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previous artist: fritz dietl		there are 7 titles featuring don dietrich in stock. they are listed below.		next artist: raymond dijkstra

$13.44

back in stock as of
january 20th, 2010

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agaric (usa) #ag 1996 cd

borbetomagus “live in allentown” compact disc

untitled (1) (32:30)
untitled (2) (21:27)

2007 release ; cd reissue of the lowlife cassette covering the band’s performance at “the 3rd annual halloween extravaganza” on october 29, 1986 ...

agaric press release...

borbetomagus - live in allentown
by phil freeman

like many music journalists/critics, my listening habits are in continual flux, my tastes evolving and mutating day by day. there are some constants - anything that could be called metal will get at least an idly curious half-listen, anything that could be called indie will get binned without a backward glance. jazz of the "free" variety (however one defines that), particularly 60s reissues, will get a warm welcome; post-bop or smooth fusion will have to argue much more strenuously for itself. but i'm always willing to be surprised. i was recently blindsided by the kompakt label compilation total 6, after years of ignoring techno. it's important to always be ready to hear something that will totally change the way you think about music.

the first record i can remember pressuring my father to buy for me was judas priest's screaming for vengeance, in 1982, when i was about to turn eleven. by 1987. i was a metalhead to the marrow of my bones, making an occasional side trip into punk - black flag, dead kennedys, flipper, bad brains, the minutemen. (remember, this was america - suburban new jersey to be precise. to this day, i have not heard never mind the bollocks in its entirety, and the only version of the clash’s debut i know is the one with “i fought the law” on it.) i owned exactly five jazz records: miles davis’ kind of blue, bitches brew and tutu, and john coltrane’s a love supreme and meditations.

spin magazine, which had recently supplanted rolling stone as my primary source for information about new music, featured byron coley’s “underground” column in its record review section. it was the most interesting thing in the magazine by a long stretch. i couldn’t always decipher his prose to figure out what he was praising about the acts he discussed, and anyhow i'd never heard of a single one of them, but it was a fascinating, must-read section, month after month. it was there that i read about borbetomagus, specifically their cassette-only release live in allentown. i don't have the magazine anymore, so i can't quote coley's prose, but whatever he wrote about this sax-sax-guitar trio from upstate new york, i had to hear them.

i knew there was no way my local record store was going to be able to get live in allentown for me. i was going to have to go somewhere that really catered to the obscure and outre - bleecker bob's, in greenwich village. i'd never been there before, only walking past a few times on the way to a nearby comic store. but somehow i was certain that they would have this thing, if anyone would. so i made the tremulous journey into what i thought was the very beating heart of underground music. i walked in the store, awed by the vinyl sleeves that covered the walls and the surly, leather-and-black-denim-clad clerks who i was certain would beat my suburban ass and throw me back to the sidewalk, knowing how unworthy i was to sully their punk rock shrine with my presence. but they didn't. and sure enough, in the glass case where they kept their cassettes, there it was. red-and-black construction paper cover, white plastic case. i think i paid six dollars. i put it in my battered walkman on the way out the door.

when the first hideously distorted shrieks and roars hit my ears, i almost fell over from the raw force of it. that couldn't be a saxophone - it sounded like someone being torn limb from limb. was that a guitar, or someone revving up a gigantic engine to the brink of explosion? in truth, it was hard to even discern one sound from the others. nothing on the tape had any obvious reference points in anything else i owned, or had ever heard. even meditations, the screechiest album in my collection, sounded like lounge music compared to this. i was terrified, but i couldn't stop listening. i had to hear what came next.

the first side of the tape contains a single long piece, ending in tape slice. the second side picks up with what might be the same piece. after eight minutes or so, there’s a brief burst of applause, and some shouts of “encore!” from a very enthusiastic woman, then the next (and final) section begins. the borbetomagus lineup documented is a quartet, with adam nodelman on bass in addition to saxophonists jim sauter and don dietrich and guitarist donald miller. nodelman actually plays some fairly straight low chords near the end of the second side, as though attempting to anchor the music and keep it from becoming total noise. toward the end, someone (maybe a borbetomagus member) begins vocalizing in a manner reminiscent of early butthole surfers, as miller's guitar and at least one of the saxophones continue to sputter, snarl and squeal.

i listened to live in allentown almost daily for a couple of years, even forcing it on friends who wanted no part. i began to memorize the subtle, almost intuitive shifts in what had initially seemed like an unceasing, undifferentiated roar. the interplay between group members revealed itself. and this repeated close listening began to alter the way i heard other music. i sought out harsher and more punishing sounds in general, yes, but i also started to pick apart all the music i heard, trying to understand what each player was contributing to the whole, rather than hearing a record as a solid mass with the vocalist slapped on top like a pizza topping. live in allentown taught me to listen like a critic.

