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Barreca, Marc

Recordings Of Failing Light

Palace Of Lights

Marc Barreca’s Recordings Of Failing Light explores the subatomic matter of ordinary instrument sounds. Pianos, glass percussion, guitars, and feedback are atomized through sampling and granular processing in search of the audio equivalent of a negative image. In the end, these granular elements became the beds and pads for elaborate extrapolations of deconstructed melodic, rhythmic, patterned, and forward-looking sound—and with the addition of analog sequencer and arpeggiator based textures, some tracks reach back to Barreca’s days with Young Scientist. Perhaps as an acknowledgment of the aesthetic guiding Jon Hassell’s Seeing Through Sound, Barreca’s work here finds its origin in images. The gradations and modulation of light and dark in radiographs, rayograms, negatives, old black and white and sepia-tone photos all impart and inform a shaping influence to the waveforms and amplitudes of sound found in these twenty pieces. Heavily layered, simultaneously dense and expansive, Recordings Of Failing Light is the result of experiments conducted in a sonic version of the Hadron Collider. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. Recordings Of Failing Light is his eleventh solo album for PoL. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2018, was one of the earliest releases on PoL. The Empty Bridge is his tenth solo album for the label. Recent releases include From The Gray And The Green (2019), Shadow Aesthetics (2018), and four collaborations with K. Leimer and two with Three Point Circle. Reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture,...

Frisk

Stalker

Iron Lung

You ever wondered what it sounds like inside the heads of people when they're fist-fighting? The sharp thuds and painful cracks, the internalized grunts and high pitched squeal of a ringing ear that just won't go away. You ever been hit in the jaw with your mouth open? It's about as unpleasant as a feeling can be. FRISK's "Stalker" strikes us the same way. Hard and gnarly, an unrelenting misanthropic pummel of the highest order culling influence from equal parts Integrity, Brainbombs and Negative Approach. Leeds is the most dangerous city in West Yorkshire.

Intensive Care

Antibodies

Iron Lung

In today's music landscape its so easy to intellectualize "noise" since there isn't much for the average listener to grab on to. You are made to feel stupid if you don't get all the nonsensical bleeps and scrapes that every mediocre can swilling table stander can belch out. And then there are the reasons that noise music, yes I'll call it music because that's what the fuck it is, took hold in the first place, the real standouts, the people and bands that have made something wholly original and visceral and against conformity that you must take notice. Intensive Care falls firmly in that realm. Coming from roots within the hardcore, metal and powerviolence scenes these cage rattlers employ a myriad of instruments including but nit limited to drums, bass, vocals, tape loops, junk, electronics and more to craft a stunning array of beat driven harsh noise and metallic industrial sounds that you can - if you're not already destroying your surroundings - almost dance to.

Mutated Void

Roses Forever

Iron Lung

Brain damaged skate thrash at it's lo-finest all the way from the eastern wilds of Halifax, NS. So raw that even the freshest catch calls it cannibal fodder. 14 filthy filthies come blasting at you in a mere 16 minutes, just long enough to back lip that crusty ledge, bail and pick the gravel out of your freshly opened road rash.

More Kicks

Punch Drunk

Dirtnap

Punch Drunk is the second album from London-based trio More Kicks. The band’s self-titled debut album was a concise and ragged lesson in pop songwriting dripping in melody, cynicism and energy—Punch Drunk marks a new era for the band. Heavier, more expansive, more twists and turns. It veers from sparkling harmonies to fearsome riffing in the blink of eye, with never a second wasted. As with the first record, it was recorded live on to 2-inch tape. It’s bottled lightning and the sound of a band firing on all cylinders. James Sullivan aka Sulli (vox / guitar), Kris Hood (drums),and Paolo Mantovani (bass / vox) have cooked up a rare alchemy. The result: a More Kicks song can touch on classic ’60s garage, ’70s NYC rock and roll, jagged ’90s guitar pop—all wrapped in a razor sharp bundle. A glance backwards and a decisive step forwards. “When the world collapsed in 2020, I realised more than ever how much I rely on music and More Kicks,” says Sulli. “This album became a total obsession and a lifeline. Stuck in one place, the songs all came from heartbreak, frustration, anger, hope. It feels like a unique set of circumstances that produced this record and I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”

Bent Arcana

Live Zebulon

Castle Face

“Recorded at Zebulon in Los Angeles as a warm-up show for a show I had booked in Holland. What was meant to be a jumping point for the ‘first show’ ended up being a real burning set. A slightly more stripped-down version on the ten piece band [Bent Arcana] (for sake of ease) keeps it nice and concise. Nerves sometimes bring out these little lost jewels of which this recording is full of…gotta love improvisation for fleeting moments.  “Recorded super-hot by none other than our sound person Liza Boldyreva. Selections of songs from Bent Arcana and Moon-Drenched—cockpit stoned space jazz here you come. Mixed by John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden. This hunky double disk sports a zoetropic screen-printed animation of the Death’s Head moth circling on its D side that works with a strobe light off yer phone...fucking cool. Fucking hot. Dig in and be well. ” —John Dwyer 

