One of the most exciting cultural excavations of the past few years has been the unearthing of the convoluted history of the Buttecounty Free Music Society aka BUFMS, a wild collective of artists, non-musicians, rockers and goofballs who came together in comparative obscurity in the early/mid-80s and who, as their world-defining box set Induced Musical Spasticity makes clear, were as attuned to garage rock, psychedelia and free jazz as much as noise, avant garde and surrealist traditions. The BUFMS aesthetic paralleled the earlier experiments in spontaneous musical theatre of LAFMS associates like Le Forte-Four, Airway et al, but with a post-punk/pre-Bananafish style that was less west coast freak and more industrial strength in its urge-to-usurp. Brent Lewis Ensemble remain one of the society’s central groups and the main carrier of their particular brand of liberated excess and though a few major documents have made it through the net- the Three Christs LP on Siltbreeze, the North Pole LP on What The...? – Out Patience presents the fullest documentation of their wild style. Sections of Out Patience were excerpted on the Siltbreeze LP and the Mary Jane cassette but this is the first time this legendary performance has been presented in its complete form. And it’s a revelation. Recorded by the trio of ‘Lucien Tielens’, ‘Tim Smyth’ and ‘Gnarlos’ at Bell Memorial Union, Chico, CA on April 28^th 1984, the performance combines tape work, doomy percussion, long sections of freak vocalese, savage percussion, ancient horn drones and sudden Ferraro-style found sound interventions in the context of free improvisation that comes out of the East Bionic Symphonia/Group Ongaku approach, with a heavy cultic energy that balances droning passages of head-spinning Om with the kind of bloodied interactions of the Urabe/Mukai duets and the monks in space feel of Taj Mahal Travellers. But there’s something else here, a classic basement/hobbyist vibe that feels like the transmission point between the LAFMS’s ground-breaking vision of a new underground rock and the contemporary experiments in DIY avant of the whole Chocolate Monk scene. If the sound of Japanese avant gardists praying in caves in order to hold off the end of the world appeals to you as much as laughing your ass off to back issues of Bananafish then this recording may well be your dream summit. Throw in echoes of Charlotte Moorman, Lee Rockey, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Opera “From The Works Of Tadanori Yokoo” as well as The A Band and NNCK and you have a peerless side of pure outsider invention. Edition of only 50 copies: “Bren't Lewiis's afterhours guerilla action, performed inside the darkened, cavernous, now-defunct Bell Memorial Union on the campus of CSU Chico on the evening of April 28, 1984, was facilitated by Alison Gude, at the time an elected official of the Associated Students. Yes, this is how she betrayed their trust. The area where Lucian Tielens, Tim Smyth and Gnarlos performed was three stories high and just under a block long. The trio was in constant motion, re-positioning themselves throughout the building, possessed by plastic flamingo, goink visions, and the compulsion to insert their heads into buckets and howl. The complete, unedited session, recorded with a single microphone, filled one side of a c90. Eight minutes were released on the Mary Jane cassette (DooDoo Product 1984) and on Three Christs of Ypsilanti LP (Siltbreeze 2010). This is the first-ever availability of the wildly spatial recording in its entirety, mastered in early 2011 from the original cassette it was recorded on. Silence occurs at around the sixteen-minute mark when a fork, scuttling at high speed across the tile floor, slams into the tape recorder and dislodges the mic. The duration of the audio interruption, a legitimate element of the recording, lasts as long as it took to plug the mic back in. As stated in Siltbreeze's Three Christs press release, "hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects [were used]." Additional brentstrumentation includes The Nube Tube (a corrugated hose from a hair dryer swung like a bullroarer), harmonica, dozens of metal remnants of antique armaments, toy guitars, toy pianos, toy drums, glassware, marbles, the staircase, empty cans, pie tins, metal coils, jewellry, moans, gurns, chants, sneezes, whistles and insectoid heralds. Heard as a single 47-minute track, the nonstop performance splits its time between a spastic corruption of the thirteenth text from Aus den Sieben Tagen and a barn where damaged minotaurs are stabled.
Packaged with hand-painted screen and found photo or abstract print.” – BUFMS. Highly recommended!

