Flenser

Mamaleek

Vida Blue

Flenser

Time is a slippery fish. Loss has inspired Mamaleek’s latest full-length album, titled Vida Blue. This marks the San Francisco Bay Area metal deconstructionists’ eighth album and their third as a full lineup. Tragedy struck in March of 2023 when the band lost a longtime friend and member, keyboardist Eric Livingston, leaving the group, which began as a duo of two brothers and later expanded to a five-piece, now with only four members. Despite this profound loss, Mamaleek persevered, performing as a quartet at various festivals, including the 2023 edition of Tilburg. The band returned to the studio to create new material that appropriately reflects their journey through loss and honors their fallen comrade. The resulting album draws inspiration from the legacy of Oakland A’s baseball legend Vida Blue, whose former team coincidentally announced its relocation to Las Vegas that same year. The band members themselves describe this poignant chapter in their own words: “Time is a slippery fish. Maybe only someone like Vida could grasp it. Although he’s left time behind, his image and that lefty heat remain in the memories of many. Eventually they’ll be forgotten, and hopefully replaced with even more exultant ones. This musical recording is a reflection on loss and its acceptance. We explore several examples for each song, including the loss of pride, of money, of glory, of country, of sanity, of a favorite sports team, of significant others, and, every day, one’s self. It also explores various associated moods—fear, panic, reverence, stoicism,...

Scarcity

The Promise Of Rain

Flenser

The Promise Of Rain, the sophomore album of the experimental black metal band Scarcity, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) grappled with extensively while writing this record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: one doesn’t have to go through everything alone. When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise Of Rain. The Promise Of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, LEYA) on bass, Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon) on guitar and Lev Weinstein (Krallice) on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise Of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance. Scarcity forges a completely fresh sound in The Promise Of Rain with their alarming guitar work and melodic arpeggiating, shedding dead skin and breaking ground with sheer vulnerability....

Agriculture

Living Is Easy / The Circle Chant

Flenser

The Flenser is pleased to announce the release of Living Is Easy, the latest EP from ecstatic black metal band Agriculture. This new EP will be paired with the band’s debut EP, The Circle Chant. For the first time, both EPs will be pressed together on a single 12-inch vinyl record as well as a cassette format Living Is Easy represents a significant new statement from the band. With their debut self-titled, Agriculture embarked on a journey to explore how heavy music can provide insights into the joys of life, both everyday and divine. Their extensive touring with this material led to a profound experience of ecstasy, surpassing expectations as they shared the intensity and joy of these songs with audiences worldwide. This experience was a catalyst for the band, inspiring them to delve even deeper into the realm of “ecstatic black metal” music. They believes that with this release they have pushed this concept to its limit, resulting in a transformative explosion of sound and meaning. The record delves into themes of community connection, holiness, violence, and the cycles of life. The title track is especially notable, featuring a retelling of a story from one of the Buddha’s past lives. In this narrative, the Buddha encounters a starving family of tigers and sacrifices himself to save them, a tale of serenity and selflessness. This story resonates deeply with the band, reflecting the humility and inspiration they find in their collaboration and echoing the generosity and interconnection they strive to...

Chat Pile

Remove Your Skin Please

Flenser

***Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.

Chat Pile

This Dungeon Earth

Flenser

In the summer of 2019, a newly formed, Oklahoma City-based rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, This Dungeon Earth. Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, Chat Pile’s body of work is emblematic of a distinctly midwestern flavor of American dread, with This Dungeon Earth being no exception to the rule. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile’s debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band’s hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make This Dungeon Earth all the more impactful. Between its biting social commentary and gratuitous grindhouse insanity, the unfiltered brutality of Chat Pile’s debut recording has seen tracks like “Rainbow Meat”, “Face”, and “Ratboy” become mainstays in its notorious live shows. Although it depicts the band’s monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, This Dungeon Earth comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an...

Ragana

Desolation's Flower

Flenser

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA and are now based in Olympia and Oakland, CA. In their time together so far, Ragana have self-released five albums and teamed up with genre-favourite Thou for a split release in 2018. The following year, Ragana released their heralded We Know That The Heavens Are Empty EP and have quietly been working on new music ever since. The band signed with The Flenser in late 2022 and now present their forthcoming debut album for the label, Desolation’s Flower. On Desolation’s Flower, Ragana draws upon a number of influences from the flora and fauna of their Pacific Northwest origins to the darkly nostalgic folk of Mt. Eerie and, yes, their Olympian forebears Wolves In The Throne Room, synthesising them into an experimental, highly idiosyncratic take on black metal. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from tender, mesmerising vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once. Written over the past few tumultuous years, Desolation’s Flower is the band’s most devastating effort to date, containing seven incantations of loss, rage, pain and hope. Expertly engineered by the masterful Nicholas Wilbur at the Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington (Planning For Burial, drowse,...

