Latest in Bill Shute's series of poetic meditations inspired by phantom narratives suggested by various recordings of library music. This one is dedicated to Frank Samperi, although when Bill mentioned that the atmosphere somehow relates to the early Wadada Leo Smith recordings (specifically, to these ears, the Kabell years) it instantly made sense. That same feel of single notes isolated by a vast expanse of silence that serves to completely focus your attention on the flux of now. Hand-numbered edition of 49 copies printed by Bill himself.

New themed series of poems from this great US writer/critic/thinker, based around hallucinated phantom narratives scored to accompany relatively blank-slate library music recordings. Hand-numbered edition of 46 copies. Recommended, as is everything from his hands.

New themed series of poems from this great US writer/critic/thinker, based around hallucinated phantom narratives scored to accompany relatively blank-slate library music recordings. This volume is one of Shute’s most affecting collections to date, with all of the illuminating personal details that define his work put to the service of ghosted female biography. Dedicated to Diane Wakoski. Hand-numbered edition of 46 copies. Recommended, as is everything from his hands.

Another new instalment in Bill Shute's on-going series of poetic meditations inspired by phantom narratives suggested by various recordings of library music. This one is "recorded in duophonic stereo" and features a narrative that unravels in various parallel flashes and multiple perspectives. Dedicated to Jake Holmes and Willie Mitchell. Hand-numbered edition of 40 copies printed by Bill himself.

Penetrating new work from Bill Shute, hand-numbered edition of 33 copies that peels back the veil in the corners of coffee shops, diners and country clubs and the brains of co-workers, immigrant labourers and small, private press poets. The last piece functions as a particular smack in the mouth. Dedicated to Swami Vivekananda.

Volume 13 in Bill's on-going Sound Library Series, inspired by P.O.E., "There Is A River" 45, UNI 55282 B. Hand-numbered edition of 21 copies.

Volume 17 in Bill's Sound Library Series, this one takes off on Willie Mitchell's It's What's Happenin' LP on Hi Records and is dedicated to "Cicely Tyson, Kurt Vonnegut, David Bowie and the rest of the 1980's 'Coffee Achievers' - my peer group!". Hand-numbered edition of 49 copies.

Collection of poems inspired by Winchester Hospital Radio and dedicated to Cid Corman, hand-numbered edition of 42 copies.

A very affecting collection of poems from Bill Shute, inspired by Bosworth Production Music and dedicated to John Wieners. Bill does a great job of plotting the arc of Wieners' trails, with lots of movie star references and watching old movies in the bath moments that serve to effectively locate the particular co-ordinates of his life. Particularly psyched to see John Felice and Frank Wright listed among a role-call of artist/poet/musicians who spent extended periods gazing straight into the void. Hand-numbered edition of 44 copies.

Bill's tribute to honk-tonkin' Hammond huffer and ram-bunk-shush soul/jazz survivor Bill Doggett in a hand-numbered edition of 44 copies. A series of still-life snapshots that move in the shadows of gang hits, runaways, beaches in winter, dating service blues and the narcotic of dreams.

Excellent trans-Atlantic collaboration between these two poets, with Shute writing from Texas, Crutchfield from Glasgow. Parallel texts that work multi-directional narratives connected by a thin, silvery logic. Hand-numbered edition of 35 copies.

Excellent new work from Shute - one of my favourites to date - dedicated to Skeeter Davis and consisting of a series of profound meditations on the mechanics of time and space and associated details of personal navigations, here and now, with references to the Peace Eye bookstore, Eddie Condon, Sam Morales et al...hand-numbered edition of 29 copies.

Latest instalment in Shute's on-going Sound Library Series, with a series of lonely portraits inspired by Mercer Ellington's Colors In Rhythm LP. Hand-numbered edition of 39 copies.

New Sound Library instalment from Shute, inspired by George Harrison's Wonderwall Music and Mr Frank Samperi. A very beautiful slow-moving survey of local topography that scans from the spiders in the desert and rundown shacks all the way up to quietly blinding visions of solar magic. Excellent. Hand-numbered edition of 44 copies.

Latest collection from the prodigious Texas poet Bill Shute that weaves a bunch of dead-end narrative flashes and quietly desperate vignettes into a series of diamond-sharp moments that work to foreground alla of this petty sadness in the movement of the stars and compassion and spiritual advancement in the face of this great, endless procession of meat conception. Very powerful stuff. Hand-numbered edition of 37 copies.

