copper glove “surviving the garden of hate” seven inch single record

• liquification process
  
  
• protogenerator

forest swords “dagger paths” long playing record

• untitled (1)
  
• untitled (2)
  
• untitled (3)
  
  
• untitled (4)
  
• untitled (5)
  
• untitled (6)

olde english spelling bee press release...

oesb-48 forest swords "dagger paths" l.p. wirral's forest swords make a textured, gauzy music as indebted to the liverpool region's rich musical heritage as it is to the bleak-yet-beautiful coastal environment from which it was born. the result is something completely organic, sounding like a dancehall mix of mogwai's more luscious soundscapes, burial's sample-strewn claustrophobia, and ennio morricone's spaghetti western scores. the record's sweaty and thunderous dub grooves and cavernous guitar licks rub shoulders with r'n'b shuffles, dread-soaked percussion, and heady drones to create a visceral and epic sound. "dagger paths" consists of specially remastered versions of songs from the out-of-print cassette singles 'miarches' and 'glory gongs', along with brand new tracks. full color pro-printed covers and insert.

rangers “suburban tours” long playing record

• deerfield village
  
• golden triangles
  
• bear creek
  
• brook meadows
  
• glen carin
  
• out past curfew
  
  
• woodland hills
  
• ross downs
  
• bel air
  
• dome city
  
• airport lights

olde english spelling bee press release...

oesb-42 rangers "suburban tours" l.p.  rangers is joe knight. "suburban tours" is his debut vinyl release after a string of popular cassette albums last year - including "low cut fades" on not not fun. his sound has been referred to out in blogland as "elevator psyche" and "mirrorball funknagogic pop" - and that's not a bad start considering his music is often bass-driven with washes of synth and prog-psych guitar riding over the top. unlike the extended side-long collages of his cassette releases, "suburban tours" is a collection of eleven concise "pop" songs that were written and recorded after moving to san francisco from his native texas. not knowing anyone in this new locale, he describes the period after the move as being extremely lonely and plagued with near-constant rainfall. so he holed up and focused his attentions on recording a batch of songs that reflected on his suburban upbringing outside of dallas and what he calls the "failed connections with nature" that exist in these suburban zones (fake lighting, cranked-up air conditioning, golf courses, and gated "communities" where everyone keeps to themselves). but despite the loneliness and melancholic themes there is a remarkable amount of color to his music. like it's the sound of what he'd want to have playing on his headphones while riding a bike thru these neighborhoods -- the sound necessary to make these places seem lively and fun. rangers is drawing from an entirely different set of musical influences than the rest of his peers - combining a passion for manchester's northern soul sound with early 80's rock radio staples like rush and the police and the 70's prog-fusion of weather report. plus he's got the chops to pull off this unlikely union -- in fact the cutting engineer for "suburban tours" was utterly baffled and commented that it sounded to him like a lost steely dan session recorded onto a mangled microcassette tape. that's a good thing, right? full color pro-printed covers and insert.

skin graft / pimlo “terminal alcoholic • the mountain” compact disc recordable

• skin graft - hazard (3:24)
  
• skin graft - carcinogen (5:54)
  
• skin graft - labour (2:16)
  
• skin graft - posthumous (3:23)
  
• skin graft - solitary (2:31)
  
• skin graft - congenital (2:33)
  
• pimlo - an endless battle for a trivial thing (4:36)
  
• pimlo - the mountain came to me (4:20)
  
• pimlo - angel of hartville (3:00)
  
• pimlo - where makers go/winestone (12:58)

durable stimuli press release...

durable stimuli #28 skin graft/pimlo cd-r release date february 2010 total running time 44:50 cd-r philips - white, editions one edition of 100 copies artwork cover photo by roxanne starnik, layout by durable stimuli packaging jewel case, pro-quality digital print, hand-numbered with silver sharpie

jazkamer “the monroe doctrine” compact disc

• the monroe doctrine (29:59)

pica disk press release...

jazkamer: the monroe doctrine pica016. cd. released march 2010. the march edition of jazkamer's 2010 monthly cd-series. free-form funk-noise.

ruin / eternal plough “ohio feathers: volume 1” c30 cassette

• ruin - untitled
  
  
• eternal plough - untitled

pizza night press release...

