Not Not Fun   Page 4

Umberto

Temple Room

Not Not Fun

Upon relocating from the Midwest to Los Angeles last year, Matt Hill discovered a number of his original audio folders were deleted or corrupted beyond repair. Alas, the fragile fantasia of digital artifacts. So, in preparation for a string of performances, he holed up and tried to recreate some of these lost compositions, strip-mining his memory for clues and notation. This revisitation process had a particularly transformative effect on the seething lead cut from 2010’s Prophecy of the Black Widow, elongating its curvature into even more elegantly paranoid shapes, riding the beat through wider corridors of spider webs and blood-red light. “Temple Room (Extended Version)” functions like a director’s cut: expansive, indulgent, and attuned to a deeper strain of the nightmare. On the flip, Umberto’s Silvio alias further re-imagines the track, upping the BPM to construct an Italo haunted house of jittery sequencers, echoing handclaps, and soaring, malevolent synth leads. Perfect for strobe-lit dungeons and brooding dancefloors alike. Catch Umberto on tour this spring in half the Western world.

Bronze

World Arena

Not Not Fun

The West Coast’s weirdest hidden-treasure trio, Bronze, has plied their molten composite of serpentine metro-gnomic drumming, oscillator raga, hash-oil free verse, and pendulum bass patterns for seven shaded years, but sonic documentation remains sparse. The new decade, thankfully, has seen them reversing this deficit, first with 2011’s Copper LP, and now with World Arena, which unfolds another octagon’s worth of their signature spellbound, smoke-ringed, psych-fusion explorations.  Tracked at their Trojan Cavern studio / bunker in San Francisco and mastered in Amsterdam by Ruud Lekx, the record freewheels from tranced, polyrhythmic sequencer meditations (“Played,” “Quality”) to burnt chrome post-punk electronic experiments (“Almost”) to jazzy, decadent mystery rituals (“Dulcinea,” “Golden Handcuffs”). The way they weld home-wired circuitry modulation with lofty poetics and intuitive, live-band dynamics feels finessed and fully-formed—and unusually liberated in today’s world-gone-solo landscape. Live, they’re even more baffling, seesawing from fluid, fog-machine narratives to mesmerizing electro-modal jams, owning all zones. Future intercontinental tours should further bolster their standing in metallic arts communities. The Bronze Age is dawning.

Torn Hawk

Through Force Of Will

Not Not Fun

Luke Wyatt's looping night-rider trance-rock instrumentals as Torn Hawk often tend towards the moody/brooding side of Brooklyn's rhythm nation but for Through Force Of Will he's flipped the script, flexing his powers for hope not mope, for rallying through those final workout reps, ripping through the tape at the finish line, pumping fists to the sky over city hall. Triumphant guitar-shred blisters atop steady cardio drum machines and heartbeat synth-basslines, invoking a FX-scrambled montage of sweaty crunches, marathons through the mountains, and muscle beach dreamers keeping the faith. There's a few respites from the modal inspiration-rock but even these fit into the album's olympian game-plan: a lulling calm after the endorphins fade ("Hutchison"), a sleepless midnight, haunted by past defeat ("A November Mission"). The rest of the cassette's 50 minutes stay on task though: the champion returned, indomitable, overthrowing the palace, streets on fire, a trophy the size of the sun soaring into the horizon. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Video mulch artwork by Luke Wyatt, designed by Britt Brown. Edition of 100.

Magic Eye

Babylon

Not Not Fun

Co-ed Edinburgh Nyquil-pop trio Magic Eye have always favored a faded, falling-through-clouds songwriting mode but Babylon filters their opaque space-echo shoegaze through new narcoleptic fidelities, birthing their best collection yet. Comprised of Alex (guitar/programming), Bek (guitar/vocals), and Roma (vocals), they suffered the rite of passage indignity of recording their first set of songs at an overly pro studio, rendering the results grit-less and dried out. Fortunately they regrouped, salvaged the stems, and methodically pieced everything back together into a lusher, degraded haze. Later takes of a couple of these cuts surfaced on last year's Shreddin' On Heaven's Door cassette but the Babylon versions predate them, primordial heroin hanging in the sky, beautifully blurred, naked, and melting in the light. Mastered by Elvis Valentine. Artwork and layout by BB. Edition of 99.

Blackhoods

Sunk

Not Not Fun

U.K. shadow-duo Blackhoods espouse a blunt, stripped strain of long-form echo-heavy battered amplifier worship: no names, no cities, no drummers, no mixers, no stages. They play on the floor, heads down, horns locked, guitar and bass and drum machine fed through heavy FX and blasted out a squadron of ratty cabinets. Sunk perfectly encapsulates their agenda and potential, a half-hour underwater hypno-slowdive of mossy guitar sludge, dub metronomes, downer low-end loops, and processional headbang, intercut with two textured electric north sea voids. A cool controlled burn of undertow riffing and grooved bunker percussion mechanics, right up our alley. Totemic sculpture/shroud J-card art by the band; individually stamped and hand-numbered. Edition of 90.