Latest Sound Library edition from Texan poet Bill Shute, inspired by The Fireballs' "Come On, React!". A series of visions of alchemically illuminated hope and despair running through backstreets and nursing homes of Southern Texas. Hand-numbered edition of 44 copies.

New solo work by Texan poet Shute that reconciles parallel timelines in order to trace relationships, fall-out and flashes of communication/contact in the dusty shadows of B-movie theatres and old western reels. Hand-numbered edition of 34 copies.

Latest volume of Shute's Sound Library series is scored to match the contours of Lennie Tristano's The Essential Keynote Collection 2 and based around evocatively fractured textual hymns to sensual/social interaction and dislocation, the nature of vision, subtle map-points derived from art and literature and the assertion that "poetry/ leads us back/into life". Hand numbered edition of 38 copies.

New work from Kohler that starts off with that great quote from Charlotte Pressler - the late Mrs Peter Laughner - about the first wave of Cleveland's avant garage musicians' refusal of the values of their parents generation and then tracks the fall-out through a bunch of nicely observed portraits of nowhere and its attendant epiphanies, compromises and disappointments. If you dig Bukowski, Wantling et al this one will take you there all over again. Hand-numbered edition of 32 copies.

New volume of dilated experimental prose/poetry from Bill Shute, written under the spell of Paul Boisselet's Symphonie Rouge, recently re-issued by the sainted Creel Pone. Numbered edition of 39 copies.

Excellent new work from Bill Shute that peels off layer after layer of import, synchronicity and poignant detail while weaving biographical fact and psychedelic fantasy around the tale of an aging beat poet and ending with a masterful parody/tribute to an original voice from the source. One of Bill's best. Hand-numbered edition of 29 copies.

New work from Shute inspired by the recent Creel Pone reissue of Ruth White's great Seven Trumps From The Tarot Cards, specifically teasing out the spiritual/transformational repercussions of Tarot Key 12: The Hanging Man via reflective, diamond-sharp wordage and illustrations by B.J.Griswold from 1913. Hand-numbered edition of 29 copies.

New work from Shute inspired by the recent Creel Pone reissue of Anestis Logothetis's Fantasmata 1960, with room upon room of revenant memories given a psychogeographical shakedown as he turns up the sounds of silence reveal the constant colliding echoes of past and future in an abandoned, burned-out building situated in Brockton Massachusetts. Hand-numbered edition of 29 copies.

New work from Shute that focuses in on the movement of people and the displacement of lives across one day in San Antonio, Texas, inspired by Thorkell Sigurbjornsson's 1975 recording La Jolla Good Friday, recently reissued by Creel Pone. Hand-numbered edition of 59 copies.

A new addition to the Kendra Steiner imprint, Doug Draime has been a presence in the small-press publishing scene since the 1960s, appearing first as a hardboiled LA urban poet before moving to Oregon about 20 years ago. This chapbook, his first for Kendra Steiner, collects eight short 'Fog Poems' and five 'Portraits Of Downtown Los Angeles' alongside a single work entitled 'This City'. The fog poems are excellent, short meditations on various personal/cosmological moments of occultation that combine tough city rhythms with nebulous atmospherics and intriguing personal/cultural detail. The Downtown material bundles sketches of various fringe city characters while This City wraps up the whole work with a desperate incantation. Hand-numbered edition of 77 copies.

New one from Shute that launches a new Kendra Steiner series dedicated to poetic ruminations on obscure Z-grade movies as windows on the culture at large. This one is based around the 1958/1961 Barry Mahon flick Rocket Attack USA and is an extended meditation on the Cold War, masculinity and black/white, either/or thinking. Hand-numbered edition of 29 copies.

Debut Kendra Steiner Edition for this Mexican poet, currently resident in Los Angeles County. A series of stately, lonesome constructs that combine quiet desperation with mental glyphs, obscure character sketches and a feel for the lightning flash of consciousness. Edition of 86 hand-numbered copies.

An affecting set of personal reminiscence, regret and disbelief at the inexplicable workings of time in the manner of a series of 'retrospective forecasts' by this UK poet and regular Beat Scene contributor. Hand-numbered edition of 82 copies.