pn 43 - "ohio feathers: volume 1" c30 ruin / eternal plough (edition of 50) the first of a series of cleveland weirdo splits. ruin is wyatt howland (skin graft, the nevari butchers) channeling a completely new zone. ruin's debut and displays wyatt's wide palette of sounds in a less confrontational but equally as dark of a manner as his skin graft work. eternal plough is lo-fi  cut up ambient sequencing project using minimal equipment, recorded mostly while half asleep in my bed. debut for both projects.

radio people “three radiant urns” c20 cassette

• three radiant urns (1)
  
  
• three radiant urns (2)

pizza night press release...

pn 42 - "three radiant urns" c20 - radio people (edition of 50) another batch of psychedelic synthesizer songs, sparkly upbeat krauty tracks are paired up with somber synthscapes and mellow drones. also features some of my best "electronics" exploration work yet. mostly recorded live in the past month.

telecult powers “orgone freakout: a happening with the telecult powers” c40 cassette

• untitled (1)
  
• untitled (2)
  
• untitled (3)
  
  
• untitled (4)
  
• untitled (5)
  
• untitled (6)

deception island press release...

di29: telecult powers "orgone freakout: a happening with the telecult powers" c40. hand-numbered edition of 150. like a forgotten sonic arts union-era session heard from the business end of an opiated rabbithole, "orgone freakout" is an album-length synthesis of all the most fucked transcendent peaks on the releases (e.g. "amazing laws" and "a beginner's guide to hoodotronix") that have formed the apex of the telecult powers catalog to date, boiled down to their strangely arching bones. it's a phenomenal codex of resinous creaks, empty cisterns, reflected moonlight, phantom choirs, and tendril-like percussive afterimages from a duo of cleveland-to-brooklyn transplants that's spent the past three years becoming one of the best and strangest live acts in the world, establishing a well-deserved reputation as a cornerstone of the contemporary new york underground, issuing a viscous drip of bizarre missives through their unerringly curated temple of pei imprint, and cultivating the masterfully honed feedback between their live and studio incarnations that reaches critical velocity with this release. as ever, mister matthews' handcrafted electronics are at the center of the proceedings and measured expansion of a shared timbral vocabulary continues to be a huge part of his and witchbeam's raison d'etre, while the paranoid opacity and sheer idiosyncracy of their improvising grammar hasn't yielded an inch. this productive tension is at once an indicator of the rewards that await the devoted acolyte and the audible stamp of their rust belt origins. writing about telecult powers back in 2008, i said that "witchbeam and mister matthews lock into their particular skewed orbit, which has something of the unhinged forelornness of nik pascal raicevic’s work, only even more fucked and disturbing, because there’s actually two people giggling at each other out on that ledge. ...one could revisit it a thousand times without ever really getting a handle on it or parsing it successfully. in short, it’s necessary, rewarding, and fantastically heavy work." that still pretty much sums it up, i believe, and it's only gotten more true with time. materials: di27-30 were pro-dubbed by nac in st. louis, missouri on the same basf chrome stock used for every deception island release since di15, with tinted shells, imprinted in matching color on both sides. they're packaged in standard lenco polyboxes (except for di27, which comes in a side-by-side double norelco case) with white gloss enamel screenprints on white 110lb j-cards and feature hand-numbered photocopy wraparounds on michigan'z finest 100lb french paper. care has been taken at every stage of the production process to use domestically manufactured materials and ph-neutral, archival-quality papers and adhesives. fair warning: the low-contrast nature of the design and the highly reflective materials used have made it more than usually difficult to photograph these tapes. the insets are intended to give you some sense of what's going on with the imprints, j-cards, etc, but my less-than-stellar photos don't really do them justice.

tiger hatchery “lemon crystal sunshine” c40 cassette

• tinfoil waterfall
  
  
• bamboo rainbow

deception island press release...

