Browse: Cassettes

Mentally Ill

Gacy's Place - The Starbeat Sessions

Last Laugh

***“Does the phrase 'total Killed By Death destruction' mean anything to you? Gacy’s Place, the defining ’79 anthem from Illinois’ MENTALLY ILL, ranks among the most disgusting and drool-inducing jams of the genre—a life-ruining classic for sure. This 12″ includes that fabled debut 45 and the other cuts from the same session, all wretched, painfully scuzzy punk. Alternative Tentacles unearthed this crapola at the turn of the century, but Almost Ready has thankfully trimmed all the fat from the rancid USDA KBD beef here, resulting in a frightening slab of fuck sure to poison the mind of any listener. Hard to beat.”—MRR #436

Vertonen

Broken Air

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Vertonen is the work of Blake Edwards, a veteran of the Chicago noise and experimental scene. With close to 100 releases many of them published through his own Crippled Intellect Productions and Ballast imprints spread over several decades, Edwards has finetuned his craft of cryptically inclined, electronic invocations that might channel the raw brutality of industrial machinery or the existential claustrophobia of a submariner's voyage nearing its untimely end. There are numerous aesthetic facets to the Vertonen oeuvre - scabrously harsh noise, zoned-out isolationism, roughly tactile cacophonics, polished smooth harmonics. Yet, much of the work is tied to a conceptual precision that informs if not agitates his sounds to act.  Broken Air is the first album for Vertonen to produce for The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Edwards cites both Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau and Butoh icon Kazuo Ohno as profound influences to the construction of Broken Air, in Edwards' own words "to explore the boundaries between the limited and unlimited capabilities of 'communication' in its broadest definition." It is electricity itself that becomes the primary medium for Edwards on Broken Air, as he extracts the errata from outdated and damaged equipment. A particular brand of radio interference leaps out of the stereo field at the onset of the album, interjecting its signal across smoldering noise from Edwards' electronic instability, starved of voltage or succumbing to old age. A monochromatic dead-circuit tone flutters in various phased states as a gird to Edwards' investigations. What sounds like an abject mutation of a...

Fuccillo, Jeff & Allen Callaci

Beyond Thunderdome

Shrimper

Peyote buttons. Bread infused with chia seeds and wheat germ. Home jail tattoos of your annoying parrot. That is what has occupied so much of our Covid-19 lockdown time. In the curious case of Jeff Fuccillo and Allen Callaci, they spent those early halcyon days of the lockdown finding odd places in their homes to record and pass files to one another as they pieced together a set of covers from the 1980’s. The Shrimper/Union Pole co-release sees the fellas turn songs by Pavement, Quarterflash, Crowded House, Prince and others inside out. You may know Fuccillo as the head honcho of Union Pole, a member of The Irving Klaw Trio or for that collaborative record he did with John Fahey. Allen’s work outside of his band Refrigerator has included collaborations with Adam Lipman, Falcon Eddy and a forthcoming team up for a song with Shrimper stalwarts Goosewind. The cover art features a spectacular drawing of our two lads being led out of the wasteland by Tina Turner as drawn by Allen Callaci. A more fitting cover for these times, I can’t properly imagine.

Eisenberg, Wendy

Auto

Ba Da Bing!

Drawing the connections between Wendy Eisenberg’s releases feels like undertaking a wide-ranging investigation. Albums of wildly inventive guitar, tempo-shifting avant rock and curiously leftfield pop fit together as offerings of Eisenberg’s curious mind. On Auto, their most innovative and inner-reaching album yet, Eisenberg explores emotional, subjective truth, and how it interacts with an objectivity no person alone can grasp. Inspired by the solo work of Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) and David Sylvian’s Blemish, with playing skills that have already seen them climbing Best Guitarist lists and an unvarnished vocal immediacy, Wendy Eisenberg has created an album of subtle display that resonates with maximal impact.  Auto has multiple meanings. First, automobile: “A lot of these songs were written about and mentally take place when I’m in the car on my way to gigs,“ says Eisenberg. Immediate melodies came to them on these trips, to which they’d later add complex guitar parts. And automata: “I make myself into a machine, which is why everything that’s played is precise.” Finally, they frame their work in the literary technique of auto-fiction, “the semi-fictionalized presentation of the self in a narrative form of growth,” as Eisenberg sees it.  The album served as a means toward working through emotional conflicts from adolescent trauma and PTSD, and dissects the dissolution and conflict that led towards the breakup of their former band. With much of it written while its events played out, Auto faces the grief of losing what one thinks is their future while experiencing a dramatic...

