Sorry about our recent absence, but travel and general shit have shoved their fingers deep into our collective schedules. Hopefully, we’ll manage to wiggle around in more timely fashions now that the nuts are off the trees.

1. Was really curious to hear some sides by The Pink Noise—Canadian noise rockers recently expanded to three pieces from two—after hearing them kill it one night at Union Pool. So, was hanging at Earwax on Bedford waiting for the line to shrink in front of the Endless Summer taco truck and eyeballed their Alpha LP (Almost Ready Records) and the “Gold Light/Prince Charlies Revenge” 7” on Sacred Bones Records. Grabbed ‘em both and was kinda stunned by how much weirder and seriously zonked they were in comparison to their live blast. Gotta see ‘em again now cuz these vinyls are really outasite no (whatever) wave primal beat drum/guitar from crazy place and the singing is odd guttural scrawl. You might wanna dig this. Or eat it. We did both and are ready for many more spoonfuls.

2. Incoherent Lullabies (Camera Obscura) is the second album by Denver-based space pop outfit, Fell. And it makes me (the older Tongue handler) recall the first time I ever heard of Pink Floyd. It was the spring of 1968. I was attending Montclair Academy. I was talking to someone about how much I liked the Doors and he said, “Oh, you should check out this new band from London, The Pink Floyd. They’re like the English Doors.” I did check them out, and didn’t really get the connection very clearly. Syd Barrett and Jim Morrison were so incredibly different it just didn’t make sonic sense. But now, hearing Fell, I am starting to appreciate some of the sonic similarities between Obscured By Clouds-era Floyd and L.A. Woman-era Doors. They really do share turf in terms of construction and looseness. Anyway, at several moments, Fell remind me of a cross between those two bands, although their vocals are more like generic post-Pepper Brit pop, verging on tongue-turf staked out by the pre-Threshold Moody Blues. Which is actually a fairly cool mix. Other parts sound real diff—with influences ranging from Suicide (copped from some Suicide-damaged band rather than the root source, I’d wager) to the Cure—but I keep thinking of 1968. Before Chicago. Before Nixon. It’s a pleasant memory.

3. Gotta say side two of the Diagram A LP, excellently titled Human Tissue Press : Vinyl Removal (Open Mouth), is one of the classiest cut-up, clipped and jagged one-man/one-mantra meditation sessions we’ve ever ommm’ed across. Really very sweet and ahead of the game. This Providence-expat dude has been on the sub-tributary scene of bizarro solo noise junk sculpture performance for like fucking ever and, along with Noise Nomads, is one of the Eastern Seaboard’s most magnificent purveyors of random brain rip.

4. Cruising the road and/or the dial and/or the web on Sunday mornings at 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM (CST), our ears are gently pressed to the dulcet warblings of Tulane Blacktop on WTUL-FM (91.5). The show, co-hosted by Lazy Dave and Mr. McSuds has proven to be a solid sniff of interesting night air. These 19 year-olds may not have brain roots as deep as redwoods, but we’ve heard more Dictators tracks played on this show than any other in recent memory, and one segue a couple of weeks ago—going from the Misfits into the Supremes—was the most bodacious transition we can recall since someone used Hendrix’s “Hey Baby” (from Rainbow Bridge) as an exit strategy out of “Anarchy in the UK” (single version) on a party mix back in ’77.

5. Ypsilanti, Michigan continues to throw up weirdo record labels without surcease, and one we’ve been sloshing through with boots of gunk lately is With Intent Records, which has been issuing some real nice graveyard drone dirt. A particularly deadening example of their aesthetic would have to be the new Exhumed Corpse LP titled Pray For Death. This minimal dark dirge morass spreads its inky stasis across both sides and when it’s over, well you won’t know it’s over, cuz you’ll be dead.

6. A couple of summers ago we had the chance to watch a mind-blowing pre-punk document from suburban L.A.’s deep underground. The object in question was video documentation of a gig by the Imperial Dogs at Cal State Long Beach, the night before Halloween, 1974. The Imperial Dogs were one of those bands about whom rumors more than facts have long tended to cohere. Led by writer/maniac Don Waller, they were part of the same aesethetic gush as Back Door Man fanzine (with whom they were tightly associated) and various other loose threads that were blowing around in those rough days. The band only had one posthumous 45 released in the ‘70s, and it didn’t seem indicative of the madness of which they were supposedly capable. That legendary quality was finally made manifest in 1989, when the Australian Dog Meat label issued the amazing Unchained Maladies LP. And this newly released dvd—Live at Long Beach! (Imperial Dogs)—is icing on all known cakes. It is an exquisite, Stooges-damaged dive into the dumpster of style—as punk as a glitter jockstrap caked with blood. It ups the ante as far as extremo-pre-punk recklessness is concerned and is one of the swellest things to watch ever.

7. Fuckin fuck fuck fantastic duo LP by trumpet mangler maestro Greg Kelley and Scottish drum freak Alex Neilson called Passport To Satori (Golden Lab Records). Just kills. First side is straight up awesome lips on brass spoot ‘n spit tone with sweet tap tap. Side two is more manic, more off the fucking wall with Kelley sending air sound through sickened pedal puh while who one of these drunk fucks starts whooshing some kind of synth hell—really great improvisation and it takes you straight to that Satori joint (or whatever that place is) where blowjobs are as good as free jazz.

8. We have been off the Corwood Records promo list for a few years now, so it was lovely to see a package with The Representative’s distinctive lettering on it in the mailbox once again. The parcel in question contained a 2CD set called Portland Thursday and it is an absolute ratification of the enduring brilliance of this eminence grise. Like Charles “Chuck” Berry, Jandek usually plays with pick-up bands as he travels around, and this quartet (Sam Coomes, Emil Amos, Liz Harris, Jessica Dennison) is very damn fine—creating drift clouds of beauty and menace to encircle the free-form composite-obsessions of The Representative. We must do some catch-up work on the Corwood catalogue. This music is far too good to not-gobble.

9. Meditations had a couple of cassette releases on the excellent Anathema Sound label a while back which exhibited a mesmerizing take on sick forest desolation and the harsh chill of deviant synth blackness. Whoever they are they got as good a grip on new nothing black grimness as anyone out there and this new Digitalis cassette of theirs called Precipice, is full-on beautiful agony of dead vocal puke tone awash in earthworm feedback. Genius.

10. Also embued with genius is Dark Horse Comics’ series of three volumes reissuing the collected adventured of Herbie–The Fat Fury. These books seem obvious as the root-source of some of the best characters invented by Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, but there’s a strangely inert quality to the drawing and writing that pushes this stuff into a real strange and unique place. Friends collected copies of these ‘60s books quite assiduously at various times, and they were never super-rare, but they were always super-weird. Great to have them in one handy place. If you got a taste of these in Dan Nadel’s great Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 (Abrams) you may now fully slake yr thirst.

Over & Out.

We remain interested in all spew—especially vinyl, print & visual. Two (2) copies are best. Send ‘em to:

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA 01061
USA

Hey little buddies. Been sick as rat turds for a while now, but the covers are peeling back and we are breathing again. Nice.

1. We have made no secret of the boundless enthusiasm with which we embrace Vermont’s Mr. Dredd Foole and all his works, so it should be no surprise to hear that sparks fucking burst when these two new slabs arrived at headquarters. Songs to Despond Ya (Apostasy) is a brilliant solo live LP, with Dredd on acoustic guitar and howler, which demonstrates the warmth of smoke and the magic of his sound. It seems bogus to repeat the mantra for the nth time, but Dredd really takes the impulse of Starsailor/Lorca/Blue Afternoon-era Tim Buckley and throws it into the stratosphere. As casual as it is amazing. And it is icing to report that there is finally graspable evidence of the Dredd & Ed experience, after a couple decades (almost) of scattered live tapes and buzzing memory bulbs. That Lonesome Road Between Heart & Soul (Bo’ Weavil) is a CD by Dredd Foole and Ed Yazijian, who may be known to a few folks for his work with Kustomized or his Gladtree solo LP, Six Ways to Avoid the Evil Eye. Anyway, Ed is a string maestro inside this conceptual bonding, doing violin, lap steel and other guitar stuff, while Dredd uncorks spirals of upful phlegm. It’s glorious buzzing, droneful music, and a great companion piece for the LP. Of course, it should have been an LP itself, but what the hex?

2. Recent trip to that poetry fest in Cleveland went okay. Thanks for asking. Saw a bunch of good stuff. Drove many miles. Got an excellent book. Actually, got a few good books, but we have favorites on our minds right now, and that is a camp into which we will always place the great Valerie Webber and the equally smokin’ Elaine Kahn (late of 50 Foot Women). The pair has collaborated on a solid new volume called Convinced by the End of It (Big Baby Books), split in twain, shared half by each. And it is a motherfucker of a read—one of the best things we’ve read in a long time. Their voices have been very different in the past, these two, but there are similarities here never noted before—a slowly twisting surrealism, combined with casually strident orgone boil. This is powerful, funny, mean and possessed of a magical quality we associate with the incredible early work of Erica “Rikki” Ducornet. This is writing in its highest form.

3. For whatever reason, new jazz/improv disks have not been finding us as regularly as they once did. Maybe we complained about the format too much, and since no one apart from SIWA, QBICO, Eremite and a coupla other places even understand that jazz should be available on LP, it’s usually no big deal. But recent car travel has made CDs a somewhat more useful format (at least in the short term), and we got these three new things from the Porter Records label (previously noted for reissuing a few key Philadelphia pieces), and figured they’d ride as well as anything. And they did. Opus de Life by Profound Sound Trio which documents a show from June ’08. Saxophonist for the date is Englishman Paul Dunmall, who doubles on bagpipes, and really blows like a maniac. Long mired in my brain as a second tier freebopper, Dunmall presents a much weirder surface here than expected, creating raw melodicism with an almost primitive grace. The rhythm section is Andrew Cyrille and Henry Grimes (Cecil Taylor’s legendary Blue Note-era backline). Cyrille sounds as good as always—alternately multi-dimensional and hammy—and Grimes puts in a very solid arco-heavy performance on bass and violin. Had not paid much attention to the rediscovered Grimes, but his work here is fine. Julu Twine by Alan Sondheim and Myk Freedman finds Sondheim’s various strings (he’s been playing, writing and creating in various fields since the early ’60s) paired with Freedman’s lap steel to lovely weird effect. Tones get bent so far they curl back on themselves, and eternity’s whistle is always just a psychedelic heartbeat away. Sondheim’s reactivated musical career has been very interesting to track, and this album’s a good one. Not jazz, but good. Even less jazzic is Folkanization by Francesco Giannico. This young Italian electro-acoustic composer in whose work we can hear tendrils of everything from Luigi Nono to Toru Takemitsu. Filled with odd details, the music is fascinating. Good for the car, anyway.

4. Much recent fume time has been spent amidst the pages of Steven Brower’s Satchmo (Harry N. Abrams), a book largely dedicated to the visual art of the last century’s premier pothead—Mr. Louis Armstrong. Brower was also responsible for that cool book of Woody Guthrie’s visuals a few years back, but this one is even bonnier on the peeps. Armstrong was an insanely gifted collage artist, who created hundreds of self-referential pieces to adorn reel-to-reel tape boxes, scrapbooks and even—until his wife pulled it down anyway—one of the walls of his house in Queens. The text Brower conjures is cool, but it’s really just a context generator for the wild wild art that crawls all over the pages of this book. Been showing this to everyone who falls by and they’re all blown away. You be, too.

5. If you held a gun to our heads and yelled, “Quick! Think of a great whiskey!” We’d have no problem rolling out a list that would make you weak in the knees. If, however, instead of whiskey, you asked for a list of great Colorado punk bands, the list would peter out in an embarrassingly short time, even if we stuttered a lot. Consequently, it’s no lie to say we were shocked (SHOCKED!) by the amazing contents of Rocky Mountain Low (Hyperpycnal)>. This 2 LP set is an insanely great insider’s view of the Colorado underground scene of the late ’70s. We’d never even heard rumors about half the bands here, but Joseph Pope (of Angst “fame”) was an active participant, and along with Dalton Rasmussen, he pulled together a great set of unreleased nuggets from demos, rehearsal tapes & whatnot. Like lotsa scenes in their early days, the sounds here are heterogenous—’60s style pop, hard garage, weird experimentalism and Brit-damaged lunge are all part of the mix, just as they were in the day. The book/zine included is a great blend of history, attitude, crappy-looking fliers and the best picture of Jello Biafra you will ever see in this lifetime (or any other) (although this one is good, too). Every town deserves this kind of deep investigation. Superb shit.

6. One of us (not telling who) recently made the trek down to New Orleans for the Ponderosa Stomp, which is an annual event tracking the trajectory of oddball roots dudes of all stripes. Two stages, ten hours a night at the House of Blues added up to 30-40 hours of solid listening insanity, but the absolute highpoint was the…well, not reunion of the Flamin’ Groovies (pic’d above), exactly, but it was the first time that founding members Cyril Jordan and Roy Loney had been together onstage since ’71, when Loney split in the wake of the Teenage Head LP. They were backed by the A-Bones, with Ira Kaplan on organ and former Groovies fanclub head Miriam Linna, banging the beat, and man, it was insane. Jordan and Loney both have a crazy sorta look going (check the youtube vids), but the sound was so right on you could just cry. They played almost all stuff from the first three LPs, but at show’s end they tackled “Shake Some Action” (from the long-post-Loney days), “Teenage Head” and “Slow Death” (which was recorded after Roy had left). It was unbelievably great. People were screaming like babies and Miriam was singing along with everything and just looking like the cat who ate the canary. There are going to be a couple of reprise shows coming up this summer, and you would be well advised to be there.

7. Many peeps out there may know something or another about the legendary NWW list. This was a printed insert of recommended obscurities Steven Stapleton included in copies of the first couple of Nurse With Wound albums. The list has been a touchstone for a lot of people over the years, and various attempts to reissue bits and pieces from it have been made. Right now there are actually a goodly number of them available in one digital format or another, but shamefully few have been blessed by vinyl reissue, which remains the king of all known formats. Thankfully, De Stijl has taken the time to do a lovely, lovely LP reissue of the sole album by the Finnish experimental band, Sperm. Entitled Shh!, the album features one side of kosmiche-tinged free-rock with many electronic asides. The flip replaces the kraut proclivities with some free-jazz reed-gush, and it all sounds utterly jake. The original had a silk-screened sleeve, but this one looks dandy and sounds better than any original we’ve ever laid ears on. Gut stuf!

8. The story of Mad in its EC days is pretty well known. The early issues, edited by the insane Harvey Kurtzman have been reprinted in whole and also in various anthologies frequently during the past 50 years. Kurtzman’s next few projects have been less well documented. He left Mad to do a glossy humor mag called Trump for Hugh Hefner. Hefner killed the mag after two issues, but he allowed Kurtzman to use free office space. As a result, Kurtzman organized a bunch of other artists to pool their funds to create an autonomous humor monthly. It ran for 11 issues in 1957-58 and was called Humbug. We’ve seen occasional loose issues of the ‘zine, but Fantagraphics has compiled the full run in a new two-volume box set, and included lots of interviews, historical context, and info about Kurtzman’s next project, Help! (among many other things). The reproduction quality is great, and the contents—by Kurtzman, Will Elder, Arnold Roth, Al Jaffe and Jack Davis—are far more sophisto than Mad, and less pop-culture-oriented than Help! In a way, Humbug almost feels like a goof-humor version of The New Yorker or something. There’s a lot of fairly serious political/social commentary, cloaked in wry rainment. It’s a blend as interesting as any cocktail, and it’s goddamn great to have this stuff easily available. Hats away!

