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Pine Meoquanee: An Anthology Of Poetry Digitalis 2005 Bk £8.99 Nice anthology of pomes from some modern days heads/musicians, the highlight of which is Christina Carter’s wonderful “Center Of Exits”. Also features work by Michael Anderson, Michelle Angelini, James Barrett, James Blackshaw, Julie Cook, Michael Donnelly (Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood et al), Sid Fallon, Spencer Grady, Denton Harris, Denton Harris, Robert Horton, Paganini Jones, Eden Hemming Rose, Brad Rose, Mainon Alexandra Schwartz, Indigo Tempesta, Kade L. Twist and Keith Wood (Hush Arbors). Hand-numbered edition of 120 copies. Each book hand-bound with cloth tape and a hard cover with a design by Keith Wood. |
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The Honeymoon Music Compilation Honeymoon Music HMM-005 CD £9.99 Brand new compilation from out of the Espers’ communal space in Fishtown, Philadelphia (an old VT stomping ground) on a new label run by Mr Norm Fetter dedicated to documenting local mutant strains and associated international orbits. Features exclusive tracks by Fursaxa (“March Hare”), Chris Bozzone, Eric Carbonara (who recorded Taurpis Tula’s Sparrows), Sharron Kraus, Trollslända (the duo of Meg Baird and Helena Espvall of Espers), Niagara Falls (featuring Fetter himself), Glasgow’s Phosphene, Stainless Japan, Peace Feather, The Watery Graves Of Portland, Sharks With Wings, Thom Zephyr Roach, The Doctor And Philip and Noah Raymond Levey. Comes in a beautifully screened hard card gatefold sleeve with insert. |
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Simply Good Taste: The Sounds Of Slippy Town Gulcher 413 CD £6.99 Thumping label sampler from this suave imprint run by Eddie Flowers, brought to you courtesy of their sister/brother label, Gulcher. A bunch of otherwise unavailable tracks – including a first take of The Gizmos’ “Hey Beat Mon” with MX-80’s Rich Stim on the horn and a destroyed version of The Yardbirds’ “Shapes Of Things” by the semi-mythical O.Rex (featuring Solomon and Jay Gruberger, Kenne Highland and Eddie Flowers), some solo thought from Joe Tunis aka Joe + N – as well as a clutch of tracks from alla the various limited CD-Rs Flowers has burned over the years, from whacked UK bedroom zoners like Neil Campbell, Stewart Walden, Phil Todd and Ian Middleton through Crawlspace, Not A Sonata, Blackthorne Stick, OvO, Big Whiskey, Allun, Lebedung, Joshua Jugband 5 and The Screamin’ Mee-Mees & Hot Scott Fischer. A whole fistful of fucked up fun and a great way in for Gulcher/Slippytown neophytes. |
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Music From The Lost Provinces Old Hat CD-1001 CD £13.99 Subtitled “Old-Time Stringbands from Ashe County, North Carolina & Vicinity, 1927-1931”, Music From The Lost Provinces is another glorious trawl through the never-ending spirit-pot of early 20th century American esotera from one of its premier exponents, Old Hat. This one focuses on string band, git-fiddle, guitar and vocal performances, mostly white, that were recorded in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the mountainous ‘lost provinces’ of Ashe County. Fans of high lonesome sound will find plenty to haunt them here, with bleak/beautiful sides from players like Frank Blevins & His Tar Heel Rattlers, The Hill Billies, Smyth County Ramblers, Grayson & Whitter, Carolina Night Hawks et al. Another great booklet with an assortment of snaps that have to be seen to be believed. Too much, highly recommended. |
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Time And Relative Dimensions In Space Rebis 005 CD £8.99 Compilation of a bunch of next generation heads out to trash flimsy concepts of time and space with a series of otherwise unavailable long-forms works. Includes exclusive tracks from Taurpis Tula (“Lonely Woman”), My Cat Is An Alien (“Alien Substratum 1.0/1.2”), The Skaters (“Fleeing Pavilions For Celestial Clouds”), Number None (“The Pole I’m Furthest From”) and Jim Haynes (“A Sense Of Levitation’). From new Chicago label Rebis. Recommended. |
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Tone of the Universe Pseudo Arcana PACD-64/65 2xCD £10.99 Killer, coherently-themed double CD (not CD-R – first ever on this label) compilation from this always-reliable New Zealand label, based around inspired extrapolations on the steady B flat drone (albeit 57 octaves below anything discernable by the human ear) said to resonate from the galaxy cluster Perseus. Think of it as another Harmony Of The Spheres. Either way there are some fantastically distended performances here from VT faves like Neil Campbell, Birchville Cat Motel, The Skaters, Keijo, Vibracathedral Orchestra, My Cat Is An Alien and Peter Wright as well as Blithe Sons, Eugene Carhesio & Leighton Craig, CJA, Anla Courtis, Hands Of Satisfaction, A.M/Uton, Moglass, seht, 1/3 Octave Band and The Nether Dawn. Comes in a fold-out three-panel sleeve with artwork by Jani Hirvonen and James Kirk. |
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Viva Negativa! A Tribute To The New Blockaders Volume One Vinyl On Demand VOD-24 4xLP £42.99 Another major milestone in Vinyl On Demand's on-going deluxe documentation of the furthest fringes of the European underground, Viva Negativa is the culmination of several years worth of commissioned remixes, extrapolations on and collaborations with the work of The New Blockaders, the UK's most consistently feral noise group. The quality of the track listing is pretty staggering – a testament to the liberating effect those early TNB sides had on a whole generation of otherwise culturally disenfranchised post-punks – and plays even better as a state-of-disunion round-up than recent attempts at void-articulation like Gold Leaf Branches, Invisible Pyramid et al. Almost every major contemporary noise artist is featured and Volume One has tracks from Oren Ambarchi, Anomali, Ashtray Navigations (a beautiful slice of slow blown-to-smoke tone), Emil Beaulieau, Benzo, Cisfinitum, Controlled Bleeding, Dieter Muh, Evil Moisture, Freiband, Grunt, The Haters, Jason Kahn, Zbigniew Karkowski, Komafuzz, Kraang, Lockweld, Massimo, Daniel Menche, Thurston Moore, MSBR, Nocturnal Emissions, KK Null, Pita, Plethora, Prurient, Richard Ramirez, Scanner, Silvum, srmeixner, Asmus Tietchens, Treriksroset, uh…V/VM (woops!), Vortex Campaign, Keith Fullerton Whitman, John Wiese, Nobuo Yamada and Z'ev. The whole deal comes packaged in a beautiful full-colour/laminated hard card box with the LPs pressed on 180g vinyl in hand-numbered sleeves and bundled with a poster/manifesto. This one knocked us clear on our asses, a staggering document. Highest recommendation. |
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Viva Negativa! A Tribute To The New Blockaders Volume Two Vinyl On Demand VOD-25 4xLP £42.99 Another major milestone in Vinyl On Demand's on-going deluxe documentation of the furthest fringes of the European underground, Viva Negativa is the culmination of several years worth of commissioned remixes, extrapolations on and collaborations with the work of The New Blockaders, the UK's most consistently feral noise group. The quality of the track listing is pretty staggering – a testament to the liberating effect those early TNB sides had on a whole generation of otherwise culturally disenfranchised post-punks – and plays even better as a state-of-disunion round-up than recent attempts at void-articulation like Gold Leaf Branches, Invisible Pyramid et al. Almost every major contemporary noise artist is featured and Volume Two has tracks from AMK, Art Break, Aube, Bloxus, Alexei Borisov, Broken Penis Orchestra, Cheapmachines, Courtis, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, Aaron Dilloway, Embudagonn 108, Government Alpha, Idea Fire Company (great quartet line-up track with slow choral vocals and droning machine dreams), Incapacitants, Lasse Marhaug, Merzbow, mnortham, Jim O'Rourke, Dave Phillips, Plexia, Putrefier, Christian Renou, RLW, Damion Romero, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Spiracle, Sudden Infant, Giancarlo Toniutti, Violent Onsen Geisha, Brendan Walls, Withdrawal Method, Wolf Eyes & Achim Wollscheid. The whole deal comes packaged in a beautiful full-colour/laminated hard card box with the LPs pressed on 180g vinyl in hand-numbered sleeves and bundled with a poster/manifesto. This one knocked us clear on our asses, a staggering document. Highest recommendation. |