Sapphire Slows

Allegoria

Not Not Fun

Received a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork On her first proper full-length album, Tokyo netscape nightingale Sapphire Slows impressively expands on the spider web tone-bank nocturnes of 2011’s True Breath EP, with headier, haunted highs and eerier, elegant depths. Patiently pieced together across all of 2012 (plus change), and inspired by everything from St. Etienne’s plasticine Euro-house, obscured J-pop memories, Blue Bell Knoll and the saddest Section 25 remixes, Allegoria swirls and spirals through ten textural electronic melancholias composed in solitude. The record grows more reflective and insular as it goes on, ebbing from the Casio ghost-dub of “Dry Fruits” and “Third Party” into the fragile sleepwalker techno of “Corekill” and “Fade Out” before dissolving into even more weightless 4 AM pop-ambient Kompakt abstractions like “Break Control” and “Meteor.” An effortless fusion of emotive and exploratory impulses, arranged in a blue-lit rock garden in an invisible apartment in the heart of urban infinity, Allegoria was mastered by Andrew Veres and features “piercing jewelry textile” cover artwork by celebrated Angeleno artisan Natasha Ghosn. As the artist herself puts it, “Darkness no one can enter; only listening to this album lets you into my real world.”

Group Rhoda

12th House

Not Not Fun

Mara Barenbaum's solo vessel Group Rhoda emerged last year with one of 2012's deftest debuts, Out Of Time - Out Of Touch, an alluring sound-garden of jittery drumbox, moody exotica, bedroom dub, and aloof shadow theater melodies. Tours both foreign and domestic soon followed, during which she began blueprinting 12th House, her sophomore collection. Recorded and produced in collaboration with Ben Versluis in San Francisco, the album's eight songs snake through similarly entrancing terrain as her past work but the production is starker and spikier, almost post-punk in its clarity. From witchy island pop ("Day Ruiner," "Dust") and dizzy, micro-cosmic disco ("Coral Castle") to paisley circus-psych ("Disappearing Ground") and wobbly, haunted house dub ("Space Race," "Blk Mtl"), the record is rich with rhinestones and reflections, her vocals detached but discerning, casting strange dimensions into the music: "Finally you look away / you look a way / do you see ghosts walking around? / it's your town / it's their town too." A free-spirited and fascinating follow-up by one of California's most intriguing young pioneers. Mastered by Ruud Lekx. Artwork by Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough.

White Poppy

S/t

Not Not Fun

White Poppy, the “experimental therapeutic pop” project from British Columbian inner-peacenik Crystal Dorval, has been evolving fresh forms for a couple years now. Last winter, packing a satchel full of four-track tapes, she ventured out from her bedroom haven and boarded a boat across the Strait of Georgia to the town of Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, to The Noise Floor Recording Studio, to mastermind and mix the ten deluxe, delirious dream-gaze gems comprising her self-titled full-length debut. Fusing the warm, washed tonalities of her earliest cassette-blurred lotus meditations with a richer range of glittering guitar gestures, sky-way keyboard cascades and neon-violet vocal refractions, White Poppy captures the catchy, dizzy fuzz and textured, opiated heights of Dorval’s deceptively vulnerable songcraft. The see-sawing balance of faded, forlorn freefalling (“Emotional Intelligence,” “Existential Angst”) with buoyant, blissed independence-pop (“Wear Me Away,” “Without Answers”) conjures a real rainbow mood ring three-dimensionality, a kaleidoscope of intimate drifter soul. True-gaze for a newer age.

Ensemble Economique

Fever Logic

Not Not Fun

Ensemble Economique has emerged as an unusually globe-trotting creative valve for Arcata, CA, beachcomber Brian Pyle. The last year alone has seen him backpacking through Scandinavia, Europe and Russia—twice. Maybe his spirit’s too absorbent, ’cause he’s brought back some deeply heavier moods and ancient world weariness since his last outing on Not Not Fun, 2010’s demonic tribal monsoon Psychical.  Recent splits with similarly instinctual psychedelic unclassifiables like Lee Noble and Heroin in Tahiti have hinted at his bracing off-roader headspace, but he bares all on Fever Logic, six songs smeared across 40 minutes. Pyle positions each composition as a slow-motion funereal landslide; grey clay electronics losing form, echoes of processed guitar, depressive synth mist, all drizzling down over his wailing prisoner’s prayer vocals. A few flirt with slightly more overt goth-gaze signifiers (“Walking into the Light,” “We Come Spinning Out of Control”), but the rest run closer to some kind of miasmic electronic abstraction mode, merging submerged mumbling and isolationist field recordings with intensely personal melodies and spacious cathedrals of ritual guitar. As with so many of Pyle’s past steps, it’s all-consuming and all out on its own (the only guest appearance is his brother, Jon, echo-plexing some occult percussion to the opening track).   Ensemble Economique "We Come Spinning Out Of Control" by NOT NOT FUN

Lx Sweat

City Of Sweat

Not Not Fun

German steamroom wrecking crew LX Sweat returns from a winter of festival dates and self-symbiosis to lay out an impressively realized full-length debut of voidist club fantasia, equal parts Screw bootlegs, slow-jack synth freestyle, and degraded phaser wash.  City of Sweat spirals through a judgement night of weird, codeined lust, luxury hallucinations, overdosed syrup rituals, and long, blurry nights stumbling home through alleys in the rain. Like last year’s Sweat Sweat Sweat cassette, this new LP siphons certain R&B and Memphis swap-meet structures but stretches them so they sprawl and sag and slide in strange moments, giving the songs a mesmerizing melting quality, like hearing overheated vinyl dissolving into the needle. An entrancing, numbed-out suite of pleasure-faded electronics by a rare head.