Heads, The

Undersided (Deluxe)

Rooster

Presenting a remastered, 20-year anniversary edition of The Heads’ third album proper, the under-rated gem in their canon that is Undersided! Originally released in 2002 on the Sweet Nothing label, Undersided was recorded in 2001 at WhiteHouse Studios in Weston Super Mare, with Martin Nichols engineering. For this reissue, the original recordings were remastered for vinyl and CD by long time Heads Masterer (!) Shawn Joseph. The resultant eight tracks are some of the best music the band have ever recorded, occurring after a bit of a hiatus following their 2000 US tour / Peel session (included in the boxset / on the 2xCD version here). The band then regrouped and worked out the tracks for Undersided, relentless rehearsing for the recording. This is a pounding sike-nightmare that shows The Heads at the peak of their powers. There’s a flow throughout the album of melding psychedelic noise rock to battering rhythms and creating a bad trip for all listening—even the gentle soothe of “Energy” is enveloped by a white noise fury, and the intensity of some of the other tracks, like the terror inducing “Bedminster” or “False Heavy” (a tour worn riffmonger from 2000) and the Magnet-esque “Heavy Sea,” showed the band as ferocious as any of the insurgent “stoner” genre bands of that time.

Innumerable Forms

Philosophical Collapse

Profound Lore

The new album from cult death / doom metal outfit Innumerable Forms Philosophical Collapse, the follow up to 2018’s Punishment In Flesh, is a pillar of death / doom enormity unparalleled. Helmed by founder Justin DeTore (aka DFJ), Philosophical Collapse (which was produced by Arthur Rizk) emerges as Innumerable Forms’ most triumphant work as alongside DFJ (Dream Unending, Sumerlands), guitarists Chris Ulsh (Mammoth Grinder / Power Trip / Devil Master) and Jensen Ward (Iron Lung), drummer Connor Donnegan (Genocide Pact), and bassist Doug Cho deliver an opus that coalesces the old school Finnish death metal cult of the early ’90s and the early ’90s UK doom glory of Anathema / Paradise Lost.

Spllit

Ledder Cote / Adobe House

Feel It

A tribute to the adobe house in Presidio, TX where we wrote and recorded for a few days around the new year, 2020-2021. Also serves as a bonus to "Spllit Sides" and as the start of something new.

Green/Blue

Worry / Gimme Hell

Feel It

"In the spirit of Dead Moon before them, Green/Blue have wrangled the simplicity of “Worry” and “Gimme Hell” to write some of their best songs to date, punk anthems that’ll have you shouting in no time. While they’ve upped the jangle and loosened the density, the duel vocal approach on “Worry” is plenty epic, a big nasty punk song with pop splendor and self-awareness. The vocals pair Sparrows and Blaha together for a riotous gang effect, giving it a sort of last-call at the seedy bar kind of energy. Which is to say, it’s pretty much perfect, a song about the struggle that feels downright triumphant. “Gimme Hell” follows suit, a down but never out call to rise up and fight. The skeletal guitars and punchy rhythm keep it firmly in the garage spit-and-jangle mode with vocals that pretty much demand to be shouted en masse. Whether it’s a new direction for the band or just a fun one-off from the studio sessions, Green/Blue sound absolutely super-charged." -Dan Goldin / Post-Trash

Sick Thoughts

Heaven Is No Fun

Total Punk

By 2016 a teenage Drew Owen had put himself on everyone's radar releasing a whopping 19 records (and that was just under the SICK THOUGHTS moniker) on pretty much every punk label that mattered over a span of three years. At the time I thought of him as a teenage novelty, an endearing sometimes pesky younger punk sibling who I kept telling "NO YOU PUT OUT WAY TOO MUCH STUFF." However in 2016 Drew sent me what became the "18 & Free" single and had me eating my words, eagerly releasing a single for the kid I kept telling never. Now its 2022 and Sick Thoughts are back on TOTAL PUNK with a brand new LP. Drew has proven himself far more than a novelty and here I am eagerly footing the bill again. The shitty attitude is still intact and the songs are still about breaking stuff but the ramshackle production and rough edged tunes of early Sick Thoughts are gone. 13 scorching riff heavy tracks that run the gambit from Stiv fueled Power Pop to ‘Cherie Love Affair’ style Sleaze Rock all masterfully recorded by Drew and Michael Hohan with Drew playing all the instruments. Great music for licking knives or lighting your wallet on fire. Nasty, catchy as fuck, and 100% TOTAL PUNK!!!