Durham, Christopher Alan

Bread & Wine

Soft Abuse

Another trip around the block with Christopher Alan Durham, a Detroit songwriter that manages to collapse the sensibilities of Jim McCarthy (Godz), Jim Shepard and Peter & Graeme Jefferies into his own particular songforms & Midwest worldview. Bread & Wine is the second album to appear under his good Christian name, but C.A.D. is no newcomer. His hand has been in some exceptional underground ensembles from the past decade, like The Bibs, Quilt Boy, and Roach Clip (and solo as Church Shuttle, among others), and his label All Gone has exposed the attentive among us to the genius racket of he and his cohorts. Revel in his communion.

Proclamation

Advent Of The Black Omen

Nuclear War Now

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  The long-awaited repress of Proclamation’s debut of unrelenting bestial black metal, in the unmistakable style of legends such as Blasphemy, Beherit, Impurity, and Sarcofago. Originally released in June of 2006. One of four Proclamation albums to be reissued in 2020/21.

Proclamation

Execration Of Cruel Bestiality

Nuclear War Now

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The long-awaited repress of Proclamation’s third album of unrelenting bestial black metal, in the unmistakable style of legends such as Blasphemy, Beherit, Impurity, and Sarcofago. Originally released in August of 2009. One of four Proclamation albums to be reissued in 2020/21.

Proclamation

Nether Tombs Of Abaddon

Nuclear War Now

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The long-awaited repress of Proclamation’s fourth and final album of unrelenting bestial black metal, in the unmistakable style of legends such as Blasphemy, Beherit, Impurity, and Sarcofago. Originally released on January of 2012. One of four Proclamation albums to be reissued in 2020/21.

Cyclist, The

Weather Underground

100% Silk

2020's tense, tectonic unrest is a fitting foreground for Andrew Morrison's freshest slab of bruised and blasted Cyclist productions, Weather Underground. Like their ravaged revolutionary group namesake, these tracks exude a mood of strife, shadows, and smoke, simmering protest transmissions from the grim north. The songs smear shades of industrial hypnosis, basement dub, and soul lament within his signature saturated “tape throb” palette like tagged concrete stained by tear gas. Rhythms of release and resistance, bodies in motion on the edge of the storm, coiled to strike for futures too unthinkable to lose.

Minerva, Maria

Soft Power

100% Silk

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Tallinn’s top leftfield pop export breaks her half-decade solo hiatus with a choice collection of daydream discotheque classics: Soft Power. Recorded between Hollywood and Calabasas over the last few years, and co-produced by Dzang studio pro Adam Gunther, the album is pure Minerva: high and low, heady and hedonistic, deadpan diva designs for neon nights and mirage dance floors. She starts off seductive (“hey pretty baby it’s been a while / haven’t seen your lovely face for a long time”), then sways through an array of bedroom bangers and crushed crystalline ballads, crooning and swooning, autobiographical electronica spanning Detroit to New York, London to L.A. Songs of intimacy and illusion, impatience and introspection, of cutting loose and being cut off, left wanting more: “Taste this love till the morning sun.” Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Pleasure Model

C.M.T.I.E. Manual

100% Silk

The don of data bank hijack house returns with his sleekest and bleakest technoid tunnel rat opus: C.M.T.I.E. Manual. Explicating a dystopian corporation’s psychonaut expansionist agenda (“Corporate Macrodosing for Technological Innovation and Efficiency”), the tracks trace a policy of liminal lysergics, automated motion, and sequential circuitry, lit by the iridescence of laser face scans. Pleasure Model 3.0 operates optimally but its grids flicker with strange sentience and opaque moods, conflicted systems in friction with their directives. Programming is brainwashing; no intelligence is artificial.

Hasufel

Lamentations Of The Foul High Priest

So Called Hell

Southern California carrion crawler Hasufel's third full-length is both its most atmospheric and most unholy, unfurling like clouds of cursed smoke from the mouth of a crumbling tunnel. High priest Helmut's synth throbs and fogged tomb groans lurk in the lower depths while cloaked collaborator Ryan Parrish summons serpentine wind currents on kaval and Egyptian ney, woven within subtle field recordings of dripping caverns, midnight insects, graveyard bells, and rumbling tectonics. Like recent Chondritic Sound collection Winter On The Hill Cumorah, Lamentations is laced with Latter-day Saints malevolence, channeling a palette of dark ambient and occult ritual into eerie electro-acoustic exorcisms. Music of bewitchment and banishment, cast into shadows south of heaven.