Invisible Path

Levitating Mirror

Not Not Fun

The billowing, cloaked drones of Michael Bailey's low-burning Invisible Path have always felt a bit out of step amidst the tweeting, energy drink-sponsored hustle of the L.A. music scene, which is perhaps what's allowed it the freedom to ferment and fortify into such a singular, vibrational force. Past shows staged in pure darkness with bowed gongs and vibrational amplifier worship hinted at the potency of the project but nothing in the IP oeuvre prepared us for the enveloping, textural infinities and planetary pulsations of The Levitating Mirror. Translucent electric mists undulate while sub-bass synth heartbeats throb sparsely and a distant, clanging metal metronome reverberates in the sky. The submerged rhythmic dimension of these pieces gives them a fascinatingly shadowed sense of motion, like some obscenely abstract ambient techno record pitched to 12 BPM. The mood moves from meditative and mesmerized ("Unraveling Threat Of Light") to drugged and dissolved ("Escaped Into The Mist," "Decompression") before plummeting to industrialized, subterranean blackness ("Descension"). One of the most transportive headphone bio-domes we've heard in multiple years, hands down. Plug into the Path. Pro-dubbed tapes in collaged J-cards designed by B. Brown. Edition of 100.

High Wolf

Kairos: Chronos

Not Not Fun

French globe-tourist High Wolf has hand-rolled his way up Mount Fuji, trainspotted every corner of Europe, hitch-hiked across America and Australia, chugged Ganges water, and crouched on all manner of smoke-stained prayer rug since first looping a bongo back in ’09. His apprenticeship in the House of Wah nearly complete, he’s hinted at a potentially seismic shift in the High Wolf third eye doctrine lurking in the near future; perhaps his Away Team exfoliation moment is nigh. Fortunately, Not Not Fun has coaxed the astral jungle jah concoctions of Kairos: Chronos out from the ether, because this LP is the summation of his entire half-decade Amazon Cosmos quest.  All the tenets of the High Wolf mythology are in place: humid hand-percussion heat-spells, coiling snake-charmer fuzz-guitar stacked six deep, sunlit synth textures, dubby bass-lines thumping through grass amps, ceremonial voodoo babble, etc. From the hidden temple hymn “Kulti” to the thirteen-minute self-beheading solar eclipse shakedown, “Alvarado,” the record represents rarified proof of The Wolf on High. On tour now in every country on Earth.

Russian Tsarlag

Gagged In Boonesville

Not Not Fun

Providence, RI, garbage-artisan savant Russian Tsarlag (a.k.a. Carlos Gonzales) should need no introduction at this point—he’s been trucking his moldy fruit cart of sewage-pop and bad acid storytelling across the American wasteland since longer than most people have had an email account. Yet over the past few years his uniquely zombified scrapheap songcraft has fermented into its ripest and most reflective forms, none more so than his latest bleach blanket odyssey, Gagged in Boonesville.  The album tells the sordid tale of a huge tenement apartment building whose residents are mentally poisoned by an ancient poster of Medusa haunting the basement, not to mention the unruly pack of rabies-stricken stray dogs living in the courtyard. (Shit’s pretty bleak in Boonesville, clearly.) Given the backstory, it’s fitting that the LP’s nine tracks traverse a more melancholy, meditative dimension of the Tsarlag multiverse: dumpster-scrounged fifth-generation new-wave demos (“Gagged in Boonesville,” “Play This Tape Again”), homeless mutant campfire dirges (“This Waltz”), cyborg-mumbling depressive ambience (“Become Solid”), even a cockroach-covered piano ballad (“Island of Lost Souls”).  It’s all here, echoing down the derelict stairwells—another fascinating, unclassifiable chapter in the Neverending Story of Tsarlag. Read it or weep. 

Reinhardt, Jonas

Mask Of The Maker

Not Not Fun

Vintage synthesizer music has ballooned from a fringe interest into something approaching an outright renaissance across the past half-decade, but few wield as much radical mastery in the realm as Jonas Reinhardt. After a couple years experimenting with group arrangements, Jesse Reiner (Reinhardt’s mastermind / alter ego) returned the project in 2011 to its solitary roots, birthing the distant moon terrarium Music for the Tactile Dome, the Klaus Schulze-spawn The Prime Revealer, plus last year’s Italo-kraut shredfest Foam Fangs. All of which, in retrospect, feel like mere promising precursors to his pumping, cosmos-slaloming electro-opus Mask of the Maker.  Crafted bi-coastally (San Fran and Brooklyn) over the course of two years, and incorporating an eclectic web of multi-instrumentalist collaborators—including percussion genie Damon Palermo, Diego Gonzalez, Phil Manley (who also engineered some of the sessions), Tim Soete, Steve Moore, Clint Newsom, Michael Barron and Meryl Press—the record’s nine compositions represent the loftiest heights of The Jonas Reinhardt Xperience, fusing deep kosmische moods with jet-propulsion lab experiments, classic galactic Italo, soaring starblood synth workouts, funky astral ragas, psychedelic dust clouds and rare mantric guest vocals.  Mixed at Spacebar Studios by ex-DFA engineer Abe Seiferth and mastered by Simon Francis at Wired Masters, London, Mask of the Maker gleams and glows like nothing in the Reinhardt solar system so far. Wear the Mask.   Jonas Reinhardt "Elimination Street" by NOT NOT FUN