Sprain

The Lamb As Effigy

Flenser

Since its formation in 2018 by like-minded Calarts students Alex Kent (guitar, vocals), April Gerloff (bass), and Sylvie Simmons (guitar), as well as the recent addition of Clint Dodson (percussionist), Los Angeles-based quartet Sprain has honed its signature flavor of experimentalism to a razor-fine point. Gradually moving from twisting conventions in its early works of minimalist slowcore to now transcending the confines of genre altogether, Sprain’s evolution over the past several years has encouraged the band to embrace a sound true to its muse. With its latest record, The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty XOXOXOS For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine, the band has translated this intent into an ambitious work that pairs its resplendent scale with uncompromising honesty towards the band’s artistic and conceptual essences. The most extraordinary of art isn’t created without its fair share of trials, of which Sprain faced numerous during the recording process of The Lamb As Effigy, with the sum and circumstances of them nearly sealing the album’s fate in limbo. With obstacles including session reschedulings as a result of a line-up change and a major studio electrical failure at the last possible moment, a mixing process that demanded the organization of several years of material across four separate studios, and the recording of the actual songs pushing the members of Sprain to their own physical limits, there were several times where the band considered scrapping the whole thing altogether. But Sprain persevered, applying the knowledge and willpower...

Agriculture

s/t

Flenser

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what one tends to experience most regularly in their lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts one emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes. What was initially a meeting and subsequent series of jam sessions between Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer, two musicians in the Los Angeles underground noise scene, would eventually manifest as a shared vision to portray the sublimity of the human experience through the vehicle of heavy music. Following the additions of veteran guitarist Richard Chowenhill and bassist / vocalist Leah Levinson to the band’s lineup, this idea would crystalize into the “ecstatic black metal” backbone of Agriculture’s music, first heard on the band’s 2022 debut EP, The Circle Chant. With Agriculture’s self-titled record and first full-length LP, it’s abundantly clear that the band’s use of heavy music to showcase the most resplendent emotions and moments of the human experience has a far deeper meaning. Woven between the flurries of soaring tremolo picking, crescendoing guitar harmonies, celebratory screamed vocals, thoughtful improvisation, and meditative atmospheric passages is the record’s...

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya

Orbweaving

Flenser

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz became close friends in 2020, regarding each other as a lifeline when things were difficult in their personal lives. This friendship was born from music but quickly became so much more than that. The two met in person in 2021, when Diaz came for a recording residency at Johnston’s studio in New Mexico. It was during this session that they wrote and recorded Orbweaving, in the heat of summer in the arid Chihuahuan Desert. Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists. The record explores themes of hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure—a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread. At night, Diaz and Johnston went herping (a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians) along the empty roads near Las Cruces. The asphalt retains heat from the day, and the snakes absorb the warmth by writhing across the pavement. They found rattlesnakes, roadkill, and orb-weaver spiders. The track “Plague X” was inspired by the lifecycle of cicadas; whose seventeen year periodical cycle took place in 2021. The group of cicadas that emerged are known as Brood X. In a post-covid world, one is no stranger to living in a plague year. The violent arrival of Brood X cicadas are alluded to...

Hand Model

Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death

Flenser

Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death is Frege’s debut LP, being released digitally on The Flenser (Chat Pile, Have a Nice Life). Will Life is at its core an electronic record constructed with synthesizers, bass guitar, and field recordings of friends, construction sites, and wild animals. The instrumentals are accompanied by Frege’s sardonic lyrics that aim to capture the immediacy of a reality that is nearly solid to the touch. WIth hints of trip-hop and an undercurrent of noise, Will Life is HTRK meets NIN. The album delivers a potent dose of electronica, with PC Music-esque moments, and even pop leaning house, all providing a backdrop for Frege's caustic and darkly hilarious spoken word. Will Life features additional vocals by Frege’s collaborators Zack Frederick and Nathan Burger (Cave Diver), who join Frege during Hand Model live performances. The track “Your Minds” is co-produced by Frege’s longtime collaborator and house producer Gloved Hands. The album art is by fellow The Flenser artist Kathryn Mohr and features a surreal photograph of a kitchen from yesteryear, laden with the anxiety that usually accompanies nostalgia.