Freak Genes

Hologram

Feel It

***How much longer can we (LIVE)…if we’re only an (IMAGE)? That’s the question FREAK GENES (FG) pose in their new album Hologram. Put down your electric scriber. Answers on wax only. Discover the difference between manifest and (MIRAGE), solid and (SHAPELESS), real and (INFORMATION_REDACTED). But here is what we actually know: Freak Genes are CHARLIE MURPHY (LIFE_FORMS, GAMMA, FRESH_SPECIMEN, ISOLATION) and ANDREW ANDERSON (PROTO_IDIOT, KAKE?). Hologram is their (FIFTH) album. The (LABEL) is Feel It Records. The playing length is (INFORMATION_REDACTED). There are (THIRTEEN) tracks. And here is what might well be: this is for fans of (THE_UNITS, FAD_GADGET, FURTHER_INFORMATION_REDCATED).

Emory, Marc

Listening Music / Anfang

Scissor Tail Editions

Scissor Tail has long been quietly releasing some of the best folk, psych, and country to hit the turntable. From early offerings from Rosali, Sarah Louise, Scott Hirsch, and Joseph Allred, through last year’s indispensable Tobacco City LP. They’ve not often dipped into reissues, though, but they’ve hit on something magical with a new edition of a lost private press gem from Marc Emory. Recorded as a college student in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania in 1974, the record is split between folk instrumentals that certainly have a familiarity with the Takoma family, and a few vocal tracks that add a loner charm to the record. The slide blues of “All Gaul” have a dose of Fahey in their DNA, but Emory gives the familiar feel his own kind of overcast glee. Elsewhere, Listening Music/Anfang, finds itself slipping through more trad folk territory, the second side practically opening in a communal pub dance feeling. There’s a bluegrass spirit bubbling under the record, with shades of Anglican folk and country blues trading off when it subsides. When Emory’s vocal surface his weariness hides his age, an already aching spirit barely out of his school days. The original record was pressed in a run of 200 and mostly given to friends and family. There were even some originals left over that Scissor Tail made available in their shop. The new edition follows suit and also comes in a run of 200. The well of private press records that haven’t been found and freed at this...

Dreadnought

The Endless

Profound Lore

For their fifth full length The Endless, Denver, Coloroado genre-defying progressive metal outfit Dreadnought present their most spellbinding musical feature yet. With riveting vocal performances, ferocious grooves, and soaring synthesis, the quartet offers a familiarity to the melodic awe of previous records Lifewoven (2013) and Bridging Realms (2015) as well as the dark complexities within A Wake In Sacred Waves (2017) and Emergence (2019), but with a beautifully fresh perspective in writing, production, and performance. At its inception in 2012, Dreadnought’s four members, including guitarist / vocalist Kelly Schilling, drummer Jordan Clancy, bassist Kevin Handlon, and keyboardist / vocalist Lauren Vieira, strove for a project laser-focused on creativity and exploration, pulling from all aspects of their musical backgrounds to craft something exciting and unique. Joining in the common ground of extreme metal, the quartet explores a blend of prog, doom, folk, jazz, classical, black metal, and post rock.

Multi-Surface

Aesthetics of Inequality Triangles

Not Not Fun

Yamaguchi electronic landscaper Tomokazu Fujimoto aka Multi-Surface returns from an eight-year hiatus with a slow-blooming suite of radiant terrains and looping lullabies, named for a geometric technique utilized in Japanese gardening: Aesthetics of Inequality Triangles. Prior tapes for Lillerne and Patient Sounds explored parallel spheres of smeared tranquility, but his recent work skews even more sun-flared and crystalline, percolating patterns of texture, melody, and circuitry into states of suspended transience. The album’s 10 tracks lull, unspool, and refract, lapping like waves against aerial shores, flickering rainbows glimpsed in raindrops. The titles offer further clues, mapping a morning walk beneath too blue skies along a path lined with ceramics and stones, pastel flowers gently billowing in a breeze blowing from tomorrow.

