Pod Blotz/Mark Lord split C26
Cover artwork realised and designed by CF. Professionally duplicated and imprinted cro2 cassettes. Professionally printed, double-sided j-card. Edition of 200 (silver ink on blue shells). Experimental artist Suzy Poling birthed Pod Blotz in 2002. Poling’s sound is an interesting cauldron of tape manipulation, organ drones, melodies, electo-acoustic sounds, synthesizers and voice. Pod Blotz is a solo project that is derived from conceptual artistic endeavors and sonic explorations relating to Science Fiction, phenomenon and material reactions. She is interested in the regeneration within materials and sound. She works with photography, video, film, video, broken glass, multidimensional lenses, chemistry and sound to celebrate and elaborate the phenomenon and permanence. Suzy is based in Oakland and represented by the Zg Gallery in Chicago. Mark Lord is the solo moniker of artist Christopher Forgues. Forgues goes by C.F. in the art world. His graphic novel series, Powr Mastrs, is published by the Grammy Award Winning Picturebox, Inc. His story “Mosfet Warlock and the Mechlin Men” was included in The Best American Comics 2009 edited by Charles Burns. Since May 2011, he has published a monthly comic strip “Monorail High” in Mothers News, a monthly newspaper in Providence, RI. His work has been included in the Kramer’s Ergot anthology series and the French graphic zine Nazi Knife.
Adam Bohman, Dylan Nyoukis & Friends C68
Cover artwork realised by Dylan Nyoukis. Layout and design by Eric Frye. Professionally duplicated and imprinted cro2 cassettes. Professionally printed, double-sided j-card. Edition of 100 (silver ink on black shells). Adam Bohman is a member of Morphogenesis and The London Improvisors Orchestra. He also regularly performs alongside his brother Jonathan under the guise The Bohman Brothers. Their sound art oscillates between states of the absurd and (sonically) grotesque to highly articulate explorations of extra-musical sound. Electroacoustic music and free-improvisation could be regarded as co-ordinates on the grid. However,unlike the hermeticism of electro-acoustic music or the purism of free-improvisation, the Bohman’s freely quote from any source and aren’t afraid to show it. So you get Varesesian sound montage supporting spoken word material sourced from a pub menu, or frenetic juxtapositions between amplified shoe brushes and a frenzied tape cut-up of 17th Century instruments. The Bohman aesthetic can be a dense and tangled thing to unpick and describe. Various and nefarious sounds and artistic influences merge and collide. Dylan Nyoukis’s work exists on the fringe of contemporary avant garde art and underground DIY insurrection. As a leading light in the UK’s tape/CD-R scene, Nyoukis has long functioned as a rallying point for artists working to clear a space for original, non-idiomatic sound and feral performance modes. Alongside his sister and long-term collaborator Lisa (Dora Doll), he founded the Chocolate Monk label in 1993, an early experimental music imprint that combined hi-jacks of outmoded media – cassette, CD-R, pen and paper – with cutting edge investigations of the limits of form, while functioning as a home for Nyoukis’s own projects, Prick Decay, Decaer Pinga, Ceylon Mange, Blood Stereo and countless one-off collaborations. His current group, Blood Stereo, is a duo with his wife, the musician and artist Karen Constance, that explores hand-cranked 20th century technology in combination with epiglottal gymnastics and free music modes inherited as much from punk rock’s mutilated aesthetic as utopian art styles. His solo vocal and tape work continues to push the envelope in terms of the expressive options offered by amplified physicality while his rejection of any kind of theoretical backdrop liberates him from servitude to any specific agenda. He remains a singular voice. Over the years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ludo Mich, Chris Corsano, Thurston Moore, Sun City Girls, Bill Nace, Heather Leigh Murray, Phil Minton, Neil Campbell, Usurper and Wolf Eyes. He lives in Brighton, England. – David Keenan, Glasgow, June 2009