Browse: Cassettes

Whiskerman

Champions

Royal Oakie

***Champions is the epic new album from WHISKERMAN. Formed in Oakland, California in the beginning of the new millennium, Whiskerman quickly became a favorite amongst Bay Area audiences with their unique blend of folk-rock coupled with mysterious and profound lyricism and evocative instrumentation. Champions is a masterpiece of wide-ranging scope and ambition, the definitive statement from a band in their prime. Featuring barroom rock n’ roll, blue eyed soul, pastoral folk, workingman’s blues, and rainy day ragas, the album is a tour de force that takes the listener on a hero’s journey of Dostoevsky-ian proportions. The songs deal with life and love and success and failure and what it means to be alive in a world where everything is small. Features string arrangements by ANTON PATZNER (Bright Eyes, Foxtails Brigade). LP packaged in gatefold jackets with artwork by YASAMINE JUNE. (STREET DATE - 5/20/2016)

Zig Zags

Running Out of Red

Famous Class

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!! Los Angeles-based bonehead savants Zig Zags are no-nonsense ’80s style thrash with a magpie eye for deep-fried pop culture detritus. These guys give so few fucks while they are out ripping faces that it’s tough to say much about them that hasn’t been said before—they shred so that we may raise beers in non-ironic salute to their Voivod worship, to a world in which young heshers subscribe to Heavy Metal and practice early Slayer solos while watching daytime TV, to waking and baking as you watch the world burn. Running Out of Red is the soundtrack to getting high and driving around in your shitty car in your small town, occasionally getting laid…occasionally getting laid out at the local liquor store by an older dude. Gang vocals: check. 1-2 pit beat: on lock. Shredder solid state guitar heroics: ripping, and so should you, the bong is packed and I think there’s still pizza in the fridge. I can smell your pants from here, dude. (STREET DATE - 5/20/2016)

Woods

City Sun Eater In The River Of Light

Woodsist

CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. “Woods have always been experts at distilling life epiphanies into compact chunks of psychedelic folk that exists just outside of any sort of tangible time or place. Maybe those epiphanies were buried under cassette manipulation or drum-and-drone freakouts, or maybe they were cloaked in Jeremy Earl’s lilting falsetto, but over the course of an impressive eight albums, Woods refined and drilled down their sound into City Sun Eater in the River of Light, their ninth LP and second recorded in a proper studio.  “It’s a dense record of rippling guitar, lush horns and seductive, bustling anxiety about the state of the world. It’s still the Woods you recognize, only now they’re dabbling in zonked-out Ethiopian jazz, pulling influence from the low-key simmer of Brown Rice, and tapping into the weird dichotomy of making a home in a claustrophobic city that feels full of possibility even as it closes in on you. City Sun Eater in the River of Light is concise, powerful, anxious—barreling headlong into an uncertain, constantly shifting new world.” —Sam Hockley-Smith

Sonic Youth

Sister

Goofin'

“Let’s get something straight. There is no album in the entire corpus of indie rock—not Loveless, not Surfer Rosa, not Psychocandy—that reaches the heights of invention, joy, and magic of Sonic Youth’s sublime fifth album.... The haunted reveries of Sister remain with you for years, even if you only hear them once” — Stereogum. 1987’s Sister was another notch in the band's move away from No Wave, yet still maintained their experimental approach. Gordon, Moore, Ranaldo and Shelley were coming into their own at this point, combining elements of noise, punk and pop. They had also become better songwriters since their previous album, providing better context for their noisier elements and incorporating the dissonance of their earlier releases into more traditional song structures. To quote Stereogum once again, “Sister is the sonic manifestation of refracted light. It’s a record that changes you.”

Eureka California

Versus

Happy Happy Birthday To Me

***‘Summer’s here and the time is right for getting blackout drunk in the street.’ EUREKA CALIFORNIA's going way too fast, and if they don’t slow down they’re gonna crash. Like peak Elvis Costello, they think if they keep the wisecracks and the puns coming fast enough they can avoid facing the truth—that death comes for everyone and nothing dies faster than dreams. Versus, their 3rd album in 3 years, is the first one recorded in a studio and it gives EC a power they’ve never had before. It’s incredible that two people can make such a big sound, but JAKE WARD and MARIE A. UHLER have developed a near-telepathic ability after years of playing together, and while they’ve always been good, Versus is their first stab at greatness, soaked in television and gin and the kind of language you hear everyday but you never heard quite like this. Endlessly self-referential and endlessly self-destructive, stuck on an endless treadmill of tension and release, of megalomania and doubt. Versus is agoraphobic fight songs, songs about loving television more than people because people always let you down and the static from the set makes more sense than the static coming out of their mouths. EC songs exist in a world where ordering a pizza is fraught with anxiety and you have to laugh to keep from dying.