9. One of the less-known documentaries by D.A. Pennebaker is the hour-long Sweet Toronto, which was filmed at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival in 1969. It has just been issued on DVD under the title John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band Live in Toronto ’69 (Shout Factory) and is a rather good eye-felch. Pennebaker is a great framer of live concerts and this is no exception. It opens amidst a somewhat half-assed looking group of bikers who seem to be escorting the Plastic Ono Band to the outdoor concert, but soon settles down to matters at hand. There are segments with Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to start things off (the full line-up was: Milkwood, Nucleus, Whiskey Howl, Cat Mother & the Allnight Newsboys, Chicago Transit Authority, Screaming Lord Sutch, Tony Joe White, Doug Kershaw, Alice Cooper, Junior Walker, Diddley, Gene Vincent, Lewis, Richard, Chuck Berry, Onos and the Doors. MC was Kim Fowley. Wonder where the other footage is?), the Plastic Ono Band hits stage with a boom. It’s crazy to see Yoko crawling around in a white bag while Lennon and Clapton howl through “Blue Suede Shoes”, and the vibe of the whole thing is gorgeously bizarre. By the end, when Yoko’s singing “John John,” Clapton has his guitar off and is kneeling, back to the audience, nudging feedback from his amp as though he was in the Skaters or something. Fuckin’ A!

10. Just got a little package with three issues of Brian Walsby’s Manchild comics (Bifocal Media), the third and fourth issues of which come with CDs by the always exquisite Melvins. Walsby was extremely active in artifying the punk underground of the mid-‘80s onward, and his books are densely scripted and great reads. Some of the stories are about Brian’s early years, but most are detailed accounts of hardcore bands, what happened to them, interactions Brain had with them over the years, etc. Kinda inside baseball, but totally fantastic if yr into the noise at all. We don’t agree with all of Walsby’s assessments, but we defend to the death his right to say that the Descendents improved over time. Now that’s funny!

Alright, please be a good egg – if you want it licked, send two (2) (TWO) copies to:

BULL TONGUE
PO BOX 627
NORTHAMPTON MA 01061
USA

1. Easily the best-looking LP we’ve had the pleasure of grappling lately is Light by Reiko and Tori Kudo, issued by Siwa. Reiko and Tori are best known for their work with Maher Shalal Hash Baz, but this stuff is even more casual, diffuse and haunting. Mostly just piano and female voice, the sound has an elegance and mystery that makes our veins wiggle. It’s like some sort of otherworldly cabaret, beamed in from Planet X. And while the music is available now as a CD, the LP version is just incredible—a wooden box, with nine separate compartments, each containing a printed booklet with lyrics. Quite unbelievable, even for Siwa, which has long set a tough-to-match standard for packaging. Hats off to the label’s Alan Sherry and all who sail with him.

Bree

2. Just got a couple of fine new books by the great Cleveland poet, Bree. The bigger of the two (although printed in a wee small format) is was chicken trax amidst sparrows tread (The Temple Inc). This one collects a bunch of Bree’s fantastic prole poesy and uses it to sorta set the scene for a long prose piece about asshole blood. Amazing stuff. There’s also if i cld a body slam on her own imprint, Green Panda Press. This one’s a slim, folded sheet with six “peace poems” (one of which is purely visual). What makes them “peace poems,” we can only guess, but they’re boss and loud, which seems like a good thing. It should be noted that Bree is also hosting the Tres Versing the Pandapoetry festival in Cleveland on May 8-10, this year, which should be an excellent place to be.

Willie Lane

3. Great new guitar record out by William “Willie” Lane, called Known Quantity (Cord Art). Willie lived up here in Western Mass. for a good long while and was involved in lots of weird musical shit. Not much of it got proper documentation, however, although Child of Microtones did issue a fine CDR, Recliner Ragas , a few years back. Anyway, Willie moved down to Philadelphia a couple of years ago, and we get a chance to hear him now and then when we’re down there, or he chooses to hit the road with one of the MV & EE traveling carnivals. But his solo work has always been amazing and rare. Well, not so rare this week. There’s this new LP, and it was recorded throughout 2006-2008, and is a total blast. Willie’s mostly solo (save for some licks by Samara Lubelski) and his playing ranges from Wizz Jones power-pluck at its cleanest to Michael Chapman electro-smear at its phasingest. But Willie knows his stuff cold and this instrumental slide through the gates of Neverland is one of this year’s great rides.

Duplex Planet editor David Greenberger and poet Ernest Noyes Brookings at Dunkin Donuts, Jamaica Plain, MA. Summer 1985 photo by Stephen Elston

4. First new issue in a long time of David Greenberger’s vastly entertaining magazine, Duplex Planet. Issue 184 doesn’t revolve around a central theme, but details various conversations David had with the residents at senior centers in East L.A. My favorite is the one with a woman who claims to be the 23rd of 24 children in her family, and also to be a great-great-grandmother. There’s no earthly way to know if she’s full of shit or not, but it’s nice to read her thoughts. Greenberger has a gentle way of probing the memories of these folks that is funny, sad and surprising—sometimes simultaneously. His work is always cool. The same is true of his sometimes collaborator, longtime pal, Terry Adams . Adams, a founding member of NRBQ as well as a legendary Sun Ra collector, has a new CD called Holy Tweet (Clang!).

Primarily recorded as a trio date with Tom Ardolino and Scott Ligon, the vibe is like a stripped down version of the Q Mothership—rolling bones of uniquely shaped, instantly recognizable goodtime roots pop whatsis that transcend boundaries of “mereness” by a mysterious propulsive force. The stuff is always just off-base enough to keep our interest thoroughly poked (especially as the first zephyrs of spring beckon us to the hill towns beyond). Sometimes it’s enough to just enjoy.

Mats Gustafsson

5. Mats Gustafsson has ten of the busiest fingers in all of Sweden. And yes, his primary focus is record collecting. But he does a few other things and he does them well. Three recent albums attest to this (lord knows how many record he has released since we last met) and they also map a width of style-ass as impressive as it is bounteous. First is The Vilnius Implosion (No Business), which is a solo work for baritone saxophone, slide saxophone and alto fluteophone. What the latter of these two instruments look like is best left unmentioned, but the sounds are swimming! The music (recorded in concert in Lithuania) is explosively sculptural—three-dimensional blocks of sound bursting through sheets of reality as though it was all a crepe paper curtain. That’s the first side, the flip has longer, grouchier masses of tongue flex, approaching jazzic concepts at times. Lovely! Then we have Mats G Plays Duke E (QBICO), a one-sided LP with Mats playing nearly-straight versions of several Ellington tunes on tenor, enlivened by primitive vocls and raw, live electronics. Parts are sweet enough to play for yr grandma, others will just make her ass bleed. The final piece is a split LP with Dutch pianist Cor Fulher on Narrominded. Fulher uses some extended techniques to take his piano sounds into vast regions of new, and Gustafsson is equally adept at squeezing sounds from his sax that are beyond the ken of most of his peers. Using rolling sequences of tongue-clacks, overblowing, breath-splatter, he ends up doing things, making sounds, that seem impossible. But Mats is more than up to the task. Amazing shit.

6. Hisham Mayet is one of the geniuses behind the Sublime Frequencies project, which is attempting to document many strands of ecstatic global culture before they are bulldozed into oblivion by Western hegemony. His efforts have been prolific and inspired, and his latest DVD, Palace of the Winds, is no exception. It combines snippets of performance footage with long shots of Saharan landscape in motion, and various other shots of the sun-smacked towns and people of the region.

Less tripped out than some of his other films, this one is carried along by the amazing guitar music of Group Doueh, Group Marwani and others. As beautiful as any foot.

7. Have received a goddamn charmer of a split LP from the UK on the new Carnivals Carnivals label. Side B has our old favorites Temperatures, making a bed-splitting racket on a long piece called “Bifurcation.” This finds them moving ever further beyond the shadow of tongue. Side A has a new-to-us trio from Manchester called A Middle Sex (presumably a reference more to Jeffrey Eugenides than Greater Uxbridge) performing a suite entitled “An Unclean Yawn.” An extended blurt of drums, voices, feedback and blood, its parts move together like kittens fitted with large boots—thump, thump, thump.

The Manchester Musicians Collective

8. Another insanely brilliant weevil with roots in Britain’s gloomy north is the new volume of Chuck Warner’s bodacious Messthetics series (Hyped To Death), which collects the forgotten teeth of the Manchester Musicians Collective from the years 1977-1982. The music here is a glorious pastiche of fully cracked DIY grunt, filled with snarling sissies, moaning keyboards, chopped rhythms and slugged guitars. The booklet contains an incredible wealth of info on the scene, but it’s collated in a manner that makes it as mysterious as most of the bands on here. Really wild stuff, though. As is most of this series. We should write more about Chuck at some point, too. He is one of the legends of record collecting. In the mid ‘80s, one of us—not telling which—was involved in a massive trade with him that involved swapping Ya Ho Wha LPs for a Volvo station wagon. But anybody who likes music in the least should be ALL OVER this series. It’s both the tits and the berries.

Death Sentence: Panda!

9. Paul Costuros is a frantic sort of gentleman who first came to our attention when he was with the spamsodically massive Total Shutdown. More recently, he has been involved with Death Sentence: Panda!, and those woozy bastards finally have a full length LP, Insects Awaken ((Upset the Rhythm) out, which allows the to extend their strange tentacles more deeply into the room. They seem to owe a certain compositional sense to some of the legendary Bay Area units of the late ‘80s, but they manage to make their sonics far less annoying than some of those bums ever could. Indeed, there is a great beauty to some of the stripped down percussion-based chants, which actually resemble certain gestured invented by the Residents in the mid ’70s. It’s a charming sort of pop/anti-pop mix that will make yr bones feel as soft as butter. Which may be a very good thing. Another good thing involving Mr. Costuros is his site devoted to ESP-Disk. This is one of the best collections of ESP imagery available anywhere in the known universe, and if you study it, you will be revelated. For sure.

10. Certain records have a kind of intimate feel that makes them immune to any sort of standard critical whatsis. The first records by bands like the Flaming Lips and Guided By Voices are ones we’d lump in this category. Both those bands seemed as though they were content to just do what they did, and they documented the process for their friends, without much thought that there’d be anyone else interested. It’s a cool state-of-being, and one which allows more honesty than most bands will manage in a thousand demos. Anyway, there’s a new LP out, collecting the long-forgotten practice tapes of a rural Pennsylvania band called Suetta, and it has the same kinda feel. The album is called Olympic Stain (Summersteps). Suetta existed for a couple of years in the mid ‘90s and wear their influence on their sleeves (post-scum-rock noise and obscurantist indy-ism). Their album has one studio session and one fake live gig, recorded in the abandoned house where they rehearsed. And while it is perhaps a minor pleasure, it’s one that has been spinning here a lot lately. C’mon, anyone who would do a mock cover of a Noise Addict song certainly deserved props for something!

Alright. That’s it, except that a keen reader pointed out the Sunny Murray LP on Shandar is actually self-titled, not called “Big Chief.” Okay. Fuck us. Bye.

PLEASE DO NOT NEGLECT TO SEND US TWO (2) COPIES OF EVERYTHING GOOD. ARCHAIC FORMATS (VINYL, PRINTED MATTER, ETC.) ARE GREETED WITH ESPECIAL GRUNTS.

BULL TONGUE
PO BOX 627
NORTHAMPTON MA 01061
USA

TONGUE TOP TEN #2

Martin Kippenberger. Untitled from the series Dear Painter, Paint for Me (Ohne title aus der serie Lieber Maler, male mir), 1981.

1. There is currently a huge Martin Kippenberger retrospective show up at MOMA in New York City. It’s called “The Problem Perspective”, and it is an incredible tribute to this wild artist, who created a fairly unbelievable amount of stuff in a trajectory that lasted only 20 years. We first became aware of Kippenberger in the late ’70s or very early ’80s because of his musical work with the band the Grugas (with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell), and for his association with the performance space, SO 36. There’s not much evidence of that aspect of his work here, but the multi-floor museum exhibit (and the dandy ass catalogue accompanying it) is a massive mind-blow. Went with some kids and one of ‘em was most impressed by the endless array of sketches, collages and whatnot Martin did on the stationery paper of fancy hotels. Another almost lost it when she realized how mean and funny the sequence of paintings of Picasso’s last wife was. But there is something for everybody here. And the book is excellent. It reprints a long, legendary interview Kippenberger did with Jutta Koether, and includes some extremely useful essays, plus a huge selection of eye candy produced by a guy who was the most influential German artist of his generation.

Leah Peah

2. Hampton, Virginia has been throwing down hard lately with its weirdo sick homegrown noise skuzz scene. The group Head Molt seems to be the chief instigators, particularly with the inclusion of wild woman Leah Peah. Leah’s solo cassette, peah pop & the baby lion show on Anti-Everything/AEN tapes is a peek into the furious sensibility she seemingly has raging through her consciousness. Lots of junk psychosis noise swill dementia. But it’s her split tape with freak loop weirdos Cheezface that really caught our attention. A highly contagious flow of sense bliss destruction.

3. A couple of jazz reissues just came out that are so savagely great it would be a goddamn shame to imagine there are homes without them. Both are on Eremite, both are LPs, and are packaged with amazing care via-a-vis sonics, wax quality & visual/heft appeal. The first is Sonny Murray’s Big Chief, originally released on the French Pathe label, not to be confused with the sessions released under the same name by Shandar. Recorded in January ’69, Murray leads a wild international octet (supplemented in spots by the expatriate jazz poet, Hart LeRoy Bibbs) into insane, ragged bursts of gorgeous beauty. The material they tackle is a fine sample of Murray’s early compositions and the brakeless genius of the group (Francois Tusques, Ronnie Beer, Beb Guerin, Bernard Vitet , , Kenneth Terroade, Alan Silva and Becky Friend!) is the perfect compliment for the moment. Long a lost piece of the Murray discography, it is finally back the way it should be.

The same is true of Red, Black and Green by Solidarity Unit Inc., a rather obscure St. Louis combo led by Charles “Bobo” Shaw, which was essentially an expanded version of the legendary BAG (Black Artists’ Group). The band this evening is Richard Martin, Oliver Lake, Floyd Leflore, Joseph Bowie, Carl Richardson, Clovis Bordeaux, Danny Trice, Baikaids Ysaeen (aka Baikida Carroll) and Kada Kayan. Here, they present a concert, dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, recorded on the day he died, and filled with some of the craziest electric guitar ever, courtesy of the late Richard Martin. The sonics have the same raw galacto-fidelity associated with Arkestral recordings of the same period, and this is a great goddamn explosion. You bet!

From Demons’ “Life Destroyer” dvd

4. Steve Kenney has always been the wild card lost cog in the Michigan noise underground – the true wizard, the most insane of the insane. An original member of the legendarily fucked up Beast People along with Aaron Dilloway,and a current member of Demons with Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young and visualist Alivia Zivich, Kenney is just now beginning to bust out some releases of his own. His axe is the synth and with the proliferation of interest in synth investigations going on in the Midwest with Cleveland’s Emeralds et al and even out East a la Infinity Window and pals–it’s gotta be said: SK rules the fucking roost. The guy’s brain might as well be a modular synth smoked with toxic fuels it sounds that jazz. A great place to lose yrself in his sweet swarm is the cassette In the Sphere I am Everywhere on Nurse Etiquette. Majestic excellence.

5. Just watched some more of Mondo Macabro’s typically great discoveries in from the international exploitation film front. Female Prisoner: Caged! is part of their Nikkatsu Erotic Cinema series and is pornier than some of the others we’ve scoped. The setting is pretty typical—WOMEN’S PRISON—but the dynamics of life inside the Japanese version has many weird little touches that separate it from the standard U.S. filmic depictions. Many more weird degradations than expected, oddball cinematography and some really interesting contextual info in the extra features.

Barry Prima is The Warrior: “Come on then…i’ll bite your kneecaps off!”