Harris, Xander

New Dark Age Of Love

Not Not Fun

The past two years have found Austin’s dark lord Xander Harris (a.k.a. Justin Sweatt) on a heavy transfigurative trip, overhauling his live rig, detouring through an expansive soundtrack project celebrating the 20th anniversary of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, touring outside Texas (from New Orleans to the Netherlands), plus a host of other inner-life turmoils and metamorphoses—all of which have seeped into the synthesizer soil of his stunning second full-length, The New Dark Age of Love.  From the first shimmering hovercraft tones that kick off album opener “Night Fortress,” the growth is glaring; gone is the slasher camp and horror tropes of Urban Gothic, replaced by sleek, streamlined post-industrial cold-wave dystopias. A Ballardian mood of paranoia, doom and technocratic elegance reigns, from icy, sci-fi night-drives (“Tristitia,” “Vultures of Tenderness”) to sweeping cyber-gothic dread symphonies (“Legacies,” “When Prophecy Fails”); even the few forays into overt VHS splatter-score worship (“I Still Look Young in the Dark,” “Bring Me Their Heads”) are executed with a similar sense of future-shocked metropolitan menace.  Echoes abound of classic Chris & Cosey urban wasteland synth-pop, Umberto’s vintage evil, and Klaus Schulze at his most candlelit and Crowleyian, but The New Dark Age of Love is unquestionably Sweatt’s story to tell, and it’s a tome.   Xander Harris "Night Fortress" by NOT NOT FUN

Moon Wheel

S/t

Not Not Fun

Moon Wheel's mellowed Kosmische laboratory research was originally conducted with the dream of cell-welding the loose, lunar lunacy of Moondog with Clara Mondshine's planetary rhythm trances (particularly "Die Drachentrommler" – played at 33, not 45, of course) but a relocation to Berlin steered the project in a starker, more technological direction. After years spent in Melbourne and a stint in a remote Swedish lodge, Herr M. Wheel aka Olle Holmberg finally consolidated hours of fractured workshop compositions into the eight uncanny absorptions composing this self-titled debut. Opening with the stark, mad scientist synth throbs of "Elbsandsteingebirge," the tape unfolds through weirdo dubby groove deconstructions ("ÁlæifR"), Agitation Free-style exotic bazaar jazz/jam fusions ("Arecaceae"), and even one FX-haunted sci-fi guitar raga ("Valhöll") before ebbing into the more mechanized, dry ice formalities of the Berlin-birthed B side. The eerie, industrial skeletons of "Brontide" and "The Weather" conjure an unsettling, melancholy, ghosts-in-the-machine mood, the sound of derelict robotics factories whispering code in the dead of night. A subtle, captivating collection by an impressively unpredictable producer with ideas to spare. Pro-dubbed cassettes in Yoga Records-inspired 3-panel full-color J-cards designed by Holmberg, with a cover painting by Die Brücke avant-gardist Ernst Kirchner. Edition of 100.

Umberto

Confrontations

Not Not Fun

Kansas City’s goblin king of neo-Giallo, brood-blooded dark fantasy soundtracking returns with his fourth official full-length, two years after the badass psychodrama of Prophecy of the Black Widow. The time betwixt was well spent, on tours (Europe twice, including the Mogwai-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties fest), one-off tapes and 12-inches (Welcome to the Chill Zone, Final Exit, etc.), and tweaking the mixes and minutia of the seven undead invasion omens comprising Confrontations.  What instantly distinguishes this new album from the previous is its ominous, slow-burn compositional model, building its evil temple brick by brick, basking in the tension of each new chiming, Carpenter-esque synth line or monkish doom Om for multiple measures before stirring the next substance into the cauldron. This elegant sense of patience gives the tracks a more oozing, operatic aura; these confrontations aren’t hostile showdowns in the woods but the creeping dread of alien-nation body snatchers infiltrating the populace. Death comes slipping. Can someone hire this genius to score the They Live remake already?

Filthy Huns

S/t

Not Not Fun

Daughters Of The Sun's singer / guitarist Nick Koenigs has been toiling solo as Filthy Huns for a couple quiet years at this point, layering grease-stained drum machines with badlands guitar, mirage keys, and desolate vocals, alternately broke-down and road-burned. His debut is a dusty midnight ride through black hills. “Watch Of The Bear” in particular captures a loner-in-leather mood, headlight off, pushing 70, chasing the horizon under a sea of stars. Elsewhere there's woozy, hungover dub (“Hot Morning”),  peyote campfire awakening (“Infinite Ride”) and stoned sunshine raga (“Out Of The Grave"). Barren times on the highway, through darkening deserts.

Super Jam Presents: Upper Layer Cruisers

Rush Consequence

Not Not Fun

Sweden’s subterranean synth/psych scene secretes some of our favorite faded electronicists (Sand Circles, Skeppet, Body Awareness, etc.) and one we’ve been following for years now is Martin Nilsson’s shapeshifting Super Jam operation. His homemade EPs (most via his own bitingly titled Oh No, More Tapes! label – which, ironically, only releases CDRs) established the template: drugged keyboards and cyber-jacked FX spiraling over pulsing low-end loops and rudimentary drum machinery, all pushed recklessly into the red. After a year or two’s wait, the latest riddle in the SJ rubik’s cube, Rush Consequence, dropped into our digital lap, and it’s even wilder than we were hoping/expecting. Presented via his cryptic production alias, Upper Layer Cruisers, RC realigns his fixation with fractured fidelities with a fresh pharmacopia of terraformed sound-forms: opiated labyrinth ragas, destabilized midi grooves, bold proggy flute-setting vamp-outs, brief blasts of electric shrapnel, and beyond. All in all one of the more assured and alien entries in the bunker-brained ‘trashed soundtracking’ aesthetic arms race of which we are proud patrons. Pro-dubbed smoke-colored tapes in double-sided full-color artwork by early ’80s computer-scape renderer David Ems. Edition of 99.

