Shelter Press

Posted on January 9, 2013 | Comments Off on Shelter Press

Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier – ‘Dark Morse’ CS €6/£5/$8
art-front-squareJe Suis Le Petit Chevalier’s Dark Morse is an exclusive lost tape inspired by the short story The Angel Esmeralda written by Don Delillo. Following two LPs and bunch of tapes dropped last year, this new output is her most whispering beat orientated material to date. Dark Morse is a tabu hidden at the end of a lost road in the suburbs, a pile of crawling concrete, burried under sub basses, broken rhythms, drunken lullubies for blind dogs. Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier whispers here holy encounters with dark shades moving at dawn, hoarse prayers, slum saints and never growing ghosts children. 6 tracks / 38:00 min / Pro-Dubbed Tape / 2013 / first edition of 200 copies / black cover / art by Félicia Atkinson / White tape with 2 folded inlay.

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Boo Tapes

Posted on January 8, 2013 | Comments Off on Boo Tapes

Champagne Sequins – ‘Gun Don’t Love’ C18 $6
gdlapGun Don’t Love is four-on-the-noise-floor dance grooves and electronic experimentations from Brooklyn based Champagne Sequins. Recording in bedrooms and basements on a Tascam 4-track over a year and a half, serving Chelsea boys, and wading into a deep fog of mathematics. This is the sound of a junior engineer in a back alley street fight love affair. Cassettes were produced the old fashioned way, without any computers, mixed and mastered on cassette, and all artwork was printed by hand. Limited to 30 black cassettes in 100% recycled cardboard sleeves with newsprint inserts. Mp3 download with purchase.

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RANO

Posted on January 7, 2013 | Comments Off on RANO

dsic – ‘Tiamat/Taniwha’ (ran003) £5/$8 C64
DSIC - (100px)-1Chrome Cassette Tape; Limited Edition of 25. Third in a series of limited edition cassettes from the experimental micro label Rano, dsic ‘Tiamat/Taniwha’ is a brutal excursion through the gnarled world of extreme noise. The cassettes are stamped in metallic gold ink and wrapped in a full color, heavyweight J-Card. Don’t let the pretty looks deceive you, this tape is hardcore as hell! Its sure to damage eardrums and piss off the neighbors.

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Full of Nothing

Posted on January 6, 2013 | Comments Off on Full of Nothing

fon37 – ‘Day’s Arc #2: Edward Sol/Husnaan/Tidal/Sparkling Wide Pressure $9.5(World)
fon37-100The second installment in the label’s “Day’s Arc” series gathers 4 sonic artists from Ukraine, Indonesia, the UK and the USA. These carefully chosen minds provide 15-minute long pieces to accompany different times of day. Edward Sol, Husnaan, Tidaland Sparkling Wide Pressure ensure this cassette makes your day! Edward Sol kick-starts “Morning” with a beautiful composition entitled “Svitanok” (“sunrise” in Ukrainian). This outstanding musician is known far and wide not only for his label Quasi Pop but also for the precise audio collages that balance on the borders of Industrial, Electronica and Field recording. Assembled in a village near Kiev, Ed’s piece evokes the feelings of stillness, purity and solitude. The rich sound palette aspires with sine waves hung still in the air, only to be broken down with bubbly gut punches and eerie whispers of electronic bird-imitations, found sound, field recordings and a sampled traditional song. “Afternoon” is represented by Husnaan, the Bandung-based Indonesian artist Duto Hardono. With the arsenal of a banjo and analog synthesizers Husnaan stresses the hectic aspect of the day time. Busy repetitive patterns slowly swirl around like giant mechanisms, a young man snaking in-between, just merely avoiding being trapped. Entwined with the sense of subtle menace, “The Day Is Getting Shorter” is an fine exercise in futuristic anti-utopian post-industrial Elevator music. “Dimming Sun” is the symbol of the B1 section of the tape, “Evening”. London’s Jimmy Billingham is on the quest of pushing further the soundworlds sculptured by previous generations of New Age musicians. Never humdrum, always on the spot,Tidal is a rare coastal drone supervisor who is able to comfort the audience at once with the sweet melancholia. Lush keys fade out into eternity as the evening darkens, they stand for last rays of perfect days. A memory to keep. The water of the tidal waves of the previous composition flows into “Night”, or actually, underneath the night – as the track title suggests. Frank Baugh’s Sparkling Wide Pressure guise has caught many attentive ears in the past few years with excellent releases on all notable tape labels. Murfreesboro, Tennessee resident seems to produce stormy clouds of messy beauty with such an easy hand, it’s hard to believe every single one is a treasure. “The Water That Flows Underneath the Night” is no exception, it’s a firm burst of Drone, white-light noisy Blues, gallant chanting and endless guitar feedback. A truly dark and mysterious night offering. White cassettes with silver-foiled black J-cards designed by Anya Kuts. Each comes with a download code. Edition of 100.