The Warrior is an ’81 Indonesian film starring martial arts guy, Barry Prima (supposedly the only Indonesian star who made a name internationally). The story itself is boilerplate—revolt against colonialist masters sometime in the last century or two—but the Indonesian hallmarks are all here. There’s a huge infatuation with black magic, heads get chopped off and fly around once they’re free, etc. Funniest part, in a way, is the make-up for the soldiers, which is reminiscent of the Vikings in a Turkish film Mondo released a few years back. Cool as hell.

Sleeve to Andy Futreal’s “Did You Find It?”

6. The Earjerk label, which has graced us with great dronage from the stalwart Drunjus collectif, has issued a tape on its Object Tapes by this dude Andy Futreal called Did You Find It?. Futreal had an earlier release on the Belgian label Slooow which was a slew of oud and tape machine improv skuggery. This jammerooni is even more oiled and and junk-toned and shows this cat to be a boss vibe sound skink.

7. Need a bit of an update on Brooklyn’s Talk Normal . Seems like their self-released CD EP, brayed about last time, is newly released on vinyl by the great new Portland label, Just for the Hell of It. No extra tracks, but what’s there is stunning. Also managed to wrangle up copies of a couple of CDRs they sell – Demos V. 2 and Prata Normalt. The demos thing has four songs with Sightings’ Richard Hoffman on bass in one spot. The other one’s live in October ’08, and chirps like a bee.

Above: Red Horse at the Butcher Shop in Brighton, Mass., spring 2007. Steve Pyne – Organ, Tapes Eli Keszler – Drums, Bells

8. Anyone who’s been fortunate enough to catch Eli Keszler and Steve Pyne’s Red Horse duo live can now bring it all home cuz these two east coast sound junk beauty futurians finally made an LP (Rel Records re1007). And it is awesome. With all the various recordings of the last decade exploring temporal interplay Red Horse, along with Western Massachusetts’ X.0.4, really achieve some deep and artful result without losing the ball to excess or mundanity.

9. Wow. Not much else to say about Clockcleaner’s Ready 2 Fight one-sided LP (Fan Death). This defunct, chaotic Philly punk band cut one motherfucker of a record, while opening for a Negative Approach reunion show in May 2008. Basically, they took the core riff of NA’s “Ready 2 Fight” (which runs what? 50 seconds?) and stretched it out into a 15-minute prog-punk instrumental Sounds unbelievably psych & winning. Packed and sold as lovingly as any condom.

10. Scumbag Relations, which is primarily a death drone and noise label, has released Mugwort and Sage, a one-sided LP by the long running Pennsylvania rock n crud legends Human Adult Band (pictured above) and it is a murky glimpse into what this trio may be doing in front of other lost souls. Four bass plodding tunes that have as much heart as any no wave smacked true believers and really makes you wanna grip some frosty skuzz lose yr brain into the amp squall.

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April 5, 2009

TONGUE TOP TEN #1

N.

1. Narcolepsia is a new fetish noise tape label out of Portugal. The first two releases show a promising wide view of what fetid broil squirms in the contemporary noise landscape. First is someone/something called N, with a tape titled Smash My Brain I Can’t Tolerate, which is basically this Italiano dude Davide Tozzoli obsessing on fairly traditional noise moves a la M.B., Atrax Morgue, Merzbow et al. But the dedication and intent is genuine and is decent…nothing too startling or new but that’s kind of the point, the aesthetic. So be it. All you have to do is be beat, dulled and lose yrself in unrequited fantasies of erotic death. Second release is Body Count by An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, the duo of Houston noise honcho Richard Ramirez and compatriot Isabella K. This duo has been documenting itself quite regularly through Ramirez’ Dead Audio Tapes imprint in super tiny editions. Not that this tape is going to reach that many more harsh wall noise freaks but it is a fine addition to their insane legacy.

2. Holy Crap. Screamingest, wobbliest No Wave screech of the year comes not from the bowels of New York, but from the lost tape archives of Vancouver, Canada. Tunnel Canary was an extremely raw co-ed trio whose entire previous known ouevre was some obscure cassette comp action. Now, Rundownsun has released a massive 2LP set, Jihad, collecting studio and live smeech that is some of the most pugnacious art punk you’ll ever hear. Ebra Ziron’s vocals make Lydia Lunch sound like Dean Martin in a mellow mood. Really fucking ripe! Lotsa weird bass stylings, scuzz generation from both electronics and guitar…what a pretty goddamn picture. Amazing to think this jabbering, destroyed masterpiece has been unheard for almost 30 years. Nice work. Somebody.

Talk Normal

For ass-burning contempo No Wave sludge, nothing has been in higher recent rotation than Secret Cog, the self-released debut CD Brooklyn’s Talk Normal. Andryo Ambro and Sarah Register create a feverish hybrid of Lydia’s “crying guitar,” the maniacal yodel-power of Die Kleenex, and the part of the Magic Band the Minutemen also embraced, which probably means the Urinals are a shadow influence. Regardless, the five songs here are totally wired, and just blow away the imaginary competition.

3. The flashpoint of true power electronics seems to jump form one locus to another. As of late the Boston area scene has been the most solid and consistent exhibitor with the ascendancy of quality of Sickness and most definitely the projects released by the Razors & Medicine label. Sickness’ newest CD Mudlark (Self Abuse Records) is a precise yet scummed out emotional onslaught of hyper loop destruction and chaos. An incredible blast.

Razors & Medicine’s recent cassette release by Sharpwaist, Poison Harbor, is more than just the violent shard vision of their past releases. Here we see a true progression into deep nightmare lust. Boston hardcore in the early ‘80s was always secondary to the regality of D.C and, possibly, the Midwest. In PE it has no rival. At least not yet.

4. Jodi Wille’s Process Books imprint continues its amazing trajectory into the heart of lost culture with Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives 1961-1971. Kagarise was an obsessive fan of “real” country and bluegrass musics, and he amassed a gigantic collection of records, live tapes and ephemera , mostly during the 1960s. This volume collects many of the color slides he shot at a couple of outdoor venues in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the views of this lost scene they provide is unparalleled. Well-known figures like Johnny Cash, George Jones and Skeeter Davis mix with more legendary unknowns (at least to proles), like the Stoneman family, with whom Kagarise had a special connection, and who he rates far above the Carter family in terms of sheer talent. The main text is by the fine D.C.-based roots music chronicler Eddie Dean, and he provides a very boss thumbnail history of country music in the pre-modern era. A total fucking treasure.

5. Interesting looking new tape label called Different Lands where all the covers are adhered to the outside of the tape case in a uniformly dark and thoughtful aesthetic. Some real contempo-charmers released here, specifically the consistently sweet huzztones of Sky Limousine and one of our longstanding favorites Xiphiidae, whose Perfuming the Foot of the Door cassette here is a remarkable manifestation of lonely day miasma.

6. Although Portland’s Grails first came to our attention by doing a Sun City Girls cover on their debut album, warmth about their subsequent releases has never always gotten beyond a kind of generic “hey! okay!” kinda quality. That said, their latest release is a DVD, called Acid Rain (Temporary Residence) and it’s really pretty goddamn qualitative. The DVD’s broken into three parts, the center of which is a relatively ordinary set captured live the Knit in late ’07. Another section is dedicated to early shows, however, and that’s quite hep. Line-ups we can’t quite decode, play in small places, and the documentation of their first Euro tour in ’04, featuring Italian moisture and Eastern European temple confusion is sweet. But the best part is the opening sequence of videos, created from “found’ footage, heavy on Mondo Macabro-style Euro exploito stuff, History Channel documentaries, samurai films and whatnot. These are really collaged together beautifully, and allow the band’s music to transcend its Godspeed/math-rock origins and scorch in a certain kind of way. Bodacious.

7. Delaware resident Joe Breitenbach, who has recorded for years under the pseudonym Methadrone, has a new tape Sing It From the Mountain Top under his real name that is a slow ass burner of really nice flowing/growing kosmiche-dirt unfoldings. Excellent and one of the more recent releases on the floodwater prolific label 905 Tapes.

8. The latest installment in Kristina McKenna’s explorative documentation of the late, great West Coast artist Wallace Berman, comes in the form of a show catalogue. She (Michael Kohn Gallery/DAP) is a very cool juxtaposition of the sexual (or at least, sexually charged) collage and photo work of Wallace Berman with that of Richard Prince. The essays and interviews are short and good, but it’s the work itself that casts the heaviest spells. Both artists have a tendency to produce images that are so weirdly funny they’re hard to read as serious image text, but looking at these pictures juxtaposed like this, a viewer tends to agree with the assertions McKenna makes about their respective views of feminine mystery and power. Either way, the books looks fantastic.

9. For real dirt sput electronic brain dust look no further than the new cassette by Chambers on Tone Filth. Called Soon, it is a glimpse into the brilliance that is Nicole Chambers who runs the Chicago tape label Ides, itself one of the more killer noise labels of the Midwest USA of the last decade.

Renderers

10. The sixth album by Christchurch NZ’s Renderers was issued just in time to coincide with their U.S. tour. Monsters and Miasmas (Last Visible Dog) continues the band’s move away from their neu-country origins into space that is dark, original and deep. The band revolves around Brian and Maryrose Crook, who have been aided by a rotating cast of characters in the two decades the band has existed (fitfully), amidst a variety of other projects. Brian is probably best known for his work with the incredible Terminals, but he began his recording career in the early days of Flying Nun Records with Scorched Earth Policy, whose brilliant EPs still resonate with left-field punk grunt. Anyway, this new Renderers disk feels something like the Terminals (in their most languid moments), sometimes fronted by Marianne Faithfull (or Howth Castle’s Lalli), performing Rick Rubin-era Johnny Cash tunes. Of course, it also sounds nothing like that at all, but it’s always a whistle-solid slab of varieted noise/pop/cunny-rock that just begs for a wet kiss.

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Of all the fucked up, nasty ass, deliriously damaged rock bands in the recent history of the American underground wonderland (particularly Texas), none come close to the squirm and hellacious sqwunk of Rusted Shut. From the incinerated skum of Houston weirdness improv outfit Grinding Teeth arose Rusted Shut in 1986. Their shows were a notorious mess, drunken and fueled by cheap-jack acid. After years of slovenly survival they’ve been somewhat rescued from universal distaste by the current noise legions. The Emperor Jones label released the Rehab CD in 2003 and AA Records did a sick lathe (“Bring Out Your Dead”) last year and their notorious “Fuckin’” track off the 2006 End Times Festival live comp is still the only loop that matters (check their myspace page for that one). It was with some apprehension of being held up by knife point that we unzipped their new Hot Sex EP (Dull Knife). But goddamn if this is not a great goddamned beast of a record. The core duo of Don Walsh and Sybil Chance (the original still alive members of Grinding Teeth) and Domokos (on drums and ‘earthscreamer’) just lay it out in an unctious smear of rawk n roll decimating any obvious pretence of hardcore, black metal, death metal, sludge, punk, avant improv goop etc.—shit is the REAL amerika full on. Salute and die.

Nigel Cross’s British label, Shagrat, only releases extraordinary material. He doesn’t bother with anything else. That means it’s always a label to watch and their newsy release, the Mariachi Riff Live and Free Music LP by Formerly Fat Harry, is a case in point. FFH were an ostensible Country Joe offshoot band, based in England, who recorded a lone laid-back, country-fried album for UK Harvest. It never struck us as wildly interesting, but Brits who saw the band live were always blowing spit-bubbles about how psychedelic they were. Some of that material finally surfaced on the Hux CD, Goodbye for Good, but this LP has the essential jewel—a 25-minute West Coast jam pinnacle that can match any ballroom band for sheer acid flash. An amazing record! The flip has two free-form pieces the band recorded earlier and they too are mind-blowers. If this material had surfaced while the band was still extant, they’d be legendary. As it was, they were so arcane only a few true believers like Pete Frame, Colin Hill (who wrote the fantastic liner notes) and Nigel had any idea that there even was a grail to seek. Easily the best archival find of the year, and an incredible record by any standard.

Really fine new book of poems by Jasmine Dreame Wagner (who also records as Cabinet of Natural Curiousities). It’s called Charcoal (For Arbors) and while it looks at first blush as though it’ll be a bit academic, she continually slams our heads with powerful words and images. “Blessed are the ego mules, for they are shod with their own lead.” Indeed! Similarly choice are the two new books by P. Shaw, Strings 02008CE and Strings Executive Toddler Edition. Shaw’s visual work is moving ever further from his ratty origins, with some of the pages achieving an oddly elfin mandala quality. The stories (esp. Ex Toddler) are actually sicker than ever, but their surface is a charming distraction.

Dunno if the band’s from Clifton NJ (where one of us b-tonguers worked as a caddie for several years), but we must give some localist props to RSO’s Row LP (RSO). They create a vibe in the tradition of the Bay Area’s Pet Rock groups: Flipper, Wounds, Lassie Come Home, Toiling Midgets, et al. Fine fine fine post-core guitar sludge with he-man vocals. From California itself come the Nothing People, and their long-awaited, eponymous debut LP (S-S Records) is the blast we’d hoped. All the noted just-pre-punk-weirdo elements are in place (Debris, Chrome, etc.) and the space-punk knob has rarely been yanked this hard since the demise of the Twinkeyz. Looking due East, we see the eponymous debut vinyl by a North Carolina duo, Waumiss (Little Ramona). Their sound lacks some of the cough-syrup-confusion of our favorite Southern artists, but it has a light and graceful weirdom all its own. Mixing concrete collage action with dub texture and the raw power of Christian pop (without the Christianity), Waumiss make days a little sunnier whether you like it or not.

Breakdance the Dawn is a cool name for a label, gotta admit. And it’s from Australia and by dint of its cassingle (yeah!) release “no one” by half OZ half Kiwi 4tet Mysteries Of Love we look forward to revisiting this equatorial wonderland. Faraway percussion and reverberoided coyote/human vox fusion make this an almost down under Pocahaunted listening experience. Fantastic utilization of quiet-style feedback lines.

Not sure how we missed it exactly, but Punk Magazine is back, still under the editorial watch of John Holmstrom. It’s a tad slicker than it was during its first incarnation, but Holmstrom’s chops are still in place (as editor, writer and illustrator) and the gestalt’s excellent. There’s some space given to new punk bands, but the bulk deals with people who were on the scene in the ‘70s, and it reads as well as ever. As does the new issue of Sharon Cheslow’s splendid occasional, Interrobang?! (Decomposition). This issue is printed in trade paperback format and has interviews and writings about the interface between family and music during childhood and beyond. Most of the pieces (by Alan Licht, Bill Berkson, Paulie Oliveros, etc.) are excellent, but our fave is the interview with Ian Mackaye. Sharon goes back to the earliest days of the DC hardcore scene and really manages to get some wonderful and very personal stories from Ian. Maxist.

Turpentine Brothers are a trio from Boston and their second LP, Turpentine Brothers (Alien Snatch!) is a pretty good, small band recreation of the Fleshtones at the height of their early ‘80s power. Very Battle of the Garages, but in a good way. On the absolute other end of Boston’s vomona, we find Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck, whose great CDR from last year has been vinylized by Apop. Really nice use of fairly harsh (but not off-putting) feedback sonnets and gruel-spattered vocal sputs. Pleasant to own in this format. Meanwhile, former sometime Bostonian, Chris Brokaw, has had his 2005 CD, Incredible Love, reissued on vinyl (I and Ear). The album is not one of Chris’s guitar demonstration efforts, rather it’s a generally quiet singer/songerwriter effort, originally released by Gerard Cosloy’s 12XU label. And, especially on the acoustic numbers, it has textures as deep as anything you’d hear on Village Thing. Been listening to it a lot lately. You will too. Another Beantown expat is improvising violinist Katt Hernandez, whose debut solo LP Unlovely (no label) is seriously boss. A student of Joe Manieri, Katt plays in a style that flies through the valley separating new music and free jazz, like a hive of cunning bees. Great inventions.