Bitchin Bajas & Bonnie Prince Billy

Epic Jammers And Fortunate Little Ditties

Drag City

***Epic Jammers & Fortunate Little Ditties” contains moments of tranquility & trance, with the players integrating their separate ways, vibing off each other, making songs together. BONNIE PRINCE BILLY is at his spirit-melting celestial best wandering through a lifetime of fortunes that amount, when incanted, to a prayer to the god of many names. The BITCHIN BAJAS’ access to the universal aural paintbox is unparalleled; their reach is deep. Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties is simple and stark and empyrean and inspirational... and pretty modal, too—probably never more than three chords!—as Bonnie and the Bajas pursue the life of the spirit down ever-fading vapor trails, in a bottomless space.

Pleasure Model

Kendo Dynamics

100% Silk

Bristol giallo disco meta-morphist Antoni Maiovvi flexes a fresh facet of his production arsenal as Pleasure Model, mapping leaner schematics of vintage cybernetic dread through stark drum machinery and cold fluorescent synthwork. Kendo Dynamics is his debut under this divergent replicant guise; it presents a persuasive world of fiber optic paranoia and technoid effacement. The album’s eight tracks trace various nuanced parallels of brooding arpeggiator jack (“Calmstone On Sea,” “Bealichtbach”), voidist new wave (“Mounnrocc,” “Dreams Of Crystal”), and blasted sci-fi body music (“Eat Itself,” “Abandonment Issues”), coaxing a mood of melancholic circuitry and souls on the brink. Data is DNA; every self, a subdivision. Slit the skin and count the pixels. One of Maiovvi’s finest futurist hours. Recorded at Mantueffelstr, Berlin, in Fall 2015.

Potions

Pushing The Cuboid

100% Silk

Eight new nubby acid permutations by Chicago’s premiere liquid electric projectionist, Potions. Sourced from a set-list of 2015 live staples, Pushing The Cuboid expands Tom Owens’ melting microchip fusion to include a more warped spectrum of bubbling concoctions. Recorded to a Tascam 4-track and digitally mixed with limited overdubs, the album oil-spills an array of fantastical wavelengths: moonbase monorail cruise (“Heel Lift,” “Space Mountain”), rubbery sarcasmic jazz (“Goof Forward,” starring Rob Frye of Bitchin’ Bajas on mult-tracked horns), outer rings cosmos shuffle (“Cool Ride”), cyber warehouse lurch (“Detroit Heart Strings”), etc. As always with Potions, there are no solid states, only alchemic flux – dissolving textures, rhythmic wobble, heavy phasing, cuboids pushed through unstable grids. In addition to Frye (whose flute and bass clarinet color the entire B Side), PTC also shows influence from Owens’ visual collaborator, Jillian Musielak, who projects mutating textural environments during performances. Speaking of: a string of spring dates throughout the heartland and west coast have been mapped to occasion the new release – catch his liquidity live if geographies allow.

Witching Waves

Crystal Cafe

Happy Happy Birthday To Me

***The winners want us to believe the world is beautiful, but WITCHING WAVES has seen the world and knows this is a lie—that everything is lost and nothing is to be trusted. We saw them open for Eureka California in the UK last year and couldn’t get the songs out of our head so we’ve jumped on the second album. EMMA WIGHAM, MARK JASPER and ED SHELLARD are Witching Waves, and they sound like exiles in their own country. Because this music is rooted in UK DIY and the only alternative to the clean smiles of 21st century surface life is dirty frowns, you might hear the fuzz, the flattened shouts, and think you’ve heard it before, but then you notice the guitars at the end of ‘Red Light,’ how they swell & buzz like an attack of locusts, and the oceanic rise & fall of album closer ‘Flowers’ and you realize that in their endless explorations of black & white, WW has created a universe of infinite textures and shade.