Uilos

I: Dark Night Of The Soul

So Called Hell

Out of the white-forested wilds of Western Canada comes the dungeon debut of a secluded siren's shadow self: Uilos. Named for star-like flowers found growing on graves around the Gate Of Silver during the journey into Gondolin, the project's inaugural volume threads 37 minutes of mystic, mournful instrumentals into a shimmering saga of hidden hermits, seductive dragons, and beheaded knights. Each of the eight tape-hazed tracks wavers between woe and wonder, moonrises viewed from craggy peaks, ageless quests of isolation, synthesizer, guitar, and grief: Dark Night Of The Soul. Numinous blooms for final resting places.

V/a

Shrimper: A Psst Compilation

PSST

***A 30th anniversary reissue of the debut Shrimper cassette. The first Shrimper cassette was not on Shrimper, it was on a label called PSST. The name of the only proper release on PSST was a compilation entitled Shrimper. The cassette, “Shrimper” was, for the most part, an amalgamation of various bands related to The Bux (the pre-Refrigerator band of Allen & Dennis Callaci) & KSPC DJ’s. The Jim Bishop Guitar Army, Punk Rock, The Sunday Supper Club & Welfare all featured DJ’s from KSPC; Girlhole, Pigsnuff, Mark, Asshole Mouth & The Satnam Puppets were offshoots of The Bux. Also featured on the tape is a live cut by The Deli Creeps (Featuring gtr maven Buckethead and the unique voicings of Barnum in their bizarro horror/comedy begins), Oskar Meyer (A bridge from the nascent LA punk scene of the late 70’s to the Inland Empire. He was in circles that featured Geza X. This limited edition reissue includes original cover art as well as the original PSST catalog from 1990.

Refrigerator

Lonesome Surprize

Shrimper

The earliest Refrigerator recordings surfaced in 1991 on the Shrimper cassette “Lonesome Surprize”. Lovingly remastered from the original sequenced tape by Steve Folta, this limited edition cassette reissue features brand new liner notes by Allen & Dennis Callaci recalling the origin of these songs. The hand painted covers offer an upgrade to the first edition, with the shell containing its sharpied “X” that also figured on the orignal issue. The cassette features the brothers along with Joel Connel ex of Pillsbury Hardcore and then a budding member of Man Is The Bastard.

Coral Club

Nowhere Island

Not Not Fun

Moscow electribalist Alexander Sirenko birthed Coral Club in 2016 but the bulk of his debut didn't emerge until 2019, in the wake of a particularly “depressive winter” when the solar thaw of spring struck “like a lifeboat.” Long forest walks sparked a multi-sensory reawakening of rainbow electronics, spiral melody, field recordings, and FX, wondrous but wobbly, like rhythms roused from heavy hibernation, blinking in the beautiful glare. Tracked live in lengthy improvisational sessions, Nowhere Island's nine swirling songs span a spectrum of ecosystems and energies, from dense mystic rainforest to glittering psychedelic tide pools to dusk coastlines dotted with distant fires. In places the album evokes an explorer's audiobook, questing into alien terrain with multi-directional microphones, but elsewhere Sirenko scrambles any illusion, reveling in surges of tape hiss and synthetic noise, possessed by the joyous catharsis of burning maps to places that don't exist.

мхи и лишайники [Mosses & Lichens]

Piss On The World

Not Not Fun

Нассать на мир ["Piss On The World"] is a Russian doll of dystopian sci-fi industrial-synth mythologies. The premise is: on the last day of 1987 an unidentified numerology-obsessed time-traveller recorded five songs of cathode-blasted Cold War cold wave out of misanthropic desperation at having become locked in a time loop, reliving the same day, unable to die. Modeling his music on esoteric Polish art group Oneiron, he released the album via vanguard underground outpost PSI, then disappeared, fate unknown. The music’s actual creator, мхи и лишайники [Mosses & Lichens], tracked the album in two days on New Year's Eve 2018, using battered synthesizers, drum machines, and a 4-track at the home of Oneiron’s founder Andrzej Urbanowicz, who passed away in 2011. The songs sound appropriately trapped in time, tape-hazed and grey-scale, minimal-wave relics scavenged from some rusted basement dimensional gateway. Occasionally a stray voice cut through the purgatory smog (“your move, creep”) but the bulk of it seethes in psychic malaise, Eastern bloc electronics blasted from and for the void.