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Number Eight Out Loud Productions #8 LP £12.99 1974. A solo Harlemans set with an appearance from Bernard Heidsieck. Tracks: WARM UP (2:22) The Harlemans, NEW YORK (3:03) Bernard Heidsieck and Francoise Janicot with the Harlemans, EVERYWHERE (2:52) The Harlemans, DRAW A CIRCLE (3:01) The Harlemans, YOU (1:19) The Harlemans, TIGER (4:37) The Harlemans, SHAMAN (4:27) The Harlemans, SOMEWHERE (1:50) The Harlemans, TAMBOURINE (3:21) The Harlemans, SNOWSONG (2:10) The Harlemans, PUSH ON (2:33) The Harlemans, FOR KLYD AND LINDA (3:10) The Harlemans. Tiger is taken from a dream by Jerome C. Romy Pollonto. |
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Number Nine Out Loud Productions #9 LP £12.99 1975. Another solo set from the Harlemans. Notes by Robert Palmer (Rolling Stone/Downbeat et al): “With this ninth volume of their “magazine” of oral poetry, the Harlemans penetrate more deeply into the resonances of speaking, chanting, and singing voices, and into themselves. Connections with the “ritual of the irrational,” the cultivation of states of disassociation or trance. were present in their earlier work, but here, in the sound pieces “Trance,” “Fear For My Body,” and “I Give My Body To The Drum,” they are explicit. Using the narrow melodic range, chant-like insistence, drum and metallophone accompaniment, and out-of-body flight images so central to shamanist tradition, the Harlemans confront a “new” use of oral poetry which is, of course, an old use also. The recitation of written texts of written texts – the “modern” way – has been superseded by the creation of poetry in sound and, in these new compositions, by the deliberate use of some of the effects tape makes possible with the idea of affecting the listener quite directly. All poetry, all art in fact, aims at a similar ordering of “thought, feeling, and apparent sensory impressions” (in the words of William S. Burroughs), but certain music, dance and other art attempts to actually trigger and control various psychological experiences. The ritual of the Central Asian shaman is an example. It is the shaman's task to pass into a trance state and report back to his community of the spirit world. In order to achieve his altered state of consciousness he resorts primarily to various organized sounds. He chant/sings, using a restricted melodic range in a repetitive pattern, a process which helps create a trance state because of the nature of hearing. The basilar membrane, a structure in the inner ear where soundwave vibrations are translated into neural impulses, is pitch sensitive and pitch discriminatory. That is, various areas of the membrane respond to various specific pitches by sending electrical “charges” along specific nerve pathways to the brain. When these areas of the membrane are “massaged” regularly and in sequence, as in strictly modal music or in much chant, the repetition sets up a hypnotic pattern of impulses. The shaman accompanies his voice with a drum and some sort of metal instrument, both of which produce the kind of sound physicists refer to as “steep fronted,” that is a “noise” sound with tightly packed overtones. In addition, drum sounds have an extremely rapid decay time. Such sounds, with their welter of enharmonic pitches, stimulate most of the surface of the basilar membrane, thus ensuring the transmission of as many simultaneous neural impulses as possible to as much of the brain as possible. And the neurons are able to rest between firings because of the rapid decay time of the sounds, thus insuring continuing peak effects for the sound and allowing changed or other sung material to periodically resume its own hypnotic pattern. In other words, the shaman's basic equipment – voice, drum, rattle – is actually a sophisticated tool for self-induced hypnosis, or trance. This self-programmed, inner-directed cultivation of dissociation, which is at the heart of magico-religious traditions the world over, is contrasted on the present recording with involuntary disassociation from each other and from the wellsprings of their own thought and actions. The first kind, practiced as a rite, puts one in touch with worlds within. The second, accepted by many as the price of living, is the source of much unhappiness and pain. Thus the narrator in “Take A Sip Of Me” casts herself in the extreme role of a disembodied cup of coffee in order to reach out to another person: “I won't burn you,” she is forced to add to her invitation. Thus the quintessential evocation of mortal fear, “Fear For My Body,” which in its more morbid manifestations bespeaks a dissociation bordering on the pathological. “I Forgot Your Name” is a somewhat lighter treatment of disassociation; as a vision of the widening gulf between the sexes it is a little reminiscent of a Rolling Stones put-down song, with echoes of Elvis in the delivery. The musical comparisons are apt ones, because with this album the Harlemans move closer to music, just as music is moving closer to the inflections of the voice. In “Curing,” which Peter proposed as an antidote to the malady of separation, Patricia's opening whines sound like an electronic synthesizer, until one recalls that the synthesizer was originally designed to give computers a “voice” and is thus an imitation of the Real Thing. And while “Trance” has the proscribed melodic vocabulary of the chant, “I Give My Body To The Drum” makes use of that most musical of devices, the well-timed modulation. But this use of music, and again it is a very old one, has to do with the creation of magical effects for the purpose of achieving magical results. In his The Wellsprings of Music Curt Sachs wrote that “Everything that sounds, be it in the cruder form of frightening noise or the organised patterns of music, bears the brunt of mankind's eternal strife against the hostile forces that threaten his life and welfare; and, just as well, nothing better than sound can summon the powers of luck and prosperity . . . Even language stresses unity of singing and magics as the Latin word incantation, ‘magic formula,' derived from cantare, and the English charm, from carmen. Whenever singing is an act of ecstasy and depersonalization, it moves away from ordinary human expression. The voice is often remote from being as ‘natural' as we believe our own execution to be. It is coloured by pulsating, yodelling, ventriloquizing, or bleating. One screams, yells, squeaks, mumbles, and nasals.” Sachs sentences on the origins of music are strikingly descriptive of what the Harlemans are up to They've been pioneering in this area of speech / music / magic with each successive album, and with # 9 they've done it again.” |
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Number Ten Out Loud Productions #10 LP £12.99 1977. Final volume of this incredible set, very affecting. Trio recordings by the Harlemans with Klyd Watkins and one solo Peter Harleman invocation. Cover by Patricia Harleman, produced by Klyd Watkins and Peter Harleman. Tracks: LET'S GO HEAR THE HOLY ROLLERS SING (3:48) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, BAD MAN (1:59) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, WILDERNESS (4:49) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, I CAN SING FALSETTO (3:05) Peter Harleman, MAYBE (4:09) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, YOUR LOVE IS A WEAPON (AFTER A THEME FROM HOWLING WOLF) ((1:29) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, LET'S LET THE WORLD GO DOWN (2:41) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, GOING BELOW (12:25) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins. |
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DIY Canons Pogus 21036-2 2xCD £14.99 Fantastic series of DIY canons based on concepts first elucidated by modern composer Larry Polansky in his Four Voice Canons series. Wickham-Smith (Tibetanist/ex-monk/juggler/Richard Youngs collaborator) describes Polansky's Four Voice Canon #13 as “a kind of open source meta canon score”. Polansky distributed this score to various composers and made it available at talks and on the web and a number of composers took up his tools and created their own canons using a wild assortment of source material. For this beautiful double CD set Wickham-Smith has gathered a selection of the most beautifully whacked interpretations, with players like Philip Corner, Kyoko Kobayashi, Mike Winter, Steven M Miller, Drew Krause and Wickham-Smith himself. Source/voice material includes phones, ringtones, flutes, clarinet, Barbie phone, cats… “The pieces on this CD are all based on the ideas in Larry Polansky's four voice canons, a series of pieces he began in 1975. These canons are usually “mensuration canons”, which means that the tempi of successive voices is proportional to their start times, so that the voices end together. They also use simple ideas of moving through a list of permutations, and applying the elements of those permutations to various musical parameters. A set of Polansky's canons was produced on Cold Blue Records as four voice canons (CB0011).” - from Wickham-Smith's notes. A great weird/avant/psychedelic/sound art series, with a booklet including notes from all of the contributors. Recommended. |