Rue, Gryphon

A Spirit Appears To A Pair Of Lovers

Not Not Fun

New York artist and composer Gryphon Rue likens his latest album to a viewfinder: “layers come into view, are obscured, and reemerge.” Begun in late 2020 as a series of intuitive patterns for multi-tracked Farfisa organ, harmonium, and modular synth, he later wove in field recordings from Puebla, Mexico and rolling thunder (“and a truly magical coyote visitation”) captured in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The result is a beguiling suite of elusive instrumentals combining electronic instrumentation with the natural world. Rue cites a fascination with the mimetic potential of electronic sounds – their ability to suggest biological actions or molecular events, from insects building mounds to nervous system synapses firing. Above all, the music was made “with people’s pleasure in mind.” A Spirit Appears To A Pair Of Lovers unspools a saga of transformations via modal voyaging, devotional drone, mantric percussion, percolating circuitry, and amniotic ambience, shaded in a nuanced haze of threshold consciousness. Rue’s vision of “keeping the human hand in electronic music” remains constant throughout, a biofeedback between chaos and control, dream states and design. It’s a music both versatile and visual (all 10 tracks are accompanied by original videos by different artists), cerebral but celestial, born of and in thrall to our garden of earthly delights.

Saphileaum

Ganbana

Not Not Fun

Multi-media mystic Andro Gogibedashvili aka Saphileaum’s latest slate expands his “spherical ambient” lexicon into increasingly celestial terrain, inspired by visions of galactical oases, sparkling starscapes, and elemental serenity. Ganbana takes its title from a Georgian word for ‘cleansed by water,’ which aptly characterizes the album’s six liquid-tribal compositions. Rolling oceans of hand percussion flow below soothing swells of electronics, streaked with ocarina, insects, and sitar. Snippets of mantric voice occasionally cut through the devotional trance but otherwise Saphileaum’s world is one of solitude and ascent, attuned to a time and space outside our own, where “a second is a century, and a century a second, as the waterfall of cosmic nectar is poured over your being.”

Skyminds

Terra Preta

Not Not Fun

The third and latest offering from Sean Conrad and Michael Henning’s Bay Area devotional duo Skyminds spans six years of steady freeform collaboration, meeting weekly for reflective, contemplative improvisations at the axis of new age noir, prayer rug jazz, and twilit ambient. The patience of their process is self-evident: this is music of shade, shimmer, and hush, divined as much as designed. Terra Preta threads twelve tracks across a full hour, unfurling a grand, glimmering vision of cloaked alchemy and quiet raptures. Conrad speaks of their music as seeking a sensation “of the moment” – amber-frozen synchronicities of texture and timing, beyond what either player can control or recreate. Keys, synths, strings, percussion, and FX trace vibrational gradients through clear water and changing light, attuned to camouflaged currents in a deepening dusk.

Leimer, K.

Music for Land and Water

Palace Of Lights

Marking its Fortieth anniversary, this definitive, release is newly remastered by James Savage and makes available all versions including the only live recording of "Art and Science". Due to the duration of these pieces Music for Land and Water is exclusively available in multiple digital formats. Since 1983 the three pieces that comprise Music for Land and Water have been available in a variety of formats and mixes: the original 1983 Palace of Lights cassette; a remastered version for the Autumn Records CD release; and finally the edited and remixed versions produced for the 2018 limited edition vinyl release on the Les Giants label. Originally developed for a gallery installation, MFLAW was assembled using four closed-loop, multi-track tape players, each playing back a different duration closed loop containing varied time and pitch compatible material. In addition to the installation, Art and Science was performed in Seattle's Seward Park. That performance, included here, shows the effects of winds on open tape loops, adding occasional flutter and distortion as the masters ran from one machine to the next. Seward Park proved an ideal setting for hearing the music, especially out on the trails and among the trees, away from the amphitheater, where the music approached silence.

Leimer, K.

Music for the Open Air

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer has composed a companion suite of vertical, low-level music for active or passive listening by revisiting and updating the techniques he used for composing Music for Land and Water. An ambient genre exercise, Music for the Open Air is not satisfied to act as aural wallpaper. The tracks present the listener with an evolving set of discrete parts, interacting at different levels and times. Sound that is immersed in detail and depth –– shaped by an overall airiness and shaded by cycles of emerging and retreating subtleties. The pieces range in duration from 21 to 38 minutes, making them ideal for ambient use in public spaces, or random shuffling wherever sheer, organized sound is useful. While Open Air is an easy and comfortable fit for the broad ambient genre, the material doesn’t employ new age gloss and never descends to simpleminded prettiness. Within its clouds and folds the sound reveals rich veins of graininess, distortion, and dissonances that impart a gravity most ambient works lack.

Pinkcourtesyphone

Shouting At Nuance

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Pinkcourtesyphone is the pseudonym for the Los Angeles based minimalist Richard Chartier. Under this moniker, Chartier indulges in an emotional torpor through his hauntological compositions for forgotten dreams with an opiated grandeur and subtle application of certain nostalgic camp. Shouting At Nuance glances back to Chartier’s earliest works that were recorded onto tape, with allusions to decay as an unrecognizable reconstruction of past works, whereby his ghostly ambience becomes a dub of itself, echoing back a dispersion of drift and drone into a feedback loop of disintegrated memory. Shouting At Nuance was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion—a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some. This double LP edition, mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin, also contains the complementary material from Something You Are Or Something You Do, a cassette originally published by The Tapeworm in 2017.

