Massive new limited edition LP on NNCK’s new imprint documenting a series of recordings from this ambitious American/European big band that unites Dave Nuss of The No-Neck Blues Band with Spencer Clark and James Ferraro of The Skaters alongside Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat, Jonna from Kuupuu, Stellar Om Source, Mik Quantius from Embryo and Tiitus Petajaniemi and Jari Koho of Uton/Keijo. The whole entourage toured through Europe in the spring of 2007 and this LP collects the best of the jams. Three long tracks and one fragment, including two pieces recorded at VPRO Radio. The sound takes off from the kind of free goof blueprint of The Godz, with a lots of percussion and odd rhythmic dunting while The Skaters work lush keyboard parts and a wall of ululating vocal drone deep into the backdrop. Quantius supplies vocals that are somewhere between Don Van Vliet and Alan Bishop and the whole thing proceeds into this kind of weird ethno-zone where fragmented world rhythms and sounds are twisted to dark, psychotropic ends. But the real gravy is the side long fourth track, the most convincing update of the monochord bass/drum confusion of Skip Spence’s “Grey/Afro” ever improvised in real time, combining sublime vocal highs with a hypnotic bottom end. Highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. This one has a more zone ESP-Disk feel, with overdubbed vocal chants, bell tones, keyboard drones and a heavy Bobby Beausoleil/Angus MacLise/Joyous Lake-style atmosphere all siphoned through the patented New Age label aesthetic. Uniquely transporting and highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. This is the most overtly ritualistic of her new releases, starting with an evocation of elemental female power via the chanting of Goddess names before dissolving into bell tones, haunting vocal cries and wiped-out tape drone. Highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. The murky, lo-fi feel of the recordings seems to function as a scrying mirror that facilitates the unlocking of repressed personas with the result that at points it sounds like Labanna is duetting with multiple incarnations of herself, as loop after loop of fourth world chant, tape junk and drums work to disorientate you completely. There are aspects of Meredith Monk, Cameron, Fursaxa, the hysterical cinema of Kenneth Anger and Ira Cohen… all filtered through the uniquely brain-erasing, Angus MacLise-to-the-nth-degree New Age label aesthetic. Fantastic and highly recommended.

First of two new limited self-released CD-Rs in hand-sewn full-colour paper packages from Labanna Bly, James Ferraro’s partner in magick, released on Ferraro’s own New Age imprint. Sounding like a more infernal Fursaxa, Bly uses crude, foggy loops and barbarous mantras to generate a thick, transformative atmosphere where shadows of drones seem populated by all sorts of nocturnal wildlife. The atmosphere is heavily ritualistsic, with the feel of the best of the Kenneth Anger soundtracks and MacLise’s Thunderbolt Pagoda jam given a massive injection of heavy feminine energy.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Wild World is Edward Flex visits Multitopia, one of the bleakest and darkest of Ferraro’s recordings thus far, as he ties up fantasies of body modification and Hollywood stardom with terrible eschatological visions and cut-ups of recorded testimonies of members of the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicide cult on their hopes for a transport to heaven. His use of minimal musical fragments looped to infinity is at its most twisted and wrong, with obsessive vocal figures played out over leery keyboard parts and snippets of vocal that conflate plastic surgery with pre-lapsarian and post-UFO powers of transformation. There’s often a lurid, cartoon aspect to Ferraro’s amplification of the various desires that contemporary popular culture works as a cipher for but this one feels less technicolour and more desperate, charting the apocalyptic fantasies (via Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson) that find their apotheosis in California’s end-of-land culture through a series of black magical workings. Also features some of Ferraro’s most shredding 80s/90s metal guitar. An extremely heavy installment.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Warning: Hacker Track™ is an eXtremely addictive cyber drug downloadable online into your brain. Hacker Track is a deprogramming/reprogramming tool created by Ferraro that uses auto-suggestion, hypnotism and sonic download technology in order to re-boot your mind. Hacker Track features some of Ferraro’s most obsessive loop constructs set within haunted laminal structures. The first piece is a murky fog of wave tones and modulated barbarous vocals that aims to by-pass the brain’s rational/language centers and effect complete organic/cyber communion. As the repeat-phrases become more alien and insistent the piece moves into a zone of ‘meaningless’ sound that works as an unsettling transport. The second piece deals in euphoric sonic boom stylings that somehow combine the wartime machinery of the David Jackman field recordings with triumphal organ tones and the expressway sounds of kundalini take-off.  A beautiful brain eraser.

New pro-printed/pro-burned limited to only 150 copies album from James Ferraro. Feed Me is set in a world where slimers feed on the dark sexual energies of the pick-up underworld and the endlessly modified bodies of transgendered strippers function as a metaphor for the immanentizing of the eschaton. Or is it just Ghostbusters with the horn?  Either way, Feed Me features some of his most fully formed ‘songs’ with a euphoric teenage appeal, vocals that sound like a 1980s children’s choir, and thick beams of guitar and keyboard melodies. It’s all cut-up with the kind of musclehead/slimer commentary that runs through much of Ferraro’s back catalogue, perfectly balanced between dystopian critique and utopian celebration. Titles include ‘My Parents Think I’m Turning Into A Cockroach’, ‘TV Dinner Underneath A Full Moon’, ‘Zit T.V. Goes To Hell’ and ‘She’s A Little Hot Pinball Machine’. A major side from James. 12 tracks, 60 minutes.

Limited vinyl reissue of one of James Ferraro’s greatest sides, Lamborghini Crystal’s 1992 Cool Runnings, now remastered and rebirthed as Grippers Nother Onesers’ At Slimer Beach. The LP is built around amazing disco/psych/drone/glam songs with high, high vox, gospelised choirs, repeat rhythms, jamming wah guitars and that beautiful, refracted-through-a-sea-of-fug sound that characterises all of his best work. Joyous, profoundly affecting and seemingly broadcast from a bedroom in the 1970s that still harbours the slowly decaying ghost of progressive disco/funk/glam dreams, the set runs from primitive NY Dolls-styled trash through full ensemble Aquarian musicals. Another singular release from this always confounding artist. Features Ghostbusters-tribute artwork and some naked snaps of our hero. Dedicated to Richard Ramirez..“It was formed by James Ferraro and it is the first release under this name (it is inspired by childhood memories of seeing holograms for the first time and hearing disco/rock music coming from other rooms around the house and from behind walls, I remember realizing the different shades/ and it felt mystical, and the images and sounds had employed psychic senses I had never used before, total ' disco breeze/sun reflecting on iridescent oil sunglasses,)” – James Ferraro. Edition of 450 copies.  Highly recommended. 

New pro-printed/pro-burned limited to only 150 copies album from James – here appearing as Jim – Ferraro. Features specially commissioned airbrush artwork. On Air feels like a luminous update of Ferraro’s early Lamborghini Crystal sides, with the atmosphere of a shortwave broadcast from a parallel universe where arpeggiated synths  function as transports to a future that feels like a lonely technicolour version of the past. Deep space morse code patterns orbit bursts of triumphal garage band guitar, simple euphoric melodies that feel like the soundtrack to your adolescence are re-imagined as a series of psychedelic instants, smears of DJ voiceovers are beamed straight from Venus... On Air is the perfect trip into Ferraro’s Multitopia. Also features an insane cover version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” which sits nicely alongside Mama Baer and Kommissar Hjuler’s version.  Titles include ‘Pleiadian Channel Surfer #1’, ‘Remote Control Under The Couch’ and ‘Heaven’s Bathroom’. 14 tracks, 60 minutes.