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Playword Onomatopee No Cat 7" £5.99 "Take two electronic musicians, two noise guitarists and two poems, put them in some rooms and what do you get? A compilation called Playword. Machinefabriek, Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen, Erwin Van Looveren and Freiband all received texts from Freek Lomme, and were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted with them. The results are cool, and the four pieces comprise a nicely congruent whole. Van Looveren's noisy-ass track is perhaps my fave, but they're all interesting. Freiband grate amp-cheese around the edges of the words'shadow, Machinefabriek runs the words through a chainsaw sequencer, and Dobbelsteen surrounds them with a bushy load of acoustic guitar scrapings." - Byron Coley. |
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Alchemism: Alchemy Records 20th Anniversary Twin Best Collection Alchemy/Imperial TECI-1073/ CD £23.99 Totally sick: celebrating Alchemy Records' 20th anniversary - and Japanese noise/rock legends Hijokaidan's 25th - major label bozos Imperial have stepped into the gulf with a series of definitive birthday sets. Alchemism is a massive two-disc overview of the activities of this consistently dazzling underground label complete with a fold-out sleeve that has colour cover shots of all the action, especially noteable for the lovingly executed Modern Lovers and Ash Ra take-offs from Ultra Bide and Christine 23 Onna. All tracks previously released except for exclusives from Tongue favourites Oshiri-PenPenz and Doodles. Also includes: Jojo Hiroshige, Ultra Bide, SS, Inu, Hoburakin, Idiot O'Clock, Sekiri, The Genbaku Onanies, The Continental Kids, Danse Macabre, Sob Kaidan, Genbaku Kaidan, Subvert Blaze, Sperma, Hanadensha, Garadama, Angel'In Heavy Syrup, Auschwitz, Tatsuya Kitajima, Tsumetai Iki No Mama, Miki Sawaguchi, Masonna, Merzbow, Incapacitants, Solmania, Hijokaidan, Seiichi Yamamoto, Omoide Hatoba, Totsuzen Dan-Ball, Christine 23 Onna and Chouzu. Highly recommended, naturally. |
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U-Sound Volume 1 Parallelism/U-Sound PAR-009-2/ 2xCD £8.99 Found a bunch of this great Tom Greenwood-curated double CD comp that beautifully articulates the nascent underground sound of 1999 via performances from Greg Anderson/Rob Hall Duo, Army Of Ghosts, Tim Barnes & Glen Kotche, Black Magic, Joshua Burkett, Daniel Carter Ensemble, Decaer Pinga, Double Leopards, The Doves, Eagle Blood, Far Fetched, Sai Flora, Furchick w/The Armaround, Glands Of External Secretion, Michael Hurley, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Lady E Quartet, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jeff Perkins & PG 6, Sewerz, Tono-Bungay, Unity Sound Ensemble and Matthew Valentine. A historically potent collection and highly recommended. |
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Xmas Snertz: Have A Very Gulcher Christmas Gulcher 420 CD £8.99 If I know Christmas – and I think I do – it’s gonna be here soon as fuck, so better bone up on the presbos front while you can. Gulcher – god bless em – have only gone and made it easy on alla us with a one-size-kills-all compilation of seasonally themed stupidity that’ll have the entire family guzzling Drano without the help of any Perry Como videos. Result! Features Angel Corpus Christi, The Automatics, Mach Bell & His Elves (good job he ain’t travelling with fairies), Crawlspace, Phil Hendricks/The Stiffs (they’re from the UK!), Kenne Highland & His Vatican Sex Kittens, Phil Hundley, The Korps, Monsterpop, MX-80, Ted Niemiec, Pansy Divison, Stalingrad Symphony, Rich Stim, The Walking Ruins and X-Ray Tango. |
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White Bicycles – Making Music In The 1960s Fledgling Fled-3061 CD £10.99 Released to coincide with the publication of Witchseason producer/label mastermind Joe Boyd, White Bicycles makes for a great, functional overview of the arc of his trails across various 1960s psych, folk, jazz and rock forms. Totally listenable from start to finish, the programming is maximalist and features great tracks from Eric Clapton & Powerhouse, The Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, The Purple Gang, Soft Machine, Shirley Collins, Fairport Convention, Johnny Handle, Fotheringay (w/Sandy Denny), Mike Heron, Vashti Bunyan, John & Beverley Martyn, Nico, Geoff & Maria Muldaur, Dave Swarbick, Martin Carthy & Diz Disley, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath, Dudu Pukwana & Spear and The New Nadir. Comes with a great full-colour booklet with comprehensive notes, pics, sleeve repros and more. |
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Love, Peace & Poetry: Chilean Psychedelic Music QDK Media 049 CD £13.99 Excellent overview and the ideal way ‘in’ to the beautiful comedown sounds of classic Chilean psychedelic music. Packaged in the usual great cheesecake sleeves, this one bundles tracks from all of the main players from this fascinating late-60s/early-70s scene: the God-like Blops, Kissing Spell, Los Jaivas, Sacros, Aguaturbia, Los Mac’s, Embrujo, Los Beat 4, Tumulto, Escombros, El Congreso and Congregacion. Highly recommended. |
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In The Pines: Tar Heel Folk Songs & Fiddle Tunes Old Hat CD-1006 CD £13.99 Great new comp of folk and fiddle based blasters from North Carolina 1926-1936 from a label that consistently delivers the cream of unknown American Primitive. This is another ass-flattening postcard from a gone world that features a ton of tough to find, rarely compiled material that runs through murder ballads, gospel hymns, mountain blues and railroad songs, the bulk of which have never been available on CD before. Features tracks by “Dock” Walsh, The Red Fox Chasers, Carolina Buddies, Carolina Ramblers String Band, Dixon Brothers & Mutt Evans, North Carolina Cooper Boys, Ben Jarrell, Cranford & Thompson, The Highlanders, Charlie Parker & Mack Woolbright, Proximity String Quartet, Blankenship Family, The Grady Family, Wilmer Watts & The Lonely Eagles, Cauley Family, Clarence Greene, Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers, Whitter-Hendley-Small, Grayson & Whitter, Mainer’s Mountaineers, E.R. Nance Family with Clarence Dooley, Frank Jenkins’ Pilot Mountaineers and Carolina Tar Heels. |
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Insane Music Box Vinyl On Demand VOD-59 4xLP + 7” Box Set £66.99 Beautifully assembled four LP box set with bonus 7” and t-shirt that compiles alla the most interesting work from the Insane Music imprint, one of the most prolific and undersung of 1980s Industrial/cassette imprints. Run by Alian Neffe, Neffe’s many projects took off from the ground-levelling work of Throbbing Gristle et al but soon diversified into a future-primitive hybrid that combined tapes, electronics, rock rhythms, free improvisation and a feel for theatre and ritual that touches on aspects of contemporary investigators from the Sudden Infant/Schlimpfuch axis through The No-Neck Blues Band. The box features material by I Scream, Bene Gesserit, Subject, Human Flesh and Pseudo Code. Hand-numbered edition of 600 copies in heavy-duty box. |
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Attic Recordings Attic Cassettes No Cat CD-R £6.99 First ever CD-R release on Marc Pilley’s Attic imprint, with his choice of the best tracks from the label’s first year of cassette releases. Features The Upskirts, Black Sparrow Dress, The Zees, Tarra, Telegraph Meltz, Dustbowl, Zach Kerouac, Speakeasy, The Sermon, Saw and Holly Hollis. |