Doldrey

Celestial Deconstruction

Iron Lung

“Doldrey make a murky, gnarled, cranked-up form of music that splits the difference between old-school death metal, classic black metal and feral D-beat. They’re one of those bands where lo-fi recording is a true asset, since it makes them sound even more like cave-dwelling berserkers.” -Tom Breihan After a couple season sets worth of gestation, Doldrey has returned with “Celestial Deconstruction”, a proper full length that is decidedly more metal that their previous efforts. Make no mistake, this is still punk as hell but this time with more of a violent stenchcore feel (sans the ridiculous "epic" intros) mixed with Slayer breakdowns and evidence of early Celtic Frost played through the HM-2. Altogether a sound that is pure thrashing nastiness.

Osees

A Foul Form

Castle Face

“Brain stem cracking scum-punk recorded tersely in the basement of my home. After a notoriously frustrating eon, the knee-jerk song path was aggressive and hooky. This is an homage to the punk bands we grew up on—the weirdos and art freaks that piqued our interests and pointed us on the trail head to here / now. Bad times make for strong music is something I agree with. I would say that is evident by the past few years of output from the underground. Transmissions have been all over the map: scanning…searching...sweeping out in the darkness looking for a foot hold.“[OSEES] A Foul From represents some of our most savage and primal instincts. Fight or flight. And the importance of a sense of humor in the darkest hour. Nothing wrong with keeping it snappy in the meantime. For fans of Rudimentary Peni, Crass, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Screamers, Abwarts, Stooges and all things aggressively tilted towards your face. You can lean back but don’t flinch…it’s a brief foray into the exhausting pogo pit, so stiffen your back and jerk with your knees. Enjoy.” —John Dwyer 

Locrian

New Catastrophism

Profound Lore

The new Locrian album New Catastrophism is the first release from the band in seven years! They are also releasing Ghost Frontiers, an EP that comes as a bonus disc with the CD edition and a bonus digital download with the vinyl. New Catastrophism sees the iconic experimental music trio return back to their roots through four immersive tracks that signal towards the band’s signature expressions of dark ambient, experimental music, drone and post rock. Massive dystopian sonic soundscapes presented through many layers of sound is the dominant audial canvas here. Locrian is a prophetic voice of decline. From the band’s inception, they have comfortably straddled both the experimental and metal underground, weaving themes of apocalypse, urban decay, environmental destruction and birth / death / rebirth throughout their multifaceted and genre-defying releases. The trio formed in 2005 in Chicago and features Terence Hannum (synthesizers, vocals, tape loops), André Foisy (guitars, electronics), and Steven Hess (drums, electronics).

Motte

Cold + Liquid

Ba Da Bing!

Anita Clark’s new Motte album, Cold + Liquid, builds glacial atmospheres, frozen moods and isolated impressions. Portraying New Zealand through socio-geological sound, breathing in Christchurch cultures and locales, the album embodies an artistic simulation of the Kiwi environment. With this release, Clark aimed to make something colossal, and set about finding the right textures to add. A friend who works at Oamaru Freezing Works gave her field recordings of the temperature control room, a vast cold space of isolated machinery, where ice grows and dissolves in ever-evolving sculptures. Getting her hands on shortwave/longwave radios, she incorporated frequency sweeps. Another friend provided her with the mechanical drones underneath the deck of a cement cargo ship, as it lay docked in Lyttelton Harbor. Still more sources came from Sign of the Bellbird, an historic environmental site in South Christchurch, where Clark and Thomas Lambert recorded bellbirds, rolling boulders, snapping sticks, thrown dirt and the papery sound of the native harakeke plant. While violin dominates the first Motte album Strange Dreams (2017), Clark sought to expand instrumentation. She was gifted a handmade Pūrerehua puoro, a traditional Māori instrument that sounds similar to the whirling and hovering of a moth (which is “motte” in German). A reacquaintance to the guitar occurred after developing an alter-ego project entitled Sex Den, with sleazy noir-esque guitar riffs in response to a failed rumour from a local drug-addled dive bar. Guitar and synth allowed for a broader songwriting palette along with a sometimes Dadaist approach to lyric writing....

Fusilier

Treason

Ba Da Bing!

