Time Furniture
(Cor Ardens) Cassette $13.25
The debut release by Jim Strong and Pony Payroll Bones (both quietly active in the American underground in addition to being visual artists) unfolds over a series of brief meetings as the pair skip gleefully between an array of dueling pianos, viola, cello, keyboard and organ, undergirded with cellular networks of tape collage, invented instruments, spiritual ritual through everyday appliances and the sputtering engines of broken down cars. Named after the Greek word for “absence of pain,” a state of perfect equilibrium in the epicurean ideal of the good life, the duo is depicted on the accompanying wood block print lanced with arrows and doctors’ protruding tools. Their art experiments are tinged with a hopeful affirmation of life in the midst of serious illness and increasing industrial pollution. Drawing on traditions of psych, noise, folk , new age drone and fluxus / sound art, Aponia A.D. specializes in a kind of haunted Americana anti-music for the post-American dystopian landscape. Packaged in altered jewelry box with woodblock print.
Gogo Underworld
(Cor Ardens) Cassette $13.25
The debut album by this Philadelphia-based multi-dimensional energy worker and interdisciplinary practitioner — known primarily as a visual and performance artist with a keen eye for the miraculous potentials of everyday objects and found materials —combs through waste streams of aural (and spiritual) detritus the way a committed cruiser scans through stations on a radio. Deal’s densely layered field recordings and plunderphonic samplings periodically break into beautiful songs, with more recognizable instruments freely mixing influences of African American free jazz, Black punk, gospel / negro spirituals, and divination rituals. Gogo Underworld presents the first installment of a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk to be spread across multiple releases and a film that explores “how the memories and mythologies of the Black diaspora can be used as conduits of historical and cultural preservation, tracing its global footprint, disrupting Western colonial thought modes, and deploying dreaming as channels for potentiality, non-linear modes of intercepting time and space, and celebration as resistance.” Packaged in wax / glass object. Edition of 100
Third Parties
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
Most of the sounds that Wilcox and Ellul make come from close-to-hand, everyday, tactile objects, accidents, or routines. And from the body as it rubs, carries, plays, waits, dawdles with its surroundings. The voices are chatting, syncopating, trying to change position, getting in a mess. Edition of 60
The Tattooed Date of the Earthquake Across the Abdomen
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
Crozier Lathrop at the controls: “Do you remember the first gasp of air you ever sucked down, abjectly sensing that things outside you can go inside you, as you crawled out from inside into the outside unknown: still-born at the still-lodge reflecting still-waters, perpetually distilling your daily boils, bils, dungs, romans, and countryfolk throughout the last half of adolescence, more-or-less mute, and then those who didn’t already live there all migrated down river to a Kentucky city-town and blurred into the salon-saloon weekly-gatherings held in foreign-tongues, obliterating toward no-known-object, only, for those who survived, to wake up decades later to a set of Pappy Van Winkle-wrinkles, and a good-enough smile? The two general rules for Kark— and what distinguishes Kark from their sibling-limb Sapat—are that there are no amps and no guitars allowed. The 19 tracks and 79 minutes of sound on this album were recorded over a 21-year period and co-created between 47 people in Louisville, Kentucky. Membership overlaps with too many bands to list here, but some highlights include The Cherry Blossoms, The Magik Markers and Ron Pate, big band leader of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s 1970’s Dada-heavies Rev. Fred Lane. Arkestrial Moondogs soak Kenny G’s jazz-concrète saxophone reeds in a Xenakis-Joujouka urinal cake. Secret agreements between past and present selves flash-form into a joyful body of outsider music.” Edition of 60
CRANK STURGEON / DYLAN NYOUKIS
Dulles Unt Huso
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
According to Crank Sturgeon himself (or itself (your call)): We recall the tactic: trundle off to visit the Scottish branch of our international cult, make a pile of recordings using a handy dandy Aiwa cassette recorder featuring the retractable mic, remix the sounds a couple months later on the pink boombox at BBF in Harpsie, Maine; then, finally, dash it off into the mail, maybe circa 1997, and wait a few decades for it to re-emerge from the lichen curds of memetic cardboard and bubblewrap. Edition of 60
Imposter
(Throne Heap) CD $10.00
Lo-fi basement surrealism, domestic and field recordings, tapes, electronics, and radio. Recorded 2012 -2019.