New very limited (only 19 hand-numbered copies and already sold-out at source) collection of poems from Bill Shute, this time out themed around visions of New England refracted through the aesthetic of Francis Bacon to create collaged synaesthetic word-instants that transport you right into Bill's eyeballs. Shute describes it as being "like a literary New England-based take on The Faust Tapes." So dig in. Recommended.

Another very limited new collection from Shute in a painterly style that seems to reflect back to some of his earlier Kendra Steiner work. These are sketches of North Texas done under the spell of David Hockney, Vanessa Bell, Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer and they are supremely tactile, sensuous evocations of overloaded vision in space.

New volume of small town meditations from poets Draime and Rainwater-Lites with movements through Texas, Indiana, California and onwards. Edition of 89 hand-numbered copies.

Excellent new work from Shute, inspired by Edward Hopper and Tristessa. A series of poetic reports from inside a smalltown rainstorm as images and thoughts snowball from cold bones to lonely map points across the world in a rolling/visionary Kerouac style. "From this perspective/everything/seems periphery". Recommended. Hand-numbered edition of only 46 copies.

Surreal, experimental, hallucinogenic channelling of specifically American area sonorities by two American poets, Zachary C. Bush and Brad Kohler. Hand-numbered edition of 68 hand-numbered copies.

New collaborative work from poets Shute and Bush inspired by Emerson Meyers 1969 composition "Intervals 1" included on the Creel Pone CD Provocative Electronics. Hand-numbered edition of 39 copies.

New entry in Kendra Steiner's long-running series of poetry inspired by music, this new chapbook from Bill Shute takes its' inspiration from The Electric Toilet's In The Hands Of Karma LP. Hand-numbered edition of 47 copies.

Another new one from Shute, this time with a run of poems inspired by the Catalan painter Antoni Tapies and the American poet Ted Berrigan. Hand-numbered edition of 32 copies.

New work from Texan poet Bill Shute with an extended experimental piece inspired by The Arditti Quartet’s recording of John Cage’s “44 Harmonies From Apartment House 1776”. Hand-numbered edition of 37 copies.

New work from this Australian poet with a series of meditations based around the concept of Rimbaud resurrected in the early years of the 21st century and walking the bars, dumpsters and seedy motel rooms of night time USA. Hand-numbered edition of 70 copies.

Fantastic archival exhumation of work by this great US counter-cultural poet, originally written on the back of a paper bag during a mescaline-fuelled vision in the summer of 1968 in rural Oregon. A series of endlessly fractal visions of the realities outside of time and space as filtered through the most subliminal of motions/events. Excellent. Hand-numbered edition of 49 copies.

New instalment in Shute’s on-going series of poetic sound studies that use various avant garde reissues presented on the Creel Pone label as jumping off points for meditations on force and form. This one is based around UK resident composer Denis Smalley’s excellent 1979 recording, The Pulses Of Time. Hand-numbered edition of 31 copies.

New work from Shute inspired by a trip to visit fellow-poet Brad Kohler’s neighbourhood in Pittsburgh and Scott Walker’s And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball? soundtrack. Hand-numbered edition of 36 copies.

Hand-numbered edition of 75 copies 3” CD-R from Bill Shute’s Kendra Steiner imprint with a heavy Industrial drone piece from Ophibre aka Benjamin Rossignol who creates densely populated spectral spaces using signal processes. A dark, claustrophobic work that touches on the infernal from of Double Leopards circa A Hole Is True. Another great one from Kendra.

“KSE is proud to present a new 19-minute work in four parts from Norway’s ANDREAS BRANDAL, one of the most respected composers/sound designers on the international drone/harshnoise/ambient/electroacoustic music scene. Also working under the monikers Flesh Coffin, Lupus Golem, and Hour of the Wolf,  Mr. Brandal has issued dozens of albums on labels around the globe, two of my own favorites being “For Einer Nielsen” (on Dumpster Score) and “The Familiar Stranger” (on Small Doses). Recorded especially for KSE, MINUS’s four drones are deep and cavernous, full of molten flow and swirling pools, but with lots of room to breathe, and having a three-dimensional quality because of percussion textures (of wood, of metal, of porcelain) which seem to occupy the foreground of each audio landscape. The listener can create his/her own mental images while bathing in the audio heavy-water—I imagine abandoned nuclear reactors, sandy winds blowing civilization’s junk across a desert, underground rivers of chemical waste, meditation in the midst of a strip-mining operation. MINUS doesn’t sound especially like any other Brandal release, showing again what a eclectic talent he is, always juxtaposing new elements, always creating new and different sound environments.” – Bill Shute. 

