Third hard to find album from this reknowned NY trio (featuring Samara Lubelski, Theo Angell and Dan Brown) who channel the palm prints of Angus MacLise and Terry Jennings into whole new vectors of tone, colour and zig-zag shape. On Siltbreeze.

Compilation of 1992-95 material from this long defunct but still legendary free-form US power trio based around guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer/vocalist Adris Hoyos. Hard to think of anyone outside of The Dead C that intuited such an exhilaratingly devolved take on standard rock moves but the proof is all in here, with Adris’s omnidirectional free-form drumming style building precarious bridges between free jazz blurt and hardcore skullfuck, while Orcutt’s guitar weeps like an open wound, with the kind of barbed tonalities of Jandek and Henry Flynt married to primitive-as-hell non-musicianly bluster. Adris’s vocals are post Patty/Yoko in the most punkingest sense and titles like “Nazi USA”, “I Fought The Police” and “Fuckology” are to die for. Highest recommendation.

Vinyl edition of this new Siltbreeze side. Pink Reason is the solo project of a Mr Kevin DeBroux, who cuts fuzzy junked basement stones in the private psychedelic style of Twisted Village monsters like Luxurious Bags, Tono Bungay, Brother JT et al. "The self-released Pink Reason debut seven-inch from 2006 was an itch of such beguiling psychic ache that all the inhabitants of Siltbreeze Island scratched it until they bled. On this first full length, the resident of Green Bay, Wisconsin, continues to ooze muzzy melancholia by the bucket, ably and formidably clearing house in Sanguine Manor, whose previous tenants include Royal Trux, The Jacobites, Phantom Payne, Black Vial, and other marginal inhabitants whose sticky fingers glimmer in stoned adulation. Dominated by creeping synths, stark strums and rickety percussive splats that complement De Broux's heartscraping vocal catharsis, Cleaning The Mirror journeys far beyond any known perspective, practically insinuating an alternate otherworld where Tim Buckley's Lorca and Jandek's Ready For The House have been hybridized into a ripe-for-plucking masterpiece. Or, shunning hyperbole in favor of acronym, Pink Reason's modern day DIY is very FYI that you should check out PDQ." - Tom Lax.

Limited two-track 7” in a run of 400 copies from this great band who manage to combine an almost classic 60s/70s rock/cowpunk delivery with a barbarous destructo edge, powerful vox and a recording aesthetic that would blow up the backline altogether, leaving a guitar banging a bunch of chords lifted straight from The Birthday Party and played early Rough Trade-style. A side is the raunch, the flip is more hypnotic and minimal. Both rule.

Latest installment in Siltbreeze’s on-going Axemen reissue campaign. Originally a cassette release from this mythic New Zealand underground group, Scary! Part 3 is less aggressively weird than the prior Big Cheap Motel and feels closer to feral American underground idiot-avant like Half Japanese than the whole aggro art-punk via The Fall style of the former live recording. There’s also a touch of the whole Shimmy Disc aesthetic that would usurp very basic song structures with oddball vocals, cranky, fall-apart instrumentation and a goof-off stance that would join the dots between the LAFMS and the Godz and the more fucked ends of the Flying Nun back catalogue. “Most band/fans active in the Christchurch & Dunedin scene’s at this time will tell you (sans embellishment) how prolifically the Axemen blazed through the 80’s decade (new cassettes seeming to exist almost on a daily basis) & in classic Rashomon style you’d likely get a different story from all willing to reminisce, though it’s be safe to say everyone would agree that the beguiling je ne sais quoi (now) found within the grooves of Scary! Part III to be some of the bands most intriguing blat to date.” – Tom Lax.

New album from the duo of Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse with guest appearances by Kurt Vile and Jesse Trbovich. The sound here has developed from the more miasmic keyboard psych of previous releases to a weird amalgam of glitzy new age glam, keyboard minimalism and devotional Kraut float, with distant saxophones occasionally illuminating simple, primitive keyboard patterns. Early tracks have a late-Popol Vuh feel which eventually gives way to a zoned Neu! beat complete with endless ripples of synth. Then it’s upstream all the way with arcs of wailing acid guitar with that distant Far Out feel and keyboards that could almost have been recorded in the Holyground studio between Gagalactyca and A To Austr sessions.

“Sensacao Do Principio is the third release proper from Tropa Macaca and their first with an American label. Their previous efforts on Ruby Red and Qbico were magnificent (though hard to find) efforts of blotted, aural sci-fi codifications somewhere between Anar Band and Blues Control. The two-track full-length continues their foray into post-psychedelic instrumental morphine, where Moolah's LP and Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" function as templates for the greater good. In other words, you gotta hear if for yourself.” – Tom Lax.

New album from the solo project of Megan Remy. US Girls is the perfect name for Remy’s project, as there’s something iconoclastically USA about her feel for classic stripped-down song-forms and rock/roll specific minimalism. Aspects of Springsteen’s classic Nebraska, the first Suicide album, Meredith Monk and even Elvis Presley’s Sun Session (think of the late night-time sound of the original version of “Blue Moon”) are filtered through a diffuse fog of F/X and looped rhythms to generate a music that sounds like the after-image in space of primitive 20^th century pop/rock culture. “Red Ford Radio” is one of her best tracks yet, a simple obsessive vocal pattern over dunting rhythms that feels like the reverse reflection of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.” Highly recommended.