V. Kristoff

Sydra

Not Not Fun

Elusive electronicist and co-captain of the Jungle Gym ambient assembly line Jared Carrigan has cycled through a gallery of aliases across the past half decade but his recent work as V. Kristoff ranks among the most refined and rapturous in his vast catalog. Sydra sequences 11 mesmeric explorations of texture and time dissolution into a shadowy aquamarine odyssey, recorded in California and Catalonia using an array of compact equipment; some tracks were crafted using only an iPhone and FX plug-ins while sleeping in cars along Costa Brava last spring.  Like the ancient water clocks alluded to in its title, these pieces capture V. Kristoff at his most liquid and systemic, percolating synthetics shaped into potent tools of mirage and reflection. But the passage of time is never neutral: serenity sinks toward dread as easy as glass frosted by breath. The album grows more opaque and ominous as it deepens, the minutes a shivering spiderweb traced in the dust of our unbecoming.

Callahan, Bill

Gold Record

Drag City

***For his first record in….uh, well, just a little over a year (!), BILL CALLAHAN’s given us his first Gold Record. You could probably call the album “Gold Records” too: all the songs have a stand-alone feel, like singles, meant for you to have a deep encounter with all of a sudden, from the start of the song to the finish. And what do you got when you have a record full of singles—and let’s face it, hit singles, at that? That’s a Gold Record for you. From the top, it’s clear this is music with an affection for people, as Bill immediately slips easily and deeply into his characters. Among them: a limo driver, a watcher of television, a suitor, a man in a broken-down car, a reader of books, a Ry Cooder superfan, and in the closing number, a wanderer who “notices when people notice things”. The voices of the people, with their ups and downs, their loss and laughter. You can feel the love.  Basics were recorded live with MATT KINSEY playing guitars, guitars, guitars and JAIMIE ZURVERZA holding it down “and then letting it go” on bass. Drums and horns were brought in for a couple songs. Spirits were high! Six out of the ten were done first take; overdubs, when needed, came equally quickly. Listening, one hears their intuitive cohesion coming together richly behind Bill’s titanic voice spread across the stereo spectrum: the gentle conversation of Bill and Matt's guitars, the subtle percussion of...

Beherit

The Oath Of Black Blood

Nuclear War Now

NWN! is honored to release this definitive reissue of The Oath of Black Blood. Often regarded as the first BEHERIT album, The Oath of Black Blood is a compilation of Beherit’s Demonomancy demo and the Dawn of Satan’s Millennium EP, both of which were originally released in 1990. Beherit never intended for these recordings to be released as a compilation LP; a dispute with their label, Turbo Music, resulted in the label’s unilateral decision to compile the earlier recordings rather than wait for a proper album of new material, as Beherit intended. Nevertheless, for many people, The Oath of Black Blood was their introduction to Beherit, causing many to assume it was recorded as a proper album. Both Demonomancy and Dawn of Satan’s Millennium represent inflection points in Beherit’s evolution. Picture LP with clear rim and a photo of Nuclear Holocausto on side B. Housed in 3mm jackets printed on thick cardstock. Includes 12" insert and 24"x24" poster of the cover art.

Sweeping Promises

Hunger for a Way Out

Feel It

***Straight from the depths of an unused Boston-area concrete laboratory comes the debut of Sweeping Promises. Written and recorded with a patented "single mic technique" just before quarantine, "Hunger for a Way Out", is a post-punk leaning gem of unpolished DIY sound. The title track kicks things off in absolutely classic fashion, full of spirited hooks that echo the early Rough Trade sound. Angular guitars and sharp synth notes float atop a raw rhythm section, while Lira Mondal's effervescent vocals truly define Sweeping Promises' sound. There's something simple yet otherworldly about these tracks - you have the DIY prowess of Kleenex/LiLiPUT and Girls at Our Best!, a brooding new wave-y minimal synth sound woven in, and an undeniable pop-leaning appeal captured in vibrant monaural glory. It's hard to mistake these ten tracks of naturally urgent and driving post-punk for anything other than sheer brilliance. Sweeping Promises deliver in spades on "Hunger for a Way Out".

