Loose Meat
(Butte County Free Music Society) CDR $8.00
Over an hour of viscera untethered! A cephalic card-counting snuffler memorizing the dress-code for visitors published by the Commonwealth Of Virginia’s department of corrections. Cranksters rutting through the neighbors’ storage shed and trying to power a homemade UFO with an aquarium air filter. Miscegenation of texts by John Steinbeck and Led Zeppelin. Foul seepage and damaged percolations. Toys-and-turntable spasticity recorded live on KXLU. Heat massage grimness. Gelatinous conflagrations. Brittle geekiopathy. A spontaneous gurnathon recorded at the fire pit behind The Dome. Lily McBilly’s WTF mash-up of the go-go-boot morality ditty “Teenie Weenie Boppie” by France Gall and Play It Again Sam’s failed-pick-up-at-the-museum scene. The 21-minute “Boiling The Grackle That Killed Suzanne Pleshette,” a live recording from The Handbag Factory in Los Angeles that delivers twice the juddering oomph of sleep-deprived space cats overdosing on bovine tranques dreaming of a laser battle with a hot water heater.
Untitled
(Chocolate Monk - choc.429) CDR $8.00
In an old issue of a London-based porn mag, the one with Funko Geräte on the cover, an essay attempts to recast Esplendor Geometrico as a Massachusetts freak-folk band. With the appropriate dosage, anything’s possible. Probably. Maybe they changed their name and emigrated from Spain and due to a translation error ended up in Seattle. Who knows what’s real and what’s made-up with that publication. From Forrest Friends’ opening herald announcing the commencement of a marathon sweat lodge cotillion, where consensual flora gropings and various pagan engorgements run their respective courses until the inevitable dousing of the nethers with ritual electronic ooze, to the spent, post-credits vibe of a homemade horror movie, this album resembles little in the Chocolate Monk catalog. The duo’s debut release for the label was recorded by the side of the road in the middle of the night, naked but for banana-leaf loin cloths bound together with twine, crouching in the mud, staring intently at a nematomorph exiting the used-up husk that had been a typically happy-go-lucky praying mantis before the zombifying parasite took over its brain. This thirty-eight-minute disc’s high-primitive hoot coaxes spirit lizards out of a secluded northern-facing lichen shack and forces them to march on an infinity-symbol-shaped path, invoking visions of communion with First Nations spasticity. Patches of impaired fidelity, damaged by overdriven sound, smear the otherwise intimate recordings with heavy whiffs of opium cinders and Wiccan-roasted genetic structure that’s mustier than an old towel full of three-day-old phat si-io. Everybody loves the idea of a lost world. Well, here’s one with hypnotic yelping, otherworldly accordion, dreams of the pipe, and processions of re-animated wooden children invoking the great drillbit in the sky to exact vengeance on the new president of Brazil. Edition of 60
A Slight Remove
(Chocolate Monk - choc.427) CDR $8.00
Low-tech cassette assemblages by Andy Bolus’s favorite tape wizard Bob Desaulniers, sourced from tapes and voice memos going back several years, like an audio junk drawer dumped out and arranged into neat little piles. Numbered edition of 60
Enge Chaleur Telegraphique
(Chocolate Monk - choc.419) CDR $8.00
Two of Chocolate Monk’s favorite old duffers got together for the label-s 25-year birthday bash at Cafe Oto for this long-distance psychic hook-up. These very old friends, one globetrotter involved in international espionage, the other a suburban West Yorkshire housewife, filled the venue with the sounds of far-flung places, piano, electronics, rambling, etc. Disorientation never felt or sounded so sweet. A Daktari for free sound adventurers. Numbered edition of 60
Life Is But A Smear
(Chocolate Monk - choc.431) CDR $8.00
Part of this recording started life as the opening for Fae Ma Bit Tae Ur Bit’s year-end Festering Season episode on Resonance Extra. During the ensuing Dionysian haze the Scots gurp realized it was the start of a companion piece for his I Found A Photocopy Of A Dream On The Street & It Sent Me To Sleep cassette. A necessary bleak December / January sound collage purge (with some regurgitation) which may help the listener cast off his or her rank and rotten ruminations, originally titled Are The Voices In Your Head Weeping Or Singing?, it should be listened to as slumber is attempted. Featuring cameos from Crank Sturgeon, Ezio Piermattei, Ludo Mich, This is Yvonne Lovejoy, The Plastic Containers Of Nothing, Joe Possett, Karen Constance, Elkka, Grant Smith, Tina Kerkels, Jonnie Prey, Angela Sawyer and others. No Sting covers. Hand-stamped cardboard cover with insert. Numbered edition of 60
Drool Freezers
(Chocolate Monk - choc.430) Magazine + CDR $16.00
