hugo Ball, Rayva Liliana, and Hippocrates traverse the spectrum of belief, resulting in a migraine coexistence of skepticism, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientology, paranoid schizophrenia, doomsdays cults, Hinduism, evangelism, Catholicism, witchcraft and wizardry, guardian angels, Armageddon, rapture, post-apocalypse, Illuminati, satanism, existential despair, purgatory, creationism and intelligent design, Darwinism, conspiracy and hoax, the Tarot, human sacrifice, Sikhs, ascension, royalty, cargo cults, divine right, fatalism, Western medicine, oaths, incantation, cosmic retribution, excommunication, alien abduction, the occult, pagans, infidels, heathens, mind control, prophecy, remote prayer, and, naturally, atheism. Guest speakers include Lucian Tielens (Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble), Bruce Russell (The Dead C.), Patricia Rowland (Vomit Launch), Jett Hotcomb (The Talented Hairdos) Thurston Graham (Resistance Works), Scott Simmons (Eat Skull), Dave Gulbis (Celine Dion) Andrew Murphy (Celine Dion, Forked, Smooch), Titch Turner (The Vaticans), Emiko Saito (Obsessive-Compulsive Cat), Cristain Ceia (Romania), Matt Mumper (Beor The Friendly Thing, The Helper), Toni Smith (HappyLucky Design), and Rainbow Cartwheel (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy). Guest musicians include Flavor Station (Ukuzuna) on ukuleles and vocals, Alastair Galbraith (A Handful of Dust) on violin, Doug Pearson (International Hello) on electronics, Black Rose (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy) on keyboards, and Earl Kuck (Tedium House) on small motors. With 24 x 36 poster."

ALL OUT

ANOTHER fantastic document of fine ear wonk from the world of BUFMS.

"Rampant gaping immensity and pathologically polychromatic hoot from the BuFMS wing of Saint WTF’s Asylum. Micro-episodic tape pieces (with a head-spinning variety of appropriated voices, noises, electronics, music and sound effects) merge with field recordings, cut-ups, loops, improv, live performances, and a range of cover versions that includes a Korean plastic surgery infomercial, bona fide poetry, a book review, a YouTube waif, and Van Morrison. The group delivers pastoral yet alien meander à la The Way Out by The Books, spots of electro-creep worthy of Ruth White’s Flowers Of Evil, entertainment at a LAFMS barbecue, and a variety show extrapolated from the A.M. radios in the background of Firesign Theatre’s Everything You Know Is Wrong. A dazzling and peculiar assemblage. Edition of 50."

A single track, just over sixty minutes long — the companion piece to the quartet's LP Fix It Again, Tony, using the same material from the same session, completely different mix and edit. Covers are hand-cut from discarded rejects rescued at a print shop. Insert has small metallic medallion glued to it. Edition of 50.

"Convening on a weekly basis for the better part of two years in the mid-1980s at Sidney Africa's Place Of Dwell, Serious Problmz navigated the type of unhinged landscape that'd make Diane Arbus blush -- musical and poetic territories littered with paranoia, dread, desolation, emotional and psychological predation, spookily anthropomorphic farm animals, and objects of inexplicable provenance. they never released anything during their time, and performed only a dozen or so bona fide live shows and at as many parties. Instead, they devoted their focus to semi-private recording sessions which were intensive, improvisational, and open to observers and participants regardless of musical skill.
The featured guest on half the tracks is Cole Marquis (28th Day, The Downsiders, The Snowmen, The Marques), whose guitar playing merges his recognizable elongated twang and loosened psychedelic drawl with Serious Problmz's industrial rurf (aka very damaged rural surf.). The results are astonishing, frankly."

"What The Red Dragonfly calls “the well-mapped out, but slightly unmeasured, off-kilter nature” of Bren’t Lewiis’s (ahem) music welcomes overmodulation, sound saturation, tape hiss, tape decay, tape damage, room noise, and many an audio defect aided and abetted by AM radio, cell phones, police scanners, weather-damaged microphones and speakers, and anything else that could impinge signal fidelity. Massive tape collages dejectedly shuffle through hopelessness and despair. Percussion-only pieces seem to be aiming for regal, yet achieve debasement. Slowed-down, amplified voices reinforce the feeling of beaten exhaustion. Tempos come from objects getting dragged clumsily across the floor and field recordings of children, machines, and workers. The same mound of objects, electric gizmos and detritus from Rapture Piles is here (as well as some of the same tape loops and answering machine microcassettes), along with new recordings of throat-clutchingly spastic electric guitar noise, claustrophobic violin, plainly declaimed words, reel-to-reel tape, and more decrepit toys. Scandalously repetitious, enthralled by the arbitrary, and peculiarly deadpan, Bren’t Lewiis does all three in a minute and a half and makes it seem like a month. Comes with a reproduction of one of the original 24 tickets to the never-performed theater piece. Edition of 50."