Carr, Kate

It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphores

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The field recordist and lucid-dream composer KATE CARR conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigations, relocating herself from her native Australia to Northern Ireland, followed by innumerable detours. Hence, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. This album from Carr intertwines the lugubrious wash of environmental detail with the dissolved songwriting described in the distant past as 'rural psychedelia' rendering an aesthetic in the orbit of :zoviet*france: or as the dub of a dub of a dub abstractions from Dome. For example, a guitar swollen with ethereal blight cycles in soft whirlpools of drone and thrum as the gloom of an irish rainstorm pours down a sewer drain. Electricity proves a nobel tool as well, as she tapes into telephone wires to extract deadtones of unanswered calls. It is as if Carr is peeling back the layers of history to uncover the ghostly stains of human existence at a particular place. The dead may not be talking; but the soil and its occupiers still do.

Himukalt

Conditions Of Acrimony

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Somewhere in the American Southwest may lie a pile of fetid cassettes, the scope and breadth of which might very well match that of the experiments with tape and electronics from Rozz Williams and Chuck Collison. In her terse exchanges with us, she once alluded to a past set of recordings without divulging them; and so for now we have this prolonged electrical cramp that marks the first published recording of HIMUKALT. The given name we know is ESTER KARKKAINN, and that's pretty much about her beyond the Nevada return address. This enigma is fitting for her work. exhaustive, claustrophobic, and cryptic, these lacerated (de)compositions address collapsed psychological states that dislocate the body, the self, and the spirit into horror, fear, doubt, hostility. Such have marked the acme for the most virulent strains of power electronics and industrial decay (e.g. Puce Mary, Anenzephalia, Maurizio Bianchi, Maria Zerfall, etc.), and this—hopefully the first of many transmissions from Himukalt—stands shoulder to shoulder next to those giants.

Segall, Ty

Emotional Mugger

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.3 rating from Pitchfork. Brand new full-length album from TY SEGALL and his first of 2016. Twelve songs!  "get in the booth—punch in the number when they pick up don’t say a word just listen shout at the double from the damned from a dry throat dry eye chuckle insistent / elastic (but never plastic) thick / butt jump pierced by the kids sweet angel voice sinister (what are they thinking) guitars sliced with scribble graffiti sprawled across the hemispheres; stuttered, stunted, dual-mono machine dreams flashing sudden stereophobic and back again / two screens alone together squeezing shaking oozing metallic pool like brain blood, slowly draining away all mental life. shaking ass / nihility at most corrodes candy’s gone no more fun." (STREET DATE - 1/22/2016)

Bonnie Prince Billy

Pond Scum

Drag City

***Received a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork. ***There are no Peel sessions anymore—that tradition was buried in the pyramids with John Peel himself upon the great man’s passing. Of the thousands left in the wake, six are ascribed to BONNIE PRINCE BILLY—and of those six, three have been combined to form the deeply congruous experience of Pond Scum. A span of eight years is covered, in reverse, and many chestnuts are rolled out, freed of former contexts with sparse arrangements. “(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit” feels, ten years from inception, more vividly worn; “Death to Everyone” is loosed from its frame, the bones decoupled and spread out, giving the song a reflective air (as opposed the biting declamation of the original); “Arise, Therefore” adapts its metronomic base, the evangelic twist of its roots made palpable. With the center of the performance in stark relief, the gnomic qualities of two “Get On Jolly” pieces are intensified. Further accenting the devoted spirit of this collection is the inclusion of “When Thy Song Flows Through Me,” from the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as the previously-unreleased original “Beezle.” Bonnie’s lone shadow casts over this lot, accompanied on the first four tracks by David Heumann, but otherwise playing solo through a set of original songs (and two covers) representing a decade of progress in the almost unbearably intimate-yet-unknowable manner that was so often the vibe of those strange and wondrous days. Peeling backwards through time produces a curious hypnosis that we may not...

Skeppet

Deluxe

Not Not Fun

Multi-instrumentalists Andreas Malm and Henrik Wallin have been triangulating a particular schematic of minimalist mantric-psychedelic instrumental music since the mid-2000s, emphasizing texture, time, and trance states. But with the exception of 2014’s Phase 3 LP, most of the group’s recordings were released as limited cassettes or vinyl in Sweden, long out of print. Skeppet Deluxe collects an assortment of these formative tracks into an hour-long mystic suite of primitivist circular sprawl. Shaping guitar, synthesizer, and percussion into fractals of FX, the ethos of Doing Less, Longer leads across varied terrain: motorik vignette, sunbleached organ vamp, drum rumble, Sky Records cruise, wah dirge, dawnbringer pop, etc. Pieces span from five to fifteen minutes; depth of repetition determines duration. As a discographical cross-section, Skeppet Deluxe revels in a vision of rustic cosmic roads and vanishing horizon lines. Of distance as illusion, and motion as meaning. Recorded from 2006-2011 in Malmö, SE. Gold metallic tapes in J-cards designed by H. Wallin. Mastered by Alex Nagle in Philadelphia, PA.