Thirty-six full-color pages packed with insight into the bizarre mind of Andy Bolus who “spent endless nights, fortified with Chinese bath salt smoothies made from polystyrene packaging materials and shredded pages of Ohayo Chinpo magazine, condensing this stuff down on the trusty Bruel & Kjaer, reducing any surplus baroque residue and streamlining the information flow to ensure only the finest and most essential neon worms and Day-Glo green dog chew toys are highlighted in LSD-sharp-focus-wide-stereo-panorama for maximum ear goops.” Listen to the disc as you stare and marvel at its pages, created and presented “in the tradition of those terrible cod-surrealist chess-board landscape cover-paintings on early Klaus Schulze albums like Timewind.” Edition of 69
Unreliable Narrative
(Chocolate Monk - choc.420) CDR $8.00
Cody Brant and Shane McDonell bust out their warped musical minds for this doozy. Strung-out toe-tapping tunes and creeped-out paranoid shuffle to make your third eye twitch. Imagine the Puzzle Punks got slipped a roofie by a young, pimple-faced Rick Potts. Kill voice to skull. Sometimes good things fall apart, putting the pieces back together. Kill voice to skull. Chewing off the insides of your cheeks. Very suspicious. Numbered edition of 60
Hardship Like A Fortune
(Chocolate Monk - choc.421) CDR $8.00
Two of northern England’s finest purveyors of head scratch, Joe Murray and Sturat Arnot, get together for some real wild brut stylings. Do the avant hunch. “We’re outsiders here, unworthy uitlanders, carbuncles even,” they admit, “We’re intruders on, about, over and in this Novocastrian soil. One of us is, at least, perseverant; of three decades standing, a good chunk of anyone’s life, worthy of some sort of respect, perverse though it may seem, but the other is painfully unripe, fresh off the boat, all flapping gills and shivering and shriveling innards. Brazenly, we attempt to appease the local wigs by paying homage as best we can to their rituals, even as we fail to read the native semiotics: we drink ourselves the wrong red and, betweeded and sweating, bray loudly but unconvincingly these half-thought half-songs, misbegotten paeans to their heroic generations; we fall out, trip and fall out onto the moor and down, through the town to the Tyne, garbed suddenly, sullenly and awkwardly in unseemly black, where we desperately expose the ferrous ribbons of our tattered fake books to the corrosive, salty sweep of the northerlies and wail.” Numbered edition of 60
Gran Trotto
(Chocolate Monk - choc.424) CDR $8.00
Beautiful meandering collage piece from Italian sound artist using tapes, field recordings, voice, harmonica, organ, bells, objects, piano, etc., to weave a weird auditory place full of head scratch, voices, chimes, sing song and distant sounds, almost like a murder mystery that replays scenes from different perspectives. Numbered edition of 60
Live At Fort Process
(Chocolate Monk - choc.425) CDR $8.00
Robin “Slim” Dickinson returns from hiatus with this live recording made at Newhaven’s 19th century fort — his first attempt at a site-specific set. Field recordings of the building breathing and wheezing in its old age mixed with imagined soldiers sitting there during the war listening to the radio and waiting. Numbered edition of 60
TOBY LLOYD / POSSET / YOL
Basement Tapes
(Chocolate Monk - choc.428) CDR $8.00
Using Toby Lloyd’s art project Between Eating And Sleeping as a starting point, Yol (bottled rust), Joe Murray (tape gasbag), and Mr. Lloyd himself (energy positive) tear new holes in the Dictaphone / metallic junk / throat-war scene. Recorded live at Bradford’s Fuse and Basement Arts Project in Leeds, three heads nod in total concrete hardcore improv mode. Switches are slipped as eyes roll back in heads. Numbered edition of 60
Pacific Rim and Hastings
(Chocolate Monk - choc.418) CDR $8.00
The wild man of the jaw harp went hiking with the sax gonk deep into the wilds of the rainforest of Tofino, British Columbia, where they stumbled upon a hermit hut and cooked up this weird, slobbery affair. Those six tracks are topped off with an improv piece recorded in squalid East Hastings, Vancouver. Numbered edition of 60
Unprecize Music
(Chocolate Monk - choc.422) CDR $8.00
Tapes, voice and rudimentary household objects are the main instruments of this shadowy outfit hailing from the South of Brussels. The ghost is a key feature, acting as the specter for the vitalist poet and the overt Romantic. This collection of cuts made over the last three years explores, in the most literal sense, possible forms, through pure sinus waves, boring repetition and raw randomness. Each piece is a materialization of a neuroscientist’s view of reality. Action precedes cause, and cause is nothing but a narrative to justify action. Numbered edition of 60
A New Normal
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.401) CDR $7.00
Part hot shot of life-affirming glimmer, part wounds-cleanser, and, in the words of Emmert himself, part “quick postcard to people who are suffering from traumas and there is no way out. That’s what the title means: finding a new place to rest inside yourself, because all previous normalcy was destroyed by trauma…. There is no fixing things….” Numbered edition of 60.