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Imaginational Anthem 2 Tompkins Square TSQ-1424 CD £8.99 Follow-up to the first volume of this on-going series that joins the dots between an earlier generation of American Primitive guitarists and contemporary intuitive sound-as-thought players. Once again Jack Rose is featured (with an absolutely gorgeous 6 string re-think of "Cross The North Fork 2") but every other player puts in a first-time appearance on this volume. The inclusion of Christina Carter is a particularly inspired move and one that speaks of the liberated range of the series in general and her track is a beauty, a stubby acoustic guitar miniature. Nice cover snap too. Other tracks include a particularly mesmeric recording from UK guitarist James Blackshaw and contributions from Peter Lang, Jesse Sparhawk, Michael Chapman, Sean Smith, Fred Gerlach, Billy Faier, Sharron Kraus, Robbie Basho and...uh...Jose Gonzalez. Another rich, far-sighted assortment from this great label. |
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Festival Der Genialen Dissidenten Enfant Terrible Enfant-11 LP + 7" £18.99 Excellent compilation of contemporary dissident European electronic/synth/Industrial/new wave sounds from this synth-focussed label. The follow-up to their epochal Electronic Renaissance LP, this one bundles a bunch of current Euro-heads with a serious jones for the early Industrial sounds of DAF/Absolute Body Control/S.P.K./Throbbing Gristle/Kraftwerk along with touches of Suicide, Public Image Limited, Minimal Man et al. There isn’t a duff track on the album but some of the highlights include Agent Side Grinder’s evocative/magickal “There Is A Sound That Always Goes Out” that mirrors Coil’s work circa “The New Backwards”/later-TG, the amazing Vincent K’s “White Sheet Glory” that crosses Billy Synth-style keyboards with an amphetamine motorik appeal and throat-shredding vocals that make it sound like the most manic La Dusseldorf track of your life and the midnight stylings of Adolf Filter’s beautiful Harmonia/DAF/Kraftwerk-esque “Inner Walls” cut up with the kinda fractured loner vocal that could almost be Peter Jeffries. Other artists featured include Dolina, Nosztalgia Direktiva, Codes, Le Triangle De L’Androgyne, the fantastically named Pierre Normal and Yseult Descieux. A great way in to the current underground Euro synth scene – which seems to have the same relation to its source material as the 80s garage explosion had to Nuggets et al – and an excellent companion piece to Poutre Apparent’s historical survey of the French new wave scene. The set comes in a handsome gatefold sleeve with a bonus 7” and is highly recommended. |
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A Tribute To Jojo Hiroshige Alchemy ARCD-167 CD £14.99 Brand new tribute set of cover versions and punk extrapolations based around the phenomenal body of work birthed by Mr Jojo Hiroshige aka Alchemy label boss and Hijokaidan mainman. Features a totally disobedient Beefheart-style rave-up from the Oshiri PenPenz, microphone-gobbling action from Masonna (first new recording in years), great psych/pop stylings from Doodles, monstrously deformed guitar/noise from Solmania, GaramonKakinoki +AOL and a whole bunch of other punk Kansai Industrialists. Think of it as a particularly focussed Night Gallery instalment. Highly recommended. |
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Lead Into Gold Rebis 008 2xCD £10.99 Follow-up to the great Time And Relative Dimensions In Space compilation with a two CD set once again dedicated to long-form drone works. Exclusive tracks from Birds Of Delay, Bruce Russell, Son Of Earth, The Opera Glove Sinks In The Sea, White/Light, Keenan Lawler, Bird Show/Lichens, Of…Ohv, The Zoo Wheel and The Gray Field Recordings. |
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Super Street 24 Fag Tapes FT-229 Cassette £6.99 Three-way split of extended live sets for this volume of Heath Moerland’s (Sick Llama) compilation series, with jams from New Pledegemaster, Steve Kenney (Demons) and Slither all drawn from their recent tour. Hand-numbered edition of 50 copies. |
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Tokyo Flashback 7 PSF PSFD-189 CD £14.99 Brand new instalment in this legendary compilation series from PSF, now in its seventh volume. For this latest survey of the state of the contemporary Japanese psychedelic underground the label ran a special live night at Koenji Show Boat in May of 2009 and recorded all of the players’ sets. The disc opens with the outer space choral folk of Le Son De L’os, a trio that features Yuko Hasegawa of Onna-Kodomo on guitar and vocal, Masahiro Deguchi of Gendai Sokkyo on flute and guitar and Shizuo Uchida on bass. Bo No Kubo are a drums/acoustic bass/guitar improvisatory unit that translate the Incus aesthetic to Tokyo. Derakushi are a phenomenal free jazz/psych ensemble who use electric rock firepower to propel the furious saxophone of Shun Suzuki; expect a full-length album from these guys on PSF very soon. There’s a great, minimal tracks from shakuhachi player Sabu Orimo, here with his new unit that features drummer/harmonica player Tomohiko Namiki. Touyounomajyo are a classic guitar/bass/drums power trio that would have fit in just as well on some of the earlier volumes and Hasegawa-Shizuo, who have had a bunch of previous releases on labels like PSF and Tiliqua, close the set with an epic drone imagining. Nothing cuts to the heart of the Tokyo underground like PSF’s Flashback series. Recommended. |
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Learning For Insipid Zeal Volume 2 American Tapes AM-840 one-sided LP £12.99 “Maths Balance Volumes, Dog Lady, Infecto, Olson/Rammer, Oil of Beauty one-sided LP / WHOA!! New Heavy Unitz Alert! Second installment of this new series of young bloodz, boiling to destroy! NEW NEW!!This wax is a hyper stoker. Complete "story for your ears" comp style with lurking flow holding all the sounds together. Here's some audio clay to mold your own twisted soundtrack: In order: Track One: MATHS BALANCE VOLUMES = Super weirdo personal mumble-piano strum-slow clanging empty space piece. If you aint partied with these two MN/OH transplants mega maniac's, then jump on board. Surreal central kick off, amazing ???? Tape collage from the only mugs that can pull off just playing tapes and staring at each other live. If your imagination is a big grimace of a pumpkin, this unit gives much of a convexed unusual surface to carve upon. Track Two: OIL OF BEAUTY = New electronic mangle from this (and Beauty Liquid) consumable face lotion that is as pungent as it is flammable. Gross stuff to coat your face with! Doesn't do anything but leave a film of gritty film all over yr. grill, figures: cheapest = on sale its: 94 cents. Nasty! Tapes soon on Chondritic Sound. Sharp short track of greasy face electronic coverings in smatter stylee. Track Three: RAMMER/ OLSON = Bryan "Rammer" Ramirez (Ex Cocaine, Poor School, Universal Indians, Killer Tree, Plants) and Zone One (Boiling Seas, Man Who Ate Himself, Sad Policeman) reconnect in a Missoula basement bar for a Reed/Guitar workout recorded live on the last WE/Black Dice tour over the summer. Super weirdo sheen of fuzz and squash. We had a super killer BBQ at the Rammer HQ with the family before das gig complete with Frisbee golf and uber strong ale. Like the Breckman Duo w/o the anger guerrilla high school mask attack. Ruling. Track Four: DOG LADY= Dude, COLLINO! The newest mover and shaker/skater from the mitten and completely on fire. This track, RULES. Song-ish violin and tape scrape warbling in and outta tune clouded in a mist that'll lure you in and grow under your skin like a shadow of a skin-cell hunter at midnight, early during the workweek w/o a lunch break. The only jammer I know that has a "Legit" secretary. Chances of this player playin your town this weekend: GOOD. Chances of it ruling: BETTER. A pro note taker and a pro note RIPPER. Slime Ball Violin Au Go Go!!! Boosh!! Track Five: INFECTO = Bookending the crew is this new mysterious tape unit. Mysterious unless you were walking behind me and princess on Howard St. when the Tovinator thought she was getting the cold I just got rid of and called me INFECTO for a day. So, a mug booked some hrs in INZANE STUDIOS and gave birth to this track. Blackwards tape treble magnetic tomfoolery, infecting style. Good thing she didn't call me SLOBBER MAN for a day. So theres the lineup. Wicked weird flow, all dark moody non-rockers, surely to set your idea pot a' boiling strong. An audio report from front n center on the crazy camp, Midwest style. Edition of 100 in handmade sleeves, numbered.” – John Olson. |