di28: tiger hatchery "lemon crystal sunshine" c40. hand-numbered edition of 150. "lemon crystal sunshine" is both the first release by chicago's tiger hatchery outside the orbit of their in-house imprints and their most coherent, lovingly realized, and hi-fidelity statement to date, with all the makings of a proper public debut. it's no small thing to say that, in a world of massively hyped ad hoc collabs, mike forbes (tenor sax), andrew scott young (double bass), and ben billington (drums) are a genuine, dedicated, and hard-touring ensemble, and a stunningly matched one at that; while all three players have turned in head-spinning cult sessions in the past few years (forbes with j. guy laughlin, forbes and young as a duo and with weasel walter on 2009's skullsplitting "american free" lp, and billington solo and in duos with jason soliday and brett naucke), i knew from the first seconds of their set at champagne of fests iii last year that this was something special, and the performances of theirs that i've caught since then, at voice of the valley, philly's danger danger, and cleveland's the cool ranch have only reinforced that notion. at once too formalist, too perversely ludic, and too explicitly conscious of all the resonant objects they're wrangling to tolerate an easy lumping-in with the neo-fire music camp and too focused on actual asskicking and immersive sheets of lusciously corroded timbral wonder to permit their reduction to ego-fodder for the plausibly bed-wetting highbrow improv set, tiger hatchery got those legs underneath 'em amid a grueling mise en abime of basement fistpumpers, and it shows. refreshingly indifferent to any/all tired, eyeball-glazing handwringing over the moral hazards of idiom, as only a band too adept and committed to bother with such rhetorical crutches can afford to be, they are, quite simply, one of the best free jazz outfits operating today. forbes' bloody, eviscerating tone and evan parker-level circular breathing chops are already the talk of the proverbial town, but what's most impressive is the integration of these traits into a complete and highly personal style characterized by flinty reserve, strikingly antihuman phrasing, obsessively slonimskyian cellular/permutational construction, and the occasional, tantalizing glimpse of a bent, neomodern lyrical sensibility, evidenced at the start of side two as he comes on like ornette coleman disintegrating in a hail of cough syrup. what glues this all together is young and billington's strikingly congruent rhythmic vocabularies, the sum of which is often rich in loose-limbed, muppety thwack, though "lemon crystal sunshine" offers each of them ample opportunity to stretch out into more nuanced territory as well. midway through side one, billington takes his finest recorded solo to date, a nearly whisper-quiet manifesto of gradually ratcheted-up tension that deftly sidesteps the cliches of contemporary free drumming, drawing to a close as young picks up the bow for a spiraling, kaleidoscopic duet with forbes, showing off a gently weathered approach to the higher partials that's both commendably focused and almost shockingly lovely. i promised myself that i'd never end a writeup with the phrase "must grip," but seriously. materials: di27-30 were pro-dubbed by nac in st. louis, missouri on the same basf chrome stock used for every deception island release since di15, with tinted shells, imprinted in matching color on both sides. they're packaged in standard lenco polyboxes (except for di27, which comes in a side-by-side double norelco case) with white gloss enamel screenprints on white 110lb j-cards and feature hand-numbered photocopy wraparounds on michigan'z finest 100lb french paper. care has been taken at every stage of the production process to use domestically manufactured materials and ph-neutral, archival-quality papers and adhesives. fair warning: the low-contrast nature of the design and the highly reflective materials used have made it more than usually difficult to photograph these tapes. the insets are intended to give you some sense of what's going on with the imprints, j-cards, etc, but my less-than-stellar photos don't really do them justice.

skin graft “a brick in the mouth of a corpse” c20 cassette

• a brick in the mouth of a corpse (1)
  
  
• a brick in the mouth of a corpse (2)
  
• a brick in the mouth of a corpse (3)
  
• a brick in the mouth of a corpse (4)

deception island press release...

di26 - skin graft "brick in the mouth of a corpse" c20: as proof that some small amount of justice lingers in the world, cleveland veteran wyatt howland is finally getting his dues, having spent the past several years amassing a discography studded with many of the all-time classics of fucked rust belt electronics ("soft police murder," "drug addict," "you deserve nothing," and the watershed "blackout" lp on tusco embassy, to name but a handful), collabbing tirelessly with the likes of ryan kuehn, david russell, emeralds, and aaron dilloway, and turning in an endless stream of punishingly focused, concise, and pissed-off performances that simply must be witnessed to be believed. "brick in the mouth of a corpse" is both a fitting introduction to skin graft and a bar-raiser for those already initiated, on which howland continues to wax subtle, detailed, and glowering, as though drawing cross-sections of harsh noise with a drafting pencil, allowing us to view the creaking, dripping, and hissing armature under its skin. this is a strategy that could never be sustained without the patience and technique that are present in spades across the six tracks that make up "brick," meticulously crafted vignettes that range from the principled scraping of bones and bodyslamming of trashcans to waking up brutally hung over beside a rustily copulating heap of sonar equipment. essential filth. hand-numbered edition of 149.

bee mask “shimmering braid” c20 cassette

• shimmering braid (1)
  