Hauras

In These Coming Days

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Hauras is the newly christened project for Howard Ryan, an idiosyncratic San Francisco musician who had previously operated under the Snickers moniker. This new name Hauras translates from the Finnish as ‘fragile,’ and a certain fragility exists as a dialectic condition to Ryan’s strange sounds. The argument could be made that Ryan is a deconstructionist of the archetypal ‘rock’ song, dissembling it into eerie echoes of guitar noise and narcoleptic vocals, something akin to Michael Morely’s work as Gate or a particular vein within Richard Youngs’ vast oeuvre (coincidentally, Ryan has collaborated with Youngs).  At the same time, one could easily defend the position that Ryan is an alchemist, assembling the base elements of tone and dissonance that always manage to self-manifest into the sonic equivalent of a homunculus, thus appearing similar to the perverse occlusions of Death & Beauty Foundation, one of the more enigmatic projects of England’s hidden reverse. From either position, the results from Hauras are peculiar, strange, and often uncanny. Once brought (into) existence, musical forms crumble and fall apart in real time through intransitive mantras of repetitive guitar strum and the occasionally whispered vocal incantation.  In These Coming Days is the debut recording for Hauras on the Helen Scarsdale Agency, and Ryan posits these songs concerning themselves with the psychology of a society at the end of civilization. Prescient for sure, as all of the music here was recorded well before the plague struck the globe. Ryan agitates this gilded decay further with...

Tough Age

Which Way Am I?

Mint

Tough Age continue to change shape on their fourth album, Which Way Am I? Drifting into unexplored territories of dreamy guitar workouts while expanding their instrumentation to include flute, synths, and organs, they hit fresh strides on this eleven-song set. Cultivating the collaborative approach of their last album, Shame, this album finds bassist / vocalist Penny Clark contributing lead vocals on three songs with music written by guitarist / vocalist Jarrett Evan Samson. Side one’s shorter run-times fight against the current with frenetic agitation, while side two’s meditative, melancholy songs welcome death’s sweet embrace. While they originated in Vancouver, Tough Age has since been based in Toronto since 2015 as a trio consisting of Samson, Clark, and drummer Jesse Locke (Simply Saucer, Chandra). Establishing themselves locally while touring across Canada, the U.S. and Japan, they have honed their approach to the point of psychic connection.  Which Way Am I? was once again recorded with producer Peter Woodford at his Montreal studio the Bottle Garden (Homeshake, TOPS, Tess Roby) and mixed by Mint veteran Jay Arner. The influence of New Zealand and Australia is still evident, yet they also introduce new colours into their musical palette, from hooky Television Personalities punk, to the placid calm of Clark singing in a tone similar to Cate Le Bon. “Maybe the biggest musical inspiration over the last few albums has been The Feelies,” Samson says. “Not necessarily in terms of songwriting or feel but in how they evolved and changed during the course...

Bishop, Sir Richard

Oneiric Formulary

Drag City

***Five years after Tangier Sessions, SIR RICHARD BISHOP, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transmuted for our mortal ears’ enjoyment. The last couple of Sir Richard Bishop releases on Drag City were genre exercises of sorts—The Freak of Araby explored the musical legacy of late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid while Tangier Sessions explored the sound of an obscure 19th century guitar that Rick had acquired from a mysterious Swiss luthier. The title Oneiric Formulary, may sit contrarily on the tongue—but we may refer to it as representing “a collection of dream states”—which means we like it! With such a lofty goal in mind and at his fingertips, Sir Rick returns to the approach of his DC debut, Polytheistic Fragments—a different sound, a different instrument, for nearly every track, drawing from the music of all nations, including and especially that infamous republic with only one person on the census roll (initials SRB).

Jackie Lynn

Jacqueline

Drag City

***Not so long ago... in the long winter of 2016–2017. The debut of JACKIE LYNN. It was a year of bright lights and alien love, and an undercurrent of undisguised tension too. It fed the music, what can you say. Then suddenly one night, one gig was just the last. For awhile. Until now. Now it’s a new year beginning, and Jacqueline is the album of that year, bringing Jackie fully back in front of us, larger than life, her arms reaching out farther into the glittering darkness than before. Jacqueline finds Jackie Lynn down the road apiece, having broken in and out of the glare of American days and nights. A casino queen in Missouri now, a stranger in a short black dress in Odessa tomorrow—another track, another rich slice of the life for our femme long-haul truck driver. Each one flowing with the white-hot bursts of NEW as it unfurls itself around her. Jacqueline blooms expansively from the synthetic rhythms of her debut, blowing up their bone structure with bigger stakes in sight. Jackie Lynn, comprised of COOPER CRAIN, ROB FRYE and DAN QUINLIVAN of BITCHIN BAJAS and HALEY FOHR of CIRCUIT DES YEUX, approached the material as a group, drawing together the journey over time, inspired collectively to find the right notes, sounds and settings to open the landscape for Jackie—and alter it inexorably.