Anathema Sound has a clutch of new heavy noise tapes out that are worth it not only for the caliber of the artists but the unified design of the cassettes themselves. Buffalo Altar by Oklahoman/Digitalis Industries honcho Brad Rose and pal Nathan Young’s Ajilvsga project is a headrush synth-storm played as cranial dirtstorm. The Light of Life by Wereju, the solo sound-world of Ireland’s Cathal Rodgers, is next in the continuing trend past prototypical drone into full-on murk expression. All Of The Witches by Husere Grav is amazing in its grey-zone harsh vocab: a lonesome fusion of early ’90s Helvete comraderie and Italiano industrial sick sadness. Not sure who this cat is but judging by this release and the previous split with Robedoor on Not Not Fun a while back he/she/it is one to beware of. Each of these tapes comes packaged in full color hyper-sense BEAUTIFUL fold-over sleeves with cool inserts and labels all designed by Matt Yacoub.

Arabesque II (Shivastan Press) is a new xerox lit mag from Woodtsock’s Shiv Mirabito, printing new work, old work & everything inbetween. Contributors revolve around the Shivastan core group (Ira Cohen, etc.) and it looks to be an ongoing project. New issue of the excellent Canadian lit mag, Carousel, is out. This one is largely turned over to poetry and illustrations, done by folks who are new to us, but of very high quality. This is issue 23, and Carousel has evolved into one of the most solid oddball-lit mags around. Another extremely solid way to fry yr eyes is with the Chicago based Mule. Issue 5 has Linda Perhacs, Jennifer Herrema and lots of words and images related to finding things. Highly recommended. Also hep is Deep Suburbia by Marissa Magic, former member of Olympia’s Punks. She’s down in the Bay Area now and this personal ‘zine, musing on Blondie, Free Kitten, noise boys and other topics is a genius move inside the genre of personal ‘zines.

The latest Directing Hands LP Songs From the Red House (Singing Knives) is a mutha. Alex Nielson has been using this moniker to further his deep UK folk investigation and he has here co-conspired with Vinnie Blackwall. Blackwall’s femme vocals swoop and swail through glorious avant garde trails whilst stroking note plenitude from cellos, harps and harmonium. A striking affair and one of the most interestingly modern perusals of folk forms to date.

Aldebaran Record Farm has released an awesome cassette called Full Frontal Nudity by Face Plant, the solo nom de plume of Aaron Coyes (Unborn Unicorn, Rahdunes, Peaking Lights). Coyes creates raw sonics from a hook up of vintage stereo components and hand-cut vinyl with a nasty-ass needle scraping thru. With his sense of rhythmic goop control and space organ jammering this is some sweet brutality.

Malcolm Duffy’s new comic book, 2 Stories, may be his best yet. The way he crafts his narratives, with simple evolving black & white illustrations, mutating slowly and quietly, has a wonderful way of simultaneously dampening and highlighting the weirdness of his tales. Good one. Which is not to diminish the value of his two other new ones—4th Bridge and The Heroic Mosh of Mary’s Son (all Missing Twin), both of which mine some of the same basic technical ideas with fluid grace. We just prefer the new one. Okay? Another massive gouge in the eye comes from E Pluribus Venom (Gingko Press), a hardcover catalogue derived from the massive Shepard Fairey retrospective in New York last year. To many folks, Fairey is still known primarily as the creator of the whole OBEY Andre the Giant schtick, but his work has evolved in all kinds of directions. His basic orientation has rejected neither public art nor political art as a touchstone, but his paintings and large works are complex meditations on the implications of those original image bursts. A very swank volume, sure to please several tough nuts on your Xmas list.

There’s something definitely cool about bands who release music on cassette that stands up to anything they do on CD or LP, regardless of which label its on. Case in point is Deathroes who, after annihilating any listener who came near their No Fun/Misanthropic Agenda LP Final Expense have unleashed a sick-ass beast of a tape on the IDES label called An Infinite Blaze. Deathroes is Gerrit from Misanthropic Agenda and the primordial existence of he who is known as Sixes. The shit is massive swaths of crushing, flowing rivers of sound sex.

Also guilty of the crime of cassette godliness is the Excitebike t*pe label (or EXBX) which is overseen by Dan Dlugosielski of the consistently ruling Uneven Universe duo. EXBX just released Unfroze, a double cassette by Fossils, who have been maniacally documenting themselves to the point where they have issued around six thousand releases on their own imprint Middle James Co., albeit in super minimal runs. Most Fossils output is cool, lo-down rumblings and texture research with slow soulfuck groove and harsh vision. The session they delivered to EXBX is definitely one of their finest and offers a playbook of their most effective moves. Fresh guh. Dlugosielski’s dark color horror art graces all the tape covers making them worthy just for his choice Midwestern junk-eye. Along with the Fossils poot EXBX releases a new Uneven Universe sput, a Wasteland Jazz Unit free noise improv killer, a haunted hayride banger from Treetops, a corrosive sluice from Body Collector and a thick black puke soup from John Olson’s wicked Medical Lake project. Not sure how everyone spent their autumn but we just locked ourselves in the Bull Tongue office and unspooled these mommas non-stop. Music for milf-lovers and beyond.

Another cassette label of note is Myasis Tapes out of Ontario, Canada. The Canadian underbelly of noise improv drone creativity has become quite the boiling over of greatness lately. Indeed the aforementioned Fossils has been a central activist in this specific geography. Myasis Tapes has just released three significant beauties from this contempo-trend. The one we keep going back to is Brooding Forest by Hunting Rituals, a duo with a moist grip on psyche-scuzz blanket motion. Both sides unfolding like a sex-sweat sheet, each rumple a dank and sensuous dream. Vestigial Limb, the noise nom de plume of Ray Shinn, has been popping off a series of happening tapes, CDRs and vinyl splits (most recently with like-minded alien tone gumps Blue Sabbath Black Cheer) since way back in 2007. This Cancel the Sky tape shows a marked development in this project’s focus on grey-light harshness. A third recent cassette on Myasis Tapes is Floods by Robe., an increasingly intriguing duo from Columbus, Indiana. Their name, Robe., always has a period after it—like: Robe. These guys revel in deep-well sonar-death where the skies threaten to break in a rain of shrieking ghoul shred. Wicked from all points of access. These tapes are super limited and deserve to be experienced, as all these outfits represent the crucial excitement alive and rampant in this amazing underworld of sound psychosis. New Swedish cassette label Klorofyll Kassetter has reared its scintillating hoof with a raw magik ritual jammer by Luva, a wide-blue-eyed blonde lad who gets sweet acid rhythms happening to create fresh portals. Lovely junk yes.

Not too many music-qua-music ’zines have swum before us this season, but the redoubtable Dagger has hit issue 41 with everything in order. Tim Hinely’s been doing this ’zine since back in the Forced Exposure days, and he still puts together a great pile of reviews and features that rock rock rock. Scott Soriano has gotten out the second issue of Z-Gun and it is a monster of form, as well. Total immersion in the post-skum aesthetic. In-depths on Drunks With Guns, Amphetamine Reptile Records and Ceramic Hobbs, and the most mouth-watering review section currently extant.

Hexlove-Falouah’s Free Jazz from Slavery 2LP set (Weird Forest) is the most expansive raft of blub yet released from Zac Nelson’s bean. The two albums have very different personalities. The first is trippy, percussed splatter-pop groon, not unlike certain aspects of Animal Collective. The latter is droney, ambient, long-format, low-bore, prog-rock with a semi-ecstatic overbite. The interior cover art reminds us of Hot Poop’s Do Their Own Stuff LP. Anyone else notice that? Charmed, I’m sure! Similarly psyched, in some ways, is the debut album by Minneapolis’ Thunderbolt Pagoda. With Eric Wivinius and several other veteran Twin City musicians with roots in bands like Salamander and Skye Klad, their eponymous LP (Thunderbolt Pagoda) offers buckets of brilliance. The ostensible playing format is more prog than psych, and the largely instrumental brunt is flowing and open, a bit like Agitation Free. Assy package too—silkcreened box & poster. A beautiful first effort. Another superb package is the one holding Dead Western’s Soften Your Screams into Songs (KDVS). Lovely silkscreen mandala work and deep woods nudity mark the effort visually. Musically, this Sacramento ensemble reminds us a bit of Feathers, if they’d been fronted by a wee Marc Bolan. Slippery, graceful volk stylings. We played it at 45. Is that right? More in the vein of the post-industrial ritual/volk/hex of Death in June is the debut LP by Cult of Youth. A Stick to Bind, A Seed to Grow (Dais). I’d forgotten how cracked that sound was. Dais also did the new 12” by Wes Eisold’s Cold Cave. The Trees Grew Emotions and Died is utterly fucked, destroyed-synth-pop by this Philadelphia renaissance man. Makes my skin crawl. Or is it just trying to dance? Wes has also just opened a bookstore in Philly that sounds bitchen. It’s called Juanita and Juan’s. Can’t wait to shop it dry. Most beautiful record this time is probably the Hasenlove picture disk by Hamburg’s Antonia Leukers (Dekorder). Primarily a visual artist, she was emboldened to stretch her brain into musical realms by a theoretical encounter with Die Todliche Doris. Her music is informed by that, but is a unique collage of sap-pop and bizarre inventions. Quite remarkable and a lovely piece of rabbity love by any stretch.

Upon reflection, we have heard a shockingly small number of Irish musicians lately, so we were fairly jazzed to dig into Sea Dog’s Wizards of the Coast LP (Stitchy Press), and it’s a pip. Classic instrumental trio thud with nods to doofs as disparate as Sir Lord Baltimore and Wishbone Ash. We have a feeling Mr. Joseph Carducci would approve. Joe might find less pleasure in the Mouthus/Yellow Swans collaboration LP, Live on Conan Island (No Fi), which is a woozily rootless and noisesome effort, recorded on tour of the Carolinas in ’06. The pairing works better than you might imagine—the Yellow Swans bring a relentless vertical squee to Mouthus’s ass-wide improvisational throb. Together, they are a snowball.

Debut, eponymous LP by Olympia’s Broken Strings (True Panther Sounds) is a goddamn gorgeous physical effort—thick, foil-stamped cover, shockingly good cassette remastering job by Weasel Walter, etc. Its vibe is somewhere between early Go Team, Daniel Johnston and Sacramento-era Pavement (or maybe Truman’s Water). Interesting, whipped-ass pop with as many broken legs as strings. The same is sorta true of Robert Pollard, who whips out two new albums that’re much more solid than some recent stuff—Brown Submarine by Boston Spaceships and the solo Robert Pollard Is Off to Business (both Guided By Voices, Inc.). But as good as both of these sound blasting around the clubhouse, even better is Pollard’s collage book, Town of Mirrors (Fantagraphics). Beautifully produced, the book collects tons of Pollard’s visual work (previously seen mostly as cover art) and it’s a shockingly rich body of work. Stunning, actually. Check it out.

When roving drone avant noise heads gather forces to “jam” “out” it can be certainly alluring but more likely than not it’s a messy mélange of whatsis. Fantastically not the case is the LP Mind of the Dolphin by Way Of The Cross (Phoenix Records), an ensemble consisting of members of No Neck Blues Band, The Skaters, Kuupuu, Embryo, Uton, Keijo and Kemialliset Ystavat and Stellar OM Source. A lot of cooks in the kitchen but these sonic spirit heads make it work with restraint and subjugation to seemingly inner sense-emotion. Supposedly all recorded on a tour across Poland, Germany, Holland and Latvia. Would like to see more proof of any of this but regardless of the myth/reality nexus these animals drove through, the sound world they inhabit is magisterial and sweet.

Mondo Macabro continues its drive to document international cinematic sickness with two new films from Japan’s Nikkatsu Studios. The Watcher in the Attic is a sex-murder tale set in 1920s Tokyo. It’s an exploito study of voyeurism and the variety of unusual pleasures available to cosmopolitans of the era. The clown sex sequences are particularly disturbing, although the guy who hides inside a chair is pretty strange, too. Assault! Jack the Ripper is about a young couple (a pudgy surly waitress and a skinny dour pastry chef) who get an erotic charge from murder. It’s fairly brutal, even by Mondo M standards. Bonuses include good interviews and a documentary about the scene from which the flicks emerged. Excellent in a completely different way is the new 2DVD set of Renee Daadler’s Here Is Always Somewhere Else (Cult Epics), a wonderful documentary about the Dutch-born artist, Bas Jan Ader. The film deals with mystery, gravity and the sea in remarkable way. It is also a meditation on art, California (where Ader relocated) and film itself. The second disk contains Ader’s complete remaining filmworks. Incoporating elements of Fluxus, performance art and conceptual work, Ader’s story is a great dissertation on art in the latter half of the 20th Century and his films are strangely lovely. His disappearance, attempting to cross the Atlantic in a ridiculously small sailboat with a copy of Hegel as his companion, was his final piece.

Toronto’s Pink Noise have a great LP on Brooklyn’s superb Sacred Bones imprint. Dream Code reminds me of nothing less than Chain Gang, somehow stripped of their metal proclivities. It has the same murky, post-explanation, out-of-time gesticulation as Luanda & crue at their damnedest. Sacred Bones also issued the remarkable Sistrum LP (+ 7”) by Factums, a band whose connections to Climax Golden Twins and the Intelligence may give some raw, vague clues to the intense weirdness and subterfuge of their sound. Brilliant stuff. Not on a Brooklyn label, but based in that borough nonetheless, Heavy Winged have a swank archival LP called Alive in My Mouth (Three Lobed). Recorded in 2005, this shows the band in a far more rockin’ mode than recent recordings. Still, they create a fudge-thick wall of Hawkwind surface damage and press it as far as anyone is likely to for a good long while. Madison, Wisconsin’s Drunjus have been investigating thick, long-tone dronecore for at least the last ten years. Primarily a duo of two gents named Woodman and Endless, they’ve popped out a wealth of grey sky bliss-guh on cassettes and cdrs. Earjerk Records has taken the leap and issued Thorn Shield, an LP of Drunjus magnificence. Expecting kinda more of the same we were nailed to our swivel chairs in trance to both sides (especially side one with its killer lock groove “ending”). Drunjus are thee reigning kings of U.S. drone action—be prepared to blank.

Superb mystery boot LP has emerged from 16 Bitch Pile-Up. It collects two of this SF band’s shows at the Wiltern in L.A. and the Fillmore. It’s a wonderful testament to these lasses’ abilities to dissolve all forms in the acid bath of their collective brain pan. A moist joy and well worth seeking. So too the new LP by Baltimore’s The Shining Path. Called Take You So Low So You Can Fly So High (Planaria), it reissues the cassette from last year and adds a wild live set recorded with Little Howlin Wolf on mouth-squall. If you’ve not yet heard these guys create their free-psych-space-jazz-squallery, this would be a great place to start.

James Hoffs is a true gentleman of quality. His work as an archivist, publisher, curator and whatnot are well known and documented. He does so much stuff it’s sometimes hard to recall he’s also a musician, recording as Airport War. But the new one-sided AW LP, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Airport War) is one of the most brilliant artist’s records we’ve seen in a while. The musical content is short and minimal, but the whole thing is so densely coded, it’s a real pleasure to behold. Gorgeous object. Very different solo animal is Cameron Stallone’s Sun Araw project. His first album brimmed with guitar gushing from bloody sacks, but his new effort, the Beach Head LP (Not Not Fun), is like some stoned cross between Jimmy Buffett’s Ate a Parrot album and Van Dyke Parks’s Discover America. It’s like being chased into a sandy wormhole by an invisible (and inaudible) steel drum band. But with rum. Very diff is Emaciator’s Coveting LP (Not Not Fun), although this nom de California noise artist, Jon Borges, is a lot less harsh than his work as Pedestrian Deposit. Indeed there’s an almost symphonic prog quality to some of the passages. Eat that, noise pennies! Not Not Fun has also gotten into the book biz with Jeremy Earl’s Skull. Jeremy may be best known for Fuck It Tapes or the Woods, but his drawings have been all over the place, and Skull collects some of the best. Color printing and collage action only add to our pleasure.

