Animal Psi

ZURICH – ‘ZURICH’ CD
Featuring members of Slowdive/Mojave 3, Seefeel and Knives Ov Resistance. Zurich was recorded in 1994 and released on vinyl via Imprec a few years ago. This CD edition contains bonus tracks not included on the LP release. With the recent touring of Slowdive and the new Aphex Twin record this re-issue seems particularly timely. 

CATERINA BARBIERI – ‘VERTICAL’ CS
Vertical is Caterina Barbieri’s debut album and it was composed for vocals and Buchla 200 modular synthesizer. Vertical takes a meditative approach to primary waveforms and the polyrhythm of harmonics, stretching the boundaries between drone, minimalism and techno in multichannel systems.

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Caethua – ‘Red Moon’ 
The mysterious and enchanting Clare Hubbard strides slowly out of the forest, guitar in hand ready to make her presence felt, finite and powerful, with Red Moon. While Red Moon can be classified as a folk record, it packs a punch. This is a record that swells as well as it swaggers. Hubbard brings to mind classics such as Karen Dalton and Judee Sill, while managing to even cross the boundaries and bring to mind even PJ Harvey. There’s moments of wonderful dissonance packed between the fuzzy ruckus and burners. Deep droners that Hubbard can chant and moan incantations atop of. In a way, it’s a hard album to exactly define, while it resides under the blanket genre folk. It falls right in line with Bathetic’s musical presence and list of musical weirdos standing out, doing their own thing. Hubbard is a pioneer, stalwart and striding. She’s brought a wonderful rock and roll album to the table, folky and weird and psychedelic. This album will stand head and shoulders above a lot of so-called folk-rockers. Hubbard’s been in this game for a long time now, and she’s spent a lot of time tucked away, perfecting a beautiful record.

Terrors – ‘Ensorcell Qori’ LP
Elijah Forrest returns to the Bathetic stable once more for an LP of vaporous burners, signature of his Terrors moniker. Ensorcell Qori is a diminutive as well as it is wild and cosmic. Forrest can’t be left to simply bend the light psychic and just float some guitar strings into the woods. No, he’s got to pack a crystalline serenity behind the wire and show us the light coming through. This album, sure, it can be classified as downtrodden, on such tracks as “Without After Life” or “Two Words (6 Jan 2013)” — the latter of which sounding like a acid-damaged and ice-submerged Bonnie “Prince” Billy — but there’s always more to the celestial sludge Forrest is concocting. “Twist Form and Memory” with it’s Everyday Loneliness origins or opener “Betrothal Patterning End” show us the side of Forrest that is not just hushed guitar and warbled croon. It’s these tracks that show how Forrest’s angel-hair ambient dirge hangs from the ceilings in his palace of ghostly folk. Ensorcell Qori is the type of weary loner folk we’ve come to love from Elijah, and if you like listening to abstract music that lifts you as much as it splits you, vibe on it. Let it swallow you whole and feel the water shake from your psyche as your surface.

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Tuluum Shimmering – ‘Dark Star’ C100 $8(US)/$12(CAN)/$15(World)
With the ability to juggle a bevy of instruments on the fly and combine worldly influences with modern psychedelia, England’s Jake Webster has built a strong reputation for himself across many incredible releases as Tuluum Shimmering. ‘Dark Star’ adds to that very impressive catalog and further showcases Webster’s knack for long, sprawling improvisations. Explicitly influenced by The Grateful Dead and employing guitar, hand percussion, and flutes, the piece starts gently and gradually builds upon itself, allowing newly introduced elements to dance playfully over each looped passage. Stretching across two long sides and ending abruptly when the tape runs out, one could almost imagine Webster jamming this one into blissful infinity. Pro-dubbed and imprinted chrome cassettes, featuring designs by Caroline Teagle. Comes with a free digital download. Edition of 100.

