FLESHTONE AURA / SEYMOUR GLASS
Amplified Teacup
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.316) CDR $8.00
On both the 20-minute tracks here, sounds that have been found, forcibly appropriated, and/or rendered unrecognizably alien ricochet off the guillotine blades operated by a couple of North American experimental wombats. Performed with no preparation or rehearsal in April 2015 at Second Act in San Francisco, accompanying a film by Winston Hacket, “Live” bends the skull with blaaps and fwunks hurled out of the Cocoquantus, a five-oscillators-and-two-delays device created by Pete Blasser that yields complex and often bewildering waveform switcheroos. “Not Live” is the product of three months swapping, editing, colliding, and intertwining mass media voices, field recordings, the ambiance from a variety of interior locations, animal noises, snippets of music both popular and obscure, sound effects and signal processing, unidentifiable gurgles and more.
... And The German Pillow Menu
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.278) Split cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a two-volume split tape gonk-off between The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble and Blood Stereo (to be followed, glob help us, by a Karen Constance / Lucian Tielens cassette) is a prologue to a full-blown Blood Lewiis collaboration. Glass spins short yarns using bottle cap, hairbrush, tapes, turntable, violin and voice, with guest clarinet by My Little Panda, while Nyoukis calls upon the forces of gravity and fermentation for his side-long trip to the bottom of a bottle via tapes, voice, piano, drums, trumpet, violin, reel-to-reel, Library Of Congress C1 tape player and objects. C20. Edition of 40.
Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut
(Chocolate Monk - choc.507) CDR $7.50
Even though no Vietnamese pop music was harmed in the making of Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut, be careful not to choke on bones during your travels throughout the westernmost quadrant of The Stinking Empire, that wasteland of mass-comm eavesdropping, loop hypnosis, burgled field recordings, and fracture-scapes that’ll clamp down on your skull like a Gorilla Glue nutcracker. Chocolate Monk’s in-house Clint Eastwood, Jr. (Brant) and Joanne Worley gender reassignment disaster (Glass) have taken every possible precaution to ensure no one exits their hour-long clatter-and-clunk buffet with blood on their hankies. Still, gnaw judiciously, you lion-hearted gonk. Edition of 60
Black Confetti
(Blue Spectrum Tapes) CDR $10.00
Challenged by the label to write a harsh noise album, Glass delivers this abomination instead. Guitar and screw; varispeed tape loops; defective disc burner; plumber’s snake; Sulphur box; field recordings; washing machine; metal plate; fails videos; 45 and flexidisc played with razor, thumbtack, staple. Standard edition of 20. Cover art by Andy Bolus
Crooked Doppler
(Tanzprocesz) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Figurative abstraction and butchery vs forced structures and speculative drifts, battling it out within noisy collages, field recordings, invented instruments, found sounds and electronics. C48
Donut Oil
(Chocolate Monk - choc.518) CDR $8.00
When Ali Robertson witnessed Seymour Glass tell Joe “Posset” Murray that he was the “only guy in the UK whose writing is worth a damn,” Robertson knew exactly who he was going to rope in for a future journalistic favor. Clearly, the Yankee behemoth knows which side of his scone is buttered. Nothing happens without fealty to the institutions of butchery and bakery, after all. “Sprinkle, crinkle, pit of mud, how I wonder who’s yer fud.” So began the silent incantation that protected the lesser half of Usurper and the decrepit 1/40th of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble in their completion of this magenta-cloud hallucination. From what, one might ask. Hard to say, as they overcame all obstacles and nefarious phenomena seen and unseen attempting to keep them from their appointed sounds. Emboldened by bullshit sorcery, the reckless pair of hobbits dove into a shared dreamstate, thrashed around inside pink cubes for a while, where disembodied voices and conveyor belts stacked high with body parts and vegan substitutes ensorcelled and nauseated, and slid back out with nary a grease stain on their Brunello Cucinelli perforated, suede-panelled, cashmere gloves. That’s all we know. Rest assured, friend, Robertson and Glass have packed all 48 minutes of this disc with primo slurps, throttled puckers, fairytale calisthenics, fading electronics, tape manipulation, intimate congress with inanimate objects, naïve instrument prowess, and the finest crackle that can be derived from stale peat loaves. Edition of 60
If You Can't Be Good, Be Reasonable
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.393) Magazine + CDR $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
An alarming, detailed travelogue by The Fourth Chinz-man Of The Apocalypse about his November 2017 trip to witch-trial country, where he played shows with Phil Milstein and Ariella Stok (aka Suppressive Persons) and on his own. CDR includes the trio’s entire set at Feeding Tube Records in Florence, Massachusetts. “The only thing weirder than what comes out of this motherfucker’s mouth is what goes in,” says Roland Woodbe. “Seriously, is there anything S. Glass won’t eat?” Forty-eight pages. The first in Chocolate Monk’s Lunkhead Library series. Numbered Edition of 100.