We don’t hear as many French bands as we ought to, so it was very fine to plug into the Tahiti Coco EP by Aquaserge (Manimal). Instrumental prog rock of no clear era, this is a lot closer in tone to bands of the Futura Records days than it is to the current crop of French drumbox skum-punks. Not that these guys are freaks like Red Noise or Mahogany Brain, but they emerge in a line from that tradition. And this sounds mighty cool, if much more in a “standard” post-fusion-instro vein. Can’t claim we know dick about Algerian pop music, but there’s a rather wild batch of it on the new Sublime Frequencies comp LP, 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground. Compiled and annotated by Hicham Chadly, the album collects a swath of unheard music from a period when the first sonic pioneers were attempting to update Algeria’s musical traditions. Trumpet featured prominently, but it’s like listening to Don Cherry sitting in at a belly dance session or something. Hard to fathom, but easy to dig.

Alright. Out of breath, time & space. Please send two (2) copies of anything you’d like covered with sput (archaic formats preferred) to

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA USA 01061

Contacts:
16 Bitch Pile-Up: 16bitchpileup.com
AA Records: wolfeyes.net/aaindex.html
Airport War: airportwar.com
Aldebaran Record Farm: aldebaranrecordfarm.blogspot.com
Alien Snatch!: aliensnatch.com
Anathema Sound: anathemasound.blogspot.com
Apop: apoprecords.com
Breakdance The Dawn: myspace.com/breakdancethedawn
Carousel: carouselmagazine.ca
Dagger: daggerzine.com
Dais: daisrecords.com
Deathroes: deathroes.com
Decomposition: sharoncheslow.com
Deep Suburbia: punkymagic.com
Dekorder: dekorder.com
Directing Hand: myspace.com/directinghand
Dull Knife: dullkniferecords.com
Earjerk: earjerk.com
Emperor Jones: emperorjones.com
Excite Bike: exbxtapes.com
Fantagraphics: fantagraphics.com
Gingko Press: gingkopress.com
Guided By Voices Inc: robertpollard.net
Hux: huxrecords.com
Juanita and Juan’s: myspace.com/juanitaandjuans
KDVS: kdvsrecordings.org
Katt Hernandez: katthernandez.com
I and Ear: ierecs.com
IDES: idesrecordings.com
Klorofyll Kassetter: klorofyllkassetter.se
Little Ramona: littleramonarecords.com
Manimal: manimalvinyl.com
Middle James Co: home.cogeco.ca/~middlejamesco/
Missing Twin: missingtwin.net
Mondo Macarbo: mondomacabrodvd.com
Myasis Tapes: http://myiasis.site.io
No Fi: no-fi.org.uk
No Fun: nofunproductions.com
Phoenix Records: c/o forcedexposure.com
Planaria: planariainc.com
Punk: punkmagazine.com
RSO: lostinthefuture.net
Rusted Shut: myspace.com/rustedshuthouston
S-S: s-srecords.com
Shagrat: nwcprods@hotmail.com
P. Shaw: pshaw.net
Shivastan Press: shivastan.org
Singing Knives: singingknivesrecords.co.uk
Stitchy Press: stitchypresshq.com
Sublime Frequencies: sublimefrequencies.com
Three Lobed: threelobed.com
Thunderbolt Pagoda: myspace.com/thunderboltpagoda
True Panther Sounds: truepanther.com
Jasmine Dreame Wagner: songsaboutghosts.com
Weird Forest: weirdforest.com
Z-Gun: zgun.org

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

Great new LP by Portland’s Jackie O Motherfucker may be our fave of theirs since Flat Fixed. Spaced out jabber and float with casual/urgent female vocals that almost sounds like certain moments of Fuzzhead at their most blues-wailin’est, interspersed with Velvetsy volk moves, and overlaid with swabs of smoke & jibber. The slab is called Valley of Fire (Textile) and it’s a monster. Also out from Jackie O is a sprawling 2 LP set, America Mystica (Dirter Productions), which was recorded in various caverns by the touring vesrion of the band between ’03 and ’05. Not quite as precise as Fire, but its muse is savagely crunchy in spots and never so formal as to appear in a bowtie. It’s an open-ended weasel-breeze you’ll happily sniff in the dark. Is that a hint of Genevieve’s crack?

This young noise dude from Minneapolis named Oskar Brummel who records and performs under the name COOKIE has released his first entry into the new new American underground noise forest and it is frothingly balls-deep: good n’ harsh. It’s a cassette titled Ambien Baby and it flows with both a FTW sexual undertow and a strange-feeling/shit-coming rejoice. There should also be rejoicing over the fact that Times New Viking seem to have made their transition to Matador with their instincts intact. Their new LP, Rip It Off, is as grumbly and fucked sounding as any blast of gas they emanated previously. Nice thick vinyl, too. I guess you need it heavy when the needle’s buried this far into the red. Smooth!

It has taken a little while to actually read the bastards, but now that it’s done, there can be little doubt that Process Books has blasted out three of the best music-related tomes to have been peeped by our tired eyes. First up is the new edition of John Sinclair’s Guitar Army. This is one of the great American underground revolutionary texts—ecstatic, naïve, visionary and powerful. It’s a little funny to glom a few of the embedded old (old) school opinions about what is happening, but it’s still a wonderful read, and a doorway into eternal truths, if you can stay open to its music. The new layout is pretty good. We miss a few visual aspects of the old one (like, where’s the Frantic John flyer?), but the new pics more than make up for it, and the bonus CD—music, interviews, rants, poetry—is fantastic. As is Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson. We’ve read endlessly about Roky over the last 30 years, but this book is jammed (JAMMED) with new facts, reproductions of fliers, posters, photos and ephemera we never even imagined, and Drummond really covers the subject the way he deserves to be covered. It’s really an overwhelming effort. The same is true of Robert Scotto’s Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue. The writing can be a little sere, but the story is juicy enough to mitigate this dryness. We finally get to read the story of how the collaboration album with Julie Andrews came to be. There are meetings with Arturo Toscanini and Edgar Varese. It’s quite a tale, and Scotto has done his homework. The only frustrating note is that there really isn’t a comprehensive straight discography. If there’s a second edition, it would be a welcome addition. Also, while the CD tracks are bitchen—especially the early recordings by (one presumes) Steve Reich—some notation there would be cool, too. Other’n those quibbles, we couldn’t be more celebratory ‘bout popping our corks. Buh!

We reported a while back how the horn has become a significant sound source in basement noise life with the weirdo bleat/junk processing of John Olson’s reed kill with Wolf Eyes, Dead Machines etc., and certainly Slithers, and to a mighty free jazz extent the always amazing Paul Flaherty. Furthering all this way hep ghost-trance-sense improv is Dan Dlugosielski’s new(ish) project Uneven Universe. Dan oversees the EXBX Tapes label and has recorded great gunks of noise-jam as Haunted Castle, plus he’s spooged out a few Uneven Universe documents. The one we keep going back to is The Rattling Caverns, on sweet Ohio label Catholic Tapes. It will make you wanna huff smoke-think and drink brews and maybe get some arm-around. If yr lucky.

‘Nother fine Ohio product is the first LP by Mors Ontologica, The Used Kids Session (VSS). Because this was recorded by Mike “Amrep” Hummel, it’s hard not to smell gusts of Cayuhogan breeze in every note. Never sure if this is a concept we generate in our own fevered brainpans, but the album feels sporadically redolent of everyone from the Quotas to Death of Samantha. The basic pummel is tres garagey, but it’s blasted throughout with croak and glam-pop highlights that just won’t quit. Very cool. Thank you, Ohio. Not from Ohio, but very cool nonetheless is the new edition of Hall of Fame’s 1999 album, First Came Love, then Came the Tree (Amish). Originally released on CD, it’s now on limited vinyl, with a swell bonus CDR of the band live. These guys were a superb trio, and went on to a lot of interesting ensembles—JOMF, MVEE’s Bummer Road, etc. But their original blend was lovely, light-assed improv-volk with an experimental undercurrent that always sounded great. And how goddamn splendid it is to have this as an LP! Another gang with a long overdue LP is Egypt Is the Magick #, whose The Valentine Process was recently issued by Wooden Wand’s Mad Monk imprint. Seems like the unit has expanded to trio size (they were but one, last time we checked), but the music remains a primitive (almost Godzian) blend of street-volk-ritualism, with some Excepter roughage tacked on for good measure. Really fine Sara Press cover art as well.

Interesting batch of small ‘zines and booklets arrived from Brass Tacks Press, out L.A. way. They’ve got an extensive list of publications, and the few we saw are pretty whacked. The Snake Pit by Baretta, is a memoir of life in a weird derelict surfer/hippie commune/village in Lower Topanga Canyon. It’s a casual read, but presents a side of the greater L.A. experience that had previously eluded us. The Last Nowhere is a collection of “Crap Poetry” by Log and Toilet, who also authored the bi-lingual 5 Poemes Crap. The poetry isn’t particularly good, but we’re not sure it’s supposed to be. What it actualy reminds us of is record reviews by the great Rev. Norb in the pages of his legendary Sick Teen fanzine. Last up is Voyage of the Timeship Medusa, a comic book by Toylit. Voyage is a very stoned feeling post-hippie image/word blur about rabbits and cops and puke and we-know-not-all-what. Suffice to say, it’s good readin’. Also extremely notable from a visual standpoint in the newest collection of drawings by Bill Nace (of XO4, Vampire Belt, etc.). Called simply Drawings (Open Mouth) it’s a strange-ass collection of pen and ink illustrations, which have been so important in defining the look of the Western Massachusetts underground. Open Mouth has also just done a CD version of their classic Daniel Higgs cassette, Plays the Mirror of the Apocalypse and Other Songs. It’s one of Higgs’ strongest pieces of extendo string ramble (with a short jaw harp break) and should make happy ears wiggle.

The new double-12-inch by Brooklyn’s Mouthus has no title (No Fun). It also has no suggested playing speed, so we tried it at 33, 45 & 78, and also played it backwards. All versions sound pretty good, although we’re currently prefering 45. It’s a little less underwater-sounding than it is at 33, but it maintains a certain energetic edge at that speed we find very captivating. Definitely a 33 player is Hive Mind’s Cast Through Shallow Earth LP (No Fun). Monolithic in a manner almost suggesting tunefullness at times, this set slowly uncoils itself into a thick length of very krautly design. It’s actually quite akin to some old school slow motion electronics of the Ohr label era. Nicely done. Also nice is Aaron Dilloway’s Chain Shot LP (Throne Heap). Less ambo than some of his more recent work, this one’s a cluttered collage of loops and thumps on metal and/or horns. Gets very crunky towards the end. Which, you’ll have to agree, is a plus.

We NEVER get promos from QBICO anymore (hint, hint), but we did manage to lay hands on a great new LP they released called Early Free-Form Waveforms by Psychatrone Rhonedakk. We’re not sure excatly what the hell this is, but it appears to be an old electronic project that involved Brian Turner, the current program director of WFMU, which is probably the best radio station we’ve ever known. Brian plays very Chrome-ian guitar on one side, the flip is a pure Zolar gloop of electro-whizz. It’s a formidable space jam, champ. And before we change topics, you have gotten the WFMU program guide anthology, right? It’s called The Best of LCD, it’s edited by Dave the Spazz, and it’s published by Princeton Architectural Press. The book is crammed to the nips with great writing, amazing art and cultural detritus of a remarkably diverse nature. Because Mark Newgarden’s bro, David, was the program director when the ‘zine started, they always had an incredible assortment of artists. The stuff here (by Panter, Burns, Clowes, Beyer, etc) is not reprinted anywhere else. The writing’s fine, too—Tosches, Linna, Marshall…a winning selection of the greats, and definitely the bathroom book of the season.

It’s possible this one’s been out for a while, but it’s such a masive effort that speediness has very little to do with it. We speak, of course, about Ashtray Navigations’ A Monument to British Rock 3 LP set (Smokers Gifts). Originally released on CDR, this vinylization of the sessions is an awesome and gorgous thing. The band here is Phill Todd, Melanie Crowley, Alex Neilsen and Ben Reynolds (at various points) and the sonics are a sluffy combo of synthesizer camel-toe, guitar of a very Jandekian nature, and the clatter of pencils in a metal cup. Portions of it are utterly brilliant extensions of a very specific kind of post-genre bedroom improvisation, others mine a very classicist post-Hawkwind space-shaft-continuum, others just sound like a mess. Which means this’s a wild, beautiful ride and one well worth taking.

Willie Lane, one of our fave guitarists from the haze-light of New England, and a critical element in the MV/EE Golden Road investigations, relocated to some weird other road in Pennsylvania and we were sad. But now we are brightened! A message beam has been fireflied into our homes via an amazing recording collab betwixt Willie and Grant Acker (gtrist from ex-Siltbreeze lost-art spacialists UN). They are called the Slurp Dogs, the tape is called Postal Licks and it’s on the consistently worthwhile earth-psyche label from Belgium, Sloow Tapes. Real singing amplifier bent note drone wah magic mind music here and all in high order. Super recommended.

Our fave saxophoner list is one on which Wally Shoup’s name is prominently displayed. This Washington state dadaist is an alto player, visual artist and musical composer of the highest order. And he has recently been present on a pantload of precious poop. One of the best is Suite: Bittersweet (Strange Attractors), an LP which features a trio of Wally, guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Greg Campbell. The session was a radio broadcast from ’05, and it is a motherfucker. Wally bloots and slurs notes like a Tristano-ite gone berserk, Nels fills the air with intense mid-range squeedle, and Greg slugs them both with fists wrapped in metal. Especially on the b-side, it’s a goddamn beautiful thing, both fully blasted and under control every inch of the way. Not as recent, but equally brilliant are the two LPs cut by the trio of Wally, drummer Chris Corsano and saxophonist, Paul Flaherty. One is Bounced Check (Records), the other is Blank Check (Tyyfus), and both are full-on spankers. Recorded one fateful night in Seattle, Bounce blares a bit more, but Blank wiggles like an eel. The playing format (two horns and a drum) is pretty maxist, especially with Corsano on tubs. Speaking of Corsano, this young honorary Limey has just had his first solo CDR, The Young Cricketeer, reissued on LP by Family Vineyard. It doesn’t sound like much is different, except the playing format. Recorded at home in Manchester, it’s a brilliant mix of Chris’s fantastic percussion work, plus the crazy tootling and tinkling that’re probably what got him hired by Bjork. Shoup then raises his shiny pate again for The Sound of Speed CD by Ghidra (Sol Disk). Another trio, this one features Bill Horist’s guitar and Mike Peterson’s drums. Sound is their second release, and it’s a great combination of Beefheart-damaged psych-noise string energy, intensely focused percussion scrums, and Wally’s anticly keening sax-work. Nicer work, Shoup don’t do.

Always a treat to get a new issue of Mike Stax’s Ugly Things. This guy has cracked the code on garage greatness, and he’s conistently producing the best music ‘zine this side of Kicks. Issue 26 has a great Rob Tyner interview, a fantastic piece on the Pop Rivets (Billy Childish’s pre-Milkshakes group) and more sweet content than you can shake yr bangs at. If you are at all interested in rock & roll, you cannot afford to miss an issue. UT has also published a new book, which we’ve started, but not quite finished. It’s called Like, Misunderstood by Rick Brown and Mike Stax, and tells the story of one of history’s great tragic bands—the Misunderstood—John Peel’s all-time faves. We’ve always loved the reissues and archival recordings by these guys (who came from the Riverside CA garage scene, and ended up in England), but their saga is fucked-up in a most splendid way. Yow. Worth reading.

Finnish neo-prog immortals Circle recently entwined mittened stumps with Boston’s Sunburned Hand of the Man (plus stray Vibrocathedral, Mick Flower) to create an organization called Sunburned Circle. An LP entitled The Blaze Game (Conspiracy) is the fruit of their loins, and it’s about as floridly stoned as you’d expect. Lotsa pulsing rhythms, squeedly Gong-like synth babble, Chrome-ian string-flange and vocal etherea, all with near-prog overtones. Recorded in Finland while Europe burned.