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Qbico U-Nite 6 & &7: Detroit & Buffalo Qbico #99 3xLP £36.99 Great limited triple LP set that bundles two nights of wild free jazz that Qbico presented in Detroit and Buffalo back in 2006. High energy sets from Arthur Doyle & Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Andrew Barker & Daniel Carter, Steve Baczkowski & Ravi Padmanabha, Muruga Free Funk (with Perry Robinson), Faruq Z Bey & Northwoods Improvisers and Odu Afrobeat Orchestra. |
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Fanajana: A Collection Of Recordings And Photography From Madagasikara Mississippi Records 067 LP £13.99 Compilation of the best of the privately pressed triple LP that Charlie Brooks put together in 1999 that featured his field recordings gathered on trips to Madagasikara in the late 1990s. The three LPs were originally themed around Vocal, Valiha Marovany and Miscellaneous Instruments but this LP compiles highlights from all three, taking in traditional and modern instruments including the jejy voatavo, jejy lava, accordion, sodinas, harmonica, the kabosy and the guitar. Comes with a twelve page booklet of photography and notes. |
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Underwater Peoples Winter Review 2010 Underwater Peoples Records UPC-002 CD £6.99 Fantastic compilation of all unreleased tracks from this great NJ label. Exclusive jams from Julian Lynch, Pill Wonder, Ducktails, Fluffy Lumbers, Big Troubles, Andrew Cedermark, Frat Dad , Dana Jewell, Air Waves, Family Portrait, Alex Bleeker, Mountain Man, Real Estate, Rainbow Bridge and Liam the Younger. |
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Sunday Matinee At The Frying Pan American Tapes AM-855 one-sided LP £11.99 Compilation featuring unreleased tracks from Connelly & The Machines, Body Morph, Hive Mind, Dog Lady and Drainolith: “So the other day, me and my lab buddy supreme Scott were knee f'in deep in trying to find out if a huge craggly motor was delta or wye three phase connected, and needless to say, was NOT having luck. It was a one of them RAW bologna built motors that has wire numbers, but its pointless cause its all on its own weirdo system. Whatever. So as usual, we shot the shit. |
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Eli The Ice Man American Tapes AM-862 CD-R £7.99 Compilation featuring unreleased tracks from Full Scales, Spykes and Pool Water: “Is the Voltages Leads in Inductance or Induction leads Current in Capacitance? ?? Huh? Always forget this easy breeze system code to know which is leading in the Induct/Capt current game...Yeah: three tracks of attack: |
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Mixed Above Emotions American Tapes AM-872 C90 Cassette £7.99 Compilation featuring unreleased tracks from Dwelling Unit, Madness, Influx, Immune Future Problems, First Responder and Cripple Crime’s Triangle: “Massive new comp of all short tracks of all sorts of styles. Weirdo flow, new blood, all heated and raw. Mysterious Island swamped and flanked in all sides by a tidal wave of consuming statics. More to come from each of these creatures, stirring and pacing in a sound cell waiting and plotting to bust out. Color covers, slip case.” – John Olson. |
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Nichi-Yobi no Uta Alchemy/Uplink ULR-020/ULR-020 CD £15.99 Irresistible new compilation CD from the reactivated Alchemy Records, an all-female psych set curated by Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan. Features fragile, breathless song stylings from a bunch of upcoming femmes including Akiko Hodaka (formerly of Maher Shalal Hash Baz), Mai Mishio of Uzumibi, Hirachin of Oninko! and Totsuzen Danboru, Shiho of Ten-No.5 and Yuka Fujita of the excellent Chozu. “Produced by Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan (The King Of Noise), the godfather of Japanese noise music and the owner of Alchemy Records. He realized the strength, fragileness, delicateness and other elements that only women could have are the keyword for this decade. This album contains 11 tunes from emerging female musicians that Hiroshige picked out from the Japanese underground music scene.” – Alchemy. |
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Menagerie 2 Blackest Rainbow Recordings No Cat LP £13.99 Edition of 500 copies compilation LP with exclusive tracks from Akron/Family, Joanne Robertson & Matthew Ashworth, Wand, Natural Snow Buildings, Married In Berdichev, Moon Duo, The See See and Seadog. Comes with a full colour zine featuring artwork by Jake Blanchard, Pete Fowler, Andrew Rae, Will Sweeney, Sarah King, Olange Gularte, James Trimmer/Mirt and Mat Pringle. |
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Been Here All My Days Mississippi Records MR-064 LP £13.99 Excellent and much-needed round-up of a bunch of 45s originally issued w/cool sleeves by Fat Possum that featured tracks from the George Mitchell collection. Mitchell wandered the South throughout the 60s and 70s capturing blues recordings from across the States and the cream of them are rounded up here. There’s some fantastic, raggedy-assed blues, not least from the bandstand rocking Jessie Mae Hemphill who comes over like a sassy trailer-park Abner Jay. Plus meaty sides from Fred McDowell, John Lee Ziegler, Rosa Lee Hill, Jimmy Lee Williams, James Davis, Houston Stackhouse, James Shorter, Precious Bryant, Joe Callicott, Lonzie Thomas, Green Paschal, Furry Lewis and Robert Johnson. This is some wild house-rocking shit. Highly recommended. |
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Blackburn Recordings Presents: Various Deficiencies Vol. 1 Blackburn Recordings No Cat Cassette £3.99 Hand-numbered edition of 130 copies compilation with unreleased tracks from a buncha VT faves including Metal Rouge, Cursillistas, Cloud Nothings, Sore Eros, Coasting, Big Troubles, City Center, Campfires, Brett Marren, Possum, Lame Drivers, Sleep In Sundays, Falsetto Boy, Mountainhood, Island’s Eyelids and Sultan. |
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The Report V.II The Curatorial Club No Cat Book + CD-R + DVD-R £16.99 New issue of this excellent underground/H-Pop journal, perfectly bound 110 pages w/colour and b/w printing and bundled with a CD-R and a DVD-R. Articles by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw), Michael McGregor interviews Velvet Davenport, Jesse Jarnow on Recording The Cosmos with Greg Davis, an interview with new age keyboard legend Iasos and more by Daniel Bachman, Nate Grace, Emilie Friedlander and Curtis Knapp. Artwork from Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Brenna Murphy, Christelle Gualdi, Christian “Megazord” Oldham, Daniel White, E*Rock, Hydrothermal Emerald, Jon Rafman, Julien Laugier, Massimiliano Bomba/Rawraw, Michelle Ceja, Productlaneevol, Push the Button, Stephanie Davidson, Yannick Val Gesto. The CD-R comes with tracks from La Big Vic, Airbird, Laurel Halo, Dent May, Ducktails, Buffalo Moon, Velvet Davenport, The Twerps, Young Prisms, Big Troubles, Alex Bleeker, Chuck Person, Zonotope ™, Sacred Harp and Dolphins into the Future while the DVD-R features video art from Amy Ruhl (excerpts from How Mata Hari Lost Her Head & Found Her Body, scored by Julian Lynch, Samantha Cromwell (live video of Speculator), Laurel Halo (video feedback piece), Ray Concepcion (live video of Julian Lynch), Christian “Megazord” Oldham (video for Dolphins into the Future), Maia Stern (live video of La Big Vic) and Ryan Hover (video remix of Candy Claws song). |
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Bloodstains Across Sweden Bloodstains 04 LP £14.99 Still one of the wildest of the legendary Bloodstains comps, with a round-up of classic disobedient wastoid DIY from Sweden, inclduing classic sides like Kriminella Gitarrer's "Sylvias Unge", Rude Kids' amazing "Raggare Is A Bunch Of Motherfuckers", Watabout, Bugs, Glo, Usch, Brulbajz, Mizz Nobody, Butter Utter, Vicious Visions, Liket Lever, Blodarna... |
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We Are All One, In The Sun: A Tribute To Robbie Basho Alt Vinyl AV-030 LP £14.99 Vinyl edition of this excellent tribute to the American Primitive genius of the late Robbie Basho from a bunch of players with a deep connection to the source including Glenn Jones, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Helena Espvall (Ghost/Espers), Meg Baird (Espers), Arborea, Fern Knight, Cian Nugent and Rahim AlHaj. Buncha female vocal tracks are particularly choice here, highlighting Basho’s gift as a highly idiosyncratic singer as well as a visionary instrumentalist. Dedicated to the memory of Jack Rose. 180g vinyl, edition of 300 copies. |