Flat Worms

Antarctica

God?

***2020, and the scene is now: world in flames, deserts in permafrost, everyone in their own corners, looking down into their hands. Nothing in common. We can all see that the way it’s happening isn’t working, and for a lot of us, that’s okay, as long as it doesn’t rock our boat, we’ll cope. But for people who are invested in the future, any future—like Flat Worms—they’re out there, full time living, playing to change minds. And they’re not alone. Antarctica is the third Flat Worms album in the past four years. It reflects a situation that’s dire, but not hopeless. Since the release of their 2017 debut LP—even since last year’s “Into the Iris” mini-LP—the sound of the trio has hardened, with the polarities of psych and post-punk smelted into a brutal cobalt alloy. No doubt they’re aided by the STEVE ALBINI-engineered sound rendered at Electric Audio, where the album was recorded and mixed (in collaboration with Steve Albini and TY SEGALL) in six days. The rest of the evolution is down to Flat Worms, whose world view and musical viewpoint pulse with a remorseless drive and a sense of collaborative unity. WILL IVY's cortex-scorching guitar leads are in united space with the full-body rhythm of TIM HELLMAN's bass and JUSTIN SULLIVAN's drums. Their social comment, bleak, yet earnest, is leavened with bone dry humor and caustic pronouncements; a vision of the chaotic, dysfunctional contemporary landscape that recalls the tragicomic expressions of 100 Flowers and the indefatigable recitations of...

No Age

Goons Be Gone

Drag City

***Goons Be Gone, NO AGE's number 2 record for Drag City, kicks into gear, takes you out west and gets some dirt on it, with what’s possible their most honed in and direct record yet. A guitar/drums duo (RANDY RANDALL and drummer/vocalist DEAN SPUNT) with a penchant for self-recorded samples, No Age are mostly unconcerned with things like space or pause, and Goons Be Gone is gorgeously thick—a hazy, delirious expanse that’s both comforting and disorienting. Listening to Goons Be Gone, it’s hard to comprehend how just two people can manage to make so much noise while still sounding so subdued and mysterious—it’s easier to imagine Randall and Spunt spewing these songs underwater, bursting forth from some colossal California quarry rather than a tiny, stuffy art space a few blocks from L.A.’s skid row. Goons Be Gone is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible.

Fossil Aerosol Mining Project / 400 Lonely Things

Nigths And Profecy

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Zombies lurk throughout the post-industrial abstractions and radiantly murky collages of Nigths and Profecy - an 80 minute split release from Fossil Aerosol Mining Project and 400 Lonely Things.  Fossil Aerosol has a long history with zombies. Or perhaps more specifically, with the contexts that fostered zombies during the 1970s and 1980s. Of particular interest was the imagined, and then realized, ruins of contemporary society - often populated with artificial corpses. One of the earliest artifacts to be employed in the Fossil Aerosol recordings was a segment of a 35mm Italian zombie film trailer, found on the floor of an abandoned drive-in theater projection booth in 1986.  Subsequently, if you enjoyed the dawn of the dead, an limited edition CD-R recorded in 2005, featured heavily processed segments from the classic George Romero trilogy of zombie films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead). That album fell out of distribution, but in 2008, the topic of synthesized corpses was revisited with The First 15 Minutes of the Second Sequel (2008), which was composed (mostly) of processed fragments from the first 15 minutes of the second unauthorized Italian sequel to Dawn of the Dead. Exploring the layers of fake-corpse fake-sequels.  Meanwhile, 400 Lonely Things released their album Tonight of the Living Dead in 2008. That project was composed entirely of loops and samples from the first modern zombie film, Romero’s aforementioned Night of the Living Dead. For obvious reasons, Fossil Aerosol and 400...

