Animal Psi

HgM – ‘Hydrargirum/Arsenium2’
HgM is (H)organismo.(g)ravemente.(M)alato. Field-recording/noise from Italy. Recorded in Ho.Gravi.Malattie Darkroom, Turin, July 2013-March 2014. L_Arsenne is Arthur Arsenne. Joystic Oscillator/Fuzz Microphone/Jomox T Resonator/Wheelbarrow/Rake from Nice (France). Recorded in the White Room, Nice. May-june 2014. Standard edition limited to 30 copies. Deluxe edition cassette with 3 bonus track in mini cdr and non identified metalic object. Limited to 12 copies.

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HgM – ‘Martensite’ C30
Whenever there is an interesting process in metallic reactions prone to produce sound in the more obvious or rather totally unobvious way, noise enthusiast HgM “(H)organismo.(g)ravemente.(M)alato” from Italy starts an experiment to record certain reactions and processes. The result shows always a very alienating and totally different listening experience. In his recent contribution to our label he collects several works he has recorded over the last years. A very interesting world between field recordings and noisy drones is spread over two golden C-30 chromedioxid tapes, housed in a foil with a warning sticker (yes, these cassette shells flake and wear off over time!) and embedded in a high quality oversized cartonage 4c cover and a rusty metallic object. Limited to 42 copies.

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Colin Fisher & Mike Gennaro – ‘Sine Qua Non’ C50 $7
High-bias C50 cassette tape in custom envelope with exclusive pinback button. Numbered edition. Free jazz duo of Colin Fisher (Alto Sax) and Mike Gennaro (Drums), beating out five face-melting, brain-blowing freak jams. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, Colin Fisher is an active voice in the Improvised, Rock, Folk, Experimental and Creative Music Community in North America. He has been most active with Not the wind not the flag, Elfin Choirs (solo project), Bernice, Bad Breath, Body Help, New Civilization, Prince Enoki Insect Orchestra, – Colin has appeared and collaborated with: Anthony Braxton, Caribou, Jah Youssouf, Rhys Chattam, William Parker, Dominic Duval, Sabir Mateen, Joe Mcphee, Maury Coles, David Daniels, Chris Kelsey, Paul Hession, and many others. Mike Gennaro is a Toronto based free improvising percussionist who has performed with Juini Booth, John Butcher, Mats Gustafsson, Kevin Drumm, Eugene Chadbourne and Wilbert DeJoode among others. He has been one of the key figures in Toronto’s free jazz / improvised music community since 1995, both as a performer and organizer. He has performed throughout North America and Europe in various regular groups and ad hoc meetings. Gennaro’s playing draws from both American and European free music and he plays with a consistently ferocious intensity.

The Unquiet Grave – ‘Whispers In The Wind’ C40 $7
High-bias C40 tape in cassette boxed encrusted with earth, twigs, grass, leaves and other detritus of nature. Each one is unique. Numbered edition. Dark, lyrical doom-folk from the gothic desolation of rural Canada. The Unquiet Grave makes relatively lo-fi meditative songs, often imbued with tropes from industrial music. Wraithlike and enveloped in the dusk-dance solemnities of macabrely attuned spirit-surges, Whispers In The Wind often coming across as a mournfully weary hybrid of Mark Lanegan and Throbbing Gristle’s most song like works, intoning stream-of-consciousness atop mechanised beats and whirring analogue noises.

BABEL – ‘ZWERM’ CDr $7
Hand stamped chipboard wallet, hand stamped disc. Made to order. Unlike other Arachnidiscs Recordings releases, this album is not numbered as we don’t know how many we will or will not be making. Six improvisations for prepared electric guitar, AM/FM transitor radio and cassette tape collage, recorded live in BABEL’s rehearsal space. Harsh drones and metallic, industrial-tinged percussive rhythms form the bedrock for plaintive melodic journeys.

BABEL – ‘TOTAAL’ USB $20
11 hours and 3 minutes (48 tracks) of live prepared guitar improvisations including the ZWERM album in its final form and recordings from two live dates. As on ZWERM, harsh drones and metallic, industrial-tinged percussive rhythms form the bedrock for plaintive melodic journeys.

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SP-49 MAIA – ’29’ CS
MAIA is the instrumental electronic side project of Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez. “29” was recorded in a 2 week period in northern California. Limited edition of 100 copies. Comes with free download code.