i’ve still go my original cassette copy of live in allentown (which until now has been ridiculously rare, not even listed in many borbeto discographies). to my amazement, it’s never melted down or spooled out of its case. i recently took it out and converted it to cd-r, and stuffed its two long tracks into my ipod. to this day, it’s my favorite borbetomagus recording, and to my ear the best thing they’ve ever done. now that it’s been reissued on disc, i can go back anytime i want and get whacked in the head by it all over again, just like when i was fifteen and first discovering that there was more to music than metal.

$13.44

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threads:
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agaric (usa) #ag 1995 cd

borbetomagus “songs our mother taught us” compact disc

aftershock (11:08)
songs our mother taught us (34:35)
after aftershock (7:45)

2003 release ; covering sets recorded during a u.k. tour in 1999 ...

$8.41

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agaric (usa) #ag 1991 ep

borbetomagus / shaking ray levis “coelacanth” ten inch single record

coelacanth
i want to be a black weight lifter named douglas
lady big boy

... black-vinyl reissue of this prior picture-disc 10” release, pitting the tennessee-an experimental-instrument / electronics duo of bob stagner & dennis palmer against the miller / dietrich / sauter juggernaut, as recorded on june 6th, 1992 at water works in new york ...

$13.44

back in stock as of
january 20th, 2010

first in stock on
march 27th, 2009

threads:
harsh-noise
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agaric (usa) #ag 1988 cd

borbetomagus “snuff jazz” compact disc

abc (16:42)
bbc (7:41)
cbc (9:44)
dc (16:28)

... cd reissue of the band’s 1988 “snuff jazz” lp (a 16-minute blurt recorded at abc no rio on november 24th, 1988, then another captured two months prior at dc space, august 25th, 1988), including their track from the “japan zero noise” tape (another excerpt from the same abc no rio gig) & one otherwise un-issued take (ditto) ...

agaric press release...

it is hard to believe that it has been twenty years since my ass warmed a bench in the dungeon at abc no rio. back in the day, it was dicey on the streets of the dank and decaying lower east side, streets riddled with drug dealers and abandoned buildings. a couple of drinks at the opening, and it was high time for a good aural irrigation. the boys gently ascended to their cruising altitude, and the sonic bursts pierced the damp masonry walls and every human eardrum in reach. the fans drooled, and the uninitiated, like the soccer players of chernobyl, stared in awe of this enfolding, life-threatening disaster and grit-crunching ass-kick machine. the dogs were howling this night!

remove all other living critters from the house, pour yourself a double single-malt scotch, turn the volume of your stereo to twelve, and enjoy as your ears are acid-etched.

-- michael hanke

$13.44

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threads:
free-improvisation
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circuit-bending
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free-jazz

agaric (usa) #ag 1987 cd
ulhang produktion (switzerland) #up 06 cd

borbetomagus / voice crack “fish that sparkling bubble” compact disc

we don't need no warrior goddess (8:38)
vungavunga (10:56)
cracked magus (7:15)
floonder king (3:12)
my tongue in your cheek (9:27)

1998 release ; cd issue of the 1988 “fish that sparkling bubble” lp (originally co-released by agaric & ulhang produktion) documenting the band’s first meeting(s) with the “cracked everyday electronics” duo voice crack (norbert möslang & andy guhl) ...

this was my personal entry into not just the voice crack / borbeto axis, but to pretty much any kind of non-metered / harmonically-linked music (remember, i was but a high school sophomore when this was launched !!!) ; as such, it of course holds a special place amidst my chest-cavity gelatin ... 20 years on, the harsh electronic wail hasn’t lost even one iota of its power ...

agaric press release...

fish that sparkling bubble

right. so this record is wild enough to send maurice sendak running for mama. but something gets lost in translation during the critics' hyperbolic feeding frenzy that inevitably surrounds each passing borbeto release. i mean, sure it's "gut crunching" ... "a vortex of infernal energy" ... "a giant paleozoic monster belch-roaring and casually swatting house-sized cockroaches with its massive toil." all perfecfty true. but their music is also very subtle. just like chemical experiments that can only occur at extreme temperatures, borbetomagus cranks up the volume so high to enable the overtone alchemy only possible in such zones. on this occasion, their sensitivity is further focussed by the collaboration of voice crack, a swiss duo dedicated to the extension of the futurist homebuilt vocab. vc assembles a sonic urban center built from electronic flotsam, a cold city then populated by the hot blood of borbeto, blazing. in this landscape, one can easily hear the echoes of xenakis, hendrix, ayler - each a colossal ghost of post-industrial extremism. but it's not study in retrospection or combinatorics; from the opening skronk of "we don't need no warrior goddess" to the (what?) quiet passage at the outset of "vungavunga," it is entirely new and unyieldingly irreverent. music like the face of a cliff: monumental. but the detail on this monument is etched oh-so fine!