Thrilling document of the more radically deconstructive side of the Butte County Free Music Society (whose Induced Musical Spasticity box set is a mandatory purchase), with a bunch of sound actions drawn from 1984-1986. Brent Lewis Ensemble come across like a darker, more occult Glands Of External Secretion, combining the goof-off Scientific American appeal of the early LAFMS broadcasts with outer space shortwave and electro-acoustic group actions that would conjure the ghosts of Taj Mahal Travellers and The Skaters. Another fantastic trawl through an alternate 1980s: “As part of the 25th anniversary of the Butte County Free Music Society, "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" follows "Induced Musical Spasticity" 4xLP (BUFMS, 2009) and roughly coincides with "The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s At the North Pole, Easter Day, 1982" (upcoming on What The...?) and, if the master tapes rescue succeeds, the soundtrack to "Esther’s Brother Is Missing by Maria Estevez". Recording and performing primarily in the mid- to late 1980s, with sporadic efforts in the early 1990s, this barely organized enclave based in rural Northern California ingests and disgorges outsider free music à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema. Members of the Brent Lewis Ensemble later migrated to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Each side of "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" is dominated by tracks whose lengths meander into double digits. On Side A, “Take It Out and Kill It” is a murky glance at mortification via caninicide, with its ancillary fleas, cockroaches, and especially worms. This is the only large group recording on the album, and as such whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner that one backwater critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” A completely different version of this track was previously released on the Maggie Is a Dot cassette in 1984. On Side B, “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks at hand, the recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice, and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are shorter tracks (average length: two minutes); these four excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience guerilla action were recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. All were previously released on the "Mary Jane" cassette in 1983. '[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird, befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow' — Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

“For this second full-length effort, Naked on the Vague eschew their tantalizingly sparse duo attack for a quartet line-up, and the results are as sensational as they are sinister. While the rickety, no-wave splat found on previous efforts had its appeal, the heft of a "proper" rhythm section has only helped Naked on the Vague delve deeper into the landscape of post-punk murk. Bleak, unrepentant, withering and droll, Heaps of Nothing is a 21st century codification of the gallows wit and mesmerizing otherworldliness of (Dub Housing-era) Pere Ubu, Primitive Calculators and Lemon Kittens. Shuttling mutant urbanity from past to present, Naked on the Vague is only too eager to confirm that the Earth isn't flat. Because Heaps of Nothing is here to flatten it.” – SB. Comes with a digital download coupon.

“For this second full-length effort, Naked on the Vague eschew their tantalizingly sparse duo attack for a quartet line-up, and the results are as sensational as they are sinister. While the rickety, no-wave splat found on previous efforts had its appeal, the heft of a "proper" rhythm section has only helped Naked on the Vague delve deeper into the landscape of post-punk murk. Bleak, unrepentant, withering and droll, Heaps of Nothing is a 21st century codification of the gallows wit and mesmerizing otherworldliness of (Dub Housing-era) Pere Ubu, Primitive Calculators and Lemon Kittens. Shuttling mutant urbanity from past to present, Naked on the Vague is only too eager to confirm that the Earth isn't flat. Because Heaps of Nothing is here to flatten it.” – SB.

Debut single from a group that previously turned up on the Skulls Without Borders 10”. The Chickens are two-thirds of FNU Ronnies plus a drum machine and they combine the no-fidelity basement attack of The Screamin’ Mee-Mees with assaults of cheap drum machine and fuzz guitar that could pass for an even more amphetamine-charged La Dusseldorf parked up in an American garage. Or does that make em Chrome? Edition of 400 copies. 

New album from this zoned Australian vocals/keyboards/drums duo: FB2 sees them moving on from the haunted dub of their Siltbreeze debut and embracing amore kraut-punk stance that takes higher-mind moves from Cluster and Harmonia and rhythms from Silver Apples and combines it with classic Australian garage pop sensibility. The form has become more extended too, with long instrumental masses that have a hypnotic modal quality bracketing songs that are as beautifully crude as anything on Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith’s Ceacescu. “The second full-length outing from Fabulous Diamonds is a continuation of the lush and mesmerizing electro / percussive landscapes explored on their self-titled debut LP (released on Siltbreeze in 2008). Jarrod Zlatic and Nisa Venerosa spark lots of musical embers along the way: dub, trance, house, ambient, minimalist, hints of Suicide and Terry Riley--basically everything from Silver Apples to Silver Apples of the Moon.
Fabulous Diamonds are equally at home in indie gulags, art galleries or disco gullies. Fans of the more esoteric side of Siltbreeze--Blues Control and US Girls, especially--should be mightily chuffed by the beauteous hypnotic (hypnagogic?) pop Fab Ds are laying down here. Look for the band to tour Europe in mid/late 2010.” – SB. Comes with free download.