  
• shimmering braid (2)

deception island press release...

di25 - bee mask "shimmering braid" c20: "shimmering braid" features two of the latest pieces in the austere, trillion-oscillator heterodyning mode of last year's "elusive lunar bow" (together tapes) and "versailles is not too large ... or infinity too long," (chondritic sound) taken to new extremes of ghostly bass weight, mind-splitting acoustic illusion, and frostbitten architechtonic contour, making audible the eternal frying of the phantom breakfast on a slo-coasting ice sheet. this is one for fans of a certain historically sited vein of minimalist electronics, brobdingnagian timbral redundancy, and the principled avoidance of temperament. in hindsight, it recalls a half-remembered passage from some essay or other, regarding how genuinely screwed up it must have been to be a pre-reformation european peasant in a cathedral, ego cooked by malnutrition, ergotism, etc, surrounded by debauched authoritarian shitbags muttering in latin, flattened by titanic standing waves from the pipe organ, and subsequently unable to stop seeing the afterimage of all that fucking stained glass for the entire next week's worth of backbreaking toil. "must grip." hand-numbered edition of 144.

fragments “kinetic sphere” c20 cassette

• kinetic sphere (1)
  
  
• kinetic sphere (2)

deception island press release...

di24 - fragments "kinetic sphere" c20: those of you who've spent any serious time in cleveland know that it's barely possible to leave your house without getting pancaked by some anvil or other of phenomenally damaged tapes. jeff hatfield and zach troxell, aka fragments, were responsible for the last such anvil to have my name on it before i split for philly last year, and their self-titled debut left me scratching my head at the point of impact for months, trying to fathom what the hell they could possibly be thinking. then again, as hatfield confided in me at the bar after fragments turned in a tense and gnarled basement set at the champagne of fests iii this past march, "i'm not even really sure that i have a head right now," so perhaps i'm overanalyzing it and the crux of the project is in fact the very billion-yard stare amply documented on the "synthetic spremulli" dvdr and made more than audible on a slew of subsequent releases for hanson, pizza night, a sounddesign, and tusco embassy. regardless, i can think of few contemporary synth projects as genuinely weird as this one, and "kinetic sphere" is incredibly gnarled stuff, kicking off like a steel door opening onto the gentle throb of miniature worlds under glass and staging it's first crescendo as the inhabitants discover space travel, summoning a great purring of afterburners and flashing of lasers, then hanging out around the rafters in a cloud of acrid smoke. side two begins with a wonderful settled/unsettled "drift studies"-esque detuned test tone that gradually accumulates filigree before blindsiding the listener with a split-second glimpse into the abyss, a pendulum that only swings farther and farther, and an ending reminiscent of the coda of schnitzler's "meditation," in which dub space, once appropriated, becomes literal, carceral, and oppressive, and our heroes keep on throttling the cosmic slot machine amid a beery haze, in a vain attempt to escape the tape itself. hand-numbered edition of 150.

spela själv “reportage: spela själv” long playing record

• stockholm, bygglekplats (7:55)
  
• 2:a festen på gardet, stockholm (9:00)
  
• stockholm, trummor (1:05)
  
• från spelmansstämman i delsbo 1970 (2:35)
  
• trädgårdsvillains kafé, leksand (1:35)
  
  
• ett barn spelar munspel (1:13)
  
• ett bard leker med vuxna (3:20)
  
• grönås (5:20)
  
• carlslund (1:55)
  
• falun (5:40)
  
• järna (2:15)

no label press release...

grey area exact reproduction lp of a swedish release from 1970. a bit of confusion surrounds this release: the album has been credited to träd, gräs och stenar, but they aren't featured on it. bo anders persson did, in fact, in collaboration with solvieg bark, compile, edit and released this album. bo anders persson, was a member of the legendary swedish bands harvester, international harvester, pärson sound, träd, gräs och stenar. solveig bark was one of a few young composers that through the unm (young nordic music festivals) would become a contemporary of erkki kurenniemi, folke rabe, etc. "reportage: spela själv" roughly translates to play yourself. it contains field recordings of amateurs playing / making sounds. raga concrète, if you will. a fine, rare, and lovely piece to behold.

ganglians “monster head room” long playing record and seven inch single record set

• something should be said
  
• voodoo
  
• lost words
  
• candy girl
  
• valient brave
  
  
• the void
  
• to june
  
• 100 years
  
• crying smoke
  
  
• modern african queen
  
  
• try to understand

weird forest press release...

