See It. Say it. Sorted. Final Lives UK
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Live recordings by Mark Groves from from Cafe OTO in London and the Colour Out of Space festival in Brighton in April 2026. Variations on a common theme: an Australian expat banging on to an acquaintance visiting from Australia. Edition of 50
A Good Deed Goes Wrong
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Crud-fi noise and DIY sound assemblage captured in a vast, dilapidated mall scheduled fo permanent shut down and demolition. It follows an engineer’s journey containing themes of neglect, faint hopes, romance and possession. The mall never sleeps. It’s always on the phone. Edition of 50
Plays ‘The Third Testament’
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. A quivering, but generally random, asymmetrical balance of lo-fi outsider folk and dense headache-inducing digital/analogue tape blurt originally recorded for Father Yod’s now-abandoned series of album-length cover versions of the ESP catalog. Edwin R Stevens (Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa), Andrew Cheetham (Desmadrados Soldades De Ventura, Richard Dawson, Kiran Leonard), Pete Um and and C Joynes initially regarded their crazed-by-lockdown-syndrome take on the Godz album The Third Testament as unlistenable, but dang if the malformed little beast hasn’t grown into something with a unique coherence and energy all of its own. Edition of 50
Standing Below Documentaries
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. “Craig Stewart Johnson explores dusty corners of life in the seven separate pieces that make up Standing Below Documentaries” reports Joe Murray.” His specialism is, of course, surfing the mobius twist, navigating that ouroboros nosh with techniques deployed that reveal a singular approach to music, thinking and visual art. It will never end but it will continually smear, redact, erase and surgically slice. This is no wanton reductionism. There is a universe of subtle crawling detail awaiting a hungry listener. Tones rise like eggs joyfully surfacing in boiling milk, exposing their proud, smooth curves as white bubbles suddenly crest the hot saucepan edge messing up the kitchen. Sloopy tape-wrek cools and crusts on the floor tiles, each mountainous ridge squelched under thick rubber crocs. The lonely piano sobs in the corner, yellowing teeth pulled by distracted rusty hands for an eternity. This endless work uncovers the secret rhythm of the spheres printed onto each saddle-backed blood cell. Diary hacks! Where secret thoughts and longings are revealed. The babble of endless ‘content’ is given a sharp poke in the eye. The dictaphone, with its primitive condenser-ear, channels our words and phrases into glorious ghosts. Each rippling with fizzing static, mysterious as kirlian photography. It’s not all scuffed metallic rationality. Real beauty exists within these pieces, airy notes are placed like a ripe pear, a fat lute, a deep blue silk scarf in some varnish-darkened still life hidden away in a Ghent suburb. Lost at sea. The cruel ocean laughs haughtily at humanity’s concerns. But the groan of the rope, quickly lashed to the various planks and barrels keeping us afloat comfort us all. Fibrous stretch and release become a faint heartbeat of hope, the flickering creak of dreams. The wrench of an elbow pulled backwards. The explosion of pain, without colour or weight, dissolves into one million stars. Relief is a salve applied in thick greasy strokes. The bright dry crack of a walking stick on a polished wooden floor restores a strict order. Lazy bees fumble their cues again. Clotting in piss-yellow clouds. A subdued menace. The circle anti-clockwise and I find myself thinking, ‘is that normal behaviour?’ until the swarm spirals like a galaxy and is reduced to sweet-scented dust.” Edition of 50
Cesspool Of The Angels
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $20.00
“This solo album by the former Bananafish editor is a recording of naturally jarring qualities and intent,” says Duncan Harrison of Adhuman. “The rippling, continuous pace doesn’t allow a whole lot of time for sinking the talons in. Incongruous sound sources are bent, warped, wrung and wrenched between the ears, as if one’s brain is an object to be flossed by Glass’s quietly punishing dentist’s hand. Clattering machines and burnt-out organs fizz as though amplified via baby monitor. Brief, ad-hoc choirs of rendered vocals are drenched in clicky synthesis and, yeah, some train noises are even detectable in the mix. But don’t for a minute ascribe his motivations to churlish desire to throw crap at a kitchen sink, then a wall, with no sense of what should stick. I’ve spoken before about the supreme deftness with which Glass sculpts his sounds and it’s all in shining evidence here. If you’ve paid attention to our man’s offerings for decades via Glands of External Secretion, Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, and the many various collabs, you’ll recognize a ton of now-trademark things on Cesspool of the Angels, too. We could talk about how painstaking it is to collect speech samples of American Assholes tricking themselves into believing something incorrect, or the nerdily inclined might be keen to know serial and model numbers responsible for the massive palette of often rich, pristine electronics and processes, but the skill of Glass’s editing is more interesting, especially his ear for… production, lacking a better word for it. This stuff is not necessarily serious, but Glass and his peers are serious as hell about doing it, deserving of consideration among some of the finest, most world-class people pissing about with difficult sounds today. It’s got action enough to suit all, from bottom-feeding post-underground burnouts to all you guys who collect that INA-GRM type shit.” First handful of copies ordered come with a bonus fridge magnet.
Unexplained Bite Marks
(Butte County Free Music Society) CDR $8.00
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $25.00
Released in April 2012 to coincide with Glands of External Secretion’s third-ever live appearance (at Trapdoor Fucking Exit, a performance series connected to Helga Fassonaki’s Touching Them Touching You - A Love Song for the Dead C), Unexplained Bite Marks took place on May 20, 1994, at legendary subterranean niteclub The Purple Onion, in the Chinatown / North Beach district of San Francisco, where a loveable maniac by the name of Tom Guido holds court whenever and with whomever he wants. Michael Morley (of The Dead C and Gate) happened to be in town, and Margaret Murray of U.S. Saucer (and Manning’s Truth Walks In Sleepy Shadows album) never refuses a challenge, so this utterly impromptu occasion also marked the first and only time Glands of External Secretion was a quartet. The raw and monolithic result is loud, distorted, saturated and more obscured by murk than The Loch Ness monster on a menopausal rampage.
LP is mastered by Weasel Walter. Paste-on artwork, postcard, hand-stamped labels. Edition of 200
GLANDS OF EXTERNAL SECRETION / ORCHID SPANGIAFORA
Couscous Bizarre
(Feeding Tube) LP $15.00
Maximum sentencing. Threads of unease, cunning strums, the rhythm of the loop. Includes download card.
Chowders
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $9.00
Perched like a weathered gargoyle ruminating behind an undiagnosed nutjob glare, this batch of grating, surrealism-ravaged sound collages and bent audio blurt arrives on the 130th anniversary of the birth of F. Bushnell Tanks, director of silent films A Girl Called Minusha and The Lady In The Filing Cabinet, whose star Irene Gordon-Pheldt is depicted on the front cover. A live recording (from Wednesday Night Live on KZSU in Stanford, another from Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland), plus two homemade beauty massacres from the Day Three of Dead Bats on The Porch sessions (for frappéd electronics and boomer delirium, respectively), and the third in a series of paper towel dispenser Fluxus actions.
Alone In A Room
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS80) CDR $12.00
Over an hour of unheard recordings by the legendary singer-songwriter, 18 tracks in all, recorded in 1997 by herself — one mic, voice, acoustic guitar. All proceeds will be dispersed to three of her friends who lost everything in the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Artwork by Karen Constance.
*** Money from all sales of any other Butte County Free Music Society release ordered before December 31 2018 will also be donated to the above families.