Much anticipated hook-up between these three trans-Atlantic monsters. One-side each and then a third monster inter-band jam. Leopards side is a classic haunt, with wraiths of hovering drone peaking in eye-rolling vocal confusion, while the Mouthus track is a fabulous punk trouncing of fuzz-impacted guitar and clattering electrified skin. Sunroof! jams are the real highlight though, especially the doofily-named “Cortez Tha Killa” that features Matthew Bower on repeat-riff nirvana while Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra lets his wrist fly with some of the most insane and righteously piloted post-Young acid delirium of anyone’s career. Too fucking much. Final big-band side presents a beautiful void of spooked eternity, with shadow forms moving in and out of earshot like so much hallucinatory cumulus. Comes in a full-colour gatefold sleeve, already sold-out at source, so move it.

LP from Mouthus that might be their most devolved circumnavigation of rock from to date. The guitars are impossibly impacted, muffled sandpaper huffs that move in tectonic slugs while the drums shrug between boings of tone-pad squelch, electrified steel-band ceremonials and primitively executed power stomps. This kinda profound retro-futurist refusal lines em up with a buncha modernists like Chrome, TG and even live Mars but there’s something in the distant, hiccupping vocals and the generally manhandled atmosphere that sounds like a more drug-degraded take on the kinda hillbilly scorch that Alpo-era Cheater Slicks occasionally delivered on. If you like yr rock gasoline-damaged to the point of almost-intelligible, stick out your cans. Limited edition of 500 copies in art sleeves released on the group’s own private press imprint.

Major new Mouthus album peaks at a whole new level of barbarous sludge with what sounds like a fleet of electric razors burying steel raptors in six feet of concrete while the Angus MacLise Orkestra play pre-Lapsarian Morse codes on a handbuilt steel drum containers and whole choirs of ghosts sing madrigals somewhere just over the horizon. There's a beautifully lapsed, primitive rock feel to much of the atmosphere - the way guitar lines appear like silvery hallucinations fading in and out of corporeal reality from track to track - that reminds me of the weird non-hierarchical instrumental mix of early NZ bombs like Trash, Dead C or Dadamah. Either way, this is another supremely devolved rock set from these crudest of cousins.

Perfect-bound collection of obsessive psychedelic line art from Nate Nelson of Mouthus, Religious Knives and Afternoon Penis, perfect for deep, late-night visioning under the influence of blots and boo. Nelson's art has graced a bunch of discs on the Our Mouth label but seeing so many of his drawings in one place really highlights the kind of metamorphic powers he's capable of channelling. This book is limited to 100 signed and numbered copies and comes with a CD that features a beautiful melancholic/repetitive tape construct that marries Mouthus destruct with Basinski-esque sad chorales that was recorded during the same period that he was working on the art.

Huge walls of psych guitar imbalance from a trio who know how to chew an axe: Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers, Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance and Brian Sullivan of Mouthus. Miasmic destructo-rock moves in a derelict post-Dead C style. Pressed on 180 g vinyl and housed in classy wraparound silkscreened sleeve by Alan Sherry of SIWA. The LP also comes with a pressed CD featuring bonus jams from the same session. Edition of 845 copies.

New self-released solo album from Brian of Mouthus featuring some acoustic led thunder ballads that sound as if they are played with the last stumps of his fingers through to hurricane force post-Industrial blues jams that cross the malevolent occult power of mid-period Swans with laminal arrangements of fuzz and drone.

New limited, self-released collaborative album from Brian Sullivan of NY rock behemoths Mouthus and Karl Bauer’s Axolotl project. A series of abstract sound works that run from drugged, slowed down vocals through subterranean vats of water and drone ala HNAS’s early recordings, heavenly shortwave codes carved into rusty Industrial miniatures and perfectly nuanced reconciliations of Axolotl’s high, religious sound and Mouthus’s low-slung urban crank.

Great fuzz-encrusted monolith guitar duel from these two solo basement/psych units, Brian Sullivan of Mouthus’s Eskimo King and Zac Davis of Lambsbread’s Sky Juice persona. This is heavy gravity guitar oblivion the whole way, with what sounds like the first power chord from The Stooges’ “Little Doll” obliterated with a combination of slowly imploding wah-wah gnosis and malformed power-chord epics. Second track sounds like a fleet of motorbikes fitted with tremolo arms. Classic stoned guitar.

Classic Americana underground rock moves from a new Baltimore-based project that features Lexie Mountain on vocals alongside Nate Nelson of Religious Knives/Mouthus, Nick Becker, Jake Freeman and Chiara Giovando. The sound is kinda like Royal Trux at their most FM-radio relevant, with huge blats of melodic moog defining the foreground while Lexie pulls out her best Jennifer Herema/Janis Joplin stylings (with occasional Meredith Monk-styled detours) and the songs work from a raggedy Suicide/Springsteen/Flesheaters/The Band base that would combine classic, iconoclastic melodies with weirdly deformed two-note keyboard drones and a fried hayseed basement style that is supremely beguiling. Can’t think of a recent release that so beautifully walks the line between classic rock and cultic underground confusion.

Limited edition of 500 split LPs complete with unique individually hand-painted/silk-screened sleeves and glossy full-colour insert. Cousins Of Reggae follow-up their killer Our Mouth CD with a side of post Harry Pussy avant garage scorch that's listed as “History And Prehistory Of Hudson's Bay In Five Parts” and reads like a massively updated rundown of variously torched scum/noise strategies as applied to skateboarding-carrying avant gardists with a penchant for the slackest aleatoric metal. Unbelievable. Mouthus side is just phenomenally dozed, two huge sqouching roars of marshmallow-heavy damage that work hiccupping hillbilly rhythms into the kind of ferocious wall-of-mong previously erected by committed actionists like Hijokaidan, Hasil Adkins and Royal Trux. Too much. Highest possible recommendation.