Excellent new organic/Industrial drone moves from Eric Hardiman aka Rambutan: “KSE’s new CDR is from one of the most essential makers-of-drone-sound-environments on today’s scene, RAMBUTAN (aka Eric Hardiman), from Albany, NY. AGE OF NONE is a newly-recorded 19 minute piece that takes the listener on a subterranean journey, full of varied textures (molten steel, burlap, wet moss, shards of broken concrete), overlapping but irregular waves, rusted subways racing through the bloodstream, out-of-phase industrial machinery running on automatic pilot, dripping springs, and cold distant winds. And as always for Rambutan, there is always a lot of space, room to breathe within the drones…a sound environment you can live in! Although this is Rambutan’s first recording for KSE, Eric is no stranger to us…his CD “Abandoned Space” on the Small Doses label was the musical inspiration for my poetry chapbook ONENESS & THE SUN (KSE #165), and I own about 10 of his tapes/discs. You should look up Rambutan and order anything you can find (after ordering AGE OF NONE from KSE!). AGE OF NONE is a limited edition of 75 copies and is available NOW for order.” – Bill Shute. 

Hand-numbered edition of 75 copies on Bill Shute’s own imprint that presents 20 tracks of cracked, disobedient electronics. Mike Barrett is a musician working out of Massachusetts who combines the speaker-melting ferocity of Noisembryo-era Merzbow with a wonky 20^th Century electronics feel and a DIY approach that reflects on the Michigan basement axis: “Belltonesuicide’s new mini-CD-R, Non-Conformist, is surely the most outrageous, over-the-top release we’ve put out so far (which is really saying something, considering what we’ve released!). When I got the master in the mail, and popped the second ‘play’ copy in my car stereo, I nearly drove off the road. Digging deep into the analog-synth muck, Mike has created a diverse 20-tracker (in under 20 minutes) that sounds like a sampler of the most abrasive sections of the most outre Creel Pone electronic music releases. Every track is different, and I must say that this release is probably the best buy for your musical dollar that you’re going to find for years. 20 TRACKS, each mind-frying and balls-to-the-wall gutsy, in under 20 minutes, and the whole thing was recorded in a few hours, and then mixed in a few hours. As an artist, Mike values spontaneity and pushing himself into a personal red-zone, where he loses to some extent conscious control and he takes his game to a higher plane, transposes it to a higher key. I can’t believe how awesome this mini-CD-R is. If you love old-school electronic skronk done with a modern attitude and with a slashing primitive feel, you NEED Non-Conformist.” – Bill Shute

Hand-numbered edition of 75 copies CD-R that features new work from musician/composer Sean Gadoury with two stately eternal drone pieces that move in slow classical arcs with all of the fallen majesty of the best of William Basinski, Thomas Koner et al: “We asked Sean to create a new work for KSE, and what he came up with is a 19 minute slow-motion flotation through dark space, lit only by a distant arc light that may well be imagined, a visual mirage. When one is in the dark, one’s pupils expand so that the darkness eventually takes on depth and perspective and contours, and the smallest glint of distant light takes on great significance. A similar thing happens to the mind as one listens to Arc Light—Sean Gadoury slows down time and pulls us into his deep, textured world beyond time, beyond landmarks, beyond traditional vision. And half-heard voices emerge and recede, and the tension heightens, and we realize how busy the space has been all along. Then shimmering, pulsing waves of light emerge in a short coda, only to recede as gracefully as they’ve appeared. Or maybe we imagined it all?” – Bill Shute.