- john corbett butt rag, 1990

fish that sparkling bubble was a full-fledged collaboration between borbetomagus and voice crack. at that time, in 1988, the brilliant swiss group was a duo; when they later collaborated again with the borbeto boys on asbestos shake two years later they hod added drummer knut remond. borbetomagus first began corresponding with andy guhl and norbert möslang soon after hearing the 1977 fmp record deep voices, which featured the pair on acoustic horns, percussion, bass, as well as home-made instruments and cassette machines. before they adopted the voice crack moniker, möslang and guhl released their first excursion into electronics-land, knack on, on the uhlklang label.

but it was voice crack, recorded in 1984, that saw the consolidation of the duo's working methodology: spreading out a panoply of sound making devices on the floor or on a table, voice crack erects a miniature sonic city. disarticulated woofers and cones are connected to technical hybrids - radio-cassette-turntable-circuitboards - through cables that stretch like so many intraveneous tubes to a patient. indeed, it's like an electronic vivisection in which the beating heart tokes on the timbres of beat up electronic gadgets. extending the gradualist, laminar industrial improvising tradition of britain's amm, voice crack constructs jogged topographies of electronic endproduct noise and detuned radio signal-shimmering, looping, phased-out landscapes that are at once seductive and at the some time sharp, brittle, and dangerous. in this context, their "cracked everyday electronics" bring the volume down a few notches, shift the energy, and draw out a wonderful combination of mechanical and cheapo-electronics aesthetics.

borbeto's response is in places reminiscent of their killer acoustic-saxed zurich; the interface with dusty electronics also brings to mind their encounter with hugh davies, work on what has been spoiled, as well as their recently reissued eponymous first record, recorded in 1980, which featured brian doherty on electronics. remember also that fish that sparkling bubble was recorded during the year borbeto spent as a quartet, with bassist adam nodelman adding his completely wrecked bass concept to the bottom-end of the borbeto-crack barrel. nodelman's addition to the group, also stunningly documented on seven reasons for tears, transformed the longstanding trio into something else altogether. no place is this more evident than in the incredible guitar/bass interplay on "my tongue in your cheek" - battling fuzztone and static saxes, nodelman blankets the low end with energy-packed bass, at times even breaking into breakneck linear runs.

listening back to fish that sparkling bubble six years after writing my butt rag review, i guess it's still about: 1) borbeto-crack blowing on extra hole in your cranium; and/or: 2) voice-magus forcing a redefinition of the notion of subtlety. the first of these is obvious-of course, there is never any lock of energy and dead-on fun with noise in any of their work. as don dietrich once told me, "we don't play to fill a room with sound; we start from the walls and ploy in from there!" borbetomagus vibrates a column of air. it just so happens that in their case the column in question is indescribably huge and the vibration notoriously furious. certain guitarists have zany moments with difference tones; borbetomagus eats difference tones for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so by concert-time they cough up something else altogether. here we find borbetomagus, city of worms, digging deeply into their high-impact style. here we find voice crack - equally grungy, though more object-oriented in their approach. the classic session is all that much better on cd, since vinyl grooves barely ever held borbeto's mag-est moments, the sum of which sometimes threaten to spit out the needle like a watermelon seed from between your fingers.

but, as stated, it's about more than the steam-roller for borbetomagus and voice crack. fish that sparkling bubble has a redefined subtlety, a kind of blow-torch delicacy: the ballet of a construction site, the poetry of a scream. that is, within the massive windstorm one can hear slight, beautiful, graceful, sometimes even fragile voices. what, borbetomagus fragile? listen to the long, smooth, howling tones that lurk beneath the surface distortion and fuzz on "warrior goddess," or that impressive opening track's stuttering, post-evan parker acoustic saxophone moments (which also appear in "floonder king"). on "vungavunga" we find a regular pulse, nearly a unique moment in the borbet-ouvre; the voice crackers undulate the sound as if it was a giant magnetic transformer caught in the waves of a metallic sea, and the piece's repetitions are echoed in the repeating "vungas" of its own name. occasional bleeps and tweets of some squeezed machinery-walkie-talkie tones, gutted phone receivers, miniature amplifiers, close-n-play record players-slip through (on "cracked magus" for instance), audible at one level of the many in this noise layer-cake. and the intimate gurgling sounds that suck out the middle of "my tongue in your cheek." and that track's nearly sweet sounding ending. borbeto-ballad? surprises on every floor!

convulsive beauty, you've got it now. subtle as a flying mallet? and then some. sparkling bubbles? festering, i s'pose. or paint peeling under the heat of a torch. or a kid blowing through his straw into his coke, as magnified 10,000 times. sorry, gone fishin'. real, real gone.

