Swanox

Swanox

Rhodyrunner

Not Not Fun

West coast riddler Anthony Boruch-Comstock aka Swanox has laid low in recent years but his cracked, contemplative vision of Golden State malaise has only refined in the interim. Rhodyrunner unspools a five-song cycle of heavenly dirge, outer sunset guitar, skeletal slow-core, Pacific lullaby, and glacial roadhouse psych. Assisted by Texan riffer Joe Knight aka Rangers on bass, synth, and extra guitar, plus Sam Rezendes on “Wrong Jury,” the tracks trace a twilit road trip through Bay Area badlands and gentrified future ruins. It’s music of reflective private depths, swirling beneath rusted bridges spanning old worlds and new truths.

Swanox

Jokes About Rain

Not Not Fun

Bay Area psychic panhandler Anthony Boruch-Comstock Orion’s music loiters in a limbo between vision and vagrancy, open roads and empty pockets, dreams and dead ends. Across seven storied years the Swanox sound has distilled but not domesticated, winding through junky back streets of hitchhiker Americana, surrealist storytelling, dada piano, cosmic Casio tone, flophouse folk, and amnesiac ambience. Jokes About Rain reworks a selection of songs from his limited 2013 cassette on Bezoar Formations alongside an array of new and unreleased tracks for a fresh collage of coastal crossroads, sunken eyes, and West Coast wanderlust. Recorded from 2010 to 2015 in various apartments, bedrooms, and bunkers across San Francisco (with the exception of one Neil Young cover tracked in in Los Angeles), the album feels loose, lost, and liminal, a rambler’s lament for lives in the rearview. What falls but never gets hurt? Dedicated to “every guitar player I’ve played with, learned from, or been inspired by.” Additional instrumentation and mixing by Sam Rezendes. Mastered by Paul Oldham. Cover artwork by Sean Hewitt and AOBC.

Swanox

Duskrunner

Not Not Fun

A sequel of sorts to his 2010 cassette, Dawnrunner, Anthony Orion’s debut vinyl long-player is a vagrant classic of stringy-haired new age loner Americana, above and beyond anything in the Swanox public domain. Mixing personal Casio squatter meditations with crystal jukebox guitar and hitchhiker whistling over echo-smeared SK1 metronomes, Duskrunner feels hungover, spaced out, worn down, and at peace – sometimes all at once. The ex-projectionist and current touring drummer for Tony Molina slowly refined the record’s nine songs across several itinerant years in San Fran’s Sunset District, between sublets, day jobs, evictions, work trips, couch life, and muggings. You can hear it: his is a voice muffled and downcast, nights lost smoking cigarettes on the fire escape, the lights of the Golden Gate swooping up dimly into the fog. “There’s a sign at my bar / and it reads NO LOCALS.” Strangeness and truths from an artist apart. Mixed, assembled, and “saved” by Sam Rezendes at Unified Stations Audio. Artwork and design by Sean Hewitt and Alex Coxen (of Milk Music). Comes with a Tres Hombres-inspired foldout poster of a wastoid’s feast. Mastered by Carl Saff. Edition of 299. 

Swanox

Dawnrunner

Not Not Fun

Anthony Swanox has been shadow-walking the greater west coast for a half decade-plus, operating in various capacities, from helming moss-cult imprint Caligula Recordings to contributing percussion for live Sudden Oak actions to his own erratic stream of tranced private modes under the Swanox moniker. Past CDRs and tapes were bathed in a blacker light, doom-haunted and sludge-strewn, but Dawnrunner hitchhikes down a markedly different road. The album opens with a hot springs soak in glowing, long-form new age ritual electricity before dissolving across a patchwork of mumbled, loner drone-folk and hypnotized dusk hikes through fields of wet ferns. A strange collection of questing songs from a fringe Pacific lifer.