Chat Pile

Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

Flenser

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller. While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music. The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” “Chat Pile bring a sense of dirt and squalor to the table.” —The FADER “Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile are the perfect people to expose the dark, seedy underbelly of American life.” —Paste Magazine “Cleansingly punishing.” —Stereogum “Harrowing.” —Pitchfork

Uboa

The Origin Of My Depression

Flenser

In an artistic landscape fueled by gamified promotional tactics, spasmodic virality, and manufactured controversy, the amount of noise that independent artists must cut through can seem overwhelming. Yet, it’s the most genuine statements—often those expecting no audience at all—that overcome. The Origin Of My Depression, the 2019 album from Australian experimentalist Uboa, proves just that; presenting such a deeply affecting mix of dark ambient, noise, and extreme metal, it all but demanded its unplanned but unsurprising cult following. With several tracks that began as live improvisations recorded in the living-room-turned-bedroom, and others recorded from live sets in venues, The Origin Of My Depression exhibits the spontaneity and ineffability of extreme emotions. Xandra Metcalfe, the mind behind Uboa, offers sonic representations of her anxieties, depressive thoughts, and lived experiences throughout the record’s seven songs, even if the origins of these feelings escape her. The result, intensely and authentically personal, undeniably resonates, as The Origin Of My Depression spread through online communities through sheer word of mouth upon its initial release. Now, four years later, the record stands as a defining statement of late 2010s underground music, and it takes just one listen to see why. Uboa has spent the better part of a decade dipping into every corner of heavy music. From harsh noise to dark ambient, glitch to doom metal, Metcalfe’s output, though sonically varied, remains consistent in her use of such styles to express her mental state at the time of writing. Whether it's her live performances (described as...

Planning For Burial

Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014 (Vol. 2)

Flenser

In 2017 The Flenser released a CD collection of material from Planning For Burial's early period entitled Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014. Named after the bands long-term home-base in Matawan New Jersey, the collection included many of Planning For Burial's beloved rare tracks that originally appeared on seven inches, cassettes, or online. Since 2017, the band's own Thom Wasluck has re-examined the material found on the Matawan collection with the intention of releasing a vinyl version. This vinyl version of the second volume of the Matawan collection includes much of the first disc of the CD version tirelessly remixed and edited, and the inclusion tracks not found on the original edition specially prepared for the vinyl format.

Sister Grotto

Song for an Unborn Sun

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Midwife’s Madeline Johnston has gone through several different iterations of her music project. In 2015, she moved into Denver’s premier DIY space Rhinoceropolis, where she began learning recording on her own and primarily focusing on Sister Grotto, a long-form ambient based project. Working alongside artists like Colin Ward and Dani Rev, she was inspired by her roommate’s tenacity and artistic outpouring. Madeline recorded Born to Lose / Born to Leave, Blindside, and Song For An Unborn Sun during the first half of her residency (before she started the project that would soon become Like Author, Like Daughter). Time is a major element in this group of recordings. Tracks were played in real time, slowed down, and played on top of, repeatedly, and has been referred to as an ambient sludge record. Components like the Casio SK-1, endless loop cassettes, delay and pitch shifters distort the passage of time - Layers, repetition, and analogue delay fold it back in on itself. Not unlike the sentimentality and difficulty distinguishing landmark moments of this time period for Madeline, the music itself is a sort of frenetic and meditative blur. Some of the tracks on Song For An Unborn Sun were later re-worked for the first Midwife album. Most importantly, “Song For An Unborn Sun” and “Placeholder” which became the song “Way Out.” Song For An Unborn Sun was originally released as a split in 2016 on the small run cassette label Terrible Pleasures. Side A was by Sister Grotto,...

Have A Nice Life

Voids

Flenser

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind. In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from...

Drowse

Wane Into It

Flenser

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi...

Mamaleek

Diner Coffee

Flenser

Of all things, it’s laughter that pervades Mamaleek’s Diner Coffee, the San Francisco metal deconstructionists’ sonically crushing ode to the humor found within catastrophe, American diners, and “the little things.” Featuring a mix of live performances, samples, and field recordings, Diner Coffee laughs through its harsh songs in an attempt to reflect the camaraderie found at the heart of global calamities and changing personal situations. It’s an homage to the quotidian set to the backdrop of the mythologized, sanctuary-like properties of a diner, reveling in irony-less nostalgia. Mamaleek embodies this ethos on and off the record. Originally two anonymous brothers, the past few years have seen Mamaleek adding members and venturing into live performance. Diner Coffee, following in the footsteps of 2020’s Come & See, features new, unfamiliar, unknown voices—including expanded experiments with horns, woodwinds, and strings and a Bay Area-local blues harmonica player who improvised recorded selections during practices. The resulting tracks touch on signifiers from black metal, blues, ambient, and more. Diner Coffee simultaneously represents the band’s artistic progression and the state of the world. Taking a surprisingly optimistic perspective, Mamaleek once again puts forward a project of left-field, wholly unique compositions, eluding easy categorization and furthering their abstraction of genre. “The group cloaks its music in the kind of warm, hypnotic distortion that defines shoegaze, and underneath that haze is a style that’s conceptually abrasive yet altogether beautiful.” —Forbes

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...