Indicate Damage Area
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Live recordings from Philadelphia Record Exchange, Temescal Arts Center, Canessa Gallery, and Red Gate Arts Society. Admired by Burning Star Core's C. Spencer Yeh for its rampant “parking garage logic.” Joe Murray of Posset values the “super subtle quivering and very arresting vocal pieces. It’s everything I wanted to be wrapped up during the nog fog.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Make Yourself Useless
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Electroacoustics, tape music, field recordings, loops, objects, non-musical music, and like that. As C. Lavender says, “There’s more than one way to play a piano with knives.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Molasses
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.394) CDR $8.00
Forty minutes of electronics and loops recorded during an impromptu session at No Spray 205 in San Francisco, named after the 1919 disaster that buried an entire neighborhood of Boston in deadly sweetened ooze. Numbered Edition of 60.
SEYMOUR GLASS / STEFAN JAWORZYN / DYLAN NYOUKIS
My Disgusting Heart
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.353) CDR $6.00
A live set of horrible noise recorded at Café Oto in 2014, a slurry of guitar, voice and other oozed junk, with prodigious post-application of tape loop lunacy and other audio tricks. Cover art by Karen Constance. Numbered edition of 80
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS100) CD $15.00
With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on replicated CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak.
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Co-released with Chocolate Monk. Edition of 150
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.520) CD $15.00
With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on replicated CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak.
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Co-released with Butte County Free Music Society. Edition of 150
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.479) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Edition of 60
Other Secretive Vehicles
(Ikuisuus) Cassette $8.00
Or maybe you're in the mood for audio excursions that whirl into position like the world's slowest tornado in the middle of a vast plain of highlighter pen hues. Might we suggest allowing Anla Courtis (of Argentinean visionaries Reynols) and S. Glass (ex-Evolution Revolution) to escort your party to a gravity pod? C42
FENWICK ADDISON / SEYMOUR GLASS
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History of The Butte County Free Music Society
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS36) Hardcover book $30.00
Oh, how the dots do connect! Recollections, opinions, confessions, revelations, quips, anecdotes, and analyses by, for, and about the art mutants and other creative weirdos working in a rural Northern California college town in the early 1980s. It's like a Philip K Dick short story meets contagious polythelia. Answering questions no one is asking -- it's the BuFMS way. There's no salacious gossip here, no long-festering resentments litigated, no tell-all humiliation porn. If that's your thing, you'll have to content yourself with living to clutch your pearls another day. Not that it's wall-to-wall good manners. Characters and oddballs abound. Some shit-talking, but nothing scandalous like we're used to nowadays. Still, the content of this Encyclopedia Spastica is slanted toward making music, listening to music, making connections because of music: tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, punk, psychedelic rock, non-music, and general WTF. Not at the exclusion of film and video, though, and radio shows, radio plays, guerilla theater, stand-up comedy, art installations, zines, collages, poetry and fiction, television shows. Activities, projects, experiences, learning, creating, obsessing, giving up, all that, the whole wad. Every page is adorned with supporting visuals — flyers and posters, paintings and drawings, newspaper clippings, photos and stills from film, television and video production, prints, personal correspondence, interview transcriptions, and autobiography excerpts. 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Under Glass, KCSC, Beor The Friendly Thing, Jett Hotcomb, The Conduits, Daily Planet, Unlikely Modernists, Man Overboard, The Viper, EL&C, The Protons, Glands of External Secretion, Chaplain Addington, Doug Roberts, and Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, 140 pages, hardcover, color throughout. Tons of stuff you've never seen or heard of, guaranteed.
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $32.00 (Out-of-stock)
This perfect-bound paperback book is a 76pp account of the August 2018 tour that took S. Glass with and without the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble to Los Angeles, Canada, Seattle, and Portland. Illustrated in color throughout with images from Lucian Tielens’s archive of objects and documents donated to and/or abandoned at the public library, photos and video stills shot along the way by The City Councilman, the book contains informal Q-and-As with many of the artists with whom the BLE shared stages (including Pulsating Cyst, Verge Bliss of Dendera Bloodbath, Rick Potts of Dinosaurs With Horns, Dinzu Artefacts recording artist Jack Taylor, Ace Farren-Ford of Hangar Quartet, Josh Stevenson of Magneticring, Joe Peg of Red Panda Death March, Jackie Stewart of The Tenses, and David Weinberg of Sic), along with kindred spirits Doug Harvey of Mannlicher Carcano and F, Bill Chen of Baby Huey and KSPC, Jesse Dewlow of People Skills, Stanley Zappa of Manzap, former editor / publisher of The Ongoing Dialogue Blossom Ahmad, and Barbara Manning. Ask your doctor if What’s Going To Happen To Us? is right for you. Side effects include: nausea; fever; mass transportation dread; vulgar dining options; attempted murder; exploitation flicks; nightmare-inducing bedtime stories; weird fuckers doing strange shit; bio-mechanical warfare; radio interviews; vile lodgings; neurological issues; hostile environments; face-palms; hallucinatory companions; shopping sprees; celebrity touchstones; bizarre acts of customer service; and the restroom-ification of public space. As a follow-up to If You Can’t Be Good, Be Reasonable (Chocolate Monk 2018), it’s exponentially more paranoid, delusional, cryptic, bleak, over-the-edge, and disgusting. You’ll love it. Cover by Stanley Zappa.