Like any scientist would before coming to a conclusion, Fusilier’s new EP, Treason, asks only questions without ever making a statement. Treason locates its universe right after the Big Bang, where fragments join and create something entirely new. This liminal space in between is what occupies the mind of Atlanta-raised, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Blake Fusilier. Themes of violence, youth, alienation, and belonging undergird this collection, while its songs serve as individual love letters to the artists Fuslier was most inspired by, like Nine Inch Nails, Bill Withers, and Fela Kuti. It fits in today somewhere between TV On The Radio, Mitski, and Radiohead with its precise yet opaque lyrics, indie-rock guitar riffs, classical motifs and sometimes-soaring, sometimes-crooning melodies.

Schizos

Banned! From The Hi Tone

Total Punk

Last year's SCHIZOS set at a GONERFEST After-Party was a bit too "amped up" for the Hi-Tone staff. 18 minutes of raw, wild, debaucherous excess that left SCHIZOS BANNED FROM THE HI-TONE!!! All caught on tape by ERIK NERVOUS and now seeing release on TOTAL PUNK. Locked, loaded, and 100% TOTAL PUNK!!!

More Kicks

Animal

Dirtnap

London three-piece More Kicks return to the fray with a brand new 7-inch single "Animal," co-released on Dirtnap Records (USA) and Stardumb Records (EU)! Slinky, beefy and interminably catchy, "Animal" is the first single from the band’s second record Punch Drunk, also out on Dirtnap and Stardumb in September 2022. The 7-inch features two exclusive new B-sides "The Wind Up" (think "White Light White Heat" fed through a meat processor) and "Ten Miles High" (Alex Chilton strolling across Abbey Road) and is on blue-green vinyl. This Animal is a monster. Grab it before it’s gone!

Bobo, Harlan T.

Porch Songs

Goner

Too enigmatic, too laconic, and too careless about the music biz to gain fame outside of his adopted homes in Tennessee and France, Harlan T Bobo is a rare bird – a soulful, comedic, yet vicious and wholly underrated singer-songwriter, a divorced single father who seems happiest when he’s most dissolute. Porch Songs, the long-awaited next chapter in Bobo’s discography, will be released on Goner Records on August 5, 2022. Everything, and nothing, has changed: Bobo’s painfully sharp lyrics and graveled delivery are omnipresent. He still deals in unvarnished, uncomfortable truths about love. His wearied worldview, revered by his listeners, has further ossified on Porch Songs, which abounds with sad titles, worn out lyrics, and tunes about departed friends, such as “Fan,” which unravels Bobo’s memories of the late Shawn Cripps. Despite the sparse melancholy that clouds most of the album’s 13 tracks, Porch Songs is no downer. Instead, it bristles with energy, sounding like a beyond-the-grave gift bestowed on Bobo from the ghosts of Waylon Jennings, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen. Bobo laughs when offered the comparison. “They may be mildly derivative of those people, but they’re not that good.” Listeners will disagree. Take “Worry,” the opening song: it unwinds like Jennings’ early outlaw country tune “The Taker,” with a similar wry sentimentality that underwrites the folly of failed love. Bobo’s commiseration on the song sounds close-up and confidential, as if he’s telling his story to the stranger on the next barstool. “Satisfaction,” “Prey,” and “Fan,” on the other...

Trauma Harness

Ten Years of Trauma

Lumpy

***"'They are always different, They are always the same'—TRAUMA HARNESS are secret Heads. I grew up with these three boys and they have had a huge impact on my life. JOSH, ANDY and JOHNNY were all playing awesome Rock n Roll back in 2007 when I met them in Belleville, IL. It was a legendary time for DIY gigs there—kids would turn out in droves and dance for every band and then after we’d all end up in a parking lot somewhere acting like idiots all night. It’s wild to think we’ve been friends for 15 years now. By 2011 each of their respective bands from before had ended and Trauma Harness was born. Over the past decade they’ve proven themselves year after year as talented songcrafters, committed hardworkers and fanatics of rock n roll. It’s rare that a band survives this long and stays interesting but somehow they’ve done it; they’ve cracked open a solid cohesive sound unconfined by the parameters of genre. For me, John Peel’s above quote about The Fall is just as applicable to Trauma Harness as it feels reductive to call them a post punk band, a synth pop band, a power pop band, etc. Much like The Fall, Trauma Harness has created a whole world of their own. They’ve been a constant pulse in the Lumpy Records catalog since the very beginning with four tapes, two 45s, and two lps released on the label since 2012. And thus I couldn’t think of a higher...

Chat Pile

God's Country

Flenser

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds...