Bronze

In Stone

Not Not Fun

Few bands perplex like San Fran riddler trio Bronze but ever fewer have managed to hatch and hone such an obliquely singular sound. The group’s third long-player, In Stone, twists and burns through eight new iterations of their classic oscillator-fusion psychedelia, inflected with shades of post-punk raga, skronk lurch, modal incantantion, deep space narcosis, lizard kingmanship, and home-wired industrial dementia. As an album, these recordings skew tenser, twitchier, a touch paranoiac, bloodshot tweakers stalking steep foggy streets. The alchemy of drummer Brian Hock, vocalist Rob Spector, and electronicist Miles Friction is always riveting in the live sphere but In Stone feels like more of a studio document, exploratory and expressionistic, full of ideas and psychic interplay. Bay Area burnout rendered as psychotropic sculptural waveforms. Confusion isn’t sex, it’s something stranger. Black tapes mastered by Ruud 66 with J-cards designed by the band. Vinyl edition on B.F.E. Records.

Legendary Hearts

Music From The Elevator

Not Not Fun

Miasmic Melbourne new age prog duo Legendary Hearts (aka Andrew Cowie + Kieran Hegarty) first entered the public eye/ear in 2012 but their music has only grown more opaque with age. Music From The Elevator is their 2012 debut, originally released via the Dungeon Taxis label, and captures their chemistry in altered states of sprawl, symbiosis, and swoon. Six expressionistic oozes of infinity gauntlet guitar, slow-motion drum machines, and warping synth, filtering in and out of focus like glares against glass, unfeeling neon aglow in smoke and smog. Each piece reflects (and is named for) the next higher level of the structure, from the low-lidded fusion lurch of “Basement” up to breezy cosmosis chillouts “Rooftop” and “Fire Exit.” Long-form, liquid, nebulous, and narcotic – Legendary Hearts walk a wavelength all their own, on their own. Remastered by Lawrence English in Brisbane, Australia. J-cards designed by Britt Brown.

X.Y.R.

Mental Journey To B.C.

Not Not Fun

Russian Federation ambient fantasist Vladimir Karpov aka X.Y.R. (aka Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja) usually frames his decaying Soviet analog synthesizer pieces within “illusory worlds” – lost cities of gold (El Dorado), polar oblivion (Arktika), deserted equatorial islands (Robinson Crusoe: Lost Soundtrack) – but his latest collection less conjures a place than a time. The mood of Mental Journey To B.C. is pre-human: obscure landscapes hissing in the heat, shimmering in the dark, uninhabited, unreal. Humid loops of Formanta Mini and smoke-ring keys float over hushed jungle metronomes and moonlit field recordings. 10 shades of prehistoric haze, slipstreamed with temple chanting, distant insects, heavy echo, silhouettes of the subconscious. New Age as Ancient Age; the Portal as Process. X.Y.R.’s escape artistry continues to expand. Tinted red cassettes with red imprinting in J-cards designed by Dieter Durinck. Mastered by Alex Nagel in Philadelphia, PA.

Other Houses

Bad Reputation

Aagoo

***Bad Reputation is the first full-length LP from OTHER HOUSES, the solo moniker of multi-instrumentalist MORGAN ENOS, known otherwise as the vocalist for doom/shoegaze band HOLLOW SUNSHINE (Robotic Empire/Iron Pier). From its first moments, Bad Reputation is a noticeably different entity than Enos’ work with Hollow Sunshine and displays a remarkable departure from even preceding Other Houses EPs No Splendor (2015) and Way Out West (2015). Bad Reputation is winsome, homespun, and crackling with pop energy. While the song cycle is deeply personal, the record simultaneously fixes its eye heavenward into an intergalactic realm, where mysterious forces found in Eastern texts collide and intermingle with interstellar bodies. It’s here that Enos’ creative impulses are presented in all honesty—simple and strong arrangements, lovingly rooted in power pop and psychedelia, weaving their threads through a set of diverse songs to create an incisive, yet fully livable universe of its own. The songs, indebted to Enos’ power-pop heroes Big Star, The Byrds and Guided by Voices, keep a sense of heart, concision and personality. Yet, the most magical part of Bad Reputation’s unkempt pop mosaic is that it presents Enos (who plays every instrument featured) as a full-fledged artist, painting the night sky with strange, dazzling melodies, emboldened and willing to try anything.