Yxxan

Satanic Fortification Overbalance

Nuclear War Now

***"Pure chaotic desecration from Sweden, in the vein of early Beherit and Revenge with some nasty d-beat to top it all off. "

Giles Corey

s/t

Flenser

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note new price. “‘Some time in the Spring of 2009, I tried to kill myself. Six months before that, I used a Voor’s Head Device for the first time.’ This line opens the 150-page book that accompanies Giles Corey, an intensely personal, intimate portrait of depression that took me almost four years to make.” —Dan Barrett Giles Corey’s haunting self-titled debut is back in print! The Flenser is pleased to offer a new version of this cult favorite as a double LP housed in a gatefold jacket, with the same 150-page book that accompanied the previous versions. Giles Corey is the gloomy folk-driven solo project from Have A Nice Life mastermind Dan Barrett. Here, Barrett forgoes the post-industrial trappings of Have A Nice Life in favor of an intimate singer-songwriter approach. While thematically related to his other work—dealing with subjects like suicide, death and the paranormal—Giles Corey feels more personal, with impressive shifts from quiet desperation to cathartic outburst. Over the years the album has gained a fervent following, and has sometimes been compared to a religious experience. It is dark yet purgative enterprise not for the frail of heart. The accompanying book is an integral part of the album. Its examinations of the life and times of cult leader Robert Voor parallel the themes within the lyrics and offer further immersion for the reflective listener. In Barrett’s own words: “The album follows a story arc of emotions that are detailed in the accompanying book, as much...

Woods

Strange To Explain

Woodsist

“Dreaming doesn’t come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors. It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. Like everything else they’ve recorded, it sounds exactly like themselves, but with subtly different shades and breaths and rhythmic feels and everything else that changes, the natural march of time and the intentional decisions of the musicians moving in what feels like an uncommonly organic alignment. “Strange To Explain trades in a different kind of dependability, maintaining a steady connection to the voice on the other side of the record needle. After quickly recording and releasing 2017’s Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with what came next. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. And when they returned to their posts, there on the other side of this particular mirror, they made this, an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there’s still light to be caught, which is also no small thing. “A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded...

Auscultation

III

100% Silk

A term for listening to sounds within the body as a method of diagnosis is a poignantly perfect moniker for Portland producer Joel Shanahan’s most elusive and emotive electronic aura-reading solo alias: Auscultation. III arrives a full four years after its SILK predecessor, L’étreinte Imaginaire, delayed by tragedies too expansive to enumerate. Throughout, these shadowy psychic rhythms percolated at the periphery, as both escape and exorcism. The songs share a smeared mood of longing and lament, foggy melodies gliding through low-lit spaces, dissipated dance floor ether spiraling like smoke under a streetlight. It’s a music of faces in the night and things unsaid, swaying at the threshold. What could have been and what will always be. Mastered by Eric Hanson. Design by Britt Brown.

Jupiter Jax

Dee-life Mix

100% Silk

Maltese falcon Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax’s latest collection is stoned, cold, classic, and conceptual: a 40-minute ode to and odyssey of smoky basement jack and melancholic warehouse anthems crafted from the psychic crates of short-lived, lost-to-time house imprint Dee-Life Records.  Credited to a cast of forgotten label staples – LifeLess, Hush Hush, Brad K, and beyond – the tracks weave from magic hour to midnight, Chicago moods and Detroit mirages, heady and hypnotized. Deep cuts dug from a dusty DJ bag found behind fog machines in a long-shuttered club, the disco sleeves shredded, the vinyl thrashed, peeling center labels scrawled with BPMs. Dee-Life Mix serves as both portal and party, parallel universe vintage club gems transported to the here and now. All tracks produced by Jupiter Jax.

Lunate

Médula

100% Silk

Bogotá body-music builder Manuel Cortes returns with a sophomore slate of politicized dancefloor schematics inspired by recent South American civil unrest, shattered bones, and the multi-tiered ruins of progress. Médula shares an eclecticism with Lunate’s 2014 debut, Far Shores, but sprawls longer and more limber, wiry workouts of dubby synth-step and coiled energies, alternately delirious, decadent, and downtempo. Some selections skew 80’s or broody but elsewhere Cortes carves up classic glitterball house, surveillance state ambient, opium den dirge, and activist jack, threading a state of the nation panorama through rhythm and sensuous sound. Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Well Being

Pleasure Garden

100% Silk

The first physical media manifestation by Portland producer Dan Kirschner aka Well Being blurs the boundary between warehouse and wilderness, future and nature, free-flowing frameworks of deep house, relaxed acid, and dewdrop electronics: Pleasure Garden. From the sparkling windswept hang-glide of “Deep Sea Exploration” to the slinky forest path jack of “Moon Valley,” the EP encapsulates a spectrum of contemporary Cascadia eco-techno modes and moves: club cuts tricked with crickets, cloud bank pads above damp earth bass, rainforest rave rhythms filtered through studio skylights. Sequenced palindromically, side one is all originals, side two alternate mixes — including an elusive aerial “rebuild” by Pac Northwest peer Akasha System. Step off of the street; stray into the Garden. Mastered by Hunter Thompson.