Nelson, Sarah Bethe

Mental Picture

Speakeasy Studios SF

Bay Area singer-songwriter Sarah Bethe Nelson’s multiple albums of balladry and pop chart an emotional wave of the multifarious and sometimes tumultuous changes of the area’s landscape. Her latest is no exception. Enter Mental Picture, a collection of aftershock spectral tunes ghosting in the aura of the recent age, spinning out from the contradictions of Nelson’s steely reserve and melancholy fragility. If past efforts highlighted a certain zeal for the times, Mental Picture, while no less resolute in its approbation of the charms of this particular wasteland, definitely adds the haunt of eyes that have seen a grimness and dared to wink back at it. Think later Townes Van Zandt self-deprecation jolted through the afterglow of Stoned And Dethroned horizon-watching. What began as a way to stay sane in the early days of the pandemic when studios remained shuttered, the album was recorded in Nelson’s own Mission District living room with long-time creative partner Rusty Miller, as well as at the home of compatriot Doug Hilsinger—who both not only play on the album, but also claim co-producing, engineering and mixing roles—Mental Picture is an incredibly homegrown, early Smog-like affair. The vibes flit between tracks like opener “Five Lovin’ Days” and the later “Night Birds,” whose bare-bones gated, archaic stripped-down electro-acoustic production prefigures a post-apocalyptic cosmic country akin to Emmylou Harris strumming in a bomb shelter. Fuller tracks like “Better Off Dead” and ringer “I Can Just Leave” never shrug off the radioactive buzz, but coalesce into soulful stretches akin to...

Georis, Nico

A Rainbow In Curved Air

Spiritual Pajamas

“It was never supposed to happen. No one was supposed to reimagine Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air—a piece of music that, until now, has existed in its own class of expression. No one was supposed to scale the perilous heights of the citadel and come back with another document of the strange festival scenes within. With the release of Nico Georis’s A Rainbow In Curved Air it’s clear now that this piece of music is a place that you can go to, a kind of astral sanctum that can be visited again and again so long as you know the mysterious paths that lead to it. “Doing away with the production tricks used on Riley’s original recording (just intonation, mirror image delay, half-speed tracking of all lead parts) Nico Georis confronts the central seven time theme with a new transparency that gradually complexifies into astonishing Persian carpet displays of patterned musical awareness. This is music of the plenum and not the void: it is teeming with forms that behave in ways that recall descriptions of elaborately jeweled DMT hyperspace; sonic shapes that are driven by the pure uplift and force of infinite, unconstrained autotransformation. In this way it is similar to the original but the pace is way less manic, way more listenable as it rides forward on a calm surge of dazzling zero point energy. “The three other songs on the record are Georis originals. “Vapor” is a moment of twilight abstraction, a plant music duet that...

Black Magnet

Body Prophecy

20 Buck Spin

With the release of Black Magnet’s debut album Hallucination Scene in 2020, a new industrial metal power emerged from the unlikely landscape of Oklahoma City. After anxiously waiting out the pandemic, the band returned to the road in late 2021 and now drop Body Prophecy, the second full length burst of machine-driven mayhem and electronic deviance. On Body Prophecy, mastermind James Hammontree welds the frenetic vitality of post-punk and metal energy with driving synthetic club beats, factory force physicality and alluringly stark melodic pulses. Tracks like “Floating In Nothing” and “Violent Mechanix” feature both intensely catchy hooks and hammering brutal noise. “Sold Me Sad” is a quietly deranged lullaby that takes an atmospheric turn. The throbbing drug-addled lurch of the Manson / Reznor-esque “Incubate” is, at the end of the album, treated to a completely re-imagined and extended club style remix by scene legend Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Zonal, etc). For all its harsher, scraping atmospheres and pummeling aggression, Body Prophecy always remains an eminently tight, memorable album molded for the stage and constructed to keep bodies in motion and listeners transfixed.

Castrator

Defiled In Oblivion

Dark Descent

This summer, furious old school mastery returns to Dark Descent Records in the form of Castrator’s long-awaited debut album Defiled In Oblivion. Nearly seven years have passed since their No Victim EP set the scene aflame…yet these were mere warning shots across the bow. With their third release to date, the New York four-piece have perfected their blend of fierce old-school USDM to a fault. More uncompromising and ruthless than ever before, Castrator’s zero-fucks-given approach rips and shreds across nine hypnotically violent new tracks (alongside a cover of Venom’s “Countess Bathory”) and makes Defiled In Oblivion a release to be reckoned with. Boys club beware!

