Alien Territory Archives - A Collection of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music from 1970s San Diego
(Nyahh) 4xCD $60.00
In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch — hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum — and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant, idyllically imagined past. In their pursuit of “Irrelevant Music” — Kenneth Gaburo’s term for an untainted music free of constraint and compromise — these disparate artists constitute a shadow history of American experimental music far removed from the European and East Coast models of the time. Sonic Meditations, compositional linguistics, microtonality, invented instruments, cutting edge electronics, underwater synthesizers, Tibetan throat singing, environmental sound and pure noise were their tools. With the exception of “Noyse” by Kenneth Gaburo, which was released on a Musicworks compilation in 1999, as well as a couple Warren Burt tracks available for purchase directly from the artist, all tracks in this set are previously unreleased. Robert Turman, David Dunn, Ernie Morgan, Harry Partch, Allen Strange, Warren Burt with Pauline Oliveros and Reinhard Berg, Citizen Band, Joseph Julian, KIVA, Dary John Mizelle, Diamanda Galás, Joji Yuasa, Alexina Louie, Kenneth Gaburo, Peter Gordon (featuring Kathy Acker), David Gamper, Robert MacDougall, Frank Mccarty. With 24pp booklet.
THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282
Tangle
(Bulbous Monacle) LP $20.00
At the time of its original release (Thwart Productions 1989), Tangle was the first stylistically frog-based leap in Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s surreal compositional modus operandi. The 2025 reissue provides an overdue revisit to the quintet’s sleek maelstrom of crackpot dissonance, noise-rock power balladry, and schizo-telepathic improv. With four-page insert. Edition of 500
Land of Thirst
(Starlight Furniture Company) LP $20.00
During their three-year existence in the 1980s, Barbara Manning, Brandan Kearney, and Jay Paget manifested all kinds of reverent beauty-moves interwoven with darker mutterings. While never abrasive, this 2017 reissue, originally released by Nuf Sed in 1989, is at times shrewdly edgy with a strong grip on instrumental spacing and texture, nicely ragged, dual-voiced guitar-pop constructions, and nervy, choppy moodiness.
Tight and Loose
(Bulbous Monacle) LP $20.00
Tracks from singles and compilations plus assorted ephemera, including a Half Japanese cover. “Their jagged and discombobulated take on underground pop music was exceptionally fertile, feral and fetching.” With four-page insert. Edition of 500
Lost Teeth
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.552) CDR $8.00
Here’s something that’ll keep your kitchen lit. (For you 20-year-olds, a “kitchen” is like the break room at work, but in your apartment.) From front to back, this disc hits like possessed plasmatic visitations happening in the middle of an otherwise silent instructional cooking program. You know that means metallic borborygmus and delicious lurching — the percussive collateral damage recognizable to anyone who has attended after-hours jousting with live but grievously unwell horses in a public library. Fear not, disdainers of randomized flail, Ypsmael + Eloine have done this before (because late fees). The duo maintains a delectable balance between electro fweep, tape fwip, and considered fwunk of the hit-it-or-quack ilk — without neglecting, as some of our peers are wont (let’s face it), sonic backdrops that enhance the ambient depth of field. The beautiful yet unprecious recording and the bounty of friction throughout Lost Teeth bring to mind a compact, super-portable Nuova Consonanza. Oh, yes they do. The homemade instrument, the field recording, the non-musical object, and the musical instrument manipulated outside the bounds of traditional propriety serve the needs of these two freedom-lickers, based respectively in Germany and San Francisco, a detail that should scream “secret tingle spoken here.”
Of Delusions
(Chocolate Monk) LP $25.00
The sound of two cracked minds locating their inner black boxes via the medium of live electro-acoustic scrambling and rummaging. Of Delusions documents the final two performances from the Ypsmael / Eloine UK tour in autumn 2023, in Brighton and Glasgow respectively, where tabletop setup damaged beyond quick repair, an unstable mess nearly collapsing on itself, and half-functioning junk (or half-damaged junk, depending where you are in the cynical-despair / wide-eyed-naivety spectrum) worked their uncanny Final-Destination-derived conspiracy. Proof, were any needed, that resonant spring clang and sine wave skittering are symptoms of a mind boggle so potent that the cosmic veil is mistaken for a handkerchief, and nasal mucus is duly expelled upon it. Murky fruit indeed. Artwork by Ian Pyper. Edition of 100.
Akystret
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00
(Chocolate Monk) LP $30.00
Soothing and interspersed with claustrophobic fogfall, Akystret tape-manipulates Brightonese baritone guitar, layered effects, and wind rustling in dissolving foliage, among other things, based on single-mic live recordings recent and ancient from East Anglia and in a sullen boxroom turned home during a prolonged episode of insomnia. The title is a mere sound, extracted from a digital handheld device left running when trying to find sleep, recording somniloquist mumblings during nightmare-ridden patches of sleep. A kind of onomatopoeic mystery resonating from a voice and in a language other than one’s own. Or perhaps of one’s own but from a place only to be accessed in a state of nausea and exhaustion, to an extent that unconscious speech meanders its way from the meaningless cosmos of the mind into a vacant vessel for sound. White vinyl edition of 60. CDR edition of 60.