PHR-116 BIG FAT LIPS – ‘Looting’ CDr
Piraeus’ own Big Fat Lips is a mash-up barker, a trend provocateur, a sanity juggler. ‘Looting’ is his first semi-proper physical release, gloriously filled w/ retro-challenging electronic anthems, pseudo-ethnological curiosities and avant-lard smoothie haikus. This is next-level bedroom Arena Beat, don’t drool on it. Shake your booty! Edition of 80 copies with full color covers and obi-strips.
PHR-115 ARNAUD RIVIERE & MARIO[ASPEC[T]/ASPIRALE]/BALINESE BEAST – ‘SchengenShenzhen’ LP
co-released w/ Viande Records + More Mars Team. ‘SchengenShenzhen’ has just been dropped off and, oh boy, did this took quite a good deal of effort to come out as it not only assembles two of the most intriguing European noise/imrpov duos, namely Arnaud Rivière / Mario Gabola and Balinese Beast, it was also co-released under the aegis of three different labels, Athenian weirdo outlets Phase! and More Mars and Mario’s own venture into improvised music, Viande Records. The first side, moving closer to the harsher end of the spectrum, is dedicated to the documentation of a live collaboration from 2011 between Parisian turntable mutilator Arnaud Rivière who’s using reconstructed phonographs and prepared mixing boards and Mario Gabola from Naples who is one half of Aspec(t) and one third of A Spirale – for the purposes of this recording he provides feedback and resonance by self-made instruments and percussion. The opening track, Fragment is a really hard-edged but neat assortment of hisses, distortion, percussive patterns, silence and feedback failures adorned towards the end by spastic crashes, howls and turntable onslaught. It Is Quite Complicate on the other hand is a way more solid artifact whose radio fragments of the first seconds give way to an avalanche of textured noise and monumental eruptions. This Is No Sax Song briefly closes the side with fast-paced flops, metallic clangs, chopped feedback and tiny pauses. On the flip-side, Athenian charmers Balinese Beast (Giorgos Axiotis and Ilan Manouach), counting more than ten releases over the past four years, attempt here a shift from their usual frenzied and hyper-active cut-up style towards somehow longer structures – despite the fact that once again they succeed to pack five tracks in less than 18 minutes using their routine gadgetry of samplers, drum machines, no input mixers and free saxophones. Still, their material is hard to pin down. The opening track Pronounce features a really superb upright bass sample that acts as a nexus that holds the piece together and is occasionally decorated by sparse drum machine patterns and exquisite reed blowing. The static that opens Colcannon Night is held together by a constant metallic hum, gradually sliced by noises and sampled jazz tracks, ending with some sweet sax playfulness, while Midi Market features some oriental pipe patterns, overwhelmed by some Euro-dance sounding raw synth build-ups. Thanks Mom is a typical Balinese smart cut-up and rearrangement celebration but one of the highlights is the closing track La Dépêche De Tahiti, a true slow burner with an elegiac opening, a few slow moving layers of mournful sax and some delicate gestures on top of spiraling synth lines. Overall, a record that places all four of them in the highest ranks of the freak register. Edition of 300 copies w/ screenprinted jackets, offset inners and hand-stamped labels.
PHR-114 vlubä – ‘Galactic Alignment I’ C60
Part one of a 2 cassette release (in diferent labels, the second ‘Galactic Alignment’ will be out in early 2015, vlubä offers a megalith of stalking freak-out, environ-mental drone music, using heavy ritualistic instantanés. In the groups’ own words, “the galactic alignment is a conceptual double tape that talks about a confrontation between two regimes: the earth’s beast and the cosmical psychic. Each one for their side complete a circumference in a cycle, one is represented by the beast from all fears of the earth civilization and the other one by the psychical man, traveler from the moon with all the multidimensional treasures from all the kingdoms. But, by the way, both together have a perfect work, that is the real powerful of to open and to loose high consciousness from their high vibration for the humanity. something like – – = + please, feel free to play both tapes, each by their side, and let to flow the energy and open the portals.” Edition of 65 spraypainted tapes housed in vividly printed photo j-cards.
PHR-112 ADAM_IS – ‘Calcinatio / Nigredo’ 2CDr
Calcinatio is the first step in most alchemical processes, it is the thermal decomposition of a material. Elements are submitted to fire, superheating them until all impurities dissolve into ash. What’s left is only that which is essential, only that which can embody the transcendent. Nigredo, blackness, that which is blacker than black, means putrefaction or decomposition. The first step in the pathway to the philosopher’s stone where all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter. The time of despair and disillusionment when an individual confronts the shadow within. “Calcinatio / Nigredo” is Adam_is’ (the man behind Putsum, Zombie Penguin and numerous other projects) most ambitious and self-defining work to-date: a dark, loner style, no-neck black blues journey into the depths of the loneliness of the self. Edition of 200 copies w/ 3-color screenprinted custom gatefold cover, screenprinted inner and pro-printed CDRs.
