A Real Nice Clambake
(BUFMS - BUFMS35) CDR $8.00
Recorded at a confusing and ambiguous event in 1987 at Wooj, where pockets of inexplicable activity included the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble applying their singular style of awkward to guitars, bass, Casio, wooden recorders, mandolins. Cassette players throughout the house were recording, while others played loops, telephone answering machine messages, and field recordings. Numerous television sets broadcast anything from The Brady Bunch to cornball noir, while radios broadcast The Isley Brothers, Crosby Stills & Nash, XTC, Paper Lace, Malcolm McLaren, and The Archies. Hours and hours of material was edited into four tracks totaling 51 minutes in length. The incidental, the involuntary, the unintended and the accidental take the lead on A Real Nice Clambake, which captures and repeats sneezes, coughs, burps, mumbles, grunts, moans, clicks, clacks, and clunks, the obnoxious zont of cables getting plugged in, tape hiss, bottles opening, keys and bottle openers rattling on tables, silverware scuttling on porcelain plates, and doors slamming. Mics are jostled and papers are shuffled, amid the spastic xylophone–windchime hybrid of coffee mugs getting stirred with strange vigor. The motor of one of the tape recorders wheezes so loudly that its own microphone picks up the sound. The group’s magical ineptitude perseveres through abrupt left turn after abrupt left turn, dizzying in their constancy, and through stretches of meandering guitar-playing, repetition, interruption, and the peculiar declarations of those present. Released to coincide with Bren't Lewiis's performance at Colour Out Of Space, November 2011. Includes an Industrial Expressionist collage made of hand-painted screen, fragment of found photograph, and defective scrap from commercial print shop.
At The North Pole, Easter Day, 1982
(What The ... - WHAT012) LP (one-sided) + 3in CDR $17.00
In comparison to the only other available recording of a complete live performance by the BLE (the side-long “Industrial Barbecue,” on the BUFMS boxset), At The North Pole, Easter Day, 1982 is starker and more minimal overall. Performing as a quintet at an open mic night in a student cafeteria, the group had played live only once prior and had yet to amass the collection of ubiquitous tape players and answering machines that accompanied most subsequent performances and recordings. The absence of overt forward progress in some parts gives the performance an incidental resemblance to those tense moments in grim power electronics just before the singer goes berserk, but then ridiculous verbal repetitions and Top 40 references come out of nowhere like nerdy Fluxus rehearsals in the middle of a New Orleans funeral. Other segments highlight the difference between aboriginal metal percussion and pots ’n’ pans getting banged together by people with a remarkably spastic sense of rhythm. Visually, Bren’t Lewiis were like a cross between the jackets of early Nurse With Wound albums and a bunch of hicks impersonating Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Television sets flickered throughout. Doug Roberts brought his bicycle onstage. Dressed in a labcoat and white wool-felt USAF boots, howling into his signature plastic lawn flamingo, Lucian Tielens stretched the limits of publicly acceptable intimate congress with inanimate objects. Tim Smyth wore a bunch of Christmas lights attached to a Civil Defense helmet. Peter D had a garbage bag filled with helium balloons taped to his head and toilet paper wrapped around his face. As some sort of oblique Day-Glo homage to Carmen Miranda, Gnarlos wore a handmade upside-down sweatsuit. The amplified 21-foot aluminum sailboat mast, the undisputed star of the show, was so unwieldy that use of a special freight door was required just to get in and out of the building, and yet a single, lonely metallic “ploong!” was pretty much the limit of its sonic palette -- appropriate testament to the methodology of this absurdly inefficient group. Includes insert printed with glow-in-the-dark ink, and a reproduction of the flyer advertising the show. Edition of 129. All orders placed here include a 3-inch CDR of previously unreleased hoot, not available elsewhere.
Make It Stop
(Training Bra) 7-inch $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
The debut vinyl by this early ’80s free-improv, Smegma-influenced outsider collective of Butte County-based freaks. Found objects, homemade instruments, prerecorded tapes and vinyl, psychotic cover versions of AM fodder, and a resolute lack of music skills abound. "Deeply peculiar," Weird Record of the Week — CMJ. Members went on to play in Vomit Launch and Glands of External Secretion.
Out Patience
(BUFMS - BUFMS33) CDR $8.00
Performed inside a darkened, cavernous student union on the evening of April 28, 1984, this after-hours guerrilla action corrupts the thirteenth text from Aus den Sieben Tagen in a barn where damaged minotaurs are stabled. Lucian Tielens, Tim Smyth and Gnarlos were in constant motion, re-positioning themselves throughout the building, possessed by plastic flamingo, goink visions, and the compulsion to insert their heads into buckets and howl. Four excerpts totaling eight minutes in length appear on Three Christs of Ypsilanti (Siltbreeze 2010), but this is the first and only time the recording of the complete, uninterrupted 47-minute session has been available. In addition to "hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects," brentstrumentation includes The Nube Tube (a corrugated hose from a hair dryer swung like a bullroarer), harmonica, metal remnants of antique armaments, hula hoop, socket wrench, aluminum bicycle crankset, toy guitars, toy pianos, bongos, glassware, marbles chucked off the balcony, the staircase, aluminum cans (kicked), pie tins (spun), metal coils, jewelry, Star Wars pinball machine, moans, gurns, chants, sneezes, whistles and insectoid heralds. Includes hand-painted screen, and either a found photo or a damaged scrap from a print shop. Edition of 50.
Three Christs of Ypsilanti
(Siltbreeze - SB131) LP + 3-inch CDR $15.00
The first post-BUFMS-boxset disgorgement of ramshackle outsider clatter and howl from one of California’s many rural nowheres exposes previously hidden, 25-year-old whack-off (à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, Gastric Female Reflex, Id M Theft Able, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema). The murky “Take It Out And Kill It” whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner one critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks in the immediate vicinity, this recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience, guerrilla action recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. “[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird , befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow.” –Roland Woodbe, Siltblog NOTE: Copies of this LP purchased here include a 3-inch CDR of previously unreleased bonus tracks.