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Silent Land Time Machine – ‘I Am No Longer Alone With Myself And Can Only Artificially Recall The Scary And Beautiful Feeling Of Solitude’; and Smokey Emery – ‘Quartz’ [Review]

Posted on January 5, 2013 | Comments Off on Silent Land Time Machine – ‘I Am No Longer Alone With Myself And Can Only Artificially Recall The Scary And Beautiful Feeling Of Solitude’; and Smokey Emery – ‘Quartz’ [Review]

sltm

Austin, TX’s Silent Land Time Machine makes its second appearance, following a full-length debut on the sadly foregone Time-Lag. With a title to make Celer smile, the 12” EP ‘I Am No Longer Alone With Myself And Can Only Artificially Recall The Scary And Beautiful Feeling Of Solitude’ additionally offers a sound supplementary to bedroom romantics all over. From the glum, psychological poetry of the title to the images of soviet monuments stylized on the cover art, SLTM confronts the world in avatars and sonic photoshopping, representing life in emotional mash-ups of musical expressionism under a heavy patina. That patina is affect, broadly-defined, turning the general matter of these tracks into micro drones from out of which, sometimes (most times), a rhythm or hint of melody ascends like stereograms. Something like a low-tech Lucky Dragons or less spooky version of Ireland’s Plinth, “Even Floating Islands Fall,” “Automata,” and “An Own to One’s Room” electrify hammer and pluck with effects adding the swell of strings and voices to a state of reverie. Though hardly dance music, beats do appear and at times consume, as “Kissa” emerges from an ecstatic rabble reminiscent of Polmo Polpo. Creating a dynamic tension within this relatively short collection, “Remembering Names” and “Dealing w/ Doubt” resemble a third band of the gradient which could tentatively be named “sublime”: sooty and bright like Black Swan, keen on swift amplification, these formless fields of sound aren’t so precious as they first appear, but demonstrate the same blunt theses as Colleen, and similar builders of tallships in bottles. In an edition of 500 on clear, 180 gram vinyl in heavy sleeves. Recommended.

qtzIn good, albeit mixed company on the Indian Queen label is ‘Quartz’ by Smokey Emery (Daniel Hipolito). With a deceptively Noisy, yet ultimately apt sleeve collage, “abrasive” is the first quality familiar from more conventional Noise Music.  But this abrasion does not emerge across a frequency, but at a higher order of phrasing and obscurantism   Like the SLTM release above, Hipolito exercises a theoretical stripe of minimalism, disguised beneath the affective textures of copious effects (and in this regard, even more resembling Black Swan).  From the snared repetition of track one (“Movement VI [Jumping the Fire]”) to the bleary offset of track three (“Movement V”), he deconstructs down to a (torn) thumbnail, an equation, then runs the program with all sliders up. Where new formations appear, there is a strong whiff of melancholia – some particular moments from Hexlove first came to mind – but soon this seems accidental, where the true formula rests unfeeling, just beneath the surface.  Thus, ‘Quartz’ comes freighted from below with a sense of uncanny and general creepy which is entirely foreign to his labelmate, generating a wonderful contrast between a joyful noise and a noise more purely kept.  In an edition of 300 copies on black vinyl.

