Animal Psi

Linear Bells – ‘///’ C58 
C58 of new ambient majesty from Nantes, France’s Linear Bells. On high-quality cassette, in a special limited edition of 20.

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rodent – ‘HAULIN’ MINDS’
All sounds recorded to Sony IC recorder from August 2011 to September 2012 in Chicago, IL. Created with Casio SK-60, Korg Mini KP, Digitech RP50, Behringer shift/harmonist, Yahmaha RX 17, pawn shop guitar. Maninpulated, chopped, and mixed during October and November 2012 using Behringer Xenyx 1202, Tascam cassette 4 track, Boss RC-2, and Sony IC recorder. Transferred to mp3 with Tascam digital 2 track.

Puberty – ‘Puberty’ $5
Psychedelic, whatever-fi, life threatening, death tracks by puberty. All tracks clips of live recordings in Chicago, IL during August 2012.

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Felicia Atkinson – ‘A River’ C40 $7
Deep vibrations layered into a frozen riverbed. A river is a dream swim, a blind crawl into the earth’s veins. Type II 40 minute cassette. Space Slave 12. Ed. 75.

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Likeicare – ‘Mixtape #1’
[EN] Mixtape of original IDM tracks by Portuguese project likeicare, showcasing some of his work through the last production year. Most of tracks having already been released through other netlabels, here they are mixed down in 20 minutes of likeicare. [PT] Mixtape de temas de música IDM da autoria do projecto Português likeicare. A maioria dos temas já tendo sido previamente editados noutras netlabels, nesta release encontram-se misturadas em 20 minutos que ilustram bem a qualidade do trabalho de likeicare.

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PJs – ‘Family Talks’ $6
Recorded to 4-track in Schaerbeek, Brussels. Yamaha Portasound PSS-290, two guitars, male duets. Bram Devens (Ignatz) and I started recording at his place in March. I would buy a Turkish roll and eat it on the 92 tram from Saint-Josse towards Schaerbeek Gare. We would drink coffee and then record downstairs in Casper’s room until it was time to pick up Casper from school. Bram would put the 4-track away so Casper wouldn’t know we had used his room. The songs sound a lot like a little boy’s room. They’re small and funny, sometimes irrational or confused. I definitely felt like a child when we recorded, looking up through the sidewalk grill at the shoes of passersby. These songs are dreamy in a pensive way and in a distracted way: riding in the backseat at night, watching your friends at a pool party. Pop songs at their core, with all of the melodies and guitar licks to prove it, filtered through reverie and uncertainty.

Tracey Trance – ‘Noise Hippie Trimmer’ $6
Tracey Trance, self-proclaimed noise hippie trimmer, trans-American road urchin and 100% chilidog. This tape listens like an autobiography, meandering through Tracey’s kaleidoscopic campfires and sleep outs, singing on the side of the road, soaked in his peculiar lexis of burpanomics. It’s hard to think of anyone currently rawdogging the 4-track quite like Tracey Trance. Recording is so integrated into his way of being that it could hardly be called a vocation. Noise Hippie Trimmer was logged in Monteville, Main and Hollywood, California. What happened in between? It’s fair to assume he drove from one to the other, jamming (burping?) along the way. “Mixed on tape for the trimmers.”

Old Growth Cola – ‘Fossicking for Frogs’ $6
Recorded to computer with federal bills (pineapples, lobsters), guitars, drums, voices, keys, hi-fructose atmospherics. Old Growth Cola, band from Brisbane, brainchild of Lewis O’Leary, play flush pop. Their songs sparkle with preteen, part Paisley Rock romantics and part energy drinks. There’s something that reminds me of watching cartoons: short attention spans, relentless squints and squeezes, and Lew’s classically bashful whisper. At first I’m fooled by OGC’s melodic brightness. Then I catch onto a languid ambivalence. Only near the end do I start to hear something really sad sitting just beneath the surface.

Untitled – ‘CDr 8/CDr 3’ $6
Recorded at Real Bad Music, Magic Mile, Moorooka. I went to Matt’s house, there was an old synthesizer and a tape-delay caked in mud. Matt told me that they were found after the summer floods. He said they worked. Then he said no, they don’t work, but that you could still get a signal if you wanked around for long enough. Matt gave me two CDrs of this music. One-offs packaged and penned in delivery slips. The first was a “techno” CDr and the second was a “House” CDr. They definitely aren’t club standards. They also aren’t liberal-arts-cum-urban revisions to “real” dance music. I’m not even sure it’s dance music.

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HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE WAVE – ‘BLUE MIRROR’
Edition of 35 printed in blue on a 12″ x 12″ mirror. Modified from original design for Eleh’s Homage To The Square Wave LP. Signed & numbered (on back). Framed by hand in clear maple with a clear satin finish. Must be elaborately packaged to avoid damage.

ARNOLD DREYBLATT – ‘TURNTABLE HISTORY: SPIN ENSEMBLE’ CS
Arnold Dreyblatt’s Turntable History: Spin Ensemble was recorded March 12, 2011 by Ernst Karel at Boston’s Goethe Institut. This performance version of the original piece (released on CD as IMPREC323) provides a different perspective on the original composition. MP3 preview available. 

JOHN BISCHOFF – ‘FIELD TRANSFER’ CS
Field Transfer projects the sounds from an analog circuit into juxtaposition with facets of raw digital audio. As a performer interacts with the circuit—which consists of two square-wave oscillators activated by pressure sensors and shorting disks—instances of pulsed and modulated sound are triggered in the laptop in a manner that couples the analog and digital sources together. MP3 preview available.

