Songs Our Mother Taught Us
(Agaric) Used CD $10.00
“The three performances from London and Glasgow captured on this disc have no real reference points in even the free-est of jazz,” asserts All Music Guide about this 1999 album, “Rather, they sound like some huge machine sanding away at itself in an attempt to break free and lumber down the highway toward an uncertain destiny. Sauter, Dietrich and Miller play through so many pedals and distortion devices that it’s entirely impossible to discern which saxophonist is making which noise, and sometimes impossible to tell whether it’s a saxophone or a guitar one is hearing. But even as each man blows or strums or otherwise plays his guts out, seemingly entranced, space always remains for the other two to be clearly heard, commenting and amplifying (in every sense of that word) and turning what could be a storm into a genuine three-way creative interaction.”
Zurich
(Agaric - 1984) CD $15.00
First-time CD reissue of the trio's classic early live recording. Capturing the sheer density of their shows being an impossible dream, along with the non-aural undertow that comes from immersion in the uncommon frequencies the trio tends to inhabit, Zurich establishes the band's ability to build something other than a tsunami of sound. Hellish, unrelenting firestorms of sound, for example.
Borbetomagus
(Agaric) Used CD $15.00
This 1995 reissue of Borbetomagus’s 1980 debut album contains the previously un-released “The Lost Concordat,” recovered from badly deteriorated master tapes of the session. “Heavy noise, deeply coiled feedback manipulation, hair-raising electronic squeal,” says Forced Exposure, “and the ultimate in air propulsion explosiveness.” With Brian Doherty on electronics. Sealed
Barbed Wire Maggots
(Agaric - 1983) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Reissue of their essential 1983 album. Highly recommended by Hindu gnostics such as Byrey Colon, to wit: "Upper register bowel tingling never felt so good. Miller's guitar joins [Sauter and Dietrich's saxes] in the stratosphere, plugging raw current into metal bowls, sizzling like a wok full of stewardess jiz, just creating and distorting and worrying the fabric of the cosmos like some idiotic terrier-god from a lost part of the Upanishads."
Trente Belles Années
(Agaric - 1998) CD $15.00
Like worms through an hour glass, so are the days of our live recordings – such as Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich, and Donald Miller’s final concert of their 2009 tour of Europe. Performing at Instants Chavires in the land of la vache qui fond, the trio celebrates thirty goddamn years of impossibly loud and uncompromising screech, pioneering unique strategies such as bells together, extended, flexible mouthpieces, open mouth wah wah, and never ever conserving a single volt of energy. “You know that bit at the end of the Monterey concert where Hendrix sets his guitar on fire?” guitarist Donald Miller famously asked. “That’s what we do. For a whole hour.” With Borbetomagus, bigger is bigger, better is better. It’s not up for debate. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2013
Buncha Hair That Long
(Agaric) Used CD $20.00
This “collection of live recordings from 1991, says Pitchfork, “Is one of Borbetomagus’s most sonically-diverse releases, moving from heavy, growling noise to churning, electronic-sounding drone to a track called ‘In The Nursery that mixes trebly test-tone whine with moments of … near-silence. The album ends with a 16-minute ‘cover’ of the Beatles’ ‘Blue Jay Way’, recorded at CBGB…, [where] the trio [was] all plugged into a single bass amp, and the result is a sonic tidal wave that’s both terrifying and weirdly calm.”
Experience The Magic
(Agaric) Used CD $10.00
“With their acerbic wit and bloodthirsty attack, Borbetomagus are virtually unlike any other band anywhere. They make Peter Brötzmann seem warm and fuzzy,” according to All Music Guide. “This is [the kind of scary music … that makes you have nightmares about serial killers. But it’s also the kind of fun-house fare that makes you want to live free or die, to scream in ecstasy, and laugh with glee with the knowledge that the creative impulse is alive and terribly well and living in America, of all places. This is music beyond language because it is the roots of language itself: the impulse that attempts to express and organize that which is unspeakable.”
Asbestos Shake
(Agaric) Used CD $20.00
Bleak Bliss summarizes this collaborative recording by the New York sax-guitar monsters and the mad Swiss scientists of cracked everyday electronics as “a six-headed beast beyond the imagination of mere mortals.”