Profligate

Videotape

Not Not Fun

The retirement of Noah Anthony’s Night Burger alias dovetails fluidly into his latest & greatest burned-mind industrial complex: Profligate. His new operational mode retains the aggressive bleakness and concrete atmospheres of previous projects but sculpted into more vigorous, streamlined shames. Videotape marks his 2nd vinyl release (after an excellent debut, Come Follow Me), and it expands his agenda with menacing clarity. “Videotape” is a pummeling ascent of drum machines, flatliner synth, and strobe-lit sequencing. The flip, “Conditioning Trench,” rides a dystopian bass line strafed with Roland claps and paranoid textures through grey voids into an exquisite vanishing point. On the fringes of negative techno, but refracted through a rawer, more basement worldview. A bracing statement by a long-flickering light in American underground music. Recorded in Philadelphia, PA. Artwork & design by Christine Jones.

Golden Donna

S/t

Not Not Fun

Madison’s insular lineage of sonic reducers replenishes at an impressive clip, so it’s both no surprise as well as a real treat to offer up the debut LP by one of the city’s freshest next-wave arc welders, Golden Donna. The solo soundworld of instrumental synthesist Joel Shanahan, GD incorporates a drained rainbow of niche hues into its multiverse: tranced sequencer constructs (“Shifter”), solar flare R&B (“Paulding Light”), glittering deep-space isolationist drift (“Infinite Earths,” “Flashing Hands Of Carousel”). The interplay of smooth rhythm and ambient body awareness tone-float gives the record a woozy in-and-out-of-focus quality, like coasting through clouds on codeine on a private jet. Grab a window seat. Recorded at Babe Lair in Madison, WI, Autumn 2011. Black vinyl LPs in smeared city skyline hieroglyph jackets designed by Brave Mysteries CEO Nate Ritter.

Rites Wild

Ways Of Being

Not Not Fun

When Adelaide enigma Rites Wild, a.k.a. Stacey Wilson, arrived in Los Angeles, her show got busted up by the cops before she even got to play (nice priorities, LAPD). Even so, she made a lasting impression, and her self-released EPs of minimalist, Echoplexed swoon-songs further stoked the fire to do a full-length.  Ways of Being collects the blackest pearls from three hyper-limited cassingles (released via her own, now-defunct Faux Friends label) as well as adding a handful of newer, previously unreleased cuts for an ideal spelunk into Rites Wild’s memory-haunted grey-crystal waters. Layering dusty church-organ drum-box rhythms with drone-dirge keyboard loops, spectral-melody shadowplay and monotonic bedroom vox, Ways of Being rides the ridge between vertical horizon raga rituals and young, marbled hypno-pop in an endlessly mesmerizing fashion, signaling a distinct new voice in the garbled membrane of global noise.

La Vampires With Maria Minerva

Integration LP

Not Not Fun

Collaborations cut deepest when participants tease out the weirder spheres of their vibe venn diagram. The Integration LP meshes Maria Minerva’s alienated pop constructs with LA Vampires’ degraded Byronic house for a luxe long-player of moodswing motion and freaky feminine mystique, spanning new wave apocalypto, teutonic club dub, and Harajuku romance wave. The album began with hazed LA Vampires beats shaped by Maria’s echo vocal constructs, then were further articulated by multi-instrumentalist Nick Malkin’s synth leads and drum programming before being filtered through recordist extraordinaire Brian Foote’s masterboard for micro-edits and fine-tuning. The resultant collection is a composite of bleached day-glo rhythm, Shelley poetics, reverbed keys, extraterrestrial romance, seasonal meditation, and smeared studio experiments - unreal and unresolved. Recorded from 2010-2012 in Los Angeles and London. Mastered by Prairie Cat. Cover portrait painting by Katie Vonderheide; design and layout by Rohan Newman.

Father Finger

S/t

Not Not Fun

Providence, Rad Islander Kylie Lance aka Father Finger synthesizes solo synth-voice-sequencer-drum-machinery into unexpectedly twisted yet elegant curvatures of glassy, avant digital-mystic post-pop, of which the four frameworks found on her self-titled debut cassette stand as some of her most gleaming achievements to date. “Temper” and “Separation Anxiety” pulse, prowl, and groove under a glowing ozone of evocative vocals (ranging in mood from minimal wave to fever dream), washed out waterfalls of wind instrument keys, cryptic samples, and backwards echo FX; fractured lyrics about “the hottest heat ever” and “cardboard boxes” and “man’s frustration” conjure an inner world of scorched cities and drugged desires. The B side flowers a more baroque synthesizer terrarium: “Fauna” and “Italy” bubble, scrape, and slide through 96 tiers of graceful, liquid arpeggiations, new neu wave hypno-melody, and ebbing, colorful arcs of psychic voice. A stunning set of songs by one of our favorite new solo heroines. Currently on tour coast-to-coast with Maria Minerva.