Scarcity

Aveilut

Flenser

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and...

Street Sects

Gentrification V: Whitewashed

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Bleeding edge Texas industrialists, Street Sects have completed their long running “Gentrification” single project with Gentrification V: White Washed. “Gentrification,” is a five part serial album that began eight years ago as a series of self-released seven inches. Now that your streets have been drained of all color and character, now that the last of the generational holdouts have been forced beneath the wheels, now that history has been torn up, rewritten, injected with fillers, plied with White Claw, passed around and shared by members of the board...are you sleeping more soundly?

Cremation Lily

Dreams Drenched In Static

Flenser

Cremation Lily’s debut album for The Flenser, Dreams Drenched in Static exists at the convergence of consciousness and disintegration.  Artist and multi-instrumentalist Zen Zsigo’s ingenuity and vulnerability is on full display throughout the course of the album’s ten tracks — glacial soundscapes float alongside earnest lyrics that capture the author in the midst of collapse.Written throughout a culmination of years of chaos, Dreams Drenched in Static serves as part diary and part comfort blanket.  The album was penned over countless sleepless nights and documents the liminal moments at the edge of sleep and the distressing thoughts that often accompany late-night R.E.M. disturbances. The lyrics were largely written in the darkest hours of the morning and serve to evoke reflection, depression and meditations on death that seem to haunt these early hours.Through the use of radiant tape hiss and degradation, guitar noise, frenetic vocal melodies and field recording samples, Cremation Lily creates a distinctive sensory experience.  At times ambient and atmospheric, at others meditative and euphoric, Dreams Drenched in Static floats back and forth from fantasy to reality.  Zsigo’s penchant for creating and dismantling traditional songwriting by using one-of-a-kind home-modified devices such as cassette walkman, micro-cassette dictaphone, circuit-bent Casio keyboard, various sequencers and self-created and tape loops weathered by nature and environment, creates an aqueous and all-encompassing aural encounter.  Zsigo comments, “The processing on the album and the concept of it is a product of how it was made.  After expressing pain and suffering in the recording of the songs, I...

Mamaleek

Kurdaitcha

Flenser

Mamaleek’s Kurdaitcha is finally back in print! The San Francisco-based duo released their third album of weirdo black metal, Kurdaitcha, on the legendary cult label Enemies List Home Recordings (Have a Nice Life, Giles Corey), and it quickly sold out. For years the LP has been a hard to find collector’s item. Kurdaitcha finds the project in its initial period of creating music influenced by black metal, hip hop, jazz, and spirituals.  Founded in 2008 in the Bay Area by two anonymous brothers, Mamaleek has explored a vast sonic territory on the edge of a genre renown for its aversion to change. Their expert utilization of left-field samples and unconventional instrumentation, and their insistent drive to experiment continues to set the band apart from their peers.  This pressing of Kurdaitcha has been remastered and features a previously unreleased bonus track with a gold foil stamped jacket.  “Mamaleek are the great destroyers.” — Invisible Oranges   “An incredibly rich and rewarding experience.” —Heavy Blog Is Heavy “Is it good, though? It’s fucking mental. It’s amazing. It’s absolutely horrible. It’s barely listenable at times and yet you can’t turn it off. The music is perfect. Like broken glass is perfect.” —Echoes And Dust  “The group cloaks its music in the kind of warm, hypnotic distortion that defines shoegaze, and underneath that haze is a style that’s conceptually abrasive yet altogether beautiful.” — FORBES

Bell Witch

Longing

Flenser

***BACK IN STOCK ON LP!!! Upon its release in 2017, Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper cemented the Seattle duo’s status as one of doom metal’s most formidable acts. Its single, monolithic track also served as a tribute to the band’s former drummer Adrian Guerra, who tragically passed away the year before. Five years earlier, on the back of a highly praised demo, the band released their debut album, Longing. Featuring the original line-up of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra (RIP), the album was recorded by Brandon Fitzsimons (Wormwood, Samothrace). It is a time-stretching journey through darkness, pain, and suffering, and doomed minimalism that is now considered a classic of the genre. Originally released on CD by Profound Lore in 2012 and on vinyl by The Flenser, the vinyl edition has been out of print for several years until now. The Flenser is proud to offer a new pressing of this timeless masterpiece.  Longing is packaged in a thick, old-style case-wrapped gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves.