Iron Lung

Cold Storage I

Iron Lung

***NOW AVAILABLE!!! A collection of EPs, comp tracks and splits from the beginning of our band up to but not including the first album Life. Iron Lung. Death. 34 tracks in total. Full color foldout sleeve with all cover art, lyrics and pressing info for all the records. Pro printed and sealed. Very chic.

Magic Circle

Journey Blind

20 Buck Spin

Who said anything about running out of ideas? The stubborn ones were born to linger, to nose out newer, more subtle permutations with the help from a few ragged fucks willing to practice them. Magic Circle mutt roll in heavy metal whatness, striking a balance with the pituitary culture it begat, and the tunes it jacked out. Suburban drag races. Basement bum wine scrum. Every collective thought burnt into a dirty tape dub of Mob Rules. Sabbath, especially in its later incarnations, hulks ephemerally among all openings, rests and codas. When Chris Corry’s and Dan Ducas’s guitars aren’t jelly-legging around Iommi, they’re rekindling “Neon Knights,” brandishing “Die Young” credo. Meanwhile, Q clubs the kit like a drunken Ginger Baker. Brendan Radigan stakes a big, black flag in vocal territory long occupied by Saint Vitus, Saxon, Armored Saint and Trouble. Bassist Justin DeTore alternates creepy crawl and thunder word belch, laying yoke over each tune and driving them predjudicially underground. But motherfuck simply “sounding” like these bands. Magic Circle celebrates them, and in doing so honors the form they have found. It’s heavy metal. Hit hard. Write riffs that clack along like rustbucket tanks into perpetuity. “Play” bass in ways that make you at once inseparable from every punch the drummer lands, and also ghosts every riff—working beneath, between, behind the rhythm. Sing that fucking story as every ancient did their Homer. It means something. It stands for something. Bring that to the tape.  And so Magic Circle does. Tunes...

Six Organs Of Admittance

Hexadic Ii

Drag City

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.8 rating from Pitchfork. Sounding forth from a resonating body, the music of SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE seems to reach us from an ancient remove. BEN CHASNY's 6OOA vehicle is a wide-ranging craft, spanning over a dozen albums whose gaze is always shifting, but whose focus never wavers, descending through a labyrinth of contrasting lexicons (both linguistic and musical) in an attempt to resolve existential codes while engaging the listener and the musician in shared pursuit. With Hexadic II, Ben Chasny’s unique touch on acoustic guitar is brought back to our ears after what feels like a kind of forever. What may signify to some ears as folk music is caught in an equally compelling undertow of powerful subterranean energy. Ghostly vocals of divergent timbres sing over the fluid interplay of guitars, harmonium, violin—and pure space, as the reverberant room around the sounds plays as much a part in the experience as the music. (STREET DATE - 11/20/2015)

Von Schleicher, Katie

Bleaksploitation

Ba Da Bing!

Released on cassette last year, Katie Von Schleicher’s Bleaksploitation took the tape world by enough of a storm to thunder demand for more formats. Consequence of Sound described her songs as “like ghosts trying to communicate through a cassette deck”; Paste claims they “sound like a vintage girl group playing in the basement of a haunted house.” This is exciting music from someone we’ll be hearing about for a long time to come. Bleaksploitation was recorded in a dark room on a Tascam 4-track cassette machine. The result is hazy, terrifying and playful. This is what happens when well-crafted songs are made in the moment, warped, drunk on themselves. Von Schleicher’s voice sinks like anchors and rises like a phoenix, wrestling its way through its very own form of basement tapes. ’70s piano rock provides the core, sad lyrics form the shell. The LP is limited to 300 copies, with silk-screened covers made by the asshole herself! They also come with liner notes by Jay Ruttenberg.

Evans, Grant

Brittle

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning of the side-long works on Brittle—a vibrant landmark in GRANT EVANS' catalogue of harsh wall noise, kosmische explorations, and dronologist collage. Beacons of monochord guitar. Radiant dispersions of glare and trill. Compacted bowed metal resonance. Interstitial ecological sounds from water, bird, and tree. Exhumed cassette minimalism. And a gasping, pulsing, morphing drone that bends around each of these sound objects. Parallels to the meticulous and wondrous bricolage by this resident of northeast Georgia can be found in Chalk, Organum, Toniutti, and Grzinich. C40.