Indian Queen Records LP & 7”
$16/$8
HERE

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Burger Records

Posted on January 4, 2013 | Comments Off on Burger Records

Fatal Jamz CS
NAC_3-Panel_JcardTemplate_FRONTFatal Jamz hesher~glam pop band of singer Marion Belle of Bowery Beasts and muli-instrumentalist extraordinaire Dan Horne of Beachwood Sparks & The Lilys. The two longhairs and their cast of Echo Park goons holed up for the first few months of 2012 in Horne’s infamous garage studio known as Lone Palm, where anyone from Matt Fischbeck to Ariel Pink to White Magic might happen to poke a fuzzy head in to observe their strange orchestrations. When not distracted, they worked savagely~hard, meticulously shaping the 14 songs which Marion had envisioned as a “a very personal, paradise-lost, Purple Rain meets Tommy version of the modern L.A. scene.” The debut album, “Vol.1″ was recorded to 2” tape and features the wild stylings of Nick Maybury on lead guitars, Nicholas Allen Johns on keys and guitars and Felipe “Pipe” Ceballos on drums. It was described by famed Redondo Beach blogger Delightful Pete in this way~ “Although I never dreamt it possible, here is a land where the hesher blood-cries of Sebastian Bach blend uncannily with the high-society glam of Roxy Music. This this the world of S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders come to life on some 2012 street, where a voice croons like Holden Caulfield on acid, spinning school boy tales of strange ages, pleasure domes, long haired babes & scorpion chains. WTF!? Songs like Trudy, and She’s Giving Up On Her Love, more than anything else I’ve heard lately, will be the soundtrack to this generations’ Gas Food Lodging, Goonies and Pretty In Pink. This is a weirdly powerful crew, & this is a new POP music that could save you for a while.

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Constellation Tatsu

Posted on January 2, 2013 | Comments Off on Constellation Tatsu

PURR 0020: Looks Realistic – ‘Where Does It Come From?’
Description: Joseph Bastardo and Ryan Mulhall erase the earth from all directions, drawing in a home where mountains grow, rainbows bow, and melodies play throughout the land.

PURR 0021: Fluorescent Heights – ‘Tidal Motions’
Description: A hue technicolor and dominant. The sun is here, but we are not here, permanently folded by the sun’s vacation-pebbles that radiate like floating metal. What do they do?

PURR 0022: GREYGHOST – ‘Memoirs of Dementia’
Description: Controlling your heartbeat, peace pervades your space, bringing with it clarity and new life to the stillness of the indoors. Tones coalesce, lazily see-saw, and gallop away — rumbling out through the walls.

PURR 0023: Hobo Cubes & Jonathan Carr split
Description: Trudging through the choking darkness of an uncertain cavern, Hobo Cubes brings warm lights to forgotten sensations. Then along comes Jonathan James Carr with a continuum of transient beauties in this organically flowing work.

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Yerevan Tapes

Posted on January 2, 2013 | Comments Off on Yerevan Tapes

Cannibal Movie – ‘MONDO MUSIC’ C30
MondoMusicThe italian drums+organ psych duo comes back, after their debut LP Avorio, with two new, obnoxious songs. One per side, almost 15min each one. Microphones In The Trees blog says: “Two long underground jams are the best recording of the duo. The first side takes you in a hypnotic journey to the afterlife, I like to think (even if only organ and percussion) in early Amon Düül, the darkest ambient of German Oak and surrounded by accumulated strain that doesn’t end explode, as the great recording of japanese Jacks. The other side begins more meditative and at times ethereal, until the percussion opens the path to a ceremony of a secret brotherhood with dissonant textures and hypnotic pulse”. Comes on pea green cassette with photographic insert and usual esotic artwork by S. Anhayt. A lmtd edition of 100.