"Another transmission from the pataphysical intersection of surrealist cabaret, show-tune bombast, enhanced dementia, and vintage Caedmon Records, recorded live in San Francisco, October 2012. No instruments were used in the rendering of the ensemble's emerald-colored darkness, jagged with alien corrosion and haze that befouls the synapses, just mounds of thrift store objects and yard-sale treasures. Highlights include a quintet for lettuce spinners, and covers of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Klaatu, Magazine, and A.M. Baggs. Freeform weirdness from beginning to end. Edition of 50."

Currently the pot is empty.

"Three raw living room and live recordings from 1985, documenting the first three months of the group’s existence, imbued with decadence and vitriol. Repetitive profanity, spartan adornment, outward-looking disgust and contempt take centerstage on “Swelling Admiration,” a tune with less dance groove than a riderless bike getting hit by a car. Honest, a skipping Suicide album sounds like “Bohemian Rhapsody” in comparison. The oblivion-embracing ode to defeatism “The Only Way Is Down” conveys, with flourishes such as impatient sighs, blasé moans and flickering drum machine, distaste for the ubiquitous, neon-colored optimism of mid-’80s fratboy / sorority girl airheads. Overdriven and sloppy in places, its pulse is insistent yet dire. Flipper’s signature tune “Sex Bomb” is stripped of all its properties, pretty much, thanks in no small part to the hand-held condenser mic recording; most of what remains is the noise of the audience in the room and the only thing potent enough to slice though it — singer Patricia Rowland’s psychotic screaming. Deep-end bonkers. Includes vintage liner notes by Lindy Lettuce."

“Most people are unfamiliar with the works of 17th century composer Jean-Philippe Borbollono. This may be because at birth, as the extensive historical notes with the release reveal, “His mother dies of an amniotic embolism and the little Jean-Philippe, a puny newborn, is declared physically dead and, straight away, his body goes missing.” Yet Borbollono communicates from the other side, “dictating his pieces through the medium of dreams” to Couperin, Ravel, Debussy, Messiaen, Pierre I-lenry, Jean-Michel Jarre and The Gypsy Kings. Such is the absurd and delicious concept behind the latest instalment from L’Autopsie A Révélé Que La Mort Etait Due A L’Autopsie, a group which includes Anla Courtis. The music varies from disjointed prepared piano to microphone-shredding barrages of overblown recorders or whistles in the “Effects Physiques” section to overlapping percussion pieces and ghostly voiced string droning for the “Effects Psychiques” and was, it is claimed, recorded in a coal mine in Wattignies, France on 31 November 1994 – a day that does not exist.” - Wire

"This first-time collaboration by Italy’s premier transcenders of time and space and guitarist extra­ordinaire from Wilco, Scarnella, Nels Cline Singers, and L. Stinkbug throbs like an Argento soundtrack for an astral perv lair, recalling vintage cassette gorp from the golden age of Industrial, when field recordings of howling dogs were repurposed as documents of institutional degradation and mind control. The Opalio brothers improvise an instant composition with the first-time playback of Cline's prerecorded space noise, bold cosmic disruptions, and nattering squibs from decommissioned satellites. No overdubs, no second takes, no leftovers. Dusted with loops from a lunar cathedral where palsied zombies dragging pots and pans skid across the soap-slathered narthex, The Ocean Above Your Heads splays the hemispheres better than Subotnik goin’ off his meds."

"This obscure ’80s quintet never released anything in their day, and performed live only a couple dozen times. The excerpts from their semi-private recording sessions preserved here (with minimal effort on a boombox) are pensive, quasi–industrial meditations peppered with dire and distorted melodies of immaculate brevity and the musings of disoriented hicks. The unhinged landscapes navigated by Serious Problmz would make Diane Arbus blush -- musical and poetic territories littered with paranoia, dread, desolation, emotional and psychological predation, spookily anthropomorphic farm animals, and objects of inexplicable provenance. As players, guitarist Lucian Tielens, Thor Heglund on Mattel Synsonics drum machine, Felix Mace on vocals, lyrics, homemade noise-makers, and assorted objects, guitarist Mark Evans, and Dave, the inevitable bass-player whose last name no one remembers, achieve a comfortable familiarity with one another, without sacrificing the ramshackle spontaneity essential to their brand of very damaged rural surf (aka rurf). Guests The Whitefronts’ Phil Smoot and Tim Smyth of Bren’t Lewiis help push the primitive jams in new directions with elements such as running water, the clack of a manual typewriter, a telephone ringing, random clangs of a metal canister, and the sinister grinds of an electronic corn-and-callous remover. Edition of 50."