SP-48 Creation VI + Astral & Shit – ‘Anamnesis’ CS
Advanced atmospheric slabs of shifting haze, studded by stuttering. A voltage surf sliding ominously onward. Thick dense layers soar… the pieces are built from the air they glide through. Crisp air clears the mind. Limited edition of 100 copies. Comes with free download code.

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Pick a Piper/Squalloscope/Love Cult 7″
is a collaborative EP by three artists from Canada, Austria and Russia respectively. The young producers met in New York to attend Red Bull Music Academy and worked out two gorgeous tracks operating on the fringes of pop, weirdo electronics and psychedelia. The 7″ vinyl contains “Never Get Lost”, an epic tripped-out semi-naive number fronted by the multi-talented Viennese singer-songwriter Anna Kohlweis, and is backed up with “Ruin”, a dark swinging 4/4 groove by Pick a Piper washed away with Anya Kuts’ trademark drone chorals. The digital part of the EP is three additional off-collab tracks, produced by Pick a Piper, Squalloscope and Love Cult separately. Brad Weber, another prime percussionist cum producer type and a longtime drummer for Caribou, fuses krautrock synth drool with piquant afrobeat-inspired patterns, while Squalloscope produces a tender melancholic bedroom-pop masterpiece and Love Cult deliver an overloaded euphoric cassette slab with an eccentric 808 beat. Vinyl was mastered and cut by Francesco Donadello (Moderat, Thom Yorke etc.) and the big hole 45 rpm 7 inch comes in slick über-minimal screen-printed design by Anya Kuts. Limited edition of 300 copies, with instant download of the digital EP.

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The Sinister Insult – ‘Ghost Of A Hurt’ C60 £5
Ghost of a Hurt is the first release by The Sinister Insult which was originally released as a CD package in 2011. Available for the first time as a limited cassette edition, it is inspired by a sixty-year-old mystery, the soundtrack for a film that need never be made because no single interpretation could do justice to the strange and haunting story of ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm’: a story that involves murder, witchcraft, Nazis, voices from beyond the grave and rituals in the dark. Wrenched from the four corners of Albion, THE SINISTER INSULT (motto: “Weird Fictions. Strange Places. Lesbian Vampires.”) pursue their ideal of ‘White Noise Folk’ via transcendental guitar movements, field recordings, quality art, obsessive writings and keyboards that never come out of the basement. Recorded on a high-quality pea green audio cassette, with artwork by Rik Rawling. Limited to 25 copies world-wide.

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Nolon Ashley – ‘Okay Molg Apported Baby Farm’
‘Okay Molg Apported Baby Farm’ is an exploration of modular synth layers, tribal/industrial beat trails, minimalist tonal exercises, and haunting vocal drones. Nolon Ashley’s solo debut features five electronic compositions that undulate throughout. Consisting of long form, drawn out passages, ‘Apported Baby farm’ is wrapped in multiple layers of dark beauty while showcasing rich and textural atmospheres, piercingly harsh pinnacles, and nuanced, yet pulsing, clattering rhythms. Having developed his chops performing in acts like Soriah, Nequaquam Vacuum, Moe Staiano’s Moe!kestra, Power Circus, Submarine Fleet, and Julian Tulip’s Licorice, Nolon Ashley began performing as Cult of Zir in 2005, which has since undergone several transformations in intention and execution. Where the work of Cult of Zir could be seen as a vehicle for Nolon’s more ambitious and frustrating creative aspirations, The material found in “Okay Molg Apported Baby Farm” is perhaps more personal and honest, while retaining all the surreal vagary expected from his quarter.