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Ongaku 80: Alternative Waves From Japan Hiruko Records No Cat LP £21.99 Fabulous follow-up to the same label’s Ongaku 70, this set takes in a buncha obscurities from the Japanese underground of the 1980s, all of which would contribute to the momentum that gave birth to the scene’s explosion in the 1990s. Alongside stuff that some heads might know - Phew of Aunt Sally’s “Urahara” from 1980, schizophrenic Pinakotheca recordings artists Tako, the mutant techno of Riuichi Sakamoto’s “Riot In Lagos” – there’s a ton of alien tongue, ranging from EP-4’s thudding tape-damaged Industrial punk through Lizard’s acid-damaged prog-pop, Portray Heads’ transplanted Trans-Europe Express, Gunjogacrayon’s usurping of James Chance & The Contortions and prefiguring of The Boredoms, the amazingly titled Daisuck & Prostitute’s blunt punk/funk, Shinobu’s psychedelic cold wave and Pta’s epic unclassifiable Josef K-play-Can-play-“Rapture” 1982 8 minute masterpiece “Woo-Guy After Dark”. Another phenomenal set that is sure to blindside anyone who considers themselves an expert on this endlessly inventive scene. On pink/white splattered vinyl. Recommended! |
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Love, Peace & Poetry: Mexican Psychedelic Music QDK Media LP-045 LP £12.99 Still one of the greatest volumes of this killer series of geographically themed private press psych comps complete w/cool Bunny Yeager snaps on the sleeve. The focus here is on Mexican psych and we get glorious sunbleached psych/folk/punk comedowns from legendary no-counts like Dug Dug’s The Kaleidoscope, La Fachada De Piedra, El Tarro De Mostaza, La Vida, La Libre Expresion, The Flying Karpets, La Revolucion De Emiliano Zapata, The Spiders, Three Souls In My Mind, Toncho Pilatos, Renaissance, Ernan Roch, Grupo Ciruela, Los Ovnis, The Survival and Nahuat. Recommended. |
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Killed By Epitaph: Dutch Punk Rock '77-'82 No Label No Cat 2xLP £29.99 Ass-blasting double LP compilation of wild Dutch punk, still some of the crudest ever spat to wax. Amazing tracks from Ivy Green (“I’m Sure We’re Gonna Make It”), Helmettes, Panic (“Requiem For Martin Heidegger”), Flyin’ Spiderz, Speedtwins, Paul Tornado, Suzannes, Tits, Mollesters, Filth, God’s Heart Attack, Mecano Ltd, Subway, Mort Subite, The Brommers, Shith, Coitus Int. Vopo’s, The Ex, Nixe, Rondos, Nitwitz, Trockener Kecks and Frites Modern. Excellent sleeve notes too. |
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Tally Ho!: Flying Nun’s Greatest Bits Flying Nun FNCD-517 2xCD £19.99 Stunning compilation that marks 30 years of one of the hands-down greatest underground record labels of the modern age, New Zealand’s Flying Nun Records. Two discs that remind you just how much of your favourite jams came out of a single imprint. Amazing tracks from The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills, The Dead C, Pin Group, The Bats, Sneaky Feelings, Look Blue Go Purple, Bird Nest Roys, The Great Unwashed, Straitjacket Fits, Able Tasmans, Fetus Productions, Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, Garageland, Bressa Creeting Cake, Chris Knox, Headless Chickens, The Mint Chicks, The Phoenix Foundation, Robert Scott, Grayson Gilmour, The Gordons, The Stones, Children’s Hour, Doublehappys, Tall Dwarfs, Snapper, The 3Ds, Shayne Carter & Peter Jefferies, Bailter Space, Skeptics, Solid Gold Hell, Dimmer, Loves Ugly Children, High Dependency Unit, Ghost Club, The Subliminals, Shocking Pinks and F In Math. If you’ve yet to check in with the label then this is the perfect primer and if you’re already a devotee this might just be the mix tape of your life. Highly recommended! |
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Menagerie #3 Blackest Rainbow Recordings TORLP-002 LP + Zine £15.99 A co-release with Tor Press, Menagerie #3 presents a compilation and zine put together by Jake Blanchard with the concept that the artists make music inspired by the visuals and vice-versa. This one features exclusive new tracks from Ben Nash, Isengrind, C.Joynes and Twinsistermoon and the A5 12 page litho-printed booklet features visuals from Jim Stoten, Simon Fowler, Adrianne Neal and Jake Blanchard. Edition of 500 copies. |
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Michigan Meltdown Coney Dog Records CDR-313 LP £14.99 Idiotically amazing compilation subtitled “Post-Garage Pandemonium And Pre-Punk Fuzz Freaks From The Mitten State’s Miliken Era” that comps a buncha rare never-previously-compiled 7s from the wasteland years of the late 60s/early 70s in and around Michigan. Think Stooges, MC5, Blue Cheer et al as filtered through a suburban punk w/dreams of wastoid rock glory aesthetic and with alla the dials set to excess. Some amazing finds in here: Robert Starks And The Geniuses’ “Space Travelling (Part 2)” has to be heard to be believed, with a zonked bongo groove that’s high on reverb suddenly bisected by the most outrageously loud fuzz wah solo since Bowie mixed Raw Power. Metropolis’s “Age Of Evolution” spins a vision of the earth in space that Lothar & The Hand People would’ve been proud of while ripping – or somehow channelling – The MC5’s take on Sun Ra’s “Starship”. Master Danse’s “Feelin Dead” turns dog-killing volume on a paean to death and self murder that shoots smack along the way and ends with the sound of a gunshot. Astaroth’s “Salanispiritus” is a classic proto-metal hymn to Lucifer while both the Master Danse tracks – released on the equally outrageous Brown Whole Jams – take two-chord Motor City punk hypnotics to the brink thanks to an outrageously keen free-form drummer. This is a phenomenal collection that resurrects some of the daffiest moves ever made in pursuit of rock stardom with outrageous levels of fuzz, wah-wah and doofs. A very heavy spin in VT – best off-the-radar psych/punk/fuzz comp since High All The Time? Comes with track commentary and label repros. Highly recommended! |
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Vellum Meudiademorte MDDM-28 One-Sided C50 Cassette £6.99 Brand new album from The Vanishing Voice minus Wooden Wand and Satya Sai in an edition of 200 copies with gold silkscreened sleeves. Starts off in a beautifully evocative almost Mirror-esque glassy trance style before levitating through screaming radio waves ala MEV into something quite unlike anything else in their back catalogue, something that more closely resembles the more Bower-reverent moments of Pete Nolan's early Spectre Flux material. Either way, it sounds fantastic and might just be the best release by this cabal to date. |
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James And The Quiet Ecstatic Peace B0008880-02 CD £6.99 From alla the pre-release noise surrounding this new album from Wooden Wand you might've been led to think that was gonna be some massive misstep into the tepid waters of airbrushed mainstream oblivion for Mr James Toth. But then that's the problem with press releases; send em out to a bunch of jobbing journos and they'll swallow the program without even tasting the meat. And if any of those duds had bothered actually listening to the rec they'd have figured out that alla that 'big-time' production hoo-haa was just another red herring. Fact is James And The Quiet sounds a lot like the last few Wooden Wand albums and feels more like a further refining of the less improvisatory road that he has been heading along since The Vanishing Voice pretty much set out on their own. Which means it's a fucking doozy. Sure it has a slightly more 'produced' feel, but all that really means is that James's voice has more space to hypnotise and the arrangements seem to sit a little neater around all the kinda serpentine shapes that his quixotic song-writing logic has always seemed to demand. In fact, if anything, this album feels even more stripped back than previous entries, with James and Jessica's vocals working malevolent harmonic smoke rings around blasted country ballads with the kind of supernatural grace that will almost have you reaching for Chris D's Divine Horseman side in order to compare notes. Anyone who has caught him live recently or kept up with the archival From The Road series will recognise a bunch of the songs here but honestly, they never sounded better. So, it's another record from James, and another fucking great one. Simple as that. So can the fucking press release. Recommended. |