Have A Nice Life

(Deluxe) Deathconsciousness

Flenser

In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their now cult classic Deathconsciousness album to a whimper and critical non-interest. Six years after its release the band followed up with 2014’s stunner The Unnatural World, and by then Deathconsciousness had become a force of influence and fanatic obsession. Seamlessly blending shoegaze, post punk, new wave, industrial and noise with unparalleled depth and weight, the album was originally released by Enemies List Home Recordings founded by HANL members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga. Now, longtime HANL collaborator The Flenser will reissue Deathconsciousness on the long-requested CD format, with a deluxe packaging option, including the lengthy accompanying zine and housed in a heavy box. The 75-page booklet accompanying the deluxe format of Deathconsciousness details the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult. Blurring the lines between novella, liner notes, and academic text, the zine itself presents an engrossing narrative. The corresponding album is rhythmic, primal and expansive, and is a gloomy-post-punk masterpiece—a mediation on death, loss and existence. It feels more fresh and engaging with every listen and has held up as a remarkable piece of art. Fans of Have A Nice Life exhibit both cultic thought and action for good reason—it is perhaps a fanbase as dark and mysterious as the Antiochean’s, which the album itself revolves around.

Succumb

XXI

Flenser

Plumbing the depths of modern death metal with primitive elegance, Succumb have returned with their sophomore release XXI. One of the strongest up-and-coming metal bands in recent years, what sets Succumb apart from their peers is vocalist Cheri Musrasrik; the juxtaposition of death metal riffing and propulsive drums with Musrasrik’s cavernous howl and sophisticated lyrics make a unique listening experience in today’s crowded landscape. Musrasrik cites authors and poets like Yeats, Genet and Zola as her primary lyrical influences. XXI sees an allegorical look at the elements and their related mythologies. Talks about Lilith, the Orphic poems, ocean and nature deities, Dionysus, Arthurian literature, fly agaric as soma, the cosmic egg, and the Boxer Rebellion. Succumb was formed in 2014 by a group of friends with diverse musical backgrounds who share a common love for Canadian death metal, war metal, and 1990s Napalm Death. The band released their self-titled debut album in May of 2017 and received praise from publications around the globe. Blocland called it “one of the year’s most intriguing metal listens” and PopMatters named it one of the best metal albums of the year, citing: “Musrasrik’s insane delivery makes Succumb one of the strongest metal debuts to come out in 2017.” The eight new tracks that comprise XXI are sure to continue this arc of praise.

Planning For Burial

Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014 (vol. 1)

Flenser

In 2017 The Flenser released a CD collection of material from Planning For Burial's early period entitled Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014. Named after the bands long-term home-base in Matawan New Jersey, the collection included many of Planning For Burial's beloved rare tracks that originally appeared on seven inches, cassettes, or online. Since 2017, the band's own Thom Wasluck has re-examined the material found on the Matawan collection with the intention of releasing a vinyl version. This vinyl version of the first volume of the Matawan collection includes much of the first disc of the CD version tirelessly remixed and edited, and the inclusion tracks not found on the original edition specially prepared for the vinyl format.  “Wasluck’s longing and misery plays such a role in Planning for Burial’s music that it often receives equal credit alongside the instrumentation.”—Pitchfork  “Thom Wasluck feels pain, and you certainly will also.”—Sputnik Music

Midwife

Luminol

Flenser

Midwife is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston. She lives and works in San Miguel, New Mexico by way of Denver, Colorado, where she spent the better half of the past decade developing her experimental pop project. As a self taught guitarist and recording engineer, Midwife explores dark subject matter in her anthemic, soft-gaze hits. Self-described as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation and catharsis.  When 2020 began, Johnston had several national and international tours planned, but the pandemic shifted her focus back to recording, and back to her internal landscape. Midwife’s third full length record, Luminol, was written and produced during quarantine.  Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators to reveal trace amounts of blood left at a crime scene. When it reacts with blood, luminol emits a chemiluminescent blue glow that can be seen in a darkened room. In the same way this chemical reveals evidence at a scene, Midwife is interested in profound truth—turning trial and tribulation into sources of light. Luminol navigates themes of incarceration, locus of control, clarity, self harm, confinement, agency, and truth-seeking, all erupting in a bioluminescent Rothko color-field of blue. The album cover shows a dark figure standing at the edge of a body of water. It symbolizes the way humanity had been on a precipice throughout 2020, to later find out they had been there all along. Being one of Midwife’s most personal records, this cover artwork is a picture of Madeline Johnston’s mother taken in the...