Precipitation

Glass Horizon

100% Silk

The first full-length vinyl collection by Tokyo-based producer Zefan Sramek aka Precipitation crystallizes his evolving synthesis of new age ambience, tape hiss, and house music into a riveting suite of motion and mirage: Glass Horizon. Conceived and recorded between two formative trips to Sado Island in the spring and late summer of 2020, the album feels both insular and infinite, threading paths through wet grass, along isolated coasts. Field recordings of tidepools, birds, and cicadas crossfade into fluid mandalas of bass, keys, and drum machinery, while synths glide and glisten, rising like heat off sand. Sramek speaks of themes of escape and estrangement, solace and desolation, visions of azure waters lapping empty shores. Weeks spent sleeping in a hammock attuned him to the extrasensory; melodies and memories materialized from the foliage, suffused with ocean air and placeless melancholy. All seven tracks swoop and swirl with patience and precision, grid-mapped golden dawns and gradient sunsets mixed live and captured on cassette. This is dance music as portal and pilgrimage, spiral environments for a refracted age.

Chaotian

Effigies Of Obsolescence

Dark Descent

Following up on their two hugely respected demos (also available as a compilation) and fairly recent 7-inch, Chaotian are back to release ultimate death metal barbarity into the underground in the form of their debut full length, Effigies Of Obsolescence. Storming into life with a rotten amalgamation of putrescent riffing and blast beats, the instrumental unity of this Danish titan is a juggernaut of pure filth. It is telling when a band can have those super groovy pinch harmonic-laden riffs and not make them sound like all the others. This may seem a weirdly specific observation—perhaps a guitarist just being a guitarist—but it makes all the difference with heaviness, intensity and also the catchiness on the records. When met with the sewer-spewing vocals and weird dissonant spasms in the music, it doesn’t take long to recognise this will be a truly warped and maniacally brutal experience of death metal might. Interlinking primitive hooks that grasp one by the throat then transcend into weird effects or spacious riffs, there’s nothing predictable about the album—yet it has that familiar feeling that all good death metal has, where it feels a bit daunting, unnerving and yet inescapable. Obviously Denmark and this trio does not let the scene down. Amazingly, this small country seems to have so much diversity in their rotten underground movement and Chaotian are a shining example who embody the grotesqueries, masterful songwriting, and tight musicianship that has become associated with this otherwise pretty and peaceful nation. It explains that mysterious...

Damon & Naomi With Kurihara

A Sky Record

20|20|20

“With its meditative tempos and enveloping guitar work by Michio Kurihara—‘it’s like this golden net,’ Naomi said of his gorgeous, versatile playing—A Sky Record offers shelter from the squall. If it has the glow of a long-delayed reunion between friends, that’s not accidental: Kurihara hasn’t traveled outside of Japan in some time, so Damon and Naomi hadn’t recorded with him in nearly ten years. When they finally made it back to Japan in November 2019 for a brief tour, they were elated to book some time with Kurihara at the aptly named studio Peace Music. “In those long stretches of quarantime, the tracks they returned from Japan with had distinct moods but not yet any lyrics. (Kurihara works best when trying to conjure a specific feeling or natural image—after all, he did once make a solo record, Sunset Notes, on which every song was based on a different sunset he’d witnessed...) How to write about the pandemic? How to not write about the pandemic? Naomi first struck upon the appropriate tone when re-reading the journals of one of her favorite abstract painters, Charles Burchfield. She arranged this found language into the lyrics of the iridescent ‘Season Without Time,’ which also became a tribute to a friend that she and Damon had lost in the last year. “From there, the floodgates opened. The wistful and watery ‘Midnight’ (electrified, towards the end, by the slow screams of a Kurihara solo) conjures Naomi’s nostalgia for youthful summers spent at Jones Beach, while the...

Oldboy

Bloody

Agitated

The debut album from pre-grunge crunch merchants Oldboy. Oldboy formed as a past-time—like golf or knitting—between old friends with a love of having a loud good time. Created by Max and Chris in an industrial estate rehearsal room back in 2019, get-togethers were few and far between but something was popping—it felt like fun. Since then, practices were again few and far between but after recruiting an old friend, Ryan, on bass (they didn't want to be a two piece—Lightning Bolt have that covered) they decided to try a little bit harder and as the world went into reverse they somehow wrote what you have here—their debut album Bloody. Recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in three days with Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Chubby And The Gang, The Chisel) and then mixed in three hours in the basement of Rough Trade West you get exactly where Oldboy are at. It's fast and relentless. It swings in places. It's super raw and the sound of three people having a high ol' time. Mucho influenced by the prime / premiere cuts of the late 80s / early 90s Chicago / US noise, as once released by Touch and Go, Amphetamine Reptile and Sub Pop. Pummeled home with a British post punk thWACK. It’s pop music, it’s just nasty pop music. For fans of: Tar, Shellac, Precious Wax Droppings, Helmet, Scratch Acid, Tad.... Play loud—and often.

Lou & Co.

The Dynamite Man

Mock