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Contemporary Suicide Music Mad Monk No Cat CD-R £5.99 Third limited-edition CD-R (run of only 150 copies) from this new project led by James Toth aka Wooden Wand and featuring Jessica Toth and original Golden Calves vocalist Max Mev Wicker. Following in the wake of their shelved second album, Jazz Improve, Contemporary Suicide Music feels more like the repository for alla Toth’s more outré sonic strategies, almost as a companion to his more classic song-based work as Wooden Wand. Here there’s a whole bunch of weird, private press style gambits, with tracks that range from devouring, almost Hototogisu-esque dinosaurs-in-the-fog style drones, squiggly early-Tietchens inspired synth magic, instrumentals that sound almost exactly like Department Store Santas playing “That’s Just Fine” by Spacemen 3 and some shredding solo punk guitar. Another highly recommended instalment. |
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Phases In Meticulous Orbit Blackest Rainbow Recordings No Cat CD-R £6.99 Limited to 250 hand-numbered-copies from the band formerly known as Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice. This one features four 'phases' across one long 30 minute track that sees the whole cultus broke down into its constituent parts. First up we get a sumptuously stoned and minimal Diehl/Taveniere jam that then segues into a great "Dark Star -esque Crane/Toth face-off which in turn morphs into a Nolan/Toth jam before the whole group kick in with a fanfare of heavy psychedelic electricity. Recorded live at Strange Maine, Portland, Maine April 2007. Comes with tour diary extract on double sided A4 sheet on the inside of the package. Both the insert and the sleeve are printed on a very thing paper (kinda like newsprint) with tiny red flecks built into the paper. |
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The Corpse Blackest Rainbow Recordings No Cat Cassette £5.99 Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies from the duo of James and Jessica Toth (aka Chazz Improv and Norma Bates) with Max ‘Mev’ Wicker, their first release outside of Toth’s own Mad Monk imprint. Some classically bleak Kraut-inspired dirge bombs cut-up with the kind of blues breakdowns and deranged avant-gardisms that best defined Toth’s previous Hassara outings. |
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Hot Lead Mad Monk No Cat CD-R £5.99 New limited to 150 copies self-released CD-R from this Wooden Wand offshoot featuring James and Jessica Toth (aka Chazz Improv and Norma Bates) and Max Wicker: “Latest and best from this mysterious tribe finds them in full synthesizer horror mode. Taking cues from the soundtracks of John Carpenter, the mutant space techno of Allan Bryant, the time-lapse mesmerism of Robert Fripp, and the intrepid synthesizer experiments of Ruth White, Hot Lead deals in nightmarisharpeggios, shapeshifting noise and ominous melodic variations. Recorded direct to 8 track - no boring, sterile microhouse polish here - and comprised of mostly solo tracks by individual members. Complete with dreamy Sisters of Mercy fanboy cover art.” – MM. |
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All Throttle, No Bottle Mad Monk No Cat CD-R £5.99 Excellent new release from another solo project of James Jackson Toth/Wooden Wand. This one is dedicated to maximum guitar destruction/amp confusion and sees Toth taking his electric guitar the fuck apart in a way that parallels Mats Gustafsson’s work with the saxophone. Extending the explorations of players like Rudolph Grey, Ray Russell, Donald Miller and Stefan Jaworzyn, this is guitar as maximum sonic disruptor, played like it was the first time he ever encountered it: “Thrash, Jr, named after Houston Mazda (RX-7) Cup driver Thomas Thrash Jr, is yet another guise of James Jackson Toth, and released on Toth's new MAD MONK ANNEX CDR imprint. This racing-themed album comprises three extended pieces of bleak and visceral solo guitar cacophony / catharsis. If Hassara was “boogie,” Thrash, Jr is “bombardment.” From the artist: "Like most American kids my age, my life was changed irrevocably by the music of bands like Courtesy Flush, Army Nightmares, Lil Johnny Eightball & the Secret Society Dildos, and The Canker Sores. This premeditated and unprovoked attack on my electric guitar is in tribute to those bands and their myriad imitators." “Lux Interior” is a duet for raging rainstorm and goat hoof-guitar, “Victory Is Hers” is a naughty little respite of delay blast and Toth’s patented “animal-tapping” fuckitude, and "Militant Walls (Is Poser Noise For Pussy Emo Fags)" finds Toth turning up the gain on his solid state amplifier and proceeding to audibly pull his Stratocaster apart - you can literally hear the entire tremolo system being slowly removed. Ouch! "Makes Rudolph Grey sound like Steve Vai" - William Blake Cobblestone, local television personality. "The best guitar noise album of the year" - The Other Dude in Claudio Two, Claudio Two. Improvised and recorded entirely live over two stormy Nashville nights, with nothing added post production.” – MMA. Limited edition of 150 copies. |
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Born Bad Mad Monk MM-007 LP £18.99 Private press album from Mister James Jackson Toth aka Wooden Wand aka Wand. Recorded on the lam downwind of some fairly destructive personal/artistic episodes, rejected by his record company, fuelled by bad blood and mental cobwebs, Born Bad is both the most intimate, the most bloody-minded and the most revelatory album by Toth to date. The sound is very stripped down and lot more countrified than the bulk of his catalogue. Imagine Nicodemus or Jim Collins playing Gram Parsons “Hippie Boy” (reputedly Dylan’s favourite Parsons track), or how about Townes Van Zandt circa the nihilistic/black hole style of “Nothing” given a one-chance live album for Siltbreeze or how about just Dylan circa The Basement Tapes, prowling his Woodstock home with a shotgun while fans creepy-crawl across the roof? Either way this is a stark postcard from the void and won’t stick around for long. Edition of 500 copies, already sold out at source, hand-screened covers, limited numbers available. Recommended. |
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Hard Knox Ecstatic Peace E#100K CD £6.99 Excellent collection of demos, home-recordings and out-takes from James Toth, recorded to portastudios between the years 2002-2007. Up-close, intimate atmosphere on this and combined with the quality of Toth's throwaways (which for anyone else would be prima material) this almost has the feel of his Nebrasaka, a series of dark, loner postcards from the other side of America that would bolster and explode traditional country, folk and ballad forms. Excellent. "To quickly address the elephant in the room - certainly, collections of demos, outtakes and home recordings are mostly bogus, but obviously you're reading this, so obviously I've somehow been coerced into releasing this batch of tunes, and you've bought it or stolen it or borrowed it or gotten a promo or whatever, so let's cut to the chase. In my defense, all of the cuts contained herein are 'songs' in the traditional western sense - my experiments in "surf harmonica" and "doom zydeco" will not be chronicled here, deep and plentiful as those archives may be. Everything here was recorded by me on either a Roland BR-8 digital 8-track or it's flashier, more cosmopolitan cousin, the BR- 1600, with incalculable assistance from Jexie Lynn, who accompanies me on many of these songs and who's encouragement and creativity allowed many of them to be. Most of the recordings were done at my then-home in beautiful Knoxville, TN between October 2002 and January of 2007, just prior to the retirement of the Wooden Wand name. You've already pardoned the narcissism, now pardon the cliche: I stand behind these songs as snapshots and enjoy them despite their many flaws. I hope you do, too." - Wand. |