Bluesharp – ‘Sinkhole Flora’ C30 $8(US)/$12(CAN)/$15(World)
Proprietor of Royallen, member of Perspectives, and regular on labels like Housecraft, Rotifer, and his own Permanent Nostalgia, Joshua Tippery uses the guise Bluesharp for his solo guitar explorations. In the world of Bluesharp, though, the six string is used more for texture and noise than melody. ‘Sinkhole Flora’ finds Tippery grinding his axe in unorthodox ways to invoke the crunch of the Earth and the murk of the swamps prominent throughout his home state of Florida. It’s spare, strange, and challenging at times, yet there’s something altogether soothing about this one as it takes you deep down through the sediment and then plunges you right into the marshy waters. Pro-dubbed and imprinted chrome cassettes, featuring designs by Caroline Teagle. Comes with a free digital download. Edition of 100.

Cenote Glow – ‘Musa Paradisiaca’ C60 $8(US)/$12(CAN)/$15(World)
The first release from Cenote Glow in about a year, ‘Musa Paradisiaca’ blends synthesis and field recordings for a deep tropical journey. With sounds both captured in Mexico and recorded in Brooklyn, the release evokes the enriching warmth of the Yucatán Peninsula at times and the darker heart of the natural world at others. Sonically, found sounds are featured more in the foreground than previous Cenote Glow excursions, as musical passages flow between melodic effervescence, oceanic drones, and hypnotic whirlpools of abstract sound. Come ashore for an hour of memories and interpretations inspired by the uniquely beautiful land known as Quintana Roo. Pro-dubbed and imprinted chrome cassettes, featuring designs by Caroline Teagle. Comes with a free digital download. Edition of 100.

cloudsound – ‘asperatus’ C38 $8(US)/$12(CAN)/$15(World)
Though he only began releasing music as cloudsound in 2014, Swedish resident and American expat Lee Boyd has been recording beautiful ambient guitar compositions directly to tape for years now. We’re excited to share his latest collection, ‘asperatus’, and it’s another stellar example of Boyd’s singular sound. cloudsound has all the lushness you could ever want from this kind of music, but Boyd’s loose, improvisational style feels distinctly homegrown – like a kind of cosmic blues brewed on Earth and then beamed out for the rest of the universe to enjoy. There’s just something so intoxicating about the combination of Boyd’s washed out guitar tones with the warmth of analog sound. Drink it up and drift away. Pro-dubbed and imprinted chrome cassettes, featuring designs by Caroline Teagle. Comes with a free digital download. Edition of 100.

Charles Barabé – ‘Dates & Confessions’ C50 $8(US)/$12(CAN)/$15(World)
Hailing from Victoriaville, Charles Barabé is a unique standout among a crop of incredibly talented rising experimental musicians based in the province of Quebec. ‘Dates & Confessions’ features an eclectic and ecstatic variety of sounds that add up to one beautifully disorienting release. The cassette consists of four “Dates”, which are tightly composed melodic pieces featuring synthesizers, found sounds, subtle acoustic instrumentation, and Barabé’s heavily vocoded voice. Six “Confessions” round out the affair with looser, more improvisational and dissonant approaches to synthesis that act as appropriate foils. With the keen ability to combine elements of musique concrète, modern composition, prog, and much more, Barabé continually ratchets up the intensity throughout the release, leading up to a gorgeous, spacious finale that allows you to catch your breath and reflect on all that came before. Pro-dubbed and imprinted chrome cassettes, featuring designs by Caroline Teagle. Comes with a free digital download. Edition of 100.

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Work – ‘Wolves’ C33 $6
Cultivated from the heavy heat and time spent between Task (birdlikebats) in New York and Evak1 somewhere south of Houston; “Wolves” WORK finally offers us a follow up to “All That Is Solid Melts.” Wolves features a wild pack of guest vocalists, boiler room beats, and harrowing raps slammed together and pounded out the stereo like beers after a hard day. Work is putting it in, a workman’s craft – at the bottom of hip hop’s ivory tower are the bricklayers crafting the foundation, sweat dripping from brow as their raps hurl through the stale air, the beats crush and push hard. Chew them up, the Cleaver League, Babelfishh, James P Honey, Perseph1, Mildew, and Beastmaster join in on vocals to the broken beats and classic hip hop stylings. Limited to 150 green hand-stamped cassettes.