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Stefan Christoff – ‘Duets For Abdelrazik’; and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’ [Review]

Posted on December 31, 2012 | Comments Off on Stefan Christoff – ‘Duets For Abdelrazik’; and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’ [Review]

duets‘Duets For Abdelrazik’ is a set of songs dedicated to political prisoner Abousfian Abdelrazik of Canada by way of Sudan.  Coordinated by the pianist and the disc’s constant collaborator Stefan Christoff, these six duets emerge idiomatically like jazz, but resemble more the “neoclassical” strain of post-rock music.  Christoff is joined by instrumentalists like Sam Shalabi (Shalabi Effect, Land of Kush), Rebecca Foon (Esmerine, Silver Mt. Zion), Matana Roberts (Sticks and Stones) – folks repping the melancholic, avuncular adult-contemporary strains from the Montreal collectivities such as Alien 8, Madrona (Foon’s label), the scenes at La Sala Rossa and Casa del Popolo, and the session heads hanging out at Hotel2Tango.  “Instrumentalist” is a key distinction of these technician-types: their sound is neo-classical in the sense of never abandoned, that romantic sentiment, but coming from the relative outside – think Rachel’s or Town & Country – rather than the “inside man” antics relating more to postmodernism, as in Michael Nyman or Laurie Anderson. The “duets” of the title in this sense refer first to the instruments themselves, not in some virtuoso contest, but appearing in the earthy hues of folk music.  The instruments are fostered to represent themselves (often non- and extra-western selves), in a minimalist recursion, and the players themselves disappear back to type on the sleeve, abstracted as the title of each track.  It may seem glib, but the best way to describe each is simply: duet of piano and saxophone, duet of piano and violin, duet of piano and buzuq, and so forth.  For example, though Peter Burton’s contribution on contrabass severely enhances Christoff’s fine-dining ballad, the germ of this track is really the timbrel juxtaposition rather than some profound revision of composition.  Similarly, the 12 minute collaboration with Shalabi’s oud sees the more traditional structures of the instrument’s design take lead while the piano responds in a craftsperson’s aphorism.  The idiom is stable, mature; this musicianship is “pedestrian” not in a critical but in a political sense, proud of its sure-footedness and presence, similar to the reclaimed ether when we “take back the night”.  Stamped CDrs come in heavy, screened chipboard sleeves with an insert.

CST081webSpeaking of what came to be known as “post-rock”: ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’ proves it’s politics as usual for Godspeed You! Black Emperor, still proudly made in Montreal, like Christoff’s duets or the sonic “casserole” protests sampled at the end of opening track “Mladic”.  Ten years since the last release (and three since they broke hiatus to play live), GY!BE are as well-prepared as possible to resurface, with their regular artistic effacement and their cautious, caring, and always sporadic release schedule back in the 20th century.  Still, a decade will necessarily tack-on mythologies and impossible expectations for anyone, particularly the first band you ever liked with a cellist and projectionist.  How did they manage to land on their feet?  Well first, it’s not like they ever “retired”: the essential, communal nature of the ensemble, their manufacture at Constellation records, and the scene at large has meant the band retains limber authority in addition to the authorship of their legacy.  In sum, they have the chops and the rights to tell us what they mean.  Second, and more important, is they do so in the plainest terms: the structures of ‘Allelujah!’ are conventions in the strictest sense.  It is conventional in the sense of tradition, in the face of a liquid modernism.  Familiar to the GY!BE formula, the elements are all there: caterwauling strings, minor chord phrasings, anthemic guitars, sinister bits of found dialogue, and of course, that Fibbonacian swell and break of triumphant tragedy and beauty.  The filmic screens are there – the band having in many ways defined how we imagine the new mediated soundtrack – with the evasive prose of the soundbites and titles, commenting with even consistency the radical platform which others would have furnished and forgave by now.  The dread and faith of the activist, the integration of zine-writing, the “personal” politics in street art – impressionistic as they may be, they willingly spill-over the edges of the page, disc, canvas – the “album”, most definitely.  The songs stand alone, observing only the most tentative balance based in contrasting dynamics: the accumulating overtures of “Their Helicopters’ Sing” bleeds into the jubilant minimalism of “We Drift Like Worried Fire” to the droning, psychedelic dirge of “Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable”.  This is the idiom which defines post-rock (and, to be sure, it is the first quality lost in its commercialization as a genre).  It is the founding statement, and the reason GY!BE hasn’t lost their footing: they ceded no ground in the first place.

