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.
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.
BUTTE COUNTY FREE MUSIC SOCIETY
Induced Musical Spasticity
(BUFMS - BUFMS25) 4xLP + CD $65.00
Induced Musical Spasticity commemorates the nascent pollination — in the musty shadows of the real ersatz Sherwood Forest, a couple hundred miles north of San Francisco — of the Buttecounty Free Music Society, an apocryphal institution that encouraged anything and nothing, in musical and amusical contexts, sometimes intentionally, sometimes because no one knew any better or cared. Highbrow concept tracks by The Marques (brothers Cole and Steve Marquis) and the dramaturgical Unlikely Modernists, along with Ambivalent Dosage’s pre-Vomit Launch nihilism, mutter and howl next to mad paisley destructo by Dilwhip and the quartet edition of 28th Day, Hypnagogic Jerk’s overmodulated roar, and sweet, YMG-influenced instrumentals by Hallucinatory Companion (aka Barbara Manning and Cole Marquis). Ripe dementia by Experimental Artists, Lawrence Crane and John Young, and Tops Inc. stops rational people in their tracks, while turntable experiments, tape yoink, and high-lonesome electro-twarnk by Rory Lyons, Ziplok, Sidney Afrika, The Conduits, Lucian Tielens, and Richard Streeter shuffle the consciousness. And then you’ve got primitard rock dunt by The Flamboyant Offals, Walking Jock, Dead Boy 3, and shockingly raw 28th Day material that predates most anyone’s idea of the original line-up of that influential band. Four episodes of Matt Mumper’s serial radio play Beor The Friendly Thing appear, in all its inscrutable, deadpan glory. The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble pollutes the lion’s share of real estate with a side-long tape cut-up a la Faust Tapes called “Goat Embryo (Covered With Glue),” and their entire live set from the Industrial Barbecue. Also here are the spot-on country lament “Plastic Jesus”; the electronic damage of “Mid-Range Phase/Link 3"Dome”; the Smegma-influenced “Lightbulb Incident,” infamous for its live, on-air sodomy; a KCSC radio interview that includes the group’s first recordings; and a handful of previously unreleased tracks. Two-thirds of the material here was previously released (translation: a few dozen cassettes were dubbed one at time and passed through the hands of people in the same rural Northern California area code 25 years ago). All the relics in this boxset are likely unheard by anyone not specifically mentioned above.
Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition
(BUFMS - BUFMS37) CDR $10.00
Inspired by Non’s Pagan Muzak (more by the repeating form than by the content), Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition was created in the early 1980s by two agriculture students (now anti-GMO activists), and released on their own Chair Chair cassette label. Using a handful of sound effects records as their sole audio source, Canker and Chancre created loops on reel-to-reel tape and endless cassettes used for answering machines, which were then manipulated via cut-up, speed, direction, saturation and multitracking for their independently made submixes; those were then merged together for the final mixes with virtually no further changes, because, as Chancre explains, “We didn’t want it to sound composed, so much as manufactured, as if it was all just happening by itself.” At times maddeningly busy with the stock-in-trade of old sound effects records -- animals and machines -- smeared, repeating, overlapping, the album’s raw and relentless uneasiness is further enhanced by omnipresent crackles and infrequent but abrupt silences. Includes non-GMO pasta (raw), and one of two different reproductions of artwork from Captain Protein noodle packaging. Edition of 50.
Reverse Atheism
(BUFMS - BUFMS32) 2xLP $22.00
Barbara Manning and S. Glass lead a small army of guest readers and musicians through barely musical versions of tunes, texts, and tracts. Barely faithful cover versions (XTC, Gods Gift, Hank Williams, The Osmonds, Edgar Winter, The Birthday Party, New Creation), with varying degrees of overhaul, mangling and looseness of interpretation, emerge like seared remnants of a torched London happening from 1966. Texts by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Dan Ashwander, Wayne Bent, John F. Kennedy, Flannery O’Connor, Hugo Ball, Rayva Liliana, and Hippocrates traverse the spectrum of belief, resulting in a migraine coexistence of skepticism, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientology, paranoid schizophrenia, doomsdays cults, Hinduism, evangelism, Catholicism, witchcraft and wizardry, guardian angels, Armageddon, rapture, post-apocalypse, Illuminati, satanism, existential despair, purgatory, creationism and intelligent design, Darwinism, conspiracy and hoax, the Tarot, human sacrifice, Sikhs, ascension, royalty, cargo cults, divine right, fatalism, Western medicine, oaths, incantation, cosmic retribution, excommunication, alien abduction, the occult, pagans, infidels, heathens, mind control, prophecy, remote prayer, and, naturally, atheism. Guest speakers include Lucian Tielens (Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble), Bruce Russell (The Dead C.), Patricia Rowland (Vomit Launch), Jett Hotcomb (The Talented Hairdos) Thurston Graham (Resistance Works), Scott Simmons (Eat Skull), Dave Gulbis (Celine Dion) Andrew Murphy (Celine Dion, Forked, Smooch), Titch Turner (The Vaticans), Emiko Saito (Obsessive-Compulsive Cat), Cristain Ceia (Romania), Matt Mumper (Beor The Friendly Thing, The Helper), Toni Smith (HappyLucky Design), and Rainbow Cartwheel (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy). Guest musicians include Flavor Station (Ukuzuna) on ukuleles and vocals, Alastair Galbraith (A Handful of Dust) on violin, Doug Pearson (International Hello) on electronics, Black Rose (This Is Yvonne Lovejoy) on keyboards, and Earl Kuck (Tedium House) on small motors. With 24 x 36 poster. Tedium House copies include a penalty CDR containing two demo-style rough mixes, two noise-loop collages, and Kali Bahlu's "A Cosmic Telephone Call From the Angel Liesle and The Buddha" reimagined as a radio play.
JETT HOTCOMB AND THE TALENTED HAIRDOS
Give Us This Day Our Swingin' Bread
(BUFMS - BUFMS31) 7-inch (one-sided) $8.00
Homemade Christian lounge music from the late ’70s, previously available as a free cassette (self-released via the Jett 3:16 label) for guests at a now-defunct rural motel in Butte County. Two tracks with a full band ("Jesus Digs Me" and "The Lord's Prayer") and two recorded a cappella in the shower ("Live and Let Die" and "Shampoo Bottle"). Includes reproductions of four period handbills and business cards, as well as a Butte County Free Music Society pink flamingo swizzle stick. Edition of 200.