- john corbett chicago, april 1995

$13.44

back in stock as of
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threads:
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live-electronic

agaric (usa) #ag 1983 cd

borbetomagus “barbed wire maggots” compact disc

untitled (1) (21:43)
untitled (2) (21:50)

2005 release ; cd issue of the 1983 “barbed wire maggots” lp (the band’s fourth) recorded at in-roads, new york, may 1982 ...

agaric press release...

barbed wire maggots is a motherfucker, even now, 23 years after it was recorded. it probably remains my favorite borbetomagus album for a number of reasons, some of them sentimental, others aesthetic. it was, after all, the first of their lps i actually owned. that being the case, it flattened me in a specifically unprecedented way, and it was always the lp that i'd pull out when introducing a new listener to the band. and when viewed through the tube of subsequent history, when weighed on the great scales of underground whuh, bwm remains a goddamn estimable listen by any sorta objective criteria. it may also be borbetomagus' first fully mature work.

while it is technically their fourth album, barbed wire maggots, occupies a somewhat more complex place inside borbetomagus' discography than the release chronology would seem to imply. the may 1982 in-roads session at which it was recorded, actually occurred more than half a year after the date that resulted in both the industrial strength and borbeto jam lps (their fifth and seventh released lps, respectively). bwm is also the first record to feature the deranged ernst / smith derived collage work of donald miller. most importantly, it is the first full borbetomagus album to be truly representative of the core trio that comprises the band's classic line-up: don dietrich, donald miller and jim sauter.

as much as their first three albums are monsters, none of them have the holist textual destruction of bwm. their eponymous debut is almost like' some kinda derailed prog-death-train. brian doherty's electronics have a pronounced ubu / hawkwind vibe to them at times - obviously enough of one to make certain jazzbos shit logs. work on what has been spoiled, the second lp, features brit free-style giant, hugh davies, sitting in for doherty, but the session seems to be led by the truly fucked-up string explosions of donald miller, whose use of a bastard file should be monitored by health organizations around the globe. "the black album" (so-called, although it may also be eponymous) is a boiling mix of live tracks that investigate several new vistas of raw concrete noise. it has the distinct feel of a sampler, however, and includes doherty on one track. borbeto jam and industrial strength - with all those darn guest artists-sound a whole lot more like mere "free jazz" albums than anything else in the band's discography. one gets the impression that the guys reacted to this by immediately becoming more ferociously hermetic, more totally outside any graspable tradition other than their own. which leads us to bwm - a goddamn whale of a record, performed exclusively by the fingers, lips and tongues of dietrich, miller & sauter.

recorded at in-roads on mercer street, bwm documents a gorgeous evening of extreme sonic dialogue. sauter and dietrich's reeds skinny-dip into virtual classicist free mode at times (think 'trane having an erotic dream of frank wright), but more often they tangle like electric eels dropped like tampons from the poop hatch of a 747. upper register bowel tingling never felt so good. miller's guitar joins them up in the stratosphere, plugging raw current into metal bowls, sizzling like a wok full of stewardess jiz, just creating and distorting and worrying the fabric of the cosmos like some idiotic terrier-god from a lost part of the upanishads.

everything just moves so beautifully here. all of the early borbeto hallmarks are on display: the ducks-attacked-by-lawnmowers thing; the wilhelm reich busts another cloud scenario; the angel-wire-thimble connection; the part about the cop car getting crushed by a bulldozer inside a maelstrom in a sewer drain-it's all here. i don't believe i picked out the sweet suckery of an actual bells-together moment, but there's puh-lenty of that later in the discography. so don't sweat it. what is most remarkable about the music on bwm is how fresh it still sounds. there're no cliches brunted about here, nothing that's time-coded in the least; it's even difficult to really categorize the music inside any genre. jazz, industrial, rock, free ... there are elements of all of those here. and they are blended and/or smashed together in ways that will make yr hair feel lighter than feathers, lighter than maggots, lighter than anything.