Meanwhile, nearby Norway’s favorite experimental/noise soundsmith Lasse Marhaug, along with Finland harsh fiend Tommi Keranen (aka Rulla), have a wicked wall-noise duo called Testicle Hazard. Which is an appropriate moniker whilst listening to their premier LP Hangover Interruption (Trash Ritual) as the rainforest of shattering aural debris is likely to shred any skum-boy’s scrotum within earshot. One side studio, one side live (where the plug gets pulled at the end —always a sign of success). Hot stuff from a label with nefarious psycho-graphic aesthetics. The LP is obi-banded with soft yet supple plastic netting and a pin featuring a hirsute asian bondage woman. Crazy. Make sure you grab the Rulla Arserection cassette from Trash Ritual as well for utter sound gutting.

Seems like we’ve mentioned Chrome a coupla times in passing. It should be noted that Jim Gibson’s newly-reactivated Noiseville label has followed their superb Helios Creed two-LP set with reissues of three crucial Chrome albums on CD: Alien Sountracks, Half Machine Lip Moves and Third from the Sun. These albums track the early development of this legendary Bay Area psych combo, from their garagist roots into their deepest Neu/Suicide trance states, on to the synchretically fused punk-space hybrid they perfected. Three great albums. And if you write Noiseville, don’t forget to ask about the Wicked King Wicker. It is a brutal guitar piece taken to a near-Skullflower level. We shit you not.

The new issue of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet is out. It’s #180, and brings to mind how long ago it was that we first ran into David. It was back when he was working at the Duplex Nursing Home in Jamaica Plain in 1980. He was involved in a band then, Men & Volts, which had originally been formed to play Beefheart covers. He was also doing a strange little magazine of interviews with the nursing home’s residents, documenting the depth of their histories as well as the wildly funny answers they’d give to questions they couldn’t quite figure out how to answer. The issues were built around themes and there were some classics. David has done lots of Duplex-related work, releasing a book by the almost indescribable poet, Ernest Noye Brookings, then curating a series of albums on which various bands sets Ernie’s words to music. He has also developed a series of great spoken pieces, which he does live and on CD with various musicians. He has also been on NPR fairly regularly as a music and social commentator. He’s a total genius, and has really been involved in some amazing projects over the last three decades. Anyway, you can check out the Duplex Planet site for more info, but this new issue is really the berries. It’s another “music issue,” and is illustrated mostly by pictures of the ’60s bands David himself had: Happy Scab, Scotland Yard Fantasy, etc. Issue 180 is a good one, and reminds us what an important cultural figure Greenberger is. If you don’t know his work, check it out.

No one mentioned to us that the genius Santa Cruz band, Residual Echoes, had imploded. So imagine our surprise when we got the eponymous LP by San Francisco Water Cooler, a band birthed from Residual Echoes’ ashes (KDVS Recordings). The album’s formatting is a bit irksome (one side’s 45, the other’s 33, making for much confusion amongst stoners), but the sounds are great. There’s a very psychedelic whiff to the guitar, but it’s all done inside a sorta neu noise context that blends keys with gloop with whatsis in a truly modern way. Pretty amazing stuff.

New tape label Custodian, Color Zoo Containers hits a high sonic marker with a sweet foray into heavy, heavy excitable music/bliss blizzard drone love with the one man Oakland dude (since relocated to Prague) Jorge Boehringer aka Core Of The Coalman. His tape Canarsie is blindingly beautiful, a scorched sky of hyper sound and it will leave you stunned and spinning. Boehringer’s been around the Bay Area scene, hanging out with the experimental head-cases at Mills College and local freaks like Rubber O Cement, Gowns et al for a few years. Dude is sick and his violin noise makes us think that the violin is turning out to be the premier instrument of the mid 1st decade 2000 avant/experimental scene (check C. Spencer Yeh, Samara Lubelski). Did Violinski presage this? No. Custodian, Color Zoo Containers has also issued a cassette by Take Up Serpents called Swollen And Full Of Parasites. These guys are an S.F. crew of rowdies, since located to Colorado, and they have the classic knees on the floor, butts high, hands on the knobs gutter improv. Like black metal, it’s the only way to really have some fun these days. Both these releases are worth seeking and sooner than later as there are less than 50 copies of each. We found ours at Aquarius Records in S.F.

While we’re hanging, happily, around S.F., a city which can still bring on the hootch charm so lost from the island of Manhattan, let us hep you to the swarming density of Usputuspud, which is the one-man slow burn of this cat Matt from local panic trance rockers Wildildlife. The cassette release Liturgical Alcoholik (White Lodge Tapes) is a real sweet and weird mind-scoping trip and definitely worth yr seek.

Any old school Bay Area improvisor/spirit music freak can tell you that Henry Kuntz has, since the late ‘70s, been one of the most audacious and interesting free improvisers on the scene non-stop. His documentation has been typically subterranean starting from his initial recorded sounds on Henry Kaiser’s 1977 Ice Death LP, a flashpoint record for many a guitar experimentalist (Jim O’Rourke e.g.). For most of the ‘70s Kuntz edited and published a great newsletter called Bells (available to read online at www.metropolis.com/bels). Throughout the ’80s Kuntz released LPs, cassettes and CDs on his own Hummingbird imprint of solo and group free-playing, all of which have amazing moments of deep spontaneous thought-love-composition. A fantastic compilation of this material, plus recordings from Kuntz’ Opeye project self described as “avant-shamanic trance jazz,” can be had on the beautiful four cassette boxset, Speed Of Culture Light, from Belgium label Bread & Animals. The label plans on systematically re-releasing the Hummingbird cassettes throughout this year. Essential music for the ancient/modern axis alive in any sentient brain. And each package comes with complimentary plastic dinosaur. So no excuses.

Been keeping an eyeball on this Tompkins Square label since they issued that Imaginational Anthem comp back in whatever year it was. The label has developed a very cool catalogue of stuff, ranging from reissues of American Primitive guitarists (Robbie Basho’s Venus in Cancer, Harry Taussig’s Fate Is Only Once), parallel contemporary work (Berkeley Guitar and James Blackshaw’s The Cloud of Unknowing), newly recorded coots (Spencer Moore, Charlie Louvin, Ran Blake), and a mind-blowing new comp. People Take Warning! is a collection of murder ballads and disaster songs, so strongly collated and beautifully presented that it rivals any of Revenant’s or Dust to Digital’s recent triumphs. Three wild CDs of lost sounds recorded between 1913 and 1938. Some real nice stuff about the Titanic and Hindenberg. They really knew how to balladize the situation in those days. Fucking cute!

Another damn cute reissue is Robert Martin’s Long Goodbye LP (Yik Yak), which has rather mysterious origins. It may have been recorded originally in ’85 or so, by some California surf dude. But it appeared in ’01 as a CDR and got passed around at stoner parties in Northern California. Anyway, it eventually ended up in on LP, but its story is no more certain than before. It’s acoustic and homemade feeling, rather lo-fi. There are some similarities to other outsider stuff of that period, but they seem incidental, and the overall vibe (if not the sound) is actually closer to the Bobby Brown/Carolyn Kleyn wing of California surftown weirdos. But it’s not as showy as anything those guys ever cut. Just low-key, damaged and nice. We keep thinking it’s veering into some sorta Christian swamp, but can never catch it actually doing so. Huh. One thing we’ve seen it compared to is Bobb Trimble, so it’s worth noting that Bobb’s first two legendary LPs, Iron Curtain Innocence and Harvest of Dreams have been reissued by Secretly Canadian. We’ve always loved Harvest, with its bizarro-world take on Marc Bolan pixie carnivals, but the real revelation has been Iron Curtain. For whatever reason, this new issue, which presents it in hermetic form (rather than as part of a twofer) and its apocalypto-folk-psych-pop damage is a mysterious and wonderful thing to behear.

Alright, those wanting to run the risk of our attentions are directed to send two (2) copies of DVDs, LPs, books, mags, cassettes, nude snaps, etc. to
BULL TONGUE
P.O. BOX 627
NORTHAMPTON MA 01061 USA.

Aquarius Records: www.aquariusrecords.org
Brass tacks Press: www.geocities.com/brasstackspress
Bread And Animals: http://users.telenet.be/bread.and.animals
Catholic Tapes: www.myspace.com/catholictapes
Conspiracy: www.conspiracyrecords.com
Core Of The Coalman: www.myspace.com/coreoggthecoalman
COOKIE: cookienoise@gmail.com
Dirter Productions: www.dirter.co.uk
Duplex Planet: www.duplexplanet.com
Family Vineyard: www.family-vineyard.com
KDVS Recordings: www.kdvsrecordings.org
Mad Monk: www.woodenwand.net/madmonk
No Fun: www.nofunproductions.com
Open Mouth: www.openmouttapes.com
Princeton Architectural Press: www.papress.com
Process Books: www.processmedia.com
Records Records: PO Box 381869, Cambridge MA 02238
Secretly Canadian: www.secretlycanadian.com
Sloow Tapes: http://sloowtapes.blogspot.com
Sol Disk: www.soldisk.com
Strange Attractors: www.strange-attractors.com
Textile: www.textilerecords.com
Throne Heap: www.throneheap.com
Trash Ritual: www.trashritual.cjb.net
Tyyfus: www.tyyfus.com
Ugly Things: www.ugly-things.com
White Lodge Tapes: www.myspace.com/whitelodgetapes
Yik Yak: www.yikyak.net

Byron Coley plays the hand he’s dealt.
Thurston Moore is in studio working with Religious Knives on new d-ope jammer.

Originally published in Arthur No. 26 (Sept. 02007)

Yoko Ono is a beauty. When we walk into the room for our interview she is stunning, vivacious, delightful and welcoming. We discover her handlers have deemed us worthy of only half an hour of access. Because our interests lie in focusing on specific, somewhat more arcane aspects of Yoko’s career, particularly those related to her access points into the avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s, we are bummed about these time constraints. Yoko is an extremely significant figure in the flow of much that is radical and/or experimental in visual art and musical culture of the last half-century. Our century, the century where media, performance and multi-disciplinary expression was galvanized into wholly new alloy.

The fact that this person is female, Japanese, an artist, and was married to John Lennon is something people are still trying to figure out. For many, it’s just a weird bit of proof that there’s a world out there (somewhere) far more fascinating than Main Street. But Yoko’s music is still regarded by the straight press and the bulk of its adherents as an anomaly, some sort of eccentric affectation. The truth is that Yoko studied and practiced traditional composition in the 1950s, while simultaneously exploring ideas of alternative notational theory. This places her right in the same class as such acknowledged transitional thinkers as John Cage, Henry Cowell and David Tudor. Yoko’s compositional work, perhaps especially the “instruction pieces,” and her sharp-edged performances, were profound by any measure. When you factor in her ethnicity and gender, it’s easy to believe her efforts were more functionally radical than those of any contemporaries. In the context of her partnership with John Lennon, we got to experience a premier avant garde artist’s attempt to unify her own process with a rock n’ roll dynamic. Which, alongside the art/music relationship of Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground and the influence these mutually beneficial connectives have had on the modern state of art/rock, is pretty goddamn great.

Anyway, the time constraints meant we were only able able to get a small taste of Yoko’s incredible history. But with Yoko a taste is way more than a mouthful.

Arthur: One thing you’ve talked about recently is the parallel between contemporary America and Weimar-era Berlin and how you never understood how artists and intellectuals could be quiet. Now you sort of understand?

Yoko Ono: Yes, now I understand because we’re quiet. We’re sort of tired of this, you know. I mean, each one of us is trying to do something, but it’s not that effective. It’s not going to change the course of things. They’ve just announced that they are going to keep on increasing warfare no matter what.

Arthur: Do you think it’s possible to affect some kind of change?

Ono: I definitely think so. I think many things are on a very different level, actually. Everything that’s happening now is so incredible. There was an experiment that was done with a paraplegic guy who lost both hands and both legs and with a computer he drew a circle. Just with the mind. Now that’s very interesting, isn’t it? But it’s not a front-page article. The things that we were saying, that we can do it with visualizing, with your mind, is what he did. Also, and I don’t know if this is true or not, but at Princeton, the latest experiment that they did was to make a mattress move by will. When a guy does it, it moves. And when a woman does it, sometimes it goes into reverse. Like when you say, “go right,” it goes left. Interesting. But when two people do it together, as a couple, it’s more effective. And, I choked up when I heard this last one, which is that when two people who are in love try it, it’s the most effective. These experiments are ready now to be done now with stem cells or DNA. We have everything we can use in front of us.

Arthur: So do you think that if everybody who’s in love would think about George Bush leaving the Earth NOW he would rise up in the air?

Ono: No, but this is what the problem is. All of us are 80 per cent water or maybe more. So when I say to you, “I hate you,” I might be saying it with a laugh, but the water takes it seriously. So your water is saying, “Omigosh, she hates me.” I say, “I love you,” you get it. But at the same time I’m water too. So I’m saying to myself that two people may be in love, God they must be in love because they look beautiful. Well of course, because each time they see each other they say, “I love you, I love you.” But actually they are saying it to themselves, too. They don’t know they are saying it to themselves. You see those people who hate and talk about, “Kill, I’m gonna kill…” They’re not just killing someone. They’re killing themselves. So you see that in their faces. And when people say, “How are we going to change the course of things?” and, “Can we destroy them?” I say “no.” If anything happens, the castle falls within.

We’re not helping; we keep putting our energy, our focus on them. We shouldn’t do that; we should just create our own beautiful world. And if they’re going to join, that’s fine. We’re not doing that. There are two industries in the world. One is the war industry and the other is the peace industry. The war industry people are very much together. They are so united they don’t even have to talk to each other. They know they want to kill and make money. But the peace industry people are such idealists and perfectionists. We’re arguing ourselves to death. “The way you’re doing it is not right.” If we can become more gentle and generous to each other, if we can love each other instead of commenting, criticizing each other then we can get together and we’ll be a good force. And our force has to be just as strong as the war industry people or more. And when I say “force,” it has to be viable as well because the economy is controlling the world. Of course the war industry is much more viable than the peace industry. But it’s getting there, in a sense. In so many countries, people are opening up to appreciating art or music. And that’s going to do it. I’m doing that and I’m sure you are too. We’re trying to cover the Earth with music. And the power of music will heal the Earth. And we should concentrate on that rather than saying, “What are we going to do with that guy?” We don’t want to know about that.

Arthur: I guess the ONOCHORD project figures specifically into that. That’s part of the peace industry?

Ono: Yes. Yes, I’m doing that. But you know, people are always saying, “It’s slow going, it’s slow going.” But it’s not, you know; things have their own time. Some things happen so quickly, like if you can change the social climate. It’s like a fashion show. First, they are wearing the chapeaux, now everybody’s wearing them. When I was in London recently and I went to my son’s concert. Afterwards they said, “You can’t go out now, there’re so many people standing out there.” Well, I just went out and FLASH FLASH FLASH and my people got scared. “Quickly! Go into the car!” And I just looked at the crowd and they all had ONOCHORD flashlights going 1-2-3. It was so beautiful. And I didn’t tell them to do it. It’s just catching on a bit.

Arthur: Where did you originally get the idea for that? It’s kind of an instructional art piece.

Ono: I’ve been doing instructional art pieces for the longest time. But ONOCHORD started around 1999 when I first started thinking about that. There’s another I did called Wish Tree. It sounds like a very, very dumb idea. I’m asking people to write their wishes and put it on the tree. And this is like my hit idea. People who’ve never been to a museum, they were queuing to go that museum to hang their wishes on the trees. Most places where I do this they have to add trees because there are so many wishes.

Arthur: When did you really start doing instructional art?

Ono: 1960, around then.