Bizarre edition of 200 copies 7” that reissues a privately pressed cassette made by a zonked born-again labourer who became a swinging self-ordained Christian lounge singer resident at the Hodge Podge Lodge in Biggs, California in the late 70s. Originally released on cassette in 1979, this EP combines some swinging/cracked takes on “Jesus Digs Me” and “The Lord’s Prayer” as well as two tracks recorded live in the shower, a version of “Live And Let Die” and a riff on shampoo entitled “Shampoo Bottle”. File in your Real People section somewhere close to Rodd Keith and in close sight of your copy of The Satanic Bible and it might start to make some kind of sense. Comes with a plastic swizzle stick and reproductions of period fliers and business cards. Hotcomb also appears on Glands Of External Secretions’ Reverse Atheism LP. 

Edition of 50 copies reissue of a very obscure cassette reputedly recorded and released in the early-1980s by a pair of agricultural students named Chancre and Canker. Inspired by Non’s massively potent locked-groove epic Pagan Muzak they began experimenting with tape loops, reel-to-reel players, scratchy sound effects records and answering machine tapes. The results are pretty bent, with a hands-on repeato vibe that is straight out of the Aaron Dilloway songbook over jungle and machine sounds that would reconcile the exotic settings of Monopoly Child Star Searchers with the hallucinatory environs of Basil Kirchin. Throw in some classic LAFMS/BUFMS-style hobbyist electro and a post-Freak approach to aleatoric psychedelic brutalism and I’m more than sold. Comes with free dried spaghetti!

Massively ambitious double-LP set from the duo of Barbara Manning and Seymour Glass (Bananafish) that sees them joined by a jaw-dropping line-up of underground figures including Bruce Russell of The Dead C, Alastair Galbraith, Scott Simmons of Eat Skull, Lucian Tielens (Brent Lewis Ensemble), Patricia Rowland (Vomit Launch), Jett Hotcomb and more. The set encompasses some stunning dark/minimal covers of primo material like The Birthday Party’s “Mutiny In Heaven”, Hank Williams’ “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive”, The New Creation’s “Dig! The Origin Of Man” through bastardised movie snippets and manipulated monologues lifted from films like The Holy Mountain, Head, Toy Story, Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and Help! Barbara provides the most song-orientated material while Glass works fucked-up tape magic with the slightest of sonic detritus. Throw in a buncha wild apocalyptic texts lifted from Elizabeth Clare Prophet, L. Ron Hubbard, Flannery O’Connor, Hugo Ball, Hippocrates etc,. Bruce Russell’s take on David Crosby, Galbraith’s higher-minded violin drone, voices of spectral choirs rising above texts about the nature of creation and infinity and you have the ultimate end-of-times report from the furthest margins of the underground. Much of Glands... back catalogue exists in a zone where tongues reside firmly within cheeks but this is the heaviest, darkest and most unaccountably affecting broadcast from these two to date. Packaged with a full-colour fold-out Sgt Peppers-style poster with manipulated images of the entire cast. A singular work, highly recommended.

Edition of 75 ‘tour’ CD-R, released to coincide with the Ensemble’s appearance at the 2011 Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton, England. This is a fantastic big-band performance recorded in 1987 that feels less elusive and more coherently structured than some of the group’s work. While there is plenty of surreal tape loopage and infomercial chatter it’s bracketed by some fantastically ‘out’ jams that have a lucid, Venusian quality. Some of the guitar work sounds like drunken loops of Loren Connors while at their most ‘explosive’ the group succeed in mainlining Faust’s classic “Krautrock” via what sounds like a warehouse full of devotees and almost Stare Case-style bass jams. A killer side from Brent Lewis, cutting their communal improvisatory style with inspired tape-work and a classic/mysterious, low-level avant rock edge. Comes in the usual classy packaging with art inserts etc.