Amulets

Blooming

Flenser

The prolific, Portland-based Randall Taylor is an audio / visual artist best known for his musical project, Amulets. Taylor’s work uses analog tape and its imperfections to explore themes like degradation and nostalgia and their relationship to technology and to the self. By constructing and modifying tape loops and repurposing antiquated cassette players, Taylor creates dense, never-ending, looping soundscapes for both his live performances and sculptural sound art installations. Taylor’s new album, Blooming, was fully written and recorded in quarantine in his home studio in early 2020. His personal life was in upheaval as was the world around him—the isolation, sadness and change had Taylor missing “… what it felt like to feel alive and the need to feel that again,” he says. With widespread global pandemic and social distancing protocols in effect, Taylor would go on solo daily walks to clear his head and was struck by all of the blooming flowers surrounding him during springtime in Portland. Within that beauty came his realization that nothing lasts forever and that everything is cyclical—ultimately resulting in themes of growth, decay, melancholy and beauty inherent throughout Blooming. Taylor says that the songs on the record became a part of his processing and journey, blossoming into a new life and outlook. Taylor has performed across the country at numerous festivals and opened for such acts as This Will Destroy You, Efrim Manuel Manuck (of Godspeed You Black Emperor), Benoit Pioulard, and Steve Hauschildt to name a few. His solo exhibition work has...

Midwife

Like Author, Like Daughter

Flenser

On the heels of Midwife’s 2020 sophomore album, Forever, The Flenser is pleased to offer a new vinyl edition of her debut Like Author, Like Daughter, remastered as a double LP in a gatefold jacket. Like Author, Like Daughter is a portrait of Madeline Johnston’s final year as a resident of Denver’s famed D.I.Y venue Rhinoceropolis, which closed in a rash of politically motivated assaults on creative spaces across the United States. The album internalizes loss, addiction, and abandonment and wrings them through distorted power chords, melancholy leads, and sheets of drone to create building, aching monuments to past-selves and lost relationships as positivist statements of resilience and self-love. It’s a record that is impossible to listen to without a lump in the throat. All songs on this release were written by Johnston between November, 2015 and January, 2017. It was performed and recorded by her and Tucker Theodore in Denver at Rhinoceropolis and INAMBULANCE in Olympia, WA.

Black Wing

No Moon

Flenser

Dan Barrett—the man behind Have A Nice Life, Giles Corey, and Enemies List Home Recordings—has unveiled his sophomore album as the electronic project Black Wing on The Flenser. No Moon is a gorgeous chillwave / post-punk record with nine bleak yet blissful songs and is a fitting close out to the year 2020. Written over the course of the last few years, with about half of the songs penned over the last six months (mostly due to pandemic “free time”), No Moon is a heart-wrenchingly honest outpour of emotion. Throughout the writing process, Barrett was having recurring dreams and felt a strange sense of timelessness—that, combined with quarantine is what he simply describes as “a weird experience.” Barrett explains, “Quarantine was profoundly isolating. With writing this record, more than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could make something out of it. That ended up being a lot of songs about feeling isolated, a lot of ‘trapped in my own head’ moments. I think that was a lot of people’s experience as well.” Barrett formed Black Wing in the mid-2010s as an opposite to his project Giles Corey; where Giles started as “only acoustic instruments allowed,” Black Wing started with only digital instruments. In 2015, Black Wing released its first proper full length, …Is Doomed, to great critical acclaim. Much like that album, No Moon bubbles with electronica and indie-pop with earworm melodies and affecting lyrics. But No Moon is a transitional change from Black Wing’s debut;...

Botanist

Photosynthesis

Flenser

Photosynthesis is a concept album about how plants convert sunlight into energy, how they transform carbon dioxide into the oxygen that all fauna need to breathe. The album’s eight tracks each deal with an aspect of photosynthesis, from the macro “Water” to the micro “Palisades,” which reflects the theme of botanical lungs on a microscopic level. The album culminates with “Oxygen,” holding high the imagery of “Verdant Alveolus Diaspora,” the album’s core visual theme, depicting the world’s forests as a functioning lung system’s individual cells, scattered throughout the globe.  Photosynthesis is the fourth “collective” album in Botanist’s greater discography, meaning it is composed of a group of individuals. Band originator Otrebor (hammered dulcimers, vocals, keyboards) composed the music and lyrics to the drums of returning member Daturus (Botanist’s live drummer since 2017, who played on 2019’s Ecosystem) and new bassist Tony Thomas. Photosynthesis sees Botanist returning to The Flenser stable, whose partnership yielded three albums, including 2014’s VI: Flora, perhaps the project’s most noteworthy work. This release was recorded in the Verdant Realm in California. The album production was handled by Dan Swanö, a musician whose legend is equally for his enormous contributions to the Swedish melodic and progressive death metal scenes in the ’90s and ’00s, as he is for his output of top-shelf album productions from his Unisound studio. The application of Swanö’s creative genius in more artistic, avant-garde areas of the metal spectrum is a match of dreams for Botanist, resulting in an album that achieves...