Hand-numbered edition of 75 copies CD-R from psychedelic pioneer, out guitarist and exemplary head John Stanton aka Kuschty Rye Ergot. This is a pretty incredible recording, a multi-layered trip through American Primitive guitar, howling peyote ritual, Folkways environmental sounds and the kind of DIY madmanisms of Charlie Nothing before cohering into some fantastic pulse-based psychedelic rock. KSE have released a ton of great material this far but this has gotta be my favourite from the label to date. “Kuschty Rye Ergot mainman John Stanton has been a psychedelic soldier for decades, providing the greater Washington, DC area with a much-needed pure higher-key presence. When I lived in Virginia in the 1980′s, I always looked forward to visiting DC two or three times a year and catching John Stanton with bands such as Gigolo Aunt, and I had the privilege of listening to many a “Psycho” and “Heyoka” and “Breeder” reissue with Mr. Stanton back then. A fine technician on the guitar, he exists somewhere within that rainbow running from Robbie Basho and Sandy Bull through Djinn Aquarian through Matt Valentine, yet he’s always been his own man. When KSE began issuing music cdr’s last year, one of my first tasks was to find John Stanton and get him to release something with KSE. SENESCENCE is the result. A three-part seamless swirling trip recorded live in DC in 2008, SENESCENCE has the warm glow and viscous flow of the best trips, musical or otherwise. You’ll be reminded of everything from Ya Ho Wa 13′s PENETRATION to Tony Conrad and Faust’s OUTSIDE THE DREAM SYNDICATE on this 19-minute inner journey, but it’s 100% Stanton. KSE is proud to offer this unique 3″-cdr from one of the East Coast’s greatest psychedelic warriors. Don’t wait for some European or Japanese label to proclaim Stanton a genius and issue a multi-cd box of his rarities dating back to the early 80′s. He’s still at it, both with Kuschty Rye Ergot and also as a member of Kohoutek, and this must-own disc captures him at his purest.” – Bill Shute.

Hand-numbered edition of 75 copies CD-R from Mike Griffin, ex-Wobblies, from Albany. Griffin creates complex electro-acoustic environments that range from chattering multi-dimensional architectures to deep sub-aqueous tone pieces that are heavy with entropy and menace. “The title refers to a 30km area around the former Chernobyl nuclear facility in the Ukraine, an area where access is forbidden without special permission, an area that became a dead zone after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Newsweek describes the area well: ‘THE MAIN DOOR, NEARLY BLOCKED BY overgrown bushes and weeds, rattles in the cold Ukrainian wind. The former day-care center’s rooms are strewn with abandoned dolls, teddy bears, tiny shoes and slippers, shattered glass. Water from melting snow on the roof drips through cracks in the concrete ceiling. Between rows of metal cribs, child-size gas masks peer up from the floor where they fell during the rushed evacuation a decade ago. In the kitchen, beside a desiccated piece of bread, an open notebook displays its last entry, a grocery list dated April 25, 1986.’ That’s what Parashi’s music is evoking here…the desolation, the things lost and abandoned, the disruption…but also eventually comes the hope, the comrades-in-loss joining hands and overcoming, although in a desolate, contaminated environment.  ZONE OF ALIENATION  is an abrasive, multi-textured electronic composition that will take you through another world…until realizing that the alien, disrupted, tainted world we’re tasting may well be our own…” – Bill Shute.

Fantastic setting for Bill Shute’s poetry by Derek Rogers with fragments of speech floating up though ethereal/doomy organ drones and tone in a way that somehow reminds me of Lothar & The Hand People’s classic “Space Hymn” (!!??)... Four Texas Streams remains one of the most evocative Shute’s early works and to hear it this dilated is just fantastic. Hand-numbered edition of 55 copies. 

Hand-numbered edition of 89 copies CD-R from Lisa Cameron of ST-37, 3 Day Stubble, Jheri Siggnfeld's Atrophied Sac et al. Two live recordings from Austin Texas, the first an ominous droning blues of infinite depth scored for lap steel and Tibetan bowls, the second more puzzlingly scored for “amplified space/time membrane” and sounding like some of Justin Meyers of Devillock/Glass Organ/Panther Skull et al’s towering tone sculptures. 