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NICK KUEPFER/KHÔRA – ‘Arachnidiscs Split Tape Series Sides 11 & 12’ C40 $9CAD (World)
Edition of 50 // pro-duped // DL code included // 16 page full-colour mini-zine. Side 11—Nick Kuepfer, Tape Test For A New Year / Audrey’s Asprin / Grackles: Grinding string harmonies drone from the celestial abyss. Birds sing, forests crumble. A ghost trains thunders across the prairies, hammers on tin roofs as it passes. Somewhere to the south, a bank robber dies in the tumbleweeds, clutching a satchel full of money with a dusty hand. An entrancing, cinematic soundscape; a travelogue of the spaces between light and shadow. BIO: Montreal-based guitarist Nick Kuepfer weaves nylon string and electric guitar pieces with live-sampled tape loops, recordings of animals, and drones from various sources. His predominantly wordless music ranges from subtle and static to frantic and abrasive, with a methodical, vigilant sense of experimentation guided by the search for consonance and dissonance with the sounds of “nature”. Side 12—Khôra, Foris: Ringing in the shadows of a European cathedral, tones weave behind a camel train on the spice road and twist like smoke beyond the bazaars of Turkey before erupting like an Icelandic volcano, black ash on white snow. BIO: Matthew Ramolo’s Khôra project is based chiefly on acoustic/electric guitar and field recordings, with extensive signal processing and digital interventions conditioning these sources to create an immersive soundworld of drones, chimes, rings and other pointillistic sonics. His longform compositions contain lovely stretches of relatively unprocessed and fully recognisable guitar work, with picking patterns and chord sequences that evolve/devolve into more signal-bent and DSP soundscapes. The results are highly organic and meditative while retaining plenty of icy shards, bubbling distortions and passages of controlled monumentalism, making this anything but an ambient listen.

SILENT LAND TIME MACHINE/MOONWOOD – ‘Arachnidiscs Split Tape Series Sides 13 & 14’ C44
Edition of 50 // pro-duped // DL code // full-colour insert // special custom poly sleeve packaging. Side 13 — SILENT LAND TIME MACHINE. They say everything’s bigger in Texas. That includes the mind-expanding tones coming out of out of Silent Land Time Machine’s epic looped violin compositions that weave and drone like tumbleweeds on crack’d black asphalt. Good sounds from bad lands. “Many Many Happy Returns” recorded LIVE at Marigold Studios (R.I.P.) in London, ON “The Contours Of Perfect Distance” recorded LIVE at Le Cagibi, in Montréal, QC, with additional amenities provided by Khôra & Nick Kuepfer. BIO: SLTM; an inadvertent aural accumulator; a fractured signal; a concerted, compassionate memory resistor; the IN/OUT of an organic circuit experiencing itself for the first time; a starry-eyed-bliss-transformer; nerves attaching, detaching, strengthening, and severing; aimed at the clearing of neural circuitry with the frequency of white wind. Side 14 — MOONWOOD, Soul Oaks. Moonwood guitarist, Jakob Rehlinger, works through six electric and acoustic solo guitar improvisations trying to get somewhere in the Easts (Far- and Middle-) while remaining rooted in the Americas. Lyrical, soaring airs played over dark, oily drones. Recorded direct to 2-track live in Moonwood’s rehearsal studio between Nov 2011 and May 2012. BIO: Moonwood is the psych-improv project of Toronto (ON) guitarist Jakob Rehlinger, often joined by Jacqueline Noire on percussion, vocals and woodwinds. Solo or as a duo, Moonwood’s music is informed by (while not necessarily adhering to the traditions of) Tibetan funeral chants, krautrock, Balinese gamelan, classic psychedelic rock, traditional Japanese and South Asian music, dub, free-jazz and the usual grab-bag of avant-folk styles

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You’ll Never Get to Heaven – ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ LP
You’ll Never Get to Heaven is the stunning new ambient, electronic pop project by partners Chuck Blazevic and Alice Hansen of London, Ontario. Chuck has been creating abstract electronic music for years under both his own name and the tag Dreamsploitation, so it is no surprise to hear such beautiful washes of tone and melody on this new album. Most of the source material is taken from early 20th century classical and ‘70s dub vinyl, with decade’s worth of scratches and dirt beautifully processed into flourishes of swirling texture. Alice’s delicate vocals emerge from this ambient fog to guide these tracks through a dream of pop music long forgotten here at DIVORCE. Limited edition of 300 vinyl copies.

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Permanent Bedhead – ‘Devolution Walkabout’ CS
After sides on Sacred Phrases and Hobo Cult, Permanent Bedhead returns with a full length tape of deep mind music. Scott Johnson intuits his machines, producing immersive environments, abstract, yet terrestrial soundscapes that stretch off into a distance.

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Arklight – ‘The Beginners’ CS $5
Arklight are Danny, Greg and Tung and they’re from NYC. The band’s been playing together in various incarnations since 2003 and we at TBR dig their weirdo noise pop stuff, created with busted guitars and malfunctioning drum machines. To our ears Arklight’s noisy, pop askew is kinda Beat Happening (check “Frankie’s Pizza”) in the joyful sense – yet also updated for today’s prolific home-recording spirited sprites. Arklight has recorded and released material for a number of labels, but this may well be their most focused and well-produced collection ever. “Abandoned Mansions” has been played on WFMU’s The Frow Show w/Jesse Jarnow and is one of the many highlights on the tape. Be sure to do as Aerosmith says and, “Just PUSH PLAY!”

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