Samantha Glass

Mysteries From The Palomino Skyliner

Not Not Fun

***The precise nature of the sunship / cloudcruiser SS Palomino Skyliner remains unclear, but the crux of its charter appears to facilitate celestial escape in one form or another. Its builder, Beau Devereaux, is perfectly suited to the task, self-describing his druidic harvest trances as “music for movement / leaving Earth.” After years wayfaring through a series of brain-burned flux-psych ensembles, Devereaux put down roots in a solo universe, birthing the Samantha Glass project back in 2010—and with much anticipation and celebration Not Not Fun presents his nine-song, 41-minute voyage / vinyl debut Mysteries from the Palomino Skyliner.  Drawing from a ritual palette of mantric bass riffs, bleached goth keyboard patterns and metronomic church-organ drum-box rhythms, each hypnosis exercise unfolds according to its own unwavering nocturnal wavelength, as if played by a spirit-haunted sleepwalker drugged by dreams. Among the brave mysteries of Mysteries: a subtly reworked version of “Seasonal Seduction,” the Northern Lights free-fall opus from his 2011 cassette, Celestial Night Sky; the stargazing uplift joyride of “Lost Along the Way”; the floating, out-of-body triptych “Return to the Sky,” a Samantha Glass thesis statement of sorts. Great things come to those who wait.

Minerva, Maria

Will Happiness Find Me

Not Not Fun

Last November, Maria Minerva accepted the invitation of a close friend to flee the grey brainwash of yet another East London winter for a temporary retreat amid the seaside serenities of Lisbon. The life oasis of the experience freed her up to hibernate with lyrics, loops, echo pedals and emotions, and she holed up at an empty exhibition space nearby to craft the eleven mercurial mysteries that comprise her brave sophomore color wheel, Will Happiness Find Me?  An impressively individualist mix-tape channeling the 360º spectrum of Minerva’s diverse obsessions, Will Happiness Find Me? connects the avant-pop dots between future-shock pirate radio singles, hermetic tone studies, late-night wanderlust lullabies, tape-faded club dee-lights, sampladelic vocal exploratoriums, private-press art pranks and even ambient hip-hop melancholia. Given that most contempo aesthetic arcs ebb from the raw and odd to the polished and accessible, it’s rad and uplifting to hear Minerva swimming so soulfully the other direction. “My heart is like a microphone / Just talk into it.” Never give up.

Moon Pool & Dead Band

Human Fly

Not Not Fun

Detroit deviants Moon Pool & Dead Band hardwire their gutter-disco waveforms with all the slime lab atmospherics and sci-fi circuitry scuzz that one might expect (and hope for) from a duo comprised of veteran garage-punk drummer Dave Shettler and Wolf Eyes noise lifer Nate Young. Utilizing a swap meet’s worth of crusty synths, sequencers, drum machines and outmoded FX units, and adhering to a purist’s regimen of “all live and improvised, no overdubs,” Moon Pool & Dead Band’s rogue-wizard approach to basement beat music has already birthed some refreshingly unclassifiable tunnel-rat techno (see their self-titled 12-inch on Agitated for proof), but Human Fly feels like their unambiguous highlight to date.  Motoring on a busted industrial-funk rhythm, the title track grinds and grooves through a maze of modular synth sparks, acid ooze and fried smoke before stopping suddenly to reveal a Cramps sample sputtering tinnily under all the noise; then, with almost a comic sense of timing, they re-bury it in the pumping pulse of duct-taped electronics. “Jagged Orbit” and “Cyber Rebels” ebb and flow with a lighter touch while looped percussion, jazzy house leads and synthesizer shrapnel echo across the stereo field like soft comets, the beats finally fading away in soothing waves of deep space hiss. An unusual synthesis of vibes and ideas, Human Fly is an ideal addition to the canon of inexplicable American EBM originators.

Holy Balm

It’s You

Not Not Fun

***Last year’s LA Vampires club-cruise across Australia unearthed a multitude of uplifting experiences (Cairns hippie aerialists, Newcastle hardcore, Melbourne acid sangria, etc), but chief among them was the live actualization of Sydney post-power trio Holy Balm, who slyly gene-splice strands of mutant new wave, freeform house, digital trashcan tribalism, and minimalist pop into something playful, primitive, and splatterpaint-party perfect. After a few micro-limited split tapes and a single 7”, the band finally enlisted the help of Jon Hunter at Magnetic Recording Council Studios to record and mix their debut full-length, resulting in the whacked-out hypercolor majesty of It’s You. Comprised of live classics (“Take It,” “Holy Balm Theme,” “Town Called Hope”) as well as some wild, extended studio experiments (“Phone Song,” “One & Only”), plus a Y Pants cover, the album captures HB’s wobbly electronic freak-funk and paradise garage grooves gloriously. September finds them embarking on their first ever U.S. tour/voyage so now’s the time to Balm up. Released in Australia via esteemed pan-genre punkers R.I.P. Society. Funky cactus cover artwork and layout by Sydney conceptual painter Mitch Cairns.