ganglians monster head room lp+7" glee. see that’s a word i rarely party with in my codex but it’s just the one that i would ascribe to ganglians. everytime i see these chaps play i come away with a big old grin on my world-weary face. how do they do it? well it’s the lightheartedness in their playing ... the angelic wilson-esque vocal harmonies ... then from out of nowhere come those west african guitar stylings! and yet i can never pin down this band’s sound ... not that that’s a bad thing. in fact it’s always been a sure sign for me that the music’s doing something right. from the lazy day musings of to june to the monumental yarn valient brave. jam this on your next road trip or on your back porch drinking an arnold palmer. this is a record for summertime if ever there was one. it’s pop music in the best sense of the word ... paramount and perennial. hot on the heels of the recently released self titled woodsist 12" and the split 7" with their buds eat skull.

brendan murray / perispirit “birches and marksmen’s graves (voice and computer #1) b/w compliant victim” long playing record

• brendan murray - birches and marksmen’s graves (voice and computer #1) (16:30)
  
  
• perispirit - compliant victim (17:00)

infinite body “infinite body” c14 cassette

• i am dust and ashes
  
  
• and for me the world was made

ekhein press release...

ek34-infinite body c14 two short and sweet sides by los angeles' kyle parker. dizzying and degraded melodies to black out to. a perfect moment. a lasting impression. us tour this spring with earn.

mirror to mirror “heart” c25 cassette

• passed hesitation
  
• coming home to see you
  
  
• rosie
  
• burning greater slowly

ekhein press release...

ek33-mirror to mirror "heart" c25 beautiful synthesizer by the fairly new moniker of alex twomey (jugular forest label). perfectly paced, orchestral ambient music that takes you places far beyond the "sit and listen" approach so commonly utilized at the moment. highly inspired by the weight that came along with the massive fires literally feet from his home in the angeles national forest this summer.

earth crown “nw wrld” c24 cassette

• look past the ruins
  
• the garden
  
  
•  peaking through the hole i & ii
  
• selling the charge

ekhein press release...

ek30-earth crown c-24 sounds from hell. bleak optimism through electricity. baltimore's earth crown pushes the ugliest sounds into surprisingly musical realms on this release. my favorite yet. very pleased with this one. 3 panel layout with hand-drawn artwork by the man himself. taking steps forward from the very bottom. edition of 75 copies.

work/death “go and be gone” c35 cassette

• then they will weep less
  
  
• then they will stop weeping

ekhein press release...

ek28-work/death "go and be gone" c35 the sound of separation. two bodies walking in opposite directions. once again providence's scott reber takes complete control over his unique approach in abrasive melodicism.  truly saying something without words. edition of 75 copies

manic shooter “dog master teleportation” compact disc recordable

• cathedral pines
  
• dog master teleportation
  
• lampreycommandline
  
• gliese 581
  
• syringe tide
  
• awkward beast
  
• pwdre sêr
  
• misericord
  
• ever self same

upstairs cdr press release...

u006 manic shooter - "dog master teleportation" manic shooter's dmt is sonic weird hieroglyphs from combination taos, new mexico and long island; the hybrid of which mirrors the effect... bent clues will set you on a path while others are meant to deceive you. powerlines whisper instructions in a non gendered voice. mystical hasid rapper vaporizedendlessly in interlocking dimensional mechanism. remember this was during the initial bush era, pre-dating 911 and thus junior's eyeballs hadn't yet been upgraded to format terrestrial. mirror plates in the eye cavity is how they found terrorists. shooter was the first to command green missle control, similar to a tartan warrior he refracted the beams himself and thus took the problem into his own hands. dmt is an in and out enhancement of this frightening time, as if the lingering confusion of a post-inside edition childhood had naturally spawned the devastated political mis-en-scene, building up to the 911 simulation telecast we witnessed while en route to yusef lateef's class when we got word of the attacks. this is also a historic document containing some of the first ever kgb man overdubs, as well as marking the first time in riaa history that anyone has ever exclusively fucked with prince of darkness and alphaville on a sampling level, but beyond recognition, musique concret style, plus a touch of cartoon skinny puppy antic meets mike patton isolated in a hotel room with a portastudio while on tour with bungle in '97. i have recommended trujillo to be committed to the material eye institute for dog master evaluation. enjoy it while you can and as lou said, "watch out for worlds behind you."