Virgin Forest
(Adhuman) CD $14.00
Relative to the searing, noise-driven intensity of recent albums Wormwood Scrubs or Wilderness Years, Virgin Forest marks a distinct turn into more introspective realms. Arora utilizes a palette of subtle tonality, calm atmospherics and the pronounced influence of computer music in ways only hinted at in past work. Seven tracks, a series of intricately sculpted vignettes, a film-like portrait of cryptic, nocturnal stillness: scenic and evocative, yet seemingly unanchored to any overt emotive or communicative angles. Buried gradients, static features, interconnected details.
There is No Fire in the Lake
(Adhuman) CD $14.00
“Hovering between motion and stasis,” notes Jack Davidson, Harrison’s first full length album since 2019 “tilts a magnifying glass toward the elusive undercurrents of the day-to-day, embracing imperfections and voids within. The physicality of magnetic tape has always been a key component of his approach, but here it becomes a language in itself; the cycling spools and hissing negative space telling tales that lurk just below the surfaces of intelligibility, exhaustion, distance, meaning. Through Harrison’s bleary lens, concepts that evade direct identification communicate themselves in deeply personal, almost diaristic fashion. These pieces are also some of his most delicate; moving beyond the baffling, roughshod absurdity of past works into something closer, starker, more calmly glimmering; as if threaded with invisible twines of light and shade.”
Sitting Still For a Living
(Adhuman) CD $14.00
Traditional folk songs (learned recordings by The Watersons, Lou Killen, Sam Larner, and Harry Cox) interpreted and performed in single takes from memory, recorded in a single evening. Mackle reworks the songs through a vocabulary of gulping, stuttering, mumbled verbiage, pushing the texture of Mackle’s unaccompanied voice and the pure sonic qualities of the lyrical arrangements to the fore. The pieces remain somewhat recognizable but are drawn into territories more immediately associated with the deconstructions of Sound Poetry or free vocal improvisation. Sitting Still for a Living also features three long-form instrumental compositions built from recordings of tin whistle and recorder played by Mackle himself. Pulling direct influence from uilleann pipe music, these pieces introduce the influence of other traditional forms by way of Mackle’s characteristically austere and disjointed approach to the sampler.
Sewer Telepathy
(Chocolate Monk) Magazine + 3-inch CDR $13.00
Raw art scrawls fresh from the claw of the crapped-out mind of Michigan’s finest low-brow outlaw, plus a slimy mini soundtrack of creep vignettes. Full-color cognitive dissonance packaged up in a handy street vendor size. They say trolls lick eyeballs. Introduction by Cary Loren. 36pp book. Edition of 50
Tour’d & Flailing
(Chocolate Monk) Magazine + CDR $13.00 (Out-of-stock)
Crude utopia blooms once again as the non-fidelity master sets foot outside. Rubber bands, found metals, a box spring, and an ancient missive. Gorge, friend. 16pp book. Edition of 50
Greenlandia
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00
Dull scrape is valorized on the opening track “Pelvic Bowl of the Common Hippo,” recorded live on the air at KZSU, Stanford, where amplified cabbage strafes a listless murk that overflows with pulverized calcium. “Please Vote Lexi Carter Thump Queen” milks the subconscious panic and despair from rural beauty contests and replaces them with psyops yoga. “All String, No Pearls” is a new soundtrack for student performance art duo Maria Callous’s recently unearthed script, the writing of which was triggered 45 years ago by psylocibin and the paddle-ball barker in the 1953 horror film House of Wax, while “Original Soundtrack Recording to PJ Cramer’s Meet Me At Agnew’s Grave,” despite a title that references a non-existent movie, is an anthem for all territories that cannot be colonized or annexed. Closing out the ordeal is a kind of secular exorcism, or what dry drunks call “a Burmese meltdown” — judgmental, shrill, loaded with blurry resentment. Wicked fine. Edition of 75
Not Quite Good Enough
(Therapy Tapes) 7-inch (lathe cut) $10.00
One track from The Modern World (Chocolate Monk, forthcoming). Edition of 50
Beavers And Moire!
(Butte County Free Music Society) CDR $10.00
The Ensemble’s interpretive / reimagining spwahaohao, while not nearly as nasty or perennial as fermented mustard water, yet aspiring to the spice level of same, delivers multiple dark gruntings in that realm on their first full album of new material in about a year. Pick or get picked, depending on your psych profile: Lindy Lettuce’s booming rendish of Amanda Lear’s autobiographical call to decadence from the height of hot-for-teacher disco era; a posh and robotic reading of the obscure “Thinking Fellers Theme”; a monologue from Ghostbusters by Dino Nuggie, squeezed in during the Professor’s researches into the effects of vaping Canadian cough syrup; Tom Chimpson and Jimmy The Baptist’s asynchronous duet on “You Played on My Piano” by mid-century rock’n’roll proto goob Hardrock Gunter; and The Red Dragonfly’s defeated crawl through the opposite of the national anthem. The near constant apocalyptica on Beavers And Moire! — literal, metaphorical, and sociological — will surely gnaw the bark off the sleep-deprived skull of even the most well-prepared mutants among us, right down to the sheaf. Excerpts from sessions at Musiclandria with Viper and The Affable Chap provide jingle, rumble, and roar worthy of Tennessee Ernie having gastrointestinal issues in the Wabash dining car. An aspiring Know-It-All Paul might confidently assert that the glitchy radio noise on the 15-minute “Scurf” is the unmistakable handiwork of the legendary Larry Crane. Such a claim would be nothing more than a grave error — one easily made but not by the same person twice. The epic sprawl of such a track can scarcely contain the debut of newcomer Johnny Mac, otherwise known up and down the peninsula as the guitarist and musical director of Petaluma-based visionary theater troupe Grawlix. Lacie Pound anchors the backend of the album with furball beats and ululations in tandem with Ustad Anwar Khan Manganiyar and with Ratchester Bastard having a conniption fit about a Yes guitar solo on the Noisextra podcast. Over an hour. Eleven tracks of peculiarama.
Succes De Scandale
(Advaita) CD $21.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Nihilistic clamor. Part I includes excerpts from a previously unreleased performance at Morden Tower in 1984. Sleeve notes by Toshiji Mikawa (Hijo Kaidan / Incapacitants). Each copy includes a unique “artwork.” Edition of 200
Baited Area #9
(Baited Area) Magazine $25.00
Interviews with Longmont Potion Castle, Chino Amobi, Jordan Sullivan, Fran Ilich, Maggie Lee, S. Glass. Art and text by Graham Irvin, Joe Roberts, Bri Cene, Nick Vyssotsky, Negashi Armada, Meg McCarville, Luis Clériga, Shawn Hollins, Jeff Cook. 106 pages.