Arthur: So it was really after you moved to the States and you were at Sarah Lawrence.

Ono: Yeah, yeah.

Arthur: We were curious if you had done any stuff like that back in Japan before you came to New York.

Ono: I was doing that not as an artwork but as poems. There were one-liners and all that, Japanese haiku style. I was doing that in high school.

Arthur: Was there anyone at Sarah Lawrence that you connected with that led you into the avant-garde?

Ono: Sarah Lawrence is a very free-thinking place. But people there were very academic as well.

Arthur: Were you studying art there at that time?

Ono: No, I was studying musical composition and philosophy and writing literature.

Arthur: Did you choose Sarah Lawrence because of their curriculum?

Ono: That’s what it was, but also it was near where my parents were living in Scarsdale. But also, I have to go back to this music thing, because when I was about four years old I was in a Japanese school called Judaku, which means Three Gardens. And there they teach children perfect pitch and harmony and all that kind of thing when they are very young. And my mother sent me there. Many famous composers from Japan graduated from there. The strange thing was the homework. One day the homework was to listen to all the sounds in the city that day. And transpose that into musical notes. And so you would listen to noise and transpose it. That’s pretty good for the 1930s! That’s the kind of exercise we were doing. So that’s where I started. And my father told me that there were no famous women composers and it’s probably easier for women to go into singing other people’s songs, playing other people’s songs. Interpretation. But I wanted to be a composer. He said that’s a very good thing to be. He meant well, of course.

Arthur: The first piece you wrote then was “Secret Piece”?

Ono: That was the first piece that was publicly shown. That was an instruction piece. At Sarah Lawrence I was writing things that were more like 12 tone compositions. But you have to go somewhere. You don’t want to be just writing like Schubert or Beethoven. My feeling was that if you can’t do something new, don’t do it. That was my way of thinking .It was so difficult to write that way. [laughs] But I loved the fact that they would change their rhythm and notation every bar, it’s beautiful. I did get influenced by that.

Also the other very interesting influence was…when I was a very young child, my mother used to say. “Don’t ever go to that end of the house where the servants are, because they are talking about some things that you should not know about.” So, of course, I was interested. So I would sneak down there and listen at the window. One day I was listening and I heard these two girls talking about the fact that their aunt or somebody had a baby. And one of them started making the sound “HUHH! HUHH!” And I never forgot that. The first thing I did was I started doing it with my breath, “HOOOOHHH!” And I thought well I’m using my voice as an instrument. And then it happened where I was to do a Carnegie Recital Hall performance in 1961. Before that I was using my voice in a tape recorder, a Nagra. I was doing some great stuff but I didn’t own a tape recorder yet, so I went uptown somewhere in New York where somebody had told me that some guy had a tape recorder that I could use. I went and did this long thing and I asked if I could copy it and have it. He said, sure, that would be fine. But I don’t have it. I don’t remember the guy, but I would hope he still has it. Anyway, two nights before the recital I was recording this thing on the Nagra. And just by mistake it went into reverse. And the thing was I was going, “AAH UHHH AAHH!!!” or something like that. Then it went in reverse and it was “UHWAAH HHUUUHWUUH!!!” and I thought—this is much better, I’ll put that in the concert too. So in the tiny recital hall concert I had this very interesting thing that I did.

Arthur: Did you perform with tapes?

Ono: I performed with a tape and also without. The show was so incredibly far out. I got somebody to control the tape recorder and I asked him to keep on taping the sounds. So It would be going, “AAHHH BBBUUHH BBUHH AAAH!!!” and he would tape that, but then the next one that I do should be taped on top of that so it would keep accumulating into a big sound.

Arthur: Was that material notated at all?

Ono: No, it wasn’t notated. I started to believe in the sound of that moment. From a very young age I used to read these Chinese stories about all the battles that they had to acquire the center. There were many, many high mountains with a field in the center. And whoever conquered the center field was the emperor. Then they would become very soft. And then the monks would come down and destroy them. I was fascinated by reading these. I thought I was a warrior. A warrior with one sword, which was just my voice. I could go anywhere. I felt if you wanted me to do something with you, then let’s do it. And I’ll do it with my voice. That’s how I was when I arrived places. And when I met John.

Arthur: When was it when you started going into New York? When you were at Sarah Lawrence would you go into to see concerts?

Ono: Yeah, I did, yeah. But there weren’t many concerts that I enjoyed so much.

Arthur: Were you going to see jazz at all?

Ono: I listened to jazz too, yeah. I wasn’t that interested. I was trying to create a new sound. The reason you create a new sound is because you’re not that interested in the sounds that are around you.

Arthur: When you were doing this was there much enthusiasm for you anywhere?

Ono: No. I knew who I was; I had the world in my hand. I could care less who knows about it and who doesn’t. It was like I was doing it, you know, and the Carnegie Recital Hall was a full house, which was nice. But the reviews were not very good. The kind of thing I was doing in my head was not expressed clearly, maybe; but I was not known.

Arthur: When you first moved to New York was the Chambers Street loft the first place you lived?

Ono: No, I was living in an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue with Toshi Ichiyanagi. We were just walking around and there was this ballet studio and I said to Toshi, “That’s the kind of place we should get. So all of our musician friends can do something there.” Because at the time there was only Town Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall and Carnegie Hall. Only three places for concerts. And you can’t get into Carnegie Hall or Town Hall; you can only get into Carnegie Recital Hall.

Arthur: So Judson wasn’t happening?

Ono: Judson was mostly dance. Al Carmine is a very, very important person, but Judson was basically showing “actions.” But Carnegie Recital Hall—people like John Cage, Edgar Varese and Henry Cowell, that class of people, only got in just maybe once. And Stefan Wolpe, he was a very good friend of mine. I met John Cage, actually, through Stefan Wolpe. I went to a concert they were doing which was Stefan Wolpe, Edgar Varese and John Cage.

Arthur: Wow!

Ono: Before the concert we met at the Russian Tea Room and Stefan said, “Oh, I’m going to introduce you to John Cage.” And John was there with David Tudor. We talked about finding a different place to play. So I went to look at this studio on 94th street, but it was very, very expensive. Does this interest you?

Arthur: Oh yeah, yeah! This is great! It’s exactly what we want to hear! The more the merrier!

Ono: So anyway, Ino Miyuzami, a sculptor, knew that I was looking for a place. So he said, “These days artists are working in a couple of lofts.” And we didn’t know what lofts were. We found out they were warehouse spaces that were not being used and they were cheap. So some artists were doing that. And in those days you could not stay in a loft, it was illegal. And he said, “One Sunday let’s go there and I’ll show you some lofts there.” So he took me downtown and we went to Chambers Street because he knew of one there. So I went there and they said, there was this very famous Japanese woman painter who came and saw it and she may take it. “But if she doesn’t take it then you’ll have it.” It was 50 dollars and 50 cents a month.

Chambers Street was really the middle of nowhere then. That was such an old neighborhood then. The buildings were from the Dutch era.

So I went home to Amsterdam Avenue. It was a second floor apartment above a liquor store. I’m rolling on the bed, moaning and saying, “I’m not going to get it, I can’t get it!” And Toshi was saying, “Stop it, don’t worry about it. So you don’t get it, so what?” So the next morning I got cash, and it was very hard for me to get cash for 50 dollars. Actually, 25 dollars, because they said an advance of 25 dollars is fine. So I grabbed 25 dollars and I ran. In those days I could walk from 125th Street to Washington Square. It was nothing. So I got to Chambers Street and I said, “What happened?” And they said, “Oh, she didn’t take it.” And I said, “OK here’s 25 dollars.” And I got it! And that was the loft where I took a piano in there, an old piano that I bought. And that was where the first loft concert was in New York. The first concert was in December 1960. It was snowing and people from Stony Point, which was David Tudor, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, those people came down. They were the first ones. Bundled up, because it was a cold water flat.

Arthur: All those places had no heat at night, just during the day. Who performed that first night?

Ono: I forgot. But there’s a whole history that George Maciunas documented.

Arthur: Had you met George at this point?

Ono: No. And then the loft concerts became very, very successful.

Arthur: How often did you do them?

Ono: Once a month. One day somebody called me, and I’m not telling you who that was, and said, “You’re finished, you know, because all your artists are now going to go to Maciunas who has a midtown gallery. Because he came to your show and he liked the idea and he’s going to do the same thing with all your artists.” By then I didn’t really mind. There was so many problems. You know when something is successful it’s a lot of problems with ego games and everything going around. And then I got a call from George Maciunas and he said he wants to do my art show. And that was my first art show.

Arthur: Yeah right, the AG Gallery.

Ono: It worked out very well for me.

Arthur: You were doing visual art all through that time as well?

Ono: Yeah.

Arthur: The show then, was that a combination of visual art, music and instructional art?

Ono: No, just visual art.

Arthur: So they were like the early Flux objects?

Ono: No, it was instructional paintings. It was very original, I think, for me to do it that way. Each painting having instructions. I can count the people who came there, that’s how few people there were. It was during the summer. By 1966 I was really there, working in New York and the same people were coming to see my work and I thought there was something wrong about this. So I started wandering off and in 1966 I went to London.

Arthur: To the Destruction In Art symposium. What drew you to London, was it just the unrest you were feeling in New York?

Ono: No, no, no. Unrest yes, but I’m not one of those people who says, “Well I’m just leaving.” It didn’t work out that way. I was invited. And my marriage was going very badly and I felt like I had to leave.

Arthur: You spent some time back in Japan before that. The Japanese avant garde probably had changed since you had been there previously. Gutai came along.

Ono: You know it’s funny, I didn’t really even know about Gutai. I went to Claes Oldenburg’s happening at his store and someone asked me if I knew about Gutai and I said, “No.” And they said, “Well you better look into it, because they did this before Fluxus, you know.” But I was sort of lazy and I didn’t really look into it. Now that I think about it, Japan was really far out.

Arthur: Yeah, I mean there were a lot of things that were sort of spinning around. It seemed like finally the post-Second World War thing had gotten shaken off to enough of a degree that people were starting to embrace their own culture. Did you feel like there was an avant-garde community when you went back there?

Ono: I noticed it when I went back there in 1962 and I did a big event and I saw all these avant garde artists there, and they were pretty violent.

Arthur: That must’ve been when you working on the Grapefruit book.

Ono: Yeah, exactly. The first people to really do things there were Gutai.

Arthur: The last thing we’ll ask you, to jump ahead to your London sojourn, with your show at Indica, which was extremely significant, is about the track you recorded called Cambridge 69 at the Mitchell Hall in Cambridge.

Ono: Ha ha, what about that?

Arthur: Well the fact that it was recorded with John Tchicai, the Dutch saxophone player and John Stevens, the British drummer. How did you hook up with those guys?

Ono: I didn’t know them, I didn’t know anything about them. What happened was, Cambridge asked me to come and do a lecture or whatever. I had few invitations from different places like Vienna asking if I wanted to make a film, any film would be OK. I showed this to John and John said, “You better make it then.” And I showed him the letter from Cambridge and he said, “OK, you better go. And you better call.” So I called and I said, “Hello, yes I will be coming.” And John said, “Say you’ll bring a band.” “Yes and I’m going to bring a band.” And John said, “I’m the band.” He said, “You don’t need anyone else, I’m gonna be the band.” And he was very excited about it.

So John and I went there and we just walked through, “Hi, hi,” you know. And they all looked at us and I think they hated it actually. They were academic people and we were dressed like rockers. I just started my thing and John Tchicai and these people just came in and improvised. We didn’t know.

Arthur: You don’t know who invited them?

Ono: I have no idea.

Arthur: The track is amazing. It’s one of the first full-on feedback guitar tracks.

Ono: I think John was really an amazing guy. He had all that in him and he couldn’t put it down on a Beatles record. He really cherished the fact that we were doing something experimental. He was very proud of it.

Originally published in Arthur No. 26 (Sept. 02007)

Bull Tongue 26
The Top 80 of 2006

1. GOTHENBURG BLOOD CULT – New tape label out of Sweden bartering in ultra hell noise. Check out the compilation Fuck Money, Fuck Life w/ grinding hardcore spew from Maniac Cop , Ochu , and Treriksroset . Sweden’s such a beatific place, it’s hard to figure the gore mania the noise scene there is so preoccupied with.

2. SAME BAND – Boxed Set 10 CD box (Disques Dual) Amazing documentation of a Portland, ME combo who existed in an oddball universe akin to some of the best just-pre-punk weirdos. They came along later than bands like MX-80 Sound, but manifest a similar vibe, which makes sense because their roots are in combos first formed in 1968 or. Part free form, part Zappa, part punk, this is rural-experimental fuckeroo of the highest order. Includes some DVD video footage, interviews, a great booklet of fliers and pics, and is contained inside a most lovely wooden box. During their lifetime they cut only one LP and one 45, but this set (recorded between ‘77 & ‘80) captures a brilliant, beautiful strangeness.

3. SIC ALPS – Pleasures and Treasures LP (Animal Disguise) It’s time for Sic Alps to fully bust out. An incredible raw psychedelia is being played here and after a couple of down low tapes on Folding and Animal Disguise we’re steamy mouthed listening to their first LP (which is basically an early version of the band w/ the awesome Bianca Sparta of Erase Errata .)

4. DESPERATE MAN BLUES DVD – director: Edward Gillan (Dust to Digital) Nice to have a DVD of this great documentary on Joe Bussard , plus another featurette, King of the Record Collectors , and other bonus stuff. Bussard is a stone gas, grooving around his basement amidst one of the finest collections of pre-war 78s ever assembled. A few nice archival shots of Fahey , too. And the stories are hilarious.

5. RAYMOND DIJKSTRA – Der Triumph LP (Le Souffleur)What sounds like a man scraping broken glass on metal w/   brain-burnt organ accompaniment makes for one killer LP. Dijkstra has been honing his skin splitting aurality for years and presents us this masterpiece in a hardback linen box sleeve.

6. LOU DUBOSE & JAKE BERNSTEIN – Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (Random House) There’s nothing in here you didn’t suspect, but Dubose & Bernstein lay out the whole ugly quilt for the entire world’s inspection. Research & writing are both excellent. You’ll puke. Again.

7. NON-HORSE – Rigor More cassette (Not Not Fun) Vanishing Voice member Gabriel Lucas Crane ’s spirit-sonic masterpiece told in 77 chapters of beautiful mystic tones.

8. VALERIE WEBBER – Thin Little Arms Build Castles (Big Baby Press) Webber has hit a new mark w/   this book of poems. They glower w/   a savage steaminess that recalls (in part) some of Lydia Lunch’s best work. But she does not have Lydia’s vicious nihilism. Valerie’s possesses a strangely juicy optimism as often as it does darkness, and there is a humor poking through many of the pieces, letting in illuminative shards of light. Favorite poem: “I Am Bitch Almighty.”

9. JAMIE FENNELLY – Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down cassette (Deep Fried Tapes) Out of nowhere, well Philadelphia actually, tape label w/   regional creative-squall action. Fennelly’s excursion here looks like it would be old-timey hoe-down but it’s a great dark, droning improvisation that strokes the inner gore nicely.

10. HI GOD PEOPLE / DEAD C – split LP (Nervous Jerk)Debut release by the great Australian label formerly known as Art School Dropout. Dead C’s side was live at the 2002 ATP Festival and is a brilliant evocation of elemental, abstract forces , culminating in a destroyed exorcism of “L.A. Blues”. The flip, by Melbourne’s finest, is their own, very special sorta rumble through a variety of style-dodges. Wonderful destruction of pre-dawn tongues.

11. SWORD HEAVEN ( www.myspace.com/swordheaven ) - Ohio duo that blamm-oed through the USA this summer really just killing live. Super intense drums/etc music-action w/   a blasted dose of off-the-stage and in-yr-face performance wildness.