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Born Bad Mad Monk MM-007 LP £13.99 Second limited edition (with slightly different sleeves) of this much-anticipated new private press album from Mister James Jackson Toth aka Wooden Wand aka Wand. Recorded on the lam downwind of some fairly destructive personal/artistic episodes, rejected by his record company, fuelled by bad blood and mental cobwebs, Born Bad is both the most intimate, the most bloody-minded and the most revelatory album by Toth to date. The sound is very stripped down and lot more countrified than the bulk of his catalogue. Imagine Nicodemus or Jim Collins playing Gram Parsons "Hippie Boy" (reputedly Dylan's favourite Parsons track), or how about Townes Van Zandt circa the nihilistic/black hole style of "Nothing" given a one-chance live album for Siltbreeze or how about just Dylan circa The Basement Tapes, prowling his Woodstock home with a shotgun while fans creepy-crawl across the roof? Either way this is a stark postcard from the void and won?t stick around for long. Recommended. |
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Wither Thou Goest, Cretin Mad Monk No Cat Art Edition CD-R £13.99 Hand-numbered/self-released edition of 200 copies art edition CD-R from Wooden Wand, packaged with a card envelope pasted onto a thick piece of wood. This is a major return to loner form for Wand, with 10 tracks that take the isolated ambience of Nebraska and dose it with the apocalyptic glam of Bowie’s “Quicksand”. Wand’s writing is at an absolute peak here, with a surreal allusive style that sets mid-60s Dylan against Gram Parson’s “Hippy Boy” in a post-Siltbreeze universe. He never sounded better. Highly recommended. |
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Live Polyamory CD-R £6.99 Feral trumpet/drums exchange, torn from the hearts of James Toth aka Wooden Wand and Lucas ‘Bones' Crane. Crane's trumpet playing sounds a little like Cosey Fanni Tutti or Pete Nolan playing Cherry-styled bugle calls and Dixon-spits with a sad, martial force while Toth's drumming style works the kind of horizontal planes previously levelled by Denis Charles into new realms of punk. Free fucking folk. Recommended. Limited edition of 150 copies w/liners by, ulp, Carlos Castaneda... |
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Briarwood Mad Monk No Cat LP £16.99 Glorious new privately released album from Wooden Wand with a virtual goddamn big band line-up that features guitar, pedal steel, plenty of organ, drums and slide. Wand has really hit his stride recently after a wobbly period around the Ryko LP and this might just be his most fully-accomplished and all-out gorgeous recording yet. The band have that constant, unfolding/revelatory style of The Hawks/The Band circa ’66 or Dylan’s studio band on Blonde On Blonde, allowing Toth to really roll with the phrasing and his songwriting here has a similar visionary/infinite aspect as classic late-60s Dylan, pushing past simple verse/chorus arrangements in favour of a constant unfolding. His lyrics are still some of the smartest/funniest/rawest of anyone of his generation and the degree of underground smarts and hard-won knowledge he brings to the table – he served time under Matthew Valentine fer gawd’s sake – means even the straightest of pounders are surreptitiously bent. The backing band are fantastic: powerful, euphoric, hard rocking and the combination of off-the-cuff backing vocals, ripping guitar solos and epic beams of organ makes this the most rewarding singer-songwriter record of the year. In a righteous universe Wand would be the dude on the front cover of Mojo but in a world where dweebs like David Gray are touted as the heir apparent to Bob Dylan, well, I’ll continue to file him alongside Arthur Doyle, NNCK and The Bummer Road and feel damn good about it. Edition of 500 copies, ‘official’ version reputedly due on Fire Records sometime in the future. On coloured vinyl. Can’t recommend this enough. |
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Collection: Money Band + Century Band Woodsist 056 2xLP £22.99 Reissue of a bunch of key documents – the Golden Calves Money Band LP and Century Band 12” – from this pre-Wooden Wand/Vanishing Voice freakout jam band led by Mr James Toth and released in the mid-90s. The sound has that classically fractured post-ESP Disk Siltbreeze feel fully down, with Skip Spence style oblivion ballads further dislocated by almost Shadow Ring-styled idiot avant and drug-dazzled cultic jam blasts ala early Tower Recordings. The spirit of Jandek hovers over the bulk of the recording and Toth makes expressive use of Sterling Smith’s barbed guitar sonorities while orbiting the kind of cultic downer ballads that he would base much of the Vanishing Voice material around. A beautiful sound from a beautiful time. Comes with some hilarious in-depth liners where Toth fesses up to the multiple inspirations behind these still-magical recordings. If you’ve never heard these before then it functions as a key to a whole lot of what was to come later. Highly recommended. |
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Chants Of Niflheim Blackest Rainbow Recordings BRRRSD1 CD £10.99 “Brand new full length CD album from Natural Snow Buildings, made especially for Record Store Day. Following on from January 2011's Waves of the Random Sea, this is the most recent recordings from the duo of Mehdi and Solange, recorded over the first three months of 2011. Epicly dark and brooding folk blurred with psychedelic and ritualistic overtones, this album sounds as good as any other Natural Snow Buildings/Twinsistermoon/Isengrind release, retaining the sound that only this duo can conjure up. Opener 'Chants of Niflheim Part 1' is a dark reflection upon the concept of its title, followed by 'Templars Ritual', a psychedelic meandering 17 minutes of ritual head nodding zone outs. 'Chants of Niflheim Part 2' builds ethereal levitation to new forms, from dark to light, blurring heavy riffs with almost vocal instrument sounds to create a mist of unknown. Album closer, 'H. Scudder', opens with Mehdi's softly sung lyrics layered with percussion and string, heading straight into a deep ritualistic swirling drone section. 'Cants of Niflheim' again concretes Natural Snow Buildings as an essential contemporary duo, crossing the lines of folk drone experimentalism, traditional folk craftsmanship and post rock aesthetic. Again, another essential record from this French duo. Released for Record Store Day, April 16th 2011, with thanks to supporters across the globe from Blackest Rainbow and Natural Snow Buildings. Limited to 500 copies in full colour 4 panel card sleeves.” – BRR. |
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Night Of Raining Fire Blackest Rainbow Recordings BRR-225 LP £14.99 Bewitching new solo LP from Solange Gularte aka one half of French acid folk experimentalists Natural Snow Buildings. Night Of Raining Fire comes adorned with Solange’s weird post-Darger cartoon artwork that serves to underlines the overall “Lost Girls” atmosphere. The sonics are beautiful, somewhere between Hosianna Mantra-era Popol Vuh, the sunbleached acid folk of Linda Perhacs and the haunted European exploitation soundtracks of the late Jean Rollin, with an impossibly ancient and otherworldly atmosphere. Plus the album really *sounds* great, with lush raga/drones hovering over distant blurs of reverb and singing up-front strings while Solange’s vocals melt all over them. Gorgeous. Edition of 500 copies. |
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Catch As Catch Can Agitated Records IMSO-001 7" £4.99 Edition of 1000 copies single, debut release for Agitated Records, with two tracks from the duo of Ripley Johnson (Wooden Shjips) and Sanae Yamada. Blazing minimal psych original on the A with a cover of The Scientists’ “Set It On Fire” on the flip. |
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Vol. 2 Sick Thirst ST-007 LP £13.99 Second volume dedicated to mopping up alla the stray 7” action from Wooden Shjips, bundling the band's Sub Pop and Mexican Summer singles, their self-released European tour singles and a track from Yeti magazine. Features "Loose Lips," "Death's Not Your Friend (Live)", and "I Hear the Vibrations (E-Z Version)," plus covers of Neil Young's "Vampire Blues" and Serge Gainsbourg's "Contact." |
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Vol. 2 Sick Thirst ST-007 CD £11.99 Second volume dedicated to mopping up alla the stray 7” action from Wooden Shjips, bundling the band's Sub Pop and Mexican Summer singles, their self-released European tour singles and a track from Yeti magazine. Features "Loose Lips," "Death's Not Your Friend (Live)", and "I Hear the Vibrations (E-Z Version)," plus covers of Neil Young's "Vampire Blues" and Serge Gainsbourg's "Contact." |