Newsom, Joanna

Divers

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.  "Good heavens—five years go by—what can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with diversions aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads, narrated from parts unknown; a family of polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones and Moogs, clavichords and celestas—and of course the harp, thrumming its threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned Simulacreage. The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements—a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed and passing times... a round, a chant, an incantation... a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that striate, in chromatic collusion, their simultaneous arc... a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song..."

Majeure

Union Of Worlds

Constellation Tatsu

***CASSETTE ONLY RELEASE!!! Since he began moonlighting from his main gig as half of sci-fi prog powerhouse ZOMBI, multi-instrumentalist A.E. PATERRA has become increasingly renowned as the mastermind behind MAJEURE. Majeure combines the dark Moog-driven film scores of Vangelis with the relentless drive of Can and the transcendent minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The brilliant mix of live & electronic rhythms is the heart & soul of Majeure's music, and Union of Worlds is both a nod to Majeure's prior accomplishments, and a peek into a more cinematic, atmospheric world.

Saunders, Bryan Lewis / Arvo Zylo

The Pleasure Tunnel / The Temple Of Paradise

No Part Of It

***Claustrophobic dream events recorded when BRYAN LEWIS SAUNDERS had a lung infection, made even more tense and surreal by the addition of ARVO ZYLO's magic. The slow, droning cacophony of “The Pleasure Tunnel” picks up depth as it grows. The whistles and wheezes of Saunders are still there, but the noise is enveloping, a bassy drive that closes in. “The Temple of Paradise” starts more abrasively and settles into whirring, echoing drones – dreamy, then colossal bass. Disconnectedness, jolting and mesmerizing. Includes written transcripts of Saunders’s dreams and a download coupon.

Sebadoh

KCRtroubleyou

Shrimper

Classic 1999 live recording of Sebadoh on air getting into it with the DJ & hitting the seldom seen highs & lows of live music on the air. Liner notes by & artwork by Lou Barlow. Edition of 300

V/a

Shrimper 25th Anniversary Cassette

Shrimper

Celebrating 25 years of Shrimper whose first cassette came out way back then. Features exclusive, brand new recordings by Calexico, The Babies, Simon Joyner, John Davis, Woods, Refrigerator, Franklin Bruno, WCKR SPGT, Liz Gilbert, Dump & Paste. Hand numbered/colored edition. Folded in the Callaci home by some of yer fave Shrimper recording artists. Edition of 300. Proceeds donated to EarthBagNepal for victims of Nepal earthquake.

Latter, The

Ivorics

Empty Cellar

It has been said that there are two sides to Tim Cohen, frontman for The Fresh & Onlys and Magic Trick. Cohen, however, is a man with many sides. Perhaps you are you aware of his producer / engineer side via his work with Cool Ghouls, Wet Illustrated, The Dry Spells, etc. Or maybe you are in the know when it comes to his black metal side as AmocomA (tUMULt). But… are you aware of his MC side? You read that right!  A decade before he surfaced as a San Francisco garage icon, Cohen spit fire under the alias "Feller Quentin" in hip hop collective The Latter. This cassette, Ivorics, contains over a dozen original hip hop tracks by the group, written and recorded between 1998 and 2003. The beats are dope (by Feller Quentin and Eddie Vic). The lyrics are fresh. The styles are incomparable. Limited to 100 cassettes.

Mr. Bronson

Trans Pacific

100% Silk

Melbourne hardware flatliner Mr. Bronson (aka Andrew Broughton) strips tracks back to their strobing skeletons, lean sequences of poly-synth and 707, a spiraling infinity window across Oceania. Motion does not equal movement; Pacific vertigo is its own reward. The eight woozy waveforms of Trans Pacific traverse overlapping strands of tranced acid, throbbing bass, and minimal synthesizer design, alternately stealthy and slogged, a low-slung speedboat in the dusk approaching Ball’s Pyramid. Previous limited lathes on his Bad Party imprint have explored similarly endless grids but the cuts collected here cruise the furthest into Mr. Bronson selfhood ritual, raw constructs of mantric pulse and drum machinery, gear in flight. Mastered by Alter Echo.