"The debut solo album by the former frontman of Serious Problmz front-loads dense tangles of diminutive noise squiggles and mechanical jitters, with elusive roars always corroding the fringes. It progresses through corridors and courtyards of increasing sparseness and disconnected unreality, and concludes in the peculiar triumphant glow of Man Against Nature. Voices with standard-issue clinical neutrality (as well as one or two that are unnervingly chummy) reciting assigned texts, institutionally formal instructions, and answers to FAQs zigzag between birds chirping, owls hooting, panting, a children’s playground, jet engines, railroads, and other sound effects. Mace’s labyrinths of looping and filtering, woozy guitar noise backdrops, appropriations of folky acoustic guitar, R’n’B instrumentals, and fragments of sharp piano playing are elaborate, yet navigable and uncluttered. This fairly vast, steadily churning chemo–narrative constructed with electronics, loops, signal processing, ambient textures, eccentric voices is a masterful hybrid of electronics and musique concrete, inspired by good ol’ fashioned existential dread brought upon by a cancer diagnosis and treatment, overcome by dexterous manipulation of its own alienating elements. Includes printed insert and a section of medical gauze. Edition of 50."

"Forty-six minutes of slightly off-kilter, instrumental soundtracks for non-existent, noir-ish movies, edited from three hours of improvisational boombox tapes recorded in the late '80s by Larry Crane (Vomit Launch, TapeOp), Mark Evans (Fat Chick From Wilson Phillips, Uh-Moncst), and Lucian Tielens (Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, Serious Problmz). Kubelik Unbugged collects straight excerpts with no additional processing beyond modest crossfades; the trio’s spontaneously rendered squalls form a surprisingly coherent patchwork a la Obscured By Clouds, filtered through the atmospherics of 3R4 and retrofitted for a Doug Roberts-directed episode of The Twilight Zone. Edition of 50."

"This first-time collaboration by avatars of the new generation of European improv and blue-haired spazimodo mutants is something of a gloriously awkward thwack marathon of crumbled guitar noise, otherworldly howls, and stuff falling down stairs. The spontaneous recordings, performed in a single 90-minute session, are cut-up, multi-tracked, looped, and reassembled into thirty-two pieces that are more scrambled than the unrealized fears of an acute entomophobe, and, according to Morgia, “sometimes sound like Twin Infinitives chewed by Polyphemus.” Cover art by the amazing Todd Emmert. Edition of 175."

Issue 11 of Non-Plastique is wholly dedicated to the two Amercian underground film makers, The Kuchar Brothers!!
Interviews with Mike Kuchar, George Kuchar, Donna Kerness, Jennifer M. Kroot plus articles, reviews and more!
Just about everything you need to know about the past, present and future of these two underground heroes!

cover art by Ms Constance.

"Free improv by two guitarists renowned for their extended technique work and consistently inventive experimentation, and female electronics vocalist who explores the outer reaches of the voice. Seven rustling matches of self-containment, as if imprisoned inside a Styrofoam-insulated sleeping bag. Electro-chitters and micro-fweent form semi-transparent mosaics on top of the high-res screech of glass tchochtkes melting from the inside out, nth generation birdsong bending in on itself along an event horizon, color-blocked abstractions of mechanical squirrels playing a kalimba, and wolf fetuses horking into a trumpet. With master percussionist sound sculptor Marcello Magliocchi. Includes insert. Edition of 175"

"Fierce blonde Barbara Manning and Bananafish founder Seymour Glass are joined by Nels Cline on lap steel for “Icebox,” a slow ascent from isolation through frozen tape manipulation, icy drones, and subtle infernal groans from the obscure side of the moon. The unearthly fragmented vocals of the Italian Opalio brothers create the heavy, emotional textures of the interstellar “After the Meteor Shower,” with howling guitars and electronics, the distant echo of a drum, and a whispered chant emerging from the concrete surface of the planet." - Tedium House