Chaw Mank is Brian Sullivan, guitarist and vocalist with Mouthus in the company of the Sightings duo. Volume 1 presents a muscular spin on established Mouthus stop-motion murk strategies with spools of rusty repeat blown to flesh by some devastating rock damage. Highly recommended.

Limited edition tour collage/mash-up from the duo of Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson. This one is even more out of focus and malformed than the corpus of their back catalogue, with vague thunder clouds and fucked-up electro percussion floating the ghost of Alan Vega through sheet metal memories of the TG 24 cassette box.

Self-released album from this Mouthus/Double Leopards supergroup featuring botha Mouthus and Mike and Maya from Leopards. Sound is as beautifully Euro-fixated as the recent Religious Knives stuff, with soft oceans of glazed 1970s synth patterns washing across the backs of yr eyelids like the Cosmic Couriers play the brain scores of Terry Riley and Klaus Schulze. A beautifully pink stone and highly recommended for fans of soft dopey muzz.

It’s no secret that we consider Mouthus’ Slow Globes to be one of the greatest albums of the 2000s, a record that devoured and regurgitated five decades of rock/roll with omnivorous industry. Their comparative silence of late is somewhat mitigated by this stunning solo album form one half of Mouthus, vocalist/guitarist Brian Sullivan. The album opens with a totally haunting drug ballad, with Sullivan’s vocals coming across like a spirit transmission from the other side accompanied by simple downer acoustic guitar that makes you think of Bob Desper floating dead in space and from there it goes deeper. At points the ghost of Wayne Rogers hovers over the album, with Sullivan marrying classic Twisted Village-style basement psych to arrangements that dissolve form and fidelity in a series of ghostly hymns, marrying straightforward ‘songs’ to arrangements that would upset them completely, sometimes reducing them to odd minimal electro workouts that could almost be lifted from the Tolerance album and that almost appear like muffled broadcasts heard through a mile of concrete. Mouthus had a way of transmuting and re-birthing rock music as an eerie after-image, an hallucinatory phantom, and Your First Ever River extends that particular formula into one of the most haunted, vaguely singer-songwriter records of the year. Released on Magik Markers’ own imprint. Highly recommended. 

New set of solo electric guitar recordings from Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/GHQ/Hototogisu et al). Tectonic string work that has the weight of planets, with high, eerie melodies threaded through massive baseline drones. Aspects of Keiji Haino, Charalambides and Electronic Meditation-era Tangerine Dream make this a particularly explosive set. On Brother Raven’s label, hand-numbered edition of 200 copies. 

“Maya Miller and Michael Bernstein met in New York a decade ago, and began making music together as half of sturm und drone quartet Double Leopards a few years after that. Religious Knives came later still, away from the road and the rehearsal space, borne and nurtured in cramped apartments throughout Kings County. Beginning in 2005, the pair released a string of CD-Rs and cassettes, both on their own Heavy Tapes imprint and through the labels of kindred spirits. Steadily moving away from the psychedelic tone baths and modern industrial scrape for which the Leopards had become known, Religious Knives coursed through minimal synth oscillations and spare Kraut repetition. Mouthus' Nate Nelson joined the pair in 2006, lending a powerful presence behind the drums that shaped Religious Knives' rudimentary jams into rough-hewn, long-form paeans to tar-blackened bummer psych. Soon after that, old friend Todd Cavallo completed the quartet on bass, adding a sturdy low end and dubwise groove that lifted Religious Knives from cellar murk to black cloud puffs of bone deep alarm. An active four-piece for a little more than a year now, Religious Knives have presided over a pair of twelve-inches, a couple of collections of out of print singles and long gone burns, and one full-length. All throughout, these four have traced a path away from the clamour they once knew, bathing slight guitars, interlocking vocals, and solemn basslines in reedy organs and recalcitrant modular synths. The seemingly tin eared would call it noise, but in these eight hands such a set plays as anything but, instead a (cough) syrupy stroll in search of the ghosts of rock's classicist past. With The Door, Religious Knives have not only found those bygone days, but broken them apart. There are bookmarks to be found here, pages creased in well-worn chapters. But make no mistake - theirs is a sound tied to the here and now, a summer record for those dread days when the heat holds low and skin sticks to cheap car seats and old patio furniture. These six songs are brighter, sharper than anything that has come before, locking in tight on jugular rhythms. It's the score for disappearing neighborhoods and crumbling buildings, a hope of holding onto the past as those around us move fast to forget it. It is scent as sound, the stench of smog and sickly smoke spiraling towards the sky. It is Brooklyn, July of 2008. The sun has left us in the East, disappearing somewhere behind Jersey, leaving our borough to find the pulse of another night deep with the city's streets.” – EP.

Limited edition of 150 copies, the first instalment in a series of releases documenting off-the-map live actions from Religious Knives. This one compiles action from four shows across 2008, with jams taken from WHOM, Hemlock, Death By Audio and Wierd. Anyone left unfazed with the production and pop stylings of the group’s Ecstatic Peace releases oughta find solace here, with some great lo-fi garage downs usurped by primitive delay and drugged keyboards. The Death By Audio set features a guest appearance from Pete Nolan of Magik Markers et al while the Wierd material matches that imprints ethos with some ginchy minimal synth/new wave settings of classic RK material including a take on “Basement Watch” that could almost be a reformed 1980s post-apocalyptic Music Machine. Or would that make em SPK? Either way, this is great.

Limited edition of 150 copies, the second instalment in a series of releases documenting off-the-map live actions from Religious Knives. This one compiles action from two shows across 2008, with a killer full band set live from 66 Hope and a weird RK2 style duo performance recorded at Big Jar Books in Philadelphia. Recommended.