Seez Mics – ‘Cruel Fuel’ C39 $6
Released by Crushkill Recordings on CD and digital, I had An Accident were fortunate enough to manufacture the cassette version. Limited to 100 copies, Cruel Fuel perpetuates the lyrical and poetic skills of Seez Mics. Featuring traditional hip hop influences and insightful lyrics of a darker place with a matter-of-fact style and uniqueness of voice. “Cruel Fuel” features production by beat-box extraordinaire Max Bent as well as appearances by DJ Abilities and KRISTOFF KRANE. The quality production compliments Seez Mics lyrical progression.

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SP-46 Aloonaluna/Ant’lrd – ‘Bleeding with the Moon / Sentimental Orbs’ split CS
Aloonaluna thumps cycled thoughtful homes of percussive synthesizer with a pensive energy. Vocals circle wistful and intimate over creaky bleats and beats. Ant’lrd put light on the walls, tracked things and watched modulation in bursts, staved loops. Breathy mud runner muffled – climbed and crushed coins hitting the fountain floor. Assorted distorted retorted, guitar, the odd percussion, synthesizers, voice; pedaled pushed and programed by Colin Blanton. Limited edition of 100 copies. Comes with free download code.

P-47 THE END OF THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP – ‘Balance Beam’ CS
THE END OF THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP extrudes cinematic long form drone work from a Moog synthesizer in periodic rising movements. Progression is apparent. Let the scenery change you hawing in a dither. A procession of it’s own space. Mastered by Lawrence English. Limited edition of 100 copies. Comes with free download code.

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NOOSPHERTILIZER 4-way split 2xC60 
HQ home printed & assembled artwork in side-by-side norelco case. Home dubbed in real time. The Big Drum In The Sky Religion, Gods of the Dead (Geoffrey Sexton & Frank Baugh), Tired Light, and Dmitri Zherbin. A small variety of analogous abstract and challenging 30 minute deposits. Some scorching, some deep digging, some nostalgic dreaming. Tired Light (US) provides a number of guitar based pieces, ambient & thoughtful. Intimate, rural, moving guitar-to-tape sculptures with occasional touches of field recording & alternate texture. Bowing techniques with reverbs and carefully dialed in effects bring about introspective moods pleasing to be lost in. BDSR (Virginia, US) does most of the scorching, with free form guitar noise and chaotic drums rooting into and separating portions of brain. Notions of ancient cultures, metaphysics, and self-awareness initiatives are juxtaposed with the now of electricity-propelled high volume sounds of abused stringed instrument funneled through microphones into storage media. Dmitri Zherbin (Helsinki, Finland) uses a distinctive technique of collage with (what is likely) a primitive cassette recorder, producing a warm varyingly-overdriven audio patina.  Through this veil is heard clustering tones from often indecipherable instruments and soundmakers. The feeling of the product is personal, nostalgic, hypnogogic. Beautiful strangeness evoking obscured meaningful formative memories, among other obscurities of life. Gods of the Dead (Los Angeles/Tennessee, US) drone toward visions of dystopian ruin and organic degradation, more similar to Geoffrey Sexton’s solo releases than those of Sparkling Wide Pressure. This is their first release together under this name. A variety of strange soundmakers and manipulations are utilized for a 30 minute shifting texture bog of eerie darkness.

NOOSPHERTILIZER – ‘II’ 4-way split 2xC60
HQ home printed & assembled artwork in side-by-side norelco case. Home dubbed in real time. Homogenized Terrestrials, Nigel Samways, Arma & Refusenik, and Gushing Cloud. Homogenized Terrestrials’ contribution is a dark exploration of a long deserted virtual reality, glitching and threatening to either explode itself into something overwhelmingly different or to drop out of existence entirely. Thoroughly alien feelings articulated by softwares and hardwares of the future we are living in. Nigel Samways’ 30 minutes takes the listener to cinematically sculpted emotional areas, and brings imagined spaces and times to life. Remarkable manipulations of various sounds. Wise usage of synthesizers. Perfectly chosen combinations of texture. High caliber science fiction ambient music; beautiful, strange, transporting. Arma & Refusenik deeply explore synth sound palettes, offering bizarre feelings and tone layerings. Some playing, some meditating, some frights, some anthill chaos of colliding frequencies. Bemused explorations of synthesizer sound banks and possibilities of spontaneous composition. The two are seeking the weirdest fruits from the synths in the largest quantity possible, and they’ve provided a prodigious basketful of fortuitous electric intersections. Gushing Cloud ruminates on moody beats, shattering and super-gluing them with dada-formed laptop computer technologies made in the 1960s and buried under a pile of moldy vinyl in the crawlspace of a house in rural Illinois. Mid-tempo head-nodding rhythms erupt and flicker among a din of skittering psychiatric research sound-play.