Howl! Arts Collective CDr
$15
HERE

Constellation LP/CD
$18/$12
HERE

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Rainbow Bridge

Posted on December 31, 2012 | Comments Off on Rainbow Bridge

Justin Marc Lloyd – ‘Erroneous Zones’ 2xCDr
rb152Off-kilter compositions of everything failing and falling. The frayed ends of the Purified Warfield Queenpuddle sessions. Disassembled pieces for healing auras. The healed are here to disassemble seemingly healthy chakras from the ground up. Wholeness demands a broken spirit. Self-image melting. Over-dependence upon minds of their own. Gray, flickering lights, and what you need to enjoy life to the fullest. 2.2 hours of live room recordings repurposed to drive a nail into the coffin of health. Stoned, lost and broken style. Hand-painted, hand-assembled, textured card stock cases with 2 CDrs and info inside colored foil. Sealed with printed animal print duct tape. Each copy includes a unique, hand-drawn image with an excerpt from the book “Your Erroneous Zones” by Wayne Dyer. Limited to 22.

Cincinnatus C/Justin Marc Lloyd – ‘Dim Dusk Looney Tunes’ split C10
rb151Craig Hodgkins of Cincinnatus C revisits and flirts with his roots as a song-writer, but performs his tunes through a mixer suffering from feedback-loop trauma, and likely some abused pedals he has acquired from me. This totally annihilated reworked version of an old acoustic song Craig wrote is oddly enjoyable as a melancholy-yet-feel-good tune, but it’s so sonically demented that it clearly limits it’s audience to fans of harsh sounds and weird ideas. JML’s side is a short but vast exploration in weird drones, malfunctioning electronics, and manipulated tape loops. Forcefully bleak, slow, lo-fi and uneasy, as if something restless was being restrained. Golden yellow card stock with black ink, transparent red tapes with hand-painted sticker labels, housed in transparent purple cases. Artwork by Alyssa Herlocher. Limited to 20.

Justin Marc Lloyd – ‘Purified Warfield Queenpuddle’ C45
rb148csFocused experimentation fanned out into 9 sections. Lo-fi, distinct pieces of predominantly abstract collages. I also find myself under a cloud of violet rather than in it. I have not creased the lid of indigo enough to see all that i’m tangled in. Blue is blinking and green is overdriven. Yellow is the thirst for genuineness. Orange has never suffered because i’ve built everything on it. Red is no base as it should be. A medium-sized stack of cheap keyboards I haven’t bothered opening, buzzing and more synthesizing, intermittent and splotchy electronics on their last leg, and strange vocal serenades pleading breaking their way through animalistic sex. I’m dangling off the correct path, uncontrollably dancing and asking this world of hypnosis some questions, mister. I’m encompassed by a massive, mysterious, and all-providing source field and I want to get to know her a little more. Black ink on lilac card stock. Solid black tapes with hand-painted, hand-stamped paper labels. Lime green transparent cases. Artwork by Justin Marc Lloyd. Limited to 21.

Justin Marc Lloyd – ‘Purified Warfield Queenpuddle’ CDr
rb148cdrFocused experimentation fanned out into 9 sections. Lo-fi, distinct pieces of predominantly abstract collages. I also find myself under a cloud of violet rather than in it. I have not creased the lid of indigo enough to see all that i’m tangled in. Blue is blinking and green is overdriven. Yellow is the thirst for genuineness. Orange has never suffered because i’ve built everything on it. Red is no base as it should be. A medium-sized stack of cheap keyboards I haven’t bothered opening, buzzing and more synthesizing, intermittent and splotchy electronics on their last leg, and strange vocal serenades pleading breaking their way through animalistic sex. I’m dangling off the correct path, uncontrollably dancing and asking this world of hypnosis some questions, mister. I’m encompassed by a massive, mysterious, and all-providing source field and I want to get to know her a little more. Lilac hand-numbered card stock hand-cut with scallop scissors in DVD cases. Hand-painted cdrs. Each copy includes a unique small collection of random clippings or found papers, pamphlets and other things. Artwork by Justin Marc Lloyd. Limited to 19.

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