Nackt

Virex

100% Silk

A decade-plus duration of Bay Area electronic community building has distilled Johnny Igaz’s production alias Nackt down to its rubbery, resinous essence. Virex captures the project in its purest state: all live, all hardware, traced in curvilinear acid. The collection flows from fog machine night-stalk (“Full Coat,” “Ford”) to grooved mothership jack (“Black Widow,” “Trash Brothers”) to 303 soul ("Husk"), cut with verve and variance. Outpost party co-founder CM-4 shares much of the writing and production credit, frequently joining Nackt for live hardware PA performances. A squad of other SF house associates – Michael Claus (Outpost), Jason Key (Rotation), Doc Sleep (Jacktone) – cameo with drum patterns, 303 design, and additional production duties. Both alone and in collaboration Nackt conjures a riveting chemistry: lean, liquid, mechanized, and mesmerizing. Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Roche

Dawn Of The Next Cycle

100% Silk

Ben Winans’ work as Roche resists niches and deadzones, threading through various outer rings of electronic trance, proto-techno, and unnamed house. His latest logbook of tracks, Dawn Of The Next Cycle, spirals as deep as ever into red-eyed trips of pulsing, gaseous patterns, electric body music reflections on “a world at war, a world that is falling apart, or perhaps reforming.” Shades of tribal jack, slap bass, submerged disco, cyber club, and programmer haze interweave and evaporate; nebulous melodies swell and dissolve; cycles dawn and die. Adapt or collapse – both man and machine. Even more than on previous releases, here Winans wields an innerspace touch, sinuous and circular, heavy-lidded like a horizon line. It’s always darkest before the Dawn. Recorded in San Francisco, California and mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Conda, Sasha

Bronco

Not Not Fun

*** The muse of BRONCO is Bronco Stephenson, a morally naïve cyber hedonist strutting ever deeper into the bowels of a dystopian capitalist arena called the Palace Interior, where he must eventually face a day of reckoning with “the true computer heart of the world.” The album acts as journey and destination, each piece reflecting his geography / mental state, from iridescent vape shops and electrode funkadelica into “the deeper, darker, questionably legal” inner sanctum of flickering fluorescent hallways and hacker pulse-programming.  Conceived by Minneapolis musician and MJ MJ Records CEO Sasha Conda in collaboration with writer Patrick Scott-Walsh III, whose 24-page narrative accompanies the release, BRONCO maps its hero’s quest across a linear 7-song cycle of decadent casino fusion boogie, neon waterfall 2-step, sci-fi new wave, and spherical synthesizer dirge  – fantasy-as-escape meets escape-as-fantasy. The text spills the story in ways both graphic and cryptic:   “At street level, the lights of the overwhelming hyperterranean Palace Interior are temporarily denied. Bronco sprints, gun in hand, passed the line for the public multipurpose privacy stalls, fitting himself through the density of bodies, to the line of mirrors and sinks.  He pulls his pants down … and puts cold water on the burn. The sound of pain/relief escapes through his gritted teeth, on top of the muffled sizzle of his flesh. The still bubbly lettering spelling EFFORTLESS is now adorned above his sheared pubic hair.”   Pro-dubbed cassettes mastered by Neil Weir in oversized cases with artwork by Keith Rankin, plus...

Colossal Yes

Surrounded By Progress

Ba Da Bing!

Utrillo Kushner, main conveyor of Colossal Yes' ivory melodics and Comets On Fire's percussive juggernauts, takes Brutalism to new levels on "Surrounded By Progress," the soundtrack to a science-fiction dystopian tale yet to be written. The music here remains wordless and instrumental, interconnecting biological rhythms with a sky the color of a television turned to a dead channel. The initial rush of inhumanity disguises the human heart at the center of "Surrounded by Progress," a living and breathing document the Monks of the Order of St Leibowitz would deify up for endless study.

Cronin, Claire

Over And Through

Ba Da Bing!

In anticipation of Came Down A Storm, Claire Cronin's full band collaboration with John Dieterich (Deerhoof) which Ba Da Bing will release next Spring, we present this Best Of compiling her solo songs of the past few years. Cronin's songs are sparse, deep, and dark, and her gravelly voice reaches unexpected levels of emotional beauty. There's something Jason Molina going on here, by way of Karen Dalton and Neil Young. Cronin is currently working towards a PhD in poetry at University of Georgia, and her lyrics reflect the intelligence and insight of someone so devoted to the written word.

Earth Jerks

The West Is A Mess

Ba Da Bing!