Wild set of crudely-rendered free improvisation across drums, synth, tenor and sopranino saxophone from Green and Magee, recorded in Brisbane Australia: “Reed player Massimo Magee and percussionist Tim Green are two young men steeped in free-jazz and the free-improv aesthetic. They grew up with it, it’s in their blood, and they’ve taken it to the next level on this new mini-cd. Massimo’s earlier recordings have been in a pointillistic vein reminiscent of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble duo of the early 70′s (think Face To Face) or Steve Lacy’s more severe and elliptical solo sessions, and he’s a master of space and texture. Those qualities are still present here, but substitute Reverend Frank Wright for Trevor Watts, and have The Rev double on gonzo analog synth, played much in the same style as his take-no-prisoners sax style. Tim Green, who has many of the best qualities of the SME’s John Stevens and also reminds me of drummers as diverse as Barry Altschul and Sunny Murray, is a fine technician and someone who gets an infinite number of sounds and polyrhythms out of a simple kit. The opening track, the 12 minute “Ray Gun” is a shredding blowout that starts in the red and keeps on growing in intensity. The second track, “Insect Music,” finds Magee switching to the sopranino sax (pitched higher than a soprano) and Green doing a number of scrapes and scratches and textures that will put you inside of an insect’s brain, sounding like free-improv hatched in the mind of an insect that just consumed twice its body weight in pesticide. After this 19-minute mini-cd, you’ll be worn out…and also wanting to hit the “repeat” button. And added to that is the intentionally lo-fi recording quality, sounding like it was recorded over a used dollar-store cassette, which previously contained one of the more outre Creel Pone electronic music albums and which bleeds through every once in a while. There’s a long history of this kind of thing in free jazz: think Sun Ra’s Saturn label, or Survival Records (the Frank Lowe/Rashied Ali album comes to mind), or BYG-Actuel, or Jihad, or other labels where the sound quality almost becomes a participant in the session.” – Bill Shute. 

Hand-numbered edition of 99 copies CD-R from this Norwegian musician/composer. Disturbing The Dust is inspired by TS Eliot’s masterpiece Four Quartets and consists of seven movements that take their titles from it. This is dark cosmo-drone with an insanely deep depth of field, ranging from gorgeous slow-motion sunrises of high gothic keyboards through thin, singing violin lines that illuminate the cavernous arcs of celestial melody and odd shortwave/field recording constructs that combine the sounds of covert surveillance with morse code melodies. A massively ambitious set from Brandal and one you could live in for weeks. 

Hand-numbered edition of 89 copies w/a live set from the duo of synth/electronic composer Derek Rogers and synth/bassist R. Lee Dockery, an excerpt from an installation performance in Austin, the atmosphere of which Bill Shute perfectly captures in his write-up: “The hypnotic “Five Toned Rows,” both cavernous and shimmering, is an excerpt from a two-hour performance by Matamoros that was part of the “Rehearsal at the Astoria” installation by UK artist Graham Hudson, which ran for two months at Austin’s Arthouse and incorporated live musicians creating sounds that were “not formal concerts or performances” but “music with the wires hanging out, fragile and with chance, more open.”  It was a Friday evening in Austin, around the end of the workday, with thousands of sealed, air-conditioned SUV’s containing men and women in business attire driving down Congress Avenue past the Arthouse, headed for dinner in the suburbs and Austin’s many bedroom communities, oblivious to the goings-on in that building on the northwest corner of 7th and Congress that they’d never entered before or even thought about. But inside, among the scaffolding and the fragments meant to evoke London’s now-demolished Astoria Theatre, described by the artist as “ghost-like,” DEREK ROGERS and R. LEE DOCKERY (together, as the duo MATAMOROS) were creating the haunting music found on FIVE TONED ROWS. Beginning with keyboards suggesting some sinister sideshow from Purgatory, the music begins to unfold and deepen, with percussion, distant wordless vocals, electronics and sampled sound, and bowed upright bass, capturing the mystery and the muted grandeur of the long-gone Astoria. This is a cdr that creates an atmosphere, an environment wherever you play it—-it begins in medias res and trails off as uneventfully as a squatter slipping out a side door when the sun comes up and the first employees arrive. And you must hit the “repeat” button and play it again. MATAMOROS played a handful of live shows in Austin before Derek Rogers relocated to Los Angeles at the end of June, and this live recording is a valuable document of the duo (studio recordings also exist and will no doubt continue to be made long-distance) that will be missed on the Austin experimental music scene. This is Derek’s third release for KSE, his two earlier works long out of print. R. Lee Dockery is a bassist and electronic musician who has gotten a lot of attention for his standout performances at the Floating Drones festival and the Lyr*I*Cism festival in Austin, and he’ll be doing a solo set at the KSE Anniversary Concert on July 31st. His set at Lyr*I*Cism will be issued this fall as a KSE 3″ cdr. As always with KSE 3″ cdr releases, while there is only 19 minutes of music on a disc so small you can slip it in your shirt-pocket, it’s meant to be a complete and satisfying trip. These are pieces not meant to run an hour, but to present such an intriguing and rich sound environment that 19 minutes is more than satisfying, and we hope also endlessly fascinating.” – Bill Shute. One of our favourite KSE releases to date. 