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PSALM’N’LOCKER – ‘Op. 01 Music For Dreamachine’ C62
Drone solo projekt by Luca Garino, already vocalist in Turin-based drone-folk trio How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck If A Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood? Op. 01 Music For Dreamachine, his very first release, is one 28-minute piece entirely built upon beats, also know as interferences between two sounds of slightly different frequencies. This composition, inspired by the Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, revolves around the stroboscopic 60Hz frequency  and his sinusoidal sounds – both digital and analogic – fluctuate around that frequency. The sound undergoes reinforcements and weakenings according as the waves are dissonant or concordant. The phenomenon has been electroacoustically recreated with two not perfectly tuned air organs that could alter the very same notes. Comes on trasparent one-sided tape cassette with artwork by Luca Garino himself. Limited edition of 54.

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Casual Junk zine
Casual Junk is a fanzine/publication written by me, Zully Adler, with contributions from: Breakdance the Dawn, Mad Nanna, Tracey Trance, Son of Salami, Russian Tsarlag, Orphan Fairytale, and Sea Urchin. The book is separated into chapters for each band, which combine interviews, observation, images, theories and commentary. Each chapter pivots around a theme, but also dwells on funny stories and strange possessions, pulling peripheral junk out of the bands’ personal lives and probing them for particularity. I make a loose argument for how the atmospheric details of amateur recording give this music a peculiar intimacy, transforming how I listen into an inquisitive and relational activity. Topics include Dodgers baseball, dead suburbs, hama beads, garbage and the intoxication of daily life. Each copy comes with a c90 cassette compilation and a keychain made out of garbage. Stencil-printed on sugar paper and perfect-bound. 84 pages (14 color).

Banana Head – ‘Phones the Public’ C46
“Phones the Public” holds pop music between two pairs of fingers and twists it. I try to mingle my favorite Crooner themes: melancholy, arrogance, eroticism, aggression and all the other ambivalent zones of young manhood. Vocals move between dejected baritones and naughty whispers; guitar laments transition into gushy electro r&b. Doleful refrains and low-end repetition dipped in the nimbus of my shitty digital interface.

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JASON MILLARD – ‘Second Based’ c32
Wow, such a warped and ripping solo debut from Jason Millard of Minneapolis. In case you have not been paying any attention at all; J. was the guitar man in the psych-pound group LIGHTED. Currently playing lap steel in experimental doom-rock trio MYRRH, as well being bass slinger in minimal Kyuss-jazz unit LAND. But this… this is something else entirely. We are blissed to deliver these fresh recordings to the people, providing only the most uncompromising sounds for our dedicated (glutton for punishment) listeners. An actual album of songs, all written at the time of recording, mostly 1st take. No long form improv noodle here, rather a series of concise sonic statements, mashing to congeal into thick paste for ideal forehead smear. These recordings are RAW, using the simple means of basically only voice, acoustic guitar, and tape machines. No looping pedals or fuzz distortion pedals were used in the making of this album. The results are staggering; crude glimpses of brilliance through the murk. Like ZZ Top trying to play “Meet The Residents”? Bizarre but catchy, almost tangible but severely mangled. Outsider song-smithery that puts to shame the throngs of hippy dippy “psychedelic” singer-songwriters that people seem to drool over. This sounds less like watching grass grow and more like peeling paint with gasoline. Heavy solvent fume, grotesque production values, so fucked. Difficult to accurately describe but completely unforgettable, coming to you with our highest possible recommendation. Professionally duplicated to Type II Chrome, imprinted bright orange shell cassette comes classically packaged with full color baseball card artwork in black/clear Norelco case. Includes large double sided fold-out 4” x 17” xeroxed lyric sheet, edition of 100. Prepare for vapor lock.

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