as jackie gleason said, "how sweet is it!" and how i wish the great one was alive, sitting next to me now, as i play barbed wire maggots for the umpteenth time. surely he would have approved.

byron coley
south deerfield ma 2005

$11.76

back in stock as of
january 20th, 2010

first in stock on
march 27th, 2009

threads:
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live-electronic

agaric (usa) #ag 1980 cd

borbetomagus “sauter, dietrich, miller, doherty (“the white album”)” compact disc

concordat 1 (12:13)
concordat 2 (5:48)
concordat 3 (5:19)
concordat 4 (9:28)
concordat 5 (7:34)
lost concordat (7:55)

1995 release ; cd version of the 1980 debut album (including a “lost concordat” which remained un-issued until now due to “badly deteriorated master tapes of the session”) from donald miller, don dietrich, and jim sauter’s borbetomagus (here augmented by future they might be giants drummer brian doherty on “live electronics”) ...

the ripples this and subsequent yearly borbetomagus releases sent out into the worlds of noise, free jazz, industrial, live electronics, and general “energy music” are incalculably present every time i sign for a package here at the mms office ; it’s endlessly inspiring that these guys are going strong after 30 years in the trenches, during which their impact has never lessened, their formula never diluted with outside influence ...

to paraphrase jimmy johnson ; no home should be without at least one borbetomagus recording ... or at least the homes that value the development of an ultra-personalized freedom-of-expression spec that, while taking cues from the movements mentioned above, could never rightly be classified solely into any one avenue other than “borbetomagus music” ...

a chronological progression through the band’s recorded oeuvre is recommended over random, stray dips ... this is where to begin ...

agaric press release...

in this world of multitude, quantity and excessive consumer saturation, it is hard to even imagine today the enormous impact made by the very first public broadcast of electronic music made in western europe during the years following world war ii.

pierre schaeffer's seminal "musique concrete" was quickly followed by the first tentative works of karlheinz stockhausen, merging a world of transformed "concrete" sounds with one of mechanically "generated" electronic purity. ultimately, this created a unique genre of compositions that would greatly influence future composers, whether their tools were to be tape recorders, sequencers, oscillators and sine wave generators; or jazz oriented live improvisatory sessions with acoustic and non-acoustic instruments, synthesizers and inevitably any object within reach that could be hit, shaken, or enthusiastically abused.

it is unnecessary to mention here all the exponents of this musical vanguard whose work expanded rapidly on a global scale during the ensuing decades. fortunately, they have been recorded on vinyl, and these rare, invaluable discs ought to comprise any decent record collection covering the evolution of this genre.

it is within this "classic" frame of reference that i would like to introduce the the first recording of borbetomagus. this "tight" group of musicians has been playing together for years, but surprisingly, and regrettably, has been enjoyed by audiences at only a few performances scattered here and there throughout the metropolitan area. they deserve for better than that.

this rather unusual but intriguing combination of instrumentalists is able to create what i, after attending a live performance, would like to call a "pollock of sound": a sustained piece of music where unity and performance in its totality is the main objective; and where naturally evolving passages of tranquility still leave ample space for non-excessive individualism, gradually gaining momentum again when members join to ensure climactic high-energy unity-attested to very appropriately by the five titles on the lp.

the "concordant" matters described above are here, freely chosen with a great dose of admirable humor. this sound palette should be fully enjoyed at a high level of amplification to do justice to its very diversified texture and color, which seems to change constantly and gradually, displaying at times a sense of daringly controlled dissonance. when the threshold of acceptability has been surpassed, feedback seems to come into its own, demanding a fascinating ear-shattering tolerance of a soundscape defying standard norms.

the most fascinating aspect of this sound texture is the combination of conventional reed instruments and electric guitar, with high amplification and electronically altered and generated sounds - all performed live, with no pyrotechnic studio wizardry, which seems hard to believe at times.

all five pieces on this disc display a highly variegated approach to the realization of these massive, linearly and spontaneously evolving soundings. soundings that are, paradoxically, more attributable to the musicians' good listening sense than to relentlessly contributing.

borbetomagus has a strong linkage with such revered classic examples as kagel, cage, stockhausen, mev (to name but a few), whose provocative musical field of taboo and permissiveness has not been fully explored on this side of the ocean. keep an eye on this group and its future developments.

may i recommend this piece of vinyl highly to the well-seasoned ear.

henk berkman
cadence, november 1980

previous artist:
fritz dietl

...and that's everything in stock featuring don dietrich.
(why not take a look at the previous and next artists?)

next artist:
raymond dijkstra

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... this page was last updated on saturday, february 11th, 2012 @ 5:27 pm