Texan poet/curator/publisher and all-round force of goddamn nature Bill Shute’s previous spoken word recording was easily one of our most popular sides of collected pomes and it turned a slew of heads onto the musical cadence of his work. This new collection feels even more assured, with Shute’s approach - a combination of intimate internally-implosive wordage, the kind of rhythmic grasp of a improvising musician and a voice that is deeply American while refusing any contemporary definition – serving to bring his impressionistic/documentarian visions of the contours of Now to technicolour life. Shute is a lifer, having been involved in some of the most important under-the-counter-culture moments, from his zine and label The Inner Mystique through his life-affirming column in Black To Comm – when is someone gonna collect those? – through his amazing poetry and music imprint Kendra Steiner Editions. And while Lester Bangs has gone on to be some kind of mainstream touchstone for all that is ‘gonzo’ Shute has maintained his connection to grassroots culture. Junk Sculpture... collects a bunch of his best recent writing 2010-2011, from sketches of nowhere America to the sounds outside your window to verbal constructs inspired by Lennie Tristano, this is the real deal and anyone w/a love of the kind of deeply personal poetics of the Beats and a belief in the magick of the word will find much to affirm in here. I still rate “The Mosquitoes Of La Marque” as one of his best and the closing rendition of it takes me out of myself every time. Can’t recommend this one enough.

Excellent new release from Sharon and Carlton Crutcher aka Texan psych outfit Book Of Shadows. Two tracks for vocals, keys, guitar and electronics that float muzzy post-tongue body sounds and distant vocal hysteria through smoky electro-environs that have a spooked high-mass appeal w/aspects of Yoko, Amy Sheffer and Meredith Monk combined with spectral feedback clouds and unknown tone. Heavy cultic vibe that Bill Shute compares to the spiritual-practice-into-music aspect of Ya Ho Wha 13 and Psychic TV. Is that the ghost of Charalambides in there somewhere? Hand-numbered edition of 89 copies. 

New work from guitarist, improviser and composer Diaz-Infante here using bajo sexton, electronic tanpura and singing bowl to hymn the essence of his late uncle Emilio who spent most of his life in a mental institution before passing away in 2010. 32 tracks that range from zoned gamelan stylings, low level percussive string work, barbed clusters of steel strings and unidentifiable drones. Hand-numbered edition of 97 copies.

Solo work from Russ Aldertone who also plays in Urkas with Mike Griffin aka Parashi. Here he combines electric bass work with deep field recordings and bird song – specifically a Three-Wattled Bellbird – to create an hallucinatory environment that’s somewhere between Basil Kirchin’s worlds within worlds, the eerie exotica of Spencer Clark and some kind of odd Barre Phillips ambient work. Hand-numbered edition of 83 copies on the consistently excellent Kendra Steiner Editions. 

New tectonic drone work and laminal cassette psych from Austin sound artist Daniel Hipolito aka Smokey Emery. This two-track 20 minute studio recording is made up of variously manipulated and stratified tape works that come together to produce dense, subtly shifting cloud forms that pulse with all sorts of alien life, creating ghostly harmonies and weird melodic after-images that fade in out in slow dissolves. Hand-numbered edition of 83 copies. 

Great new set from this long-running psych rock group out of Austin Texas that feature Lisa Cameron of Venison Whirled/3 Day Stubble et al. The group combine primitive, almost Mo Tucker-style drum tattoos with garage band fuzz and a ton of modal weight, all cut with the kind of primitive delivery more associated with ’72 private press sides than contemporary jam bands. There’s a nod to Hawkwind and yer favourite biker side in the way that the twin guitars dissolve into woozy UFO tones and the group have a way of collapsing song structures that feels as righteously wasted as anything by Nicodemus. 

Excellent set of long string drones from this Austin-based musician who also plays in Matamoros with Derek Rogers. The sound is truly cavernous here, generating a huge reverberant sound/space from arcs of slow droning strings w/aspects of Ellen Fullman’s drifting continental reveries or Alan Lamb’s wire recordings, with sudden purple patches of knotty overtones and the kind of heavy laminal psych feel of the original Dream Syndicate. Pretty fantastic, hand-numbered edition of 85 copies.