Ether Island

Season Of Risk

Not Not Fun

***Among the legions of bands we’ve worked with that have died natural (or unnatural) deaths, MYTHICAL BEAST was a particularly lament-worthy casualty. Fortunately phoenixes rise, creative energies get repurposed and reharnessed, and what’s gone is not always lost. So it is that singer/kettle drummer CORINNE SWEENEY and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist JEREMIAH COWLIN abandoned Philly for the Nowheresville of Coyote, New Mexico to live off the grid with other address-less culture renegades and be reborn as post-apocalyptic grunge-drone doom-soul duo ETHER ISLAND. A Side opener “Season Of Risk” corrals a mud-flood of thick tectonic shred over a buried beat, Sweeney’s vox tearing through in hot red flashes like a prairie flash fire (tonally, it’s total 4-Track Demos-era PJ, raw and sensual). “Be Light” vibrates more vertically, rising like a smoke signal, a threatening cloud of raga strings and delay-stretched witch-blues vox. “Black Wind Way” deathmarches across the entirety of the B, plodding like a dying mule over parched plains, tremolo guitar hatcheting down, a single funereal organ melody threading over the sands and into the silence. Three singular statements from two old favorites on this one perfect nomad-psych slab. Black vinyl 7 inches in color-photocopied covers, with art/design by EL. Edition of 325.

Cankun

Isalo Waterfall

Not Not Fun

***St Flour de Mercoire’s patron saint of sunburned guitar and electric mirages issues forth this new homage to an exquisite natural wonder in Southwestern Madagascar which Monsieur CANKUN had the pleasure and privilege of witnessing first hand on a personal quest years prior. The strategies employed on last year’s debut, Jaguar Dance, are in even finer form here, fusing solar flares, feathery fields of guitar blur, and skeletal groove metronomes into multi-movement trance states of sunset skyway-psych. Moods crossfade between muted, spiraling, inner space loop-cruises (“Collages,” “Stylo”) and more revved up celebratory waverunners (“Blue Vanilla”, “Jugular Rhythms”) but all share his uniquely fried tonalism and magic touch. Welcome to the waterworld of the Waterfall. Pro-dubbed metallic gold tapes with ecstasy collage artwork by VALERIAN MARGUERY. Edition of 150.

Russian Tsarlag

Midnight At Mary’s House

Not Not Fun

***Vagabond American legend CARLOS GONZALEZ drops his first NNF full-length, and it's 10 of his greatest junkyard surf-slime tunes of all time. Edition of 500.

Sand Circles

Motor City

Not Not Fun

This is Martin Herterich’s second pass around the NNF circuit in his Sand Circles hovercraft (following 2011’s Midnight Crimes EP), and though the general schematics and engine design remain the same – aged drum machines, afterhours analog tape echo, faded synth riffs, derelict metropolis atmospheres – Motor City’s grace and execution place it in a superior division to anything else he’s tracked to date. A cool, loner narrative arc plays out across each side too: “Entering Motor City” across “White Sand” wherein there’s a “Downtown Holdup” in the “Innercity Haze,” before cruising back out of the urban sprawl, “Distant Lights” in the rearview, on through the “Endless Nights,” “Descending Into Space.” As with his last tape, the Sand Circles chemistry of transfusing reverb-refracted electronic horizon melodies with pulsing, primitivist warehouse-party drum machinery really succeeds in evoking this weirdly poignant bedroom/industrial reverie mood-sphere, and the 11 instrumentals of Motor City hit this interzone pressure point better than ever. 

White Poppy

I Had A Dream

Not Not Fun

From out of the coastal, cloud-covered conifer forests of Canada’s coolest west coast enclave (Vancouver, BC) comes this blithe slice of exploratory gauze-pop majesty by one-woman guitarist-looper-siren-producer White Poppy (aka Crystal Dorval), I Had A Dream. The moniker conjures her soundworld astutely. The spiraling, sunblind ascent of “Wish & Wonder,” “In The Window”, and “Free” feel like levitating over fields of poppies, opiated pollen glowing gold in the air, while a scrappy, early 4AD/Rough Trade 7” obscurity’s rhythm section rides a lock-groove somewhere down by a glittering stream. Deeper in, “In Over” out-Cocteau Twins the CT’s (in terms of delay pedal sensuality), while “I Had A Dream” and “Treeforts” both percolate and pirouette dizzy blurs of electric guitar, practice-amp bass fuzz, cardboard drums and skywashed vocal mists. A lot of the songs have this beautifully bewitching ‘fantasy band’ vibe that makes the project feel less solitary and 4-track-y than its origins. A mesmerizing debut and hopefully a harbinger of things to come.

Ettinger, Dylan

Lifetime Of Romance

Not Not Fun

***Heartland synthesist DYLAN ETTINGER follows up 2010’s widely lauded New Age Outlaws imaginary cyber-soundtrack with a stark, dark, and intensely different collection of misshapen new wave weirdnesses, Lifetime Of Romance. Recorded at a proper studio, and written over the course of a year, the seven songs of Romance reflect a heavy influence from the fringier strains of bummed out quasi-industrial synth-pop in the vein of Fad Gadget, certain Cabaret Voltaire, early Human League, etc, but dragged through his own warped, wonky filter. The approaches vary radically, from abandoned factory dirges (“Sport And Superstion,” “Maude”) to dubbed-out man-machine paranoia (“Disparager”) to bouncy sine-wave robot radio singles (“Arco Iris,” “Blue and Blue”) and general electronic workshop exploration (“18.0”). It’s always to be heralded when an artist braves terrain they haven’t traversed yet, so it’s a kick to hear Ettinger’s secret circuitry language channeled into the pop architectures of twisted synth-wave melancholia for the first time. Another engaging step by an always intriguing American original.

