Excellent collection of recent work from Antwerp’s Daniel Renders aka Cassis Cornuta, a European thinker who took a similar aesthetic stance to early Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders way back at the dawn of the 70s, making anti-music, noise and art-prank statements using broken turntables, Korg synths, vacuum cleaners, fucked-up pianos, microphone feedback, primitively executed sound poetry and industrial debris purloined from Smegma. Cornuta’s story makes for a fascinating secret history that sheds further light on the culturally decimating power of avant garde theory in the hands of punk primitive kids, documenting a dramatic cultural engagement played out across countless long-lost cassettes and private performances. This new Ultra Eczema collection gathers material recorded between 2005 and 2009 and it’s dominated by lonely/minimal analogue keyboard work that comes out of the same solitary universe as Edmond De Deyster (indeed one doughball has already suggested they are one and the same person) while combining cracked drum machines, gurgling melodies and that classic fried middle-European avant punk appeal. A fantastic collection, edition of 300 copies with inserts and with multiple holes punched in the centre, should you want to skew the sonics even further. Highly recommended.

“The first time I've met Jeff Hartford aka moose jaw aka NOISE NOMADS was around 4 years ago in providence, a tense looking bear putting a mic in front of a amp, leaving the audience alone with a whale of feedback, pretty pretty pretty confused!! He walks out after kranking open the amp, a minute later a giant REAL Christmas tree walks thru the audience trying to find the way back to the amp, kicking people over, I guess this show was right after Christmas time and Jeff found it somewhere or he stared at a young kid that was about to decorate it. I was very impressed by his show, both sound and performance wise, there was a seriously intense vibe there, felt like he could snap at any given moment and squeeze you to death with a Christmas tree.. Noise Nomads' live sets are always strange, confusing and amazing, an amp iiiiiiiiiiiiiii-ing while the man goes running around the block, a mountain of amps that start talking after he picked a fight with them, a sludgier drummer does not exist. It was definitely not the last time the man amazed me, his duo set with PAUL FLAHERTY (which is released on American Tapes), the loner car rides I shared with him to his area in the valleys of Northampton, his amazing monthly zines and tapes, his drumming with grey skull, his drawings etc.. It's a total psycho package; everything is there; visuals, sounds and a great dude! The first side of this record was recorded a bunch of years ago and is just voice and tascam! An amazing swollen beast of sound poetry, gargling waanzin, and muffled barking! The b side is the same dude a few years later on his knees in my living room screaming thru a bass drum and a contact mic attached to a bunch of pedals, harsher than a prison full of parrots to be released! There should be more paintings like Kim Gordon's NOISE NOMADS!!!  Limited to 300 copies” – DT.

Fantastic new book of art, found photographs, Xeroxed imagery etc from Belgium’s Dennis Tyfus, here masquerading as Mr Tiefhuys. Tyfus has a great eye for funny/odd detail and his choice of snaps here is fantastic, from moody weirdo gals through truculent adolescents, rockers, pin-up work, dogs, some nudes, all printed on a variety of coloured/textured card. A great entry point into middle-European art madness. 

Long term VT followers will know the esteem in which we hold Ultra Eczema’s on-going series of archival LPs documenting the more off-the-radar European Wildman/avant garde sides, presenting definitive documents by previously little know artists such as Cassis Cornuta, Kommisaar Hjuler & Mama Baer, Edmond De Deyster, Jos Steen, Leo Coomans, Ludo Mich, Wout Vercammen et al... this stunning one-sided LP with a silkscreen on the flip is a recording taken from sound sculptor, artist, instrument inventor and experimental radiophonist George Toet Smits’ first exhibition in Antwerp in 1981. Smits was involved in the underground film and comics scene in the late Sixties and soon graduated to presenting an experimental radio show on Radio Centraal where he would mix music with environmental recordings and his own inventions. He was inspired to create long string instruments after the discovery of an old surfboard on the beach and soon his visual and sonic interests came together in a series of constructions that had a spare Industrial beauty to them and combined long strings with Styrofoam, metal, bamboo, glass rods and steel springs. His music is stunning, occupying that lonesome luminal zone that Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures came out of or even Alan Lamb’s recordings of the Faraway Wires (still my favourite contemporary  ‘environmental’ recordings) but there are also aspects of Chris Corsano and – particularly – Eric Thielemans’ work with drum skins, with tracks that sound like fleets of heavenly dulcimers wobbling in and out of corporeal reality while leaving strange clouds of fuzzy overtone in their wake. Some of the playing is more drone centred, with Smits threading a thin pulse between your ears with all of the evocative sleight-of-hand of Maryanne Amacher. Elsewhere there’s more of a Fluxus action aspect to the sonics w/the sound of Joe Jones’ toy orchestra playing deep space wow ala Ranta/Kosugi/Ichiyanagi or even an Alastair Galbraith/Ellen Fullman/Eli Keszler power summit. The set also comes with some cool snaps of his constructions plus an interview from just before his untimely death in 1997 by Patrick Vandenberghe. Another peerlessly outside archival presentation from Ultra Eczema, which has turned out to be the Nonesuch Explorer of Middle Europe’s Hidden Reverse. Highly recommended! 

Massive dose of aural confusion from this Finnish primitivist/prankster/sound artist. Made with little to no instrumentation, content or thematic material whatsoever, Dreaming Of Being A Tampon is up there with Jandek’s Put My Dream On This Planet, some of the Schlimpfluch recordings or the extremes of the Revue Ou series with a set of recordings that move from documents of precisely nada – a tape rolling in an empty room – through sounds of TV and movement on the very periphery of hearing through harsh domestic noise and what sounds like a symphony scored for a microphone inserted into the throat. Despite its wholly negative construction it’s eerily compulsive, which is a testament to the force of character Pami can bring to the sound of almost-silence and non-music, or something... “Only very few people on this planet can get away with what Reijo Pami usually does, luckily! Minimalism has been taken far too serious, though Pami single handed succeeds to change the tooth of time by stretching his arms and demanding a bunch of plastic horses to icebear on contact mic-ed wooden tables all over the planet, resulting in revolutionary simple sound barks! Finland is played by Reijo Pami, the result of left wing parents and children of the revolution refreshing his loud mind. For maximum confusion on most levels, no treatments, no overdubs, no instruments, no money... cheap tapes, open window, some walking. If your body is an elastic you might wanna use it that way too, the muscles of this finnished headbanger are hear-able on this LP, bricks are made ON this record, or do you wanna watch TV on this LP, it's all possible! Chocolate monk and Lal Lal Lal were pioneers in publishing his music earlier, and I am sure this will be the spring hit of 2011! Hand spray painted and stuck on cover design, all covers are a little different.” – UE. Edition of 200 copies, no reissue ever.