Sprain

As Lost Through Collision

Flenser

Los Angeles-based outsider artists Sprain play downer music at cacophonous volumes. Their new album, As Lost Through Collision, unfurls threads of spidery ’90s rock (think Unwound, Duster, Slint, etc.) and is a complex and cathartic exercise in tension and restraint.  Formed in L.A. in early 2018 by Alex Kent and April Gerloff, Sprain‘s initial home-recorded forays into minimalistic slowcore resulted in their self-titled EP (2018) that distinguished them from the lo-fi pack through visceral expressions of depressed life. Soon, guitarist Alex Simmons and drummer Max Pretzer joined, folding tumultuous noise rock, drone, and flirtations with the avant-garde into the band’s arsenal. Touring converged these explorations into Sprain’s current sound: pure 21st century panic strained through a wall of piercing, feedbacking guitar amps.   Written at home and refined on the road, these five new tracks are parts monolithic and minimalist, manic and mellow. Engineered by Josiah Mazzaschi at The Cave (Built to Spill, The Jesus and Mary Chain) and mixed by Tim Green at Louder Studios (The Melvins, Lungfish, Jawbreaker), the music here retains its organic purity and captures the band in its truest state. While the noticeable persuasion from ’90s post hardcore and noise rock is palpable, this release takes cues from 20th century avant-classical such as Xenakis and Penderecki. The end result is freewheeling and urgent, dynamic and destructive, and Sprain is marked by an aggressive versatility that has been sorely lacking in recent guitar music.

Planning For Burial

Leaving - 11th Anniversary Edition Box

Flenser

The Flenser presents a new deluxe vinyl edition of Planning For Burial’s debut full-length “Leaving.” The 2010 album is a depressing journey though isolation and sadness now recognized as a cult classic. Originally released by the legendary micro-imprint Enemies List Home Recordings, CD copies of Leaving have since become sought-after collector’s items. The Flenser is proud to offer a limited edition of Leaving in its intended analog format with updated artwork.    Planning For Burial is the solo work of gloom prince Thom Wasluck, who has toured the DIY circuit with his one-man show extensively and become an unlikely sad-boy figurehead in the new-school gloom-gaze movement alongside labelmates Have a Nice Life. With heavy, dark shoegaze, ’80s goth, and ’90’s rock influences, Planning For Burial is hard to categorize and hard not to like. The project has released a slew of EPs and splits on various labels in the last five years, and shared the stage with a wide breadth of musical compatriots.  This new 2020 box-set edition includes a never before heard recording called “Sorry For Your Loss” pressed on a 10inch record. It contains songs from the original time period that Thom remixed in 2018 and had mastered by Nicholas Wilbur in Summer 2019.

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...

Midwife

Forever

Flenser

As Midwife, Denver-based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston plays what she describes as “heaven metal,” or emotive music about devastation. Johnston began developing the experimental pop project in 2015 while a resident of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis. The venue / co-op started in the early aughts and nurtured local artists until 2016, when its doors were shuttered due to high tensions surrounding the safety of DIY spaces (not coincidentally following the horrific Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). Residents were displaced around Denver and artists like Midwife were forced to start over.  However, it was at Rhinoceropolis that Johnston became close with Colin Ward, an artistic confidant and friend to whom her new album, Forever, is dedicated. Johnston comments, “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place [Rhinoceropolis] in a lot of ways. We became really close friends there. I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” When Ward passed away unexpectedly in 2018, she turned towards sound to express the indescribable feelings that partnered with her grief.   These mournful sounds ultimately developed into her new album, Forever. The six-song LP is a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies—anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone. On the track “C.R.F.W.,” we hear Colin Ward reading a poem that speaks of a leaf falling from a tree in autumn: “imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body...