Half-Time 1916
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.406) CDR $8.00
Hitchin’s finest scruff about the square Russell Walker (The Teleporters, Lloyd Pack, Pheromoans, etc.) reads from his upcoming novel, the follow-up to his poorly selling When New Towns Act Tough. James Tranmer adds tech yes/no beat crud and Tom James Scott more of a loopy drone mumph vibe. Come feel the mundane mumble, friend.
Vetch
(Chocolate Monk - choc.411) CDR $8.00
Lila Matsumoto, Matthew Hamblin and Greg Thomas’s engrossing follow-up to their Animal Work cassette (Beartown Records 2017) pulses, drones, scrapes and baffles — a strange sedative to help you cover that attitude of cynical indifference. Somebody once said, “Vetch is a food made out of flowers. The violin is made of mouths. The computer is also eating the food. Hens roused and goaded to tumors, the monk is known to write nonsense. Moping at doofus, the violent node of edam is shut for maintenance. Everything will be played backwards. Sprawling peyote limbs and bees. There will be a guitar, pills and bream enacting Cnut. Everything will be played at once. Chocolate slipping into pugs, spume of rats. Tunnocks cantering at veal. There will be a sampler. Shy and numb, the tulips and goats eloped.” So keep that in mind. Numbered edition of 60
Lump Of Stuff
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.318) CDR $8.00
Back in 2008, one-time Nipple Erector and The Pogues’ most handsome got together in North London with Vibracathedral’s dad about town and former A Band swing king. Result: heavy, private jam blowout. The walls were hung with heavy rugs, the censer was filled to bursting, and the duo took off — Campbell on charged and elated guitar, Stacy handling commotion with whistle and clarinet. Their fried alien brew centers around a cloud of electronic rust that prevents nervous collapse and steals you away. Edition of 50.
A Summer’s Day And Night
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.390) CDR $8.00
No one makes being a visionary seem like an attractive career more than Todd W. Emmert. His beguilingly unassuming compositions slip through the cracks between the cosmic binaries — your yings and your yangs, the bottom of the aboves and the tops of the belows, the magic hours of twilight and dusk. A Summer’s Day And Night oozes with sacred perspiration wrung from the garments of the children of the supreme hypno-void getting dizzy on an interstellar merry-go-round. Four opening tracks lull you into a false sense of New Age security, better than any vegan restaurant hold muzak, before Emmert goes full ghost story and bakes your head into a wax unagi pie replica in the galley of a Unarius UFO with a series of heavy, scalp-striating distorto drones that have every right to take up entire album sides. A fine, fine distillation of “splashing” and “down.” Huff it. Numbered edition of 60
OUTRÉCHESTRA / BRYAN LEWIS SAUNDERS
Sewing Party
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.383) CDR $8.00
“Three nights in a row I had dreams about parties and/or sewing,” explains Bryan Lewis Saunders. “Also, the batteries in my recorder were dying and I did not know. So when I went to transcribe the recordings I threw the batteries away. But then after hearing the content (the dreams) I thought this would be perfect in subject and tone for Princess Haultaine III! So then I asked him if he wanted to work with me on these parties. When he said yes, I thought, shoot, I should get those mostly dead batteries out of the trash and use them to their fullest potential because I thought that might complement the tone and noisy party style of the great duo Outréchestra. So then I milked those batteries for every electron in them. Hundreds of false starts trying to capture every word of the dreams in the state of death. It was a challenging task. And then Princess Haultaine III took those recordings and stitched them together with the music.” Numbered edition of 60
Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018
(Pica Disk - PICA047) 6xCD + DVD + book $45.00 (Out-of-stock)
Since 1993, this Buenos Aires group, led by its Down’s syndrome drummer/vocalist and spiritual architect Miguel Tomasín has been a universe completely of its own. Booklet 1: Liner notes by Marc Masters, Lasse Marhaug, Oren Ambarchi, Sindre Bjerga, Sixto Fernando, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, C. Spencer Yeh, John Olson and others. Booklet 2: Photos, artwork, press clippings, quotes, flyers and posters (most have not been published before). Disc 1: Early recordings, some material from small edition cassettes, some previous unreleased. Disc 2: The never-released Vedeosmas Tecretre album, recorded 2001-2003. Disc 3: Selections from the 2001-2002 Jaz Ronco Jits sessions, previously available as very limited CDRs. Disc 4: Previously unreleased conceptual pieces, including performances at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, NASA in Houston, the Atomium in Brussels, outtakes from the 10,000 Chickens Symphony and from public street protests in Buenos Aires during the December 2001 crisis. Disc 5: The never-released Roniles Dasa Selebro album, recorded 2000-2001. Disc 6: Previously unreleased collaborations with Dr. Socolinsky, Pauline Oliveros, Nelson Gastaldi, Jazzy Mel and Acid Mothers Temple. DVD: A 90-minute collage of live performances and other videos that offer a rare portal to the world of Reynols. All discs come in individual printed wallets. Edition of 500.
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $40.00
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 Adrian Dimond of 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, Doug Harvey of Mannlicher Carcano and F, 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 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.