One guy. A keyboard, a few pedals (reverb, delay, tremolo, fuzz) and that's it. The guy, (me) has been in bunch of other bands; most notably, I played drums in Death Sentence: PANDA! (who had records out on Upset the Rhythm and a couple other Euro labels). I classify the jams as surf rock and honestly the point of reference is more Sunset Strip `66 than Berlin* or Cologne `72.  Earth Jerks is a very pro-California entity.  * RIP Moebius

Wand

1000 Days

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.0 on Pitchfork. The plan, it turns. Some many revolutions in a year, in a life. WAND launch their third album in what can only be called the relative blink of an eye, and it is 1000 Days. This year’s last year: August of 2014 was Ganglion Reef, Wand’s debut album release, on GOD?, reveling in their dark circuits and three-ring modulations. Following that, they ranged from their south-Cali base, towing their sound around this maze of interstates and state routes. Shows of all kinds were playing, plenty of people to meet up with on the way. Hands across the water: Europe got booked. And suddenly, just look over your shoulder—it was March of 2015, with a second album entitled Golem (this time on In the Red) trailing Wand’s sound farther down the road, past the sky, into storm and casino food. No time to spare; more dates to be played across the landmass. And another set of European dates later, 1000 Days. One year in the life of Wand so far: the world—some beyond.

Bitchin Bajas & Natural Information Society

Automaginary

Drag City

***NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY, like their partners in time BITCHIN BAJAS, live their days in flow motion. Rhythms come and go, instruments sound as a means to a greater end. Their debut convergence, Automaginary, feels as natural as it does inevitable. Both groups were first heard in 2010, both emerging from solo endeavors that accessed a vastness, more room than a single player might ultimately fill—a place then for fellow travelers! JOSHUA ABRAMS, a questing bassist and improviser by trade, with an extensive discography of solo recordings and collaborations with a wide variety of artists, formed Natural Information Society as a conduit for the live presentation o f his guimbri music. Abrams had delved into the sound of the three-stringed Gnawan lute on his own, intrigued by the instrument’s ability to provide melodic and rhythmic direction with a minimal, hypnotic palette. Known for the drone also are Bitchin Bajas. Both Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas are in pursuit of the unconscious in their musical expression, and through their independent methods, both have ridden the wind to unseen places, using the playing as the carpet that will take them there. LPs packaged in silkscreened jackets with art from LISA ALVARADO.

Dope Body

Kunk

Drag City

***CHECK STOCK!!! Reveived a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork. Since 2008, DOPE BODY have been refining and redefining their own kind of hard rock music, a sound that has many tributaries flowing into it, but one that is definitely coming through a group that could only happen in the post—ALL the shit mashup of 21st century schizo, man! Kunk is essential, coming from the marrow of Dope Body. While laying tracks for Lifer, they were prepared, ready to go, with the material in their grip, under their hands. Tense, with the anxiety that comes from the rendering process: you gotta get that flesh stripped off, so try and clear your mind and get it done. But in between takes, they relaxed, let their animal selves out, blew steam. Creativity sparked and new music flew. Catharsis was in the house. Lifer got done, but nobody could get over those moments, and at a certain remove, they went back and said, man—are these the next songs? They were—and the songs were already written and recorded. Dope Body are in a four-way conversation here, with drums, guitar, bass and vocals all pushing it around. Leaning into the future, mindlessly, just reacting, the jams of Kunk are shimmering, alive with a simmering sizzle. Swirling jams that pound and float, cloudlike, associating segmentally like a naturally growing train of thought. Kunk rolls forth with funk and flutter, plenty of riffs, stuttering and structure gleaming in the air. It’s a juggling act, and no balls hit the...

Auscultation

L'étreinte Imaginaire

100% Silk

Auscultation is Madisonian-gone-Oregonian musician Joel Shanahan’s outlet for slinkier, more subliminal productions, as inaugurated on last year’s sprawling self-titled debut for 1080p Collection. His sophomore set, L’étreinte Imaginaire (which translates generally as imaginary embrace), was recorded off and on across France and Wisconsin throughout the last year, during and between various regional tours. The album’s seven selections swerve through jazzy, sunflared house (“Black Window,” “Composure Fuzz”), glimmering rhythm (“Stranded Love”), and misted, moody electronics (“Drop Off,” “Lost You In The Fog”). As with Shanahan’s work via Golden Donna and elsewhere, structures spiral and slide, textures phase in and out of focus, and a mood of heavy longing hovers in the headphones. Even so, the sense of focus and craft-sharpening here is unambiguous; these pieces are among his most plasmatic, pensive, and aerodynamic. Slow growth on a shadowed vine. The embrace may be imaginary but the touch feels real. Mastered by Alter Echo.