Mamaleek

Come & See

Flenser

Mamaleek seeks to weaponize the tropes of blues, jazz and black metal through an understanding of their respective formal structures. Known for flouting genre conventions, the band’s newest album Come & See, marks yet another degree of separation from their black metal roots. Here Mamaleek draws inspiration from post-war public housing—specifically Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green housing project—seeking to analyze the emotional impact of the spaces one occupies, the surreal forces behind the appearance of physical reality, and the residues they leave behind. This is the band’s third full-length album for The Flenser, and their first release written and recorded with a full band. Founded in 2008 in the Bay Area by two anonymous brothers, Mamaleek has explored a vast sonic territory on the edge of a genre often renown for its aversion to change. Their expert utilization of left-field samples and unconventional instrumentation, and their insistent drive to experiment continues to set the band apart from their peers. Mamaleek will be making a rare live appearance at the 2020 edition of the acclaimed Roadburn festival in Tilburg, The Netherlands.  “Is it good, though? It’s fucking mental. It’s amazing. It’s absolutely horrible. It’s barely listenable at times and yet you can’t turn it off. The music is perfect. Like broken glass is perfect.” —Echoes And Dust  “An incredibly rich and rewarding experience.”  —Heavy Blog Is Heavy “Mamaleek are the great destroyers.” —Invisible Oranges

Street Sects

Gentrification IV: Suspended From Gallery Rails

Flenser

Gentrification IV: Suspended From Gallery Rails is the penultimate installment in the five part serial album by Texas industrialists Street Sects. Delving further beneath the surface of the festering malcontention that is born from increasing class disparity in rapidly developing urban environments, this chapter of the series loosely touches upon the repugnant hypocrisy inherent in our arts and entertainment circles. Passing through the gateway of shameless self promotion and into the halls of unapologetic exploitation, artists and industry parasites scurry to capitalize upon the plights of the underprivileged and oppressed, even when there is no money to be made. However, as always, popularity and influence are the most valuable social currencies, and nothing bolsters exposure and interaction like waving a flag for a supposed cause. The irony of this topic being weaved into the narrative of a self serving, monetized, navel gazing piece of "art" is not lost upon us, but we invite you, the consumer, to pull the pencil from the writers hand and shove it deep into our one good eye...until you feel the graphite connect with gray matter. We're as tired of this bullshit as you are.

Have A Nice Life

Sea Of Worry

Flenser

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received a 7.4 rating from Pitchfork.  Have A Nice Life was formed in a time of Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga’s life that reflected concerns with depression and suicidal ideation. As the following for the project has grown, and Barrett and Macuga have aged and faced new life challenges with family and careers, their new album Sea Of Worry reflects just that. Dread is the primary theme that is woven throughout this release—the dread of aging, children growing up, and an increasingly uncertain future.  However, Sea Of Worry is Have A Nice Life at the peak of their powers: Barrett and Macuga’s unmistakable chemistry coupled with a propulsive backing band catapults them into stratosphere. These seven tracks ebb and flow with noise and melody, and are so well-crafted it’s near impossible to get them out of one’s head.  More concise and perhaps more straightforward than their past releases, Have A Nice Life has found new focus and discipline on Sea Of Worry and the album is a triumphant addition to their ever-evolving discography.

Consumer

In Computers

Flenser

Consumer formed in 2017 to generate reptile-brain, late capitalist agitprop. Its main tools are over-processed riffs played at high volume, impressionistic slogans, and soundscapes built from analog synths, broken electronics, and tape loops. Past your well-stocked garage, descending into Mammon’s deep world of darkness, with regional coupon circulars in hand, Consumer offers doomy, electro, post-whatever. Featuring Tim Macuga from Have A Nice Life as well as Have a Nice Life’s live band Myke Cameron (bass), Rich Otero (drums, synths, programming), and Joe Streeter (guitar/engineering).  “Great experience. A+ Customer service was excellent and almost no wait on the phone. Would buy again.” —Ebay Reviewer

Street Sects

Gentrification III: Death And Displacement

Flenser

In January of 2014 Street Sects released their first single, Gentrification I: The Morning After the Night We Raped Death. The two song 7-inch was the first of a planned five part series titled Gentrification: A Serial Album. In June of the same year they released Gentrification II: Broken Windows, Sunken Ceilings. After the second single was released, the band was approached by San Francisco-based record label The Flenser, and the band switched gears to begin working on a full length for the label. One release led to another, and the final three installments of the Gentrification series were put on hold, indefinitely. Now, five years later, in the wake of the release of their more melodic and melancholic sophomore LP, The Kicking Mule, the band have returned to the serial album that started it all to pick up where they left off. Gentrification III: Death and Displacement isn't so much a return to form (the bands' style has always been in flux, and their approach to songwriting and production has evolved significantly in the past half-decade) as it is a return to the emotional intent that fueled those first two releases. The themes and stories addressed within the Gentrification series were never intended to be strict socioeconomic commentary, but rather the conversation and consequences surrounding Gentrification were meant to be a fractured and brutal lens through which we are given a voyeuristic look into the emotional perspectives of characters whose lives are maligned by alienation, exile, and economic peril....