Lx Sweat

Sweat Sweat Sweat

Not Not Fun

Given that we're living in the age of the come-back, one terrain we’ve been extra-pleased to see get resurrected and siphoned through the stargate of cassette-crud mutation is hypno R&B. A significant cut of global listeners can count the style as one of their formative musical memories, so there’s nothing shallow or ironic about its recent reappropriation in alien-ized bedroom beat scenes (regardless of what blog conservatives post to the contrary). All of which is joyously confirmed and celebrated in the retro-futurist exoskeletons scavenged and funkified by Germany’s one-man groove merchant LX Sweat. Screwed Up Click backing tracks are stacked high with sci-fi vocoder-soul vox, lush synthesizer counter melodies, and classic echo/reverb unit studio trickery for a production that’s vaguely reminiscent of Barry-White-on-morphine-transmitted-through-a-fax-machine-to-a-low-wattage-pirate-radio-station. Steamy, disembodied bubble baths of endorphin slow-rides and pleasure crunk. Excellent shit, and only the beginning for this inspired dude.

Samantha Glass

Midnight Arrival

Not Not Fun

It’s been a full seasonal cycle since Samantha Glass last laid down his Madison anti-magic into NNF’s tape vaults (2011’s Celestial Night Queen) and, judging from the spectral sound of things, the time was uniquely spent. Holed up at his wax-dripping church organ/wolf tapestry shrine-studio, Ms. Glass (aka Beau Devereaux) dug deep into his candle-lit cross pollination of kraut-pop crop circle keys, art-hesher basement Sabbath bass, and golden dawn vocal mantras, emerging with an evocative EP of occultish hibernation mood-grooves – Midnight Arrival. Later this year will see the unveiling of Sam Glass’ debut vinyl long-player, Mysteries Of The Palomino Skyliner; consider this neophyte training for what is to come. Also, FYI: he’s about to embark on a US tour down to Texas for SXSW 2012 with fellow electronic Midwestern misfit Cuticle; def pay a visit if the roadshow lands in your periphery.

Prince Rama

Utopia = No Person

Not Not Fun

***We first met the Sisters Larson (aka PRINCE RAMA OF AYODHYA aka PRINCE RAMA) in 2009 in Texas, where they had a brief stop during their inaugural road-warrior bicoastal US tour. They had feathers in their hair and gave us a CDR covered in sequins and fake fur. Since then a lot has happened: they signed to Paw Tracks, someone joined the band and left the band, they toured the US and Europe at least three more times, and—relevant to this release—they got invited to fashion a conceptual art performance for the Manhattan gallery, Issue Project Room. The topic they chose to explore was very P Ramanian: the ritual nature of exercise, body movement as a form of exorcism, trance-inducing physicality, etc. They staged an elaborate song-and-dance with costumes, crystal skulls, prayer aerobics, Krishna statuettes, and astral projections. Thus was born “Utopia = No Person,” a 19-minute shamanistic electro work-out anthem, equal parts apocalypto opera, hippie ecstasy, and new wave cardio dance. It’s a strange vision but one perfectly in keeping with the sisters’ Now Age hypothesizing and joyous psych tribalism. The B side features an otherworldly chopped-and-skrewed dream-syrup reworking by R.E.M. KOOLHAAS (aka LANDON ODIE of the Animal Image Search label). Black vinyl LP in jackets with a stylin’ cover portrait (by COREY TOWERS) of TARAKA and NIMAI decked out in unitards/leotards, gold lamé leggings, white Reeboks, the works, plus a full-color double-sided insert. LP layout by NNF faves New Feeling Industries. Edition of 600.

Cruise Family

We're In Heaven

Not Not Fun

***The vinyl debut by this Viennese rave abstractionist boils down pulsing LED beats and deep synth strobe FX into a cavernous laser-streaked fog. Packaged in blinding Alex Grey-style acid-body artwork by MR. CRUISE FAMILY himself.

Cuticle

Mother Rhythm Earth Memory

Not Not Fun

***The NNF debut (after an EP on 100% SILK) by this Iowa City electronic maximalist. M.R.E.M. is the first purely solo CUTICLE release, after working with a series of part-time collaborators, and it's freed him to let loose his wildest and weirdest impulses.

Tg Gondard

Avontuur

Not Not Fun

‘Wayward Belgium electronics’ would require several volumes of a radical music encyclopedia to even loosely engage the topic, and part of that reason is the endless river of new names that keeps cascading up from the cobblestoned sewers. Thibault Gondard floated on to our music map early this summer with a self-released LP of overdriven keyboard muscle, echo-warped skrewed-down drum machines, lulling air raid sirens, stained glass synth tonal pools, and alien soul vocal manipulations, and Avontuur is his freshest (and best) batch of tracks, which also functions as a debut of sorts. The opening cut, "Avontuur," is as hybridized and electrifying as any he’s crafted thus far, slicing through the speakers with a stuttering codeine cassette-ready beat peppered with reverb handclaps and minimal keyboard riffs jacked through junk shop speaker cabinets. He’s just embarked on a two week European tour with ‘glue-wave’ post-punkers The Dreams so go huff his fumes live if he crosses yr flight path.