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SISKYOU – ‘Nervous’ LP
Siskiyou returns with Nervous, a majestic album of carefully constructed art rock built around songwriter and lead singer Colin Huebert’s stacked acoustic guitars and intimate, whispery vocals. Siskiyou’s sound has been previously dubbed a sort of ‘Northern Gothic’, conjuring cold winds and the life-saving warmth of temporary shelters and tiny hearth fires. With Nervous, the band continues to push beyond the crisp lo-fi intimacy of its early work, and has forged its most confident and finely-crafted recording to date, moving fully into auteur and chamber-pop territory with a song cycle that brings to mind the meticulousness of mood and sonics found in recent work by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Tindersticks. Inflected by an anxious, sussurant restraint, Huebert’s voice is supported by the falsetto backing vocal counterpoint and economical instrumentation of bandmates Erik Arnesen, Peter Carruthers and Shaunn Watt. Fans of the understated and underrated 1990s group Swell may also hear a welcome evocation of that group’s acoustic guitar-driven simplicity and austere deployment of adornments. Following Siskiyou’s excellent sophomore release Keep Away The Dead in 2011, Huebert became afflicted with a serious inner ear condition that eluded conventional diagnosis. While honouring a previously scheduled songwriting residency in Dawson City, Yukon in winter 2012, Huebert found himself grappling with severe anxiety and an unwelcome interiority, engendered by hyperacusis and a house that felt utterly haunted. Intense chronic ear-ringing and panic attacks continued throughout the year, for which conventional medicine was unable to find any cause or effective treatment; Huebert began focusing on meditation, retreated to silence for a period, and then began rehearsing his new songs with the band at extremely low volumes. The songs on Nervous are shot through with the entirety of this experience: the literal feeling of being trapped in one’s head and the physical-psychological feedback loop of debilitating anxiety; the lyrical themes and tense, whispered singing amidst tightly-wrought compositions and arrangements. Huebert found solace in new working methods within the controlled environment of studio-based production and composition, developing new sonic palettes and pursuing new avenues of instrumental arrangement and recording fidelity. Working with producer/engineer Leon Taheny (Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy, Dusted, Austra) on most of Nervous, Siskiyou has emerged with by far its most assured, ambitious and authoritative recordings, while preserving the economy of elements, deft structures, and assiduous melodic deliberation for which the band has been rightly celebrated over its two previous albums. In charting escape paths from his disquieting cranial confinement, Huebert has very much succeeded in setting his songs out on an expansive canvas, while preserving a palpable sense of nervous interiority and quiet desperation at their heart. Nervous includes contributions from guest musicians Colin Stetson, Owen Pallett, JP Carter, Ryan Driver and the St. James Music Academy Senior Choir, among others. The album features original artwork by Michael Drebert; the Deluxe LP edition includes a series of 12″x12″ prints of Drebert’s india ink drawings inspired by the album.

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Frond – ‘The Second Continent’
The Second Continent is the debut album from producer and phonographer Frond. Blending gentle acoustics, intense electronics and field recordings, this is a personal journey through a landscape of forgotten melodies and vivid textures. A haunting beauty lingers inside these tracks, which draws you in deeper every time you listen to them. Richard Bultitude has produced music since he was a teenager and in his mid-twenties launched his first project Point B, the back catalogue of which features numerous atmospheric beatless tracks which were the precursor to Frond. The Second Continent is the first album in the Esc.rec. catalogue to be released on a (limited) audio cassette. Not just because releasing audio cassettes is ‘hot’ right now, but because the tape sound aesthetic compliments Frond’s album. Just like the selected artwork by Holger Lippmann does. German artist Holger Lippmann began his career with traditional materials but moved into computational design and generative art in the early 90s. The piece ‘perlin scape 24’, which features on this record, was completed in 2012 and comprised of 12 plates of laser engraved wood. Besides the limited edition audio cassette in handmade cover (only 50 copies!), The Second Continent is also available as a digital download.

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Parashi – ‘Pilot’s Salt’ LP
Since 2009 Mike Griffin has been exploring sound by steadily releasing Parashi missives on a slew of tape labels including Tape Drift, GNS, Stunned, and his own Skell Records as well as playing in Burnt Hills, Urkas, and Mensheviks. Busy guy, for sure. Though prolific his mounting body of work continues to evolve & expand in new ways with each release, broadening the bleak & often ominous abyssal planes he’s become known for. Still, a distinct signature naturally permeates into his sound: every dark corner & shrill tone is uniquely & unmistakably Parashi and Pilot’s Salt is no exception. Pilot’s Salt finds Parashi utilizing modular synths, tape, metal objects, & noise generators to further his technique of improvised sound as defined by the interactions of the sonic elements within. Perhaps more than ever a sense of abstract narrative & development emerges from each patiently evolving track as Parashi freely explores the limits of his rigs. As Griffin himself states, “the goal is to create something with as little conscious method of control or composition as possible, to rely upon the unconscious mind to drift through the setup and produce something before it’s all over.” Restrained or intense, ominous or outright hostile, the raw gristle of Pilot’s Salt transports the listener to the dark recesses of improv noise & leaves it up to them to find their own way back. Pilot’s Salt is limited to 300 copies with original art by Jacob Van Loon, the first 100 of which come on white & black marble-mixed vinyl.

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