Lalo Mendy
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00
Cinematic molecules from another era, having seeped through fissures in the timeline, arrive on Lalo Mendy disguised as neurological pulsations and astrally projected trailers from a drive-in theater. Does this mean La Constance is here to willy Enter The Dragon and Cool Hand Luke samples all over your nilly? You deserve a slap for even asking, Bun-Bun. The repetitions here feel compulsive and hypnotic, yes, but also off-kilter and Just Not Right, away from which one is loathe to look. Areas rumble like boats traveling where they oughtn’t, shot through with the kazoo-like quack of bleeps and voice fragments and shadows of transmissions intercepted from intercoms at Business Goose HQ. A recurring tempo recalls quasi-synchronous swingsets rocking back and forth as enjoyed by the surreal children often depicted frolicking and assuming recognizably-Constance postures in her paintings and collages. It is also, however, a bit more complicated. Orders from the Supreme Honk simultaneously ooze over and whiz toward an all-femme Space Force, destabilizing civilians like us with Doppler Effect howls that leave us feeling pushed out of an airplane and descending through a hailstorm of whistling meat rocks. Destination: Unarius picnic overtaken by groundskeepers scooping up damaged mechanical heads with shovels. Edition of 50
Chewing Scenery
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS108) CDR $8.00
A slow-motion buckshot spray of Lost in Space bleeps and bloops spreads the group’s heat-sought rash across the canvas, as usual, throbbing and twinkling in a void seemingly sponsored by the Wubb Telescoop. But be on the lookout for collisions with gravity fields that pull the elements apart, leaving their piercing shrillness to jab at nothing within the corridors of your personal solitude. If that seems a little too Star Trek for your tastes, don’t worry: no one’s gonna mention the time you took ecstasy at the convention and thought one of the parking attendants was Nyota Uhura. Still, moog-adjacent yoib whizzes past like fresh junk, courtesy of The Library At Musiclandria in Sacramento, where much of Chewing Scenery was recorded in November and December 2021. The Affable Chap, on loan from the UK home office, makes his debut appearance in Bren’t Lewiis here, and returning champion The Viper was on board to scrape the cat gut — a real life saver since the fingernail-friendly chalkboard had been borrowed by another patron earlier that day. From sessions at Hazel’s ’Lectric Washouse, a re-christened Jimmy The Baptist wrings pure glory from the ether like a brand new solar panel so potent you’d be advised to mind the UV, while Tom Chimpson reads OCD laundry demands from the script for an abandoned prequel to Seven centered around the origin story of Kevin Spacey’s character. The customary disembodied voices, field recordings, household catastrophes, animals losing it, fails video soundtracks, edits both smoother and more jarring than Daddy-o’s morning anxiety dump abound, so don’t think this is nothing more than a fresh take on space rock no one was desperate enough to ask for. Lacie Pound pops up throughout, eavesdropping on neighbors, performing a bit of Blood Stereo karaoke, and investigating electronics-enhanced grooming procedures of the co-inhabitants of his place of dwell. Lala Lu maintains her in-house wild card monopoly, singing back up to avant Cleaver Babs Billingsley, citing Shakespeare, and musing about high school sports admins. An electric baby monitor flashes the creep-on-the-subway voice of Gnarlos reading a selection from Spike Milligan’s Puckoon (page 129, to be exact). Consider that Lucian Tielens’s cover art mosaic of post blizzard powder reads like an explosion at a fire extinguisher factory, and the hint is there for you to take.
#8
(Butte County Free Music Society) Magazine $10.00
Dylan Nyoukis, Joan of Art, Ted Trager, Glands of External Secretion, Steve Marquis, Lilly McBilly, S. Glass, Lucian Tielens, Richard Streeter, Mari Kono, The In-Crowd, Bren't Lewiis, Toni Lee Smith, EL&C, Hazel’s ’lectric Washouse, Barbara Manning, Lenore, Ratbox 2021, Orificial Surgery, Cruel Duane, The Viper, Thomas Editson, The Dome, Gnarlos. 32pp, full color.