Elder

Omens

Armageddon

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!! Following 2017’s Reflections of a Floating World and the 2019 experimental EP The Gold & Silver Sessions, it was anyone’s guess what the band’s next full-length might have in store. Having cemented their own heavy progressive rock sound, the latter EP showcased an exact opposite side of Elder, more rooted in sparse krautrock and even jazz-tinged jams. Omens answers this speculation with a contradiction that embodies the spirit of ELDER: somehow, there’s even more everything. In five cinematic songs, lush, intricately interwoven melodies grow and dissolve into spaced-out jams. Massive riffs thunder down into a churning sea of psychedelic sounds and unpredictable grooves carry away the listener. Elder paints pictures with their music, and Omens shows the band experimenting with an even more colorful palette—with good reason. After thirteen years, this is the first full-length recorded with a new lineup including guitarist MICHAEL RISBERG and new drummer GEORG EDERT, along with guest performances by FABIO CUOMO on Rhodes piano and synthesizers. This is music for a vacation from reality—to lose oneself in another world. And yet Omens is not purely an exercise in escapism, but also reflects the increasingly bleak, confusing and antagonistic times in which it was written. Composed as a concept album spanning the lifespan of a civilization, the album also reads as a commentary on our own society hell-bent on profitability at the expense of our own lives and environment.

Sip

Leos Naturals

Not Not Fun

Cosmic Chicago modal organ grinder Jimmy Lacy developed the dexterous dialect of SiP some years back while helming a happy hour residency at a Logan Square cocktail lounge that required he vamp rambling three-hour sets nightly. With such a wide window to fill, he free-flowed serpentine mandala keyboard motifs across 15-minute expanses, soaking in every spiral, stasis, and sliding scale. These hypno-motion strategies were rehearsed and refined across stellar radio performances (notably for Planet Catieo, WLPN 105.5FM) and studio sessions, finally culminating in the sidewinder séances of his dazzling debut: Leos Naturals.  Lacy speaks of SiP as a headspace “in sync with my own clock and rhythms,” which is apparent in his uniquely attuned playing, both motorik and meandering, between raga, rave-up, and reverie. Limber lotus position keyboard designs interweave with soft threads of bass clarinet, melodica, kalimba, and percussion, deepening the spectrum and expanding the trip. It’s a music elevated yet earthbound, loose but precise, natural magic for unnatural times.

Vague Imaginaires

L'île D'or

Not Not Fun

The music of Grenoble gardener Denis Morin aka Vague Imaginaires cross-pollinates modal synthetics, equatorial ambience, and drum circle minimalism into ecological fantasias of “natural forces and enchanted worlds,” seven of which comprise his spacious debut, L'île D'or.  Recorded in anticipation of the birth of his daughter (an experience Morin likens to “an ancestral journey”), the album alternates between ritual and lullaby, spirit vine questing and chill-out tent meditation. Guyana forest field recordings and the sounds of springtime birds color the songs with wind and wildlife, evoking lagoons clouded in mist and steam, overgrown paths winding through twilit jungles. It’s an intimate, emotive vision of archipelagos and mirages, epiphany and escape, free-ranging across islands of golden light of the mind.

Wave Temples

Tales From The Cymatic Abyss

Not Not Fun

A prime divination document by elusive Floridian entity Wave Temples finally receives full presentation rites: Tales From The Cymatic Abyss. Tracked in fragments from 2013 through 2015, this collection captures the essence of the project’s illusory allure, cross-fading vignettes of coastal drift, thatched hut percussion, and aquamarine dreams into a seamless séance of the inner Keys.  Excerpts appeared on limited Rainbow Pyramid formats half a decade ago but the complete open sea saga has remained hidden on privately circulated artist editions until now. Totaling nearly an hour, Tales traverses windswept shores, campfire ruins, quiet villages, and rainbow reefs, restless but reflective, tape-hiss and tropical bliss interwoven in psychic landscapes at the end of the earth. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Luke Sick & Wolfagram

Yegg War

Iron Lung

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! One of West Bay's finest underground rappers meets beats from Toronto's most promising new producer with a little help from the homies near, far and in-between. Yegg War is a little drugged, a little thugged and criminally smooth. Beats by WOLFAGRAM, raps by LUKE SICK, cuts and scratches by DJ RAW B. Features two bonus tracks not on the original cassette version.