12. P SHAW – Strings (Pshaw!) P Shaw has long been one of Boston’s great creators. His homemade comics are jammed w/   crazy details and storylines that will make you spit cereal out yr nose. Anyway, Strings is something like the story of Death Rattle Cat, plus related sketchbook material. And if it doesn’t melt yr eyes, well, that’s just too bad.

13. BLUES CONTROL – Riverboat Styx cassette (fuckittapes) Sweet rolling psyche minimalism from Brooklyn. Members of the way more abstracted Watersports .

14. KA-NIVES!! – Get Duped LP (Lance Rock) ( www.lancerock.com ) Crude, stupid, intimately sloppy garage punk from Houston. Drunkenly related to the great Sugar Shack , this one will make every cup in yr house quiver like a tin rattle.

15. NEUNTOTER DER PLAGE – The Spectre Sows His Seed cassette (Truculent) H owling dark ambient spook core. Perfect long winter night blood ritual groan fest. One of the better labels out of Providence, RI.

16. KAREN CONSTANCE & LAUREN NAYLOR – Chapters PORTFOLIO (Someone Else) 20 gorgeous two-sided prints by these brain-felching UK artists – one side b&W, one side color – all images drawn from deep wells of the impossible. Corrosive dreamscapes at their absolute finest. Beautiful!

17. RUNDOWNSUN - Of all the tape labels that spray paint their cassettes it’s this Canadian label that does it most exquisitely. Gorgeous, dot-dash Pollock abstraction w/   lovely topographic sensuality.

18. STUMPS – Split Fleet Dodge LP (Palindrone) Cool New Zealand trio antics from Antony Milton and pals. From winsome electro-dribble, through into full-blown avant-rock splooie, this LP includes some splashy guest organ work by Campbell Kneale and great wobble-vibes galore.

19. FEMINIST ACTION BRIGADE - Formerly known as Feminists Against Bush , an open-forum collective of women expressing through music, art, ideas, opinions the state of power-imbalance in regards to gender and politics. Their FAB site has the story. Co-organizer Marissa also has a wicked cool experimental sound-jam cassette on Tobi Vail’s Bumpidee tape label called Marissa Magic! Also a good place to hook up w/   awesome liberation-punk trio, The Punks .

20. OGX – 2LP (Old Gold) Not sure if this has been out for years already or something, but it just landed in the box. Anyway, it’s a tenth anniversary comp for the great Old Gold label, and it includes all kindsa sick shit – from the high end improv of Charlie Parker (the band) to live duo work from Eugene Chadbourne & Davey Williams . Solid and handmade – just like crack!

21. RAIONBASHI – Chloral Works I & II LP (Entr’acte) Not sure if chloral is a misspelling or intentional. But as insanely heavy as this body-part sound/yodel manipulation 1-sided LP goes who cares? Raionbashi is a German dude, part of Schimpfluch Aktionist scene, and this is a weirdo tongue and ass slap piece of amplification that is full on hot n’ nasty.

22. MONDO MACABRO - Still the coolest exploito DVD reissue company going. Highlights from this year include Snake Dancer (the highpoint of South African stripper cinema) & The Bollywood Horror Collection Vol. 1 – a 2 disc set w/   a pair of amazing satan-o/vampire flicks + great documentaries.

23. KENT TAYLOR AND ALAN HORVATH – looking for d.a. levy (Random Sightings) – THE d.a. levy BIBLIOGRAPHY Volume 1 [1963 - 1966] (Kirpan Press) Premier volume rundown of every publication d.a. levy involved himself with. With full page reproductions of many of the titles. Essential resource for anyone into the work of one of America’s greatest voices of inspired dissent and bloodymindedness. ( Box 2943, Vancouver, WA 98668)

24. DAN NADEL – Art Out of Time (Abrams) Dan Nadel of Picture Box edited this superb anthology, subtitled Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969 . Some of the text is a little hard to read, but it’s worth the eye strain to see this stuff – it’s unbelievably choice & weird!

25. THE BRATS – Criminal Guitar LP (Rave Up) Oh my God, The Brats were the perennial house band at Great Gildersleeves down the street from CBGB in the ’70s. With punk in full-on birth pang The Brats were still stuck in New York Dolls/Sweet mode w/   shag hairdos and platforms starry-eyed that Kiss made it big and street-wise enough to acknowledge that the New York Dolls just plain OD’d. 30 years down the road listening to this assembly of demos, practices, live shit and their one and only 7″ its cool to hear how these guys were kinda great in a genuine NYC street trash “raunchy rock” way. Where’s our Quaalude Queen now?

26. BRUCE CAEN – Sub-Hollywood (Yes Press) Crazy, sloppy, excellent L.A. punk novel by the guy who did the west coast No Mag w/   Michael Gira (& others). The scenes w/   the L.A.P.D. are so true you’ll be able to smell the jiz on their breath.

27. THOMAS ANKERSMIT / JIM O’ROURKE – Weerzin / Oscillators and Guitars   LP (Tochnit Aleph) Excellent split LP by two guys who you know’d smoke the joint heavily if face to face. Ankersmit’s piece unfolds quietly w/   sophisto-tension ending in a long blaaang -tone. Pretty boss. Jim O’s is from ‘92 and is a full on music mix of heavenly electric bliss.

28. CLAYTON NOONE & STEFAN NEVILLE – MIMI: City of Tales (City of Tales) I think this is the correct name for the homemade comic by these two New Zealand maniacs. Neville also records as Pumice , Noonan is part of CJA , Armpit & many others. Their comics are as crude as their music, and as lovely.

29. SUPERFLUX – editors: Susan Briante, Chris Murray, Hoa Nguyen Awesome new 8 1/2 X11 staple poetry book anthology from the po-hot bed of Austin TX. Killer kuts from Alice Notley , Anne Waldman and a stunning all-female cast. (2925 Higgins St. Austin, TX 78722)

30. FUN FROM NONE 2DVD – dir. Chris Habib (No Fun/Load) There are some slight inaccuracies in the credits (where’s Nautical Almanac ?), but otherwise this is a crackerjack display of two years of noise highlights from the No Fun Fest, filmed by the great Haboob.

31. TRONIKS - L.A. has risen up like an aural dynamite phoenix w/   the efforts of the Troniks label. Besides the grandeur of the California 10 LP box set earlier this year, proprietor Phil Blankenship sends us off to 2007 w/   five LPs of high grade resonance: Oscillating Innards Bleak , Circuit Wound Density & Assimilation , Obstacle Corpse C’est La Vie , Romance / Black Sand Desert / The Cherry Point split LP, The Cherry Point & Privy Seals Casual Sex , and The Cherry Point & Howard Stelzer Untitled . These plus the various CDs, CDRs and the new Deep Jew War 7″ all make for a whole new California stun. Cowabunga , motherfucker.

32. LEE ROCKEY – Lee Rockey Music LP (De Stijl) Jaw-splitting solo LP from a Portland-based musician who worked w/   Herbie Mann in the ’50s and Smegma in the ’70s. This archival material (from the late ’60s or so) is much closer to the latter – strings, voices, clutter and gums.

33. ANN STEPHENSON – Wirework (Tent Editions) Nice collection of this, presumably, New York poet who has had excellent lines in Larry Fagin’s Sal Mimeo poetry journal (437 E 12th St. #18, New York, NY, 10009). Taut, thoughtful ruminations on the smell of friends and evaporating streets.

34. LORD FYRE – Destruction at 2013 LP (Emperor Jones) A founding partner of the John Wilkes Booze collective lets one fly (more or less solo) in Bloomington. The instrumentation is squiggly as hell, incorporating a lot of space without sacrificing a certain claustrophobic luster.

  35. DON CAUBLE – This Passing World (AuthorHouse) Along w/   d.a. levy, Tom Kryss, William Wantling, and Kent Taylor (to just name a few), Don Cauble delivered some of the heaviest 60s underground poetry this country has produced (and ultimately oppressed beneath cobwebs of supermarket goop). Cauble was a mystery and unheard from for a long time but it seems he’s alive and well in Portland and has written this strange novel of a young man from 1972 thrown in a Greek prison for a pot bust. And the interior spirit drive he cruises out on.

36. GROUP DOUEH Guitar Music from the Western Sahara LP (Sublime Frequencies) A very berserk album of electric music from the desert. Doueh combines Hendrix w/   traditional forms, creating an extremely distorted raunch vocabulary for guitar, not exactly like anything else you’ve ever heard. Yikes.

37. JESSE SELDESS – Who Opens (Kenning Editions) Each poem here moves forward w/   banal yet lifeforce-infused lines which all seemingly relate to each other, then space out into meditations of repetition and some kind of language-prayer. Odd and affecting and issued by one of the more interesting small poetry presses currently (barely) active.

38. FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS – Fantagraphics continues to overwhelm all competition w/   oceanic spumes of wonderful graphics work. Some recent ones that are particularly amazing are Frank Stack’s The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming (which collects all of his hilarious & brilliant Jesus strips), Shadowland by Kim Deitch (all his incredible sideshow yarns in one place, finally!), and Terrible Thompson by Gene Deitch (Kim’s father, who was an animator for UPA – and a great cartoonist in his own right.) Get a damn catalogue, NOW!

39. TALIBAN / PARANOID TIME – Air Lice split 10″ (Tapeworm / SNSE) Two Midwestern bands head to head in junk star lawnmower fight. Premier vinyl outing from gut slicing Tapeworm label. All systems dead, proceed to kill city.

40. WWW.GARYPANTER.COM Totally smoking site where you can read Garloo’s seriously whacked-out blog, and purchase everything from original drawings to little hand molded rubber men. Ewwww…

41. SÉANCE – editors: Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (Make Now Press) A collection of writers involved w/   the contemporary concern of language and how it conducts itself through us sexually and spiritually. It also is the cream of the crop of the hot and bothered linguistic academia which alone makes it kind of an ink-on-paper wet dream. Eileen Myles , Dennis Cooper , Dodie Bellamy , Kevin Killian , Ben Marcus , Jaap Blonk , Tracie Morris and others ruminate w/   experimental essays and examples. (8152 Coldwater Canyon, N. Hollywood CA 91605)

42. ANTIPAN – LP (Pulled Out) (pulledout.org) It took us a few minutes to comprehend that this one-sided LP by this Sydney quartet was cut backwards, but once we deduced that, everything was ducky. Antipan are mostly instrumental, and thrash away amidst collapsing old buildings, using “standard” rock instruments to create small blizzards of feedbucked howl.

43. ALICE NOTLEY – Grave of Light (Wesleyan) This is it. One of the most critical and fascinating poets of the latter day New York School scene, originally from Chicago, intimately associated w/   Ted Berrigan, a master of thought-life experiential poetry, Alice Notley is one of America’s greatest contemporary poets. An expatriate for years, residing in Paris, she has one of the most distinctly American-eyed voices to be heard. Grave of Light collects a wealth of her writing from 1970 to 2005 into a massive 364 page work of art. Essential.

44. JEREMI MOURAND – We know of 2 CDs thus far by this Montreal unit, and they are both woozy combinations of Beefheart blues licks, grotesque French readymades and absolute tongue-babble. The first one, FOR , might be more fucked up, but Vacher is pretty well splattered too. Great silk-screened covers as well, which appear to be the work of the great Simon Bosse.

45. MOHAMMAD ALI NIAZMAND – Wizard Poisonings (Insurance Editions) Not sure who this cat is, and Insurance Editions press is also a mystery, though we know they’re nestled in Brooklyn somewhere. Regardless, Wizard Poisonings is a boss and fast read w/   sharp, evocative nailings of daily life, kids, lovers and all other weirdness. Recommended. ( 35-48 80th Street #52, Jackson Heights, NY 11372)

46. THE DRAMA   - ed. Joel Speasmaker Every issue of this magazine gets better. It’s a hard-to-tag mix of words and pictures about art & music & culture, all viewed from a particularly interesting angle. Very sleek, but not slick.

47. PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT – who let the dogs out 7″ (Columbus Discount Records) Super great fucking messed up music from Ohio. Self proclaimed inspirations are “pussy, acid, hatred.” You know they rule.

48. HOMOSTUPIDS – The Brutal Birthday 7″ E.P. (Richie Records) Completely wrecked noise core splunge from Cleveland – the only real rock n roll city in the world. These guys are as excellent as it gets, everything else eats ass in comparison.

49. KENDRA STEINER EDITIONS - Bill Shute keeps pumping out great little poetry booklets. Newest batch has two by Tarpis Tula’s David Keenan , a Lew Welch tribute by Stuart Crutchfield , and some bracing horse racing poetry by Shute himself and Brad Kohler . Outstanding stuff.

50. UKE OF SPACES CORNERS COUNTY – So Far on the Way LP (Trd W/d / Friends and Relatives / Hello Asshole + 5 others) (Dan B of the great Impractical Cockpit appears here to present his take on the folk muse. And the results have a spectacular lo-fi burn that keeps reminding me of Rounder-era Hurley at his shakiest. (Trd W/d: POB 52096, New Orleans, LA 70152)

51. PASALYMANY – Just when you think Montreal will be crushed under the weight of new around-the-bend experimental spelunk, here comes this wicked hot label offering extra-damaged sluice from Thames (which is primarily Blake Hargreaves of the great Dreamcatcher and Waxathon ) and Wapstan ( Martin Sasserville of brise cul records / Foutredieu!!!). Forthcoming goodness from the already legendarily-messed-up Altar of Flies . God help us.

52. RURAL ROCK & ROLL DVD – director: Jensen Rufe (Jensen Rufe) This documentary about the local scene in Humboldt CA is actually pretty interesting. I’m not sure about some of the music, but the musicians here are great examples of exurban lifers , dedicated (more or less) to just kickin’ it out. Could be the story of a lotta little smallish college towns w/   a couple hundred pan-generic weirdos hanging on for dear life (or something like it).

53. CARLOS GIFFONI / SMEGMA / METALUX – LP (LAFMS / No Fun)Dream collaboration, if your dreams are in a noise freak brain. Excellent and nicely reserved unfoldings of liquid dada broil.

54. JO ROBERTSON - Very ruling Brit painter- cum -singer who has been recording w/ the great David Cunningham and sounds like a totally cool update of the great Sybille Baier. Or something. Reportedly has an album due soon via Textile, although whether it’s solo or with her noisy combo Mememe is unclear.

55. CADAVER IN DRAG – Septic Tomb LP (Elephant Graveyard) 1-sided silkscreened monster down-in-the-dumps Midwest pummeler. On Chondritic Sound side label. Beastly bong-snort bowel scrape and fucking good.

56. HAN BENNINK & PETER BROTZMANN – Their duo gigs this past year have been mind-blowing, and their two archival CD sets, Total Music Meeting 1977 Berlin (BRO) , and Schwarzwaldfahrt (Atavistic/Unheard Music) , are fully with it. Young turd improvisors could stand to learn a few thousand things from these gentlemen.

57. FISH & SHEEP – Double Banana LP (Ruby Red) Amazing off shoot of Portugal outsider freaks Loosers . Scrabbling guitars and drums making waste of any concept of presentable fidelity. A sweet sick and captivating motion not too unlike Lambsbread minus the holy smoke.

58. KENDRA – Extremely interesting duo from Keene, NH, comprised of Danny Kemps and Kate Hanlon. Guitar and drums combined in all new ways – imagine! Psychedelically challenging, but also heavily referenced inside some imaginary Olympia continuum. Choice. Check them out live or seek their CDR, They in Heaven .

59. R.O.T. – L’Ecurie LP (Kraak) Long awaited LP by a group who issued some intriguing drone, scrape and death-tone cassettes the last few years. This baby shows R.O.T at the peak of their game which is a slow burn ambience of raw sound psychosis and spooked noise periphery.

60. LIGHTBULB – Live: First Show CDR (Heresee) Admittedly, there is some residual parental pride getting worked here, but the chaos Lightbulb emit is pretty special, no matter whose kids they are. Can’t wait to hear the Heresee studio sessions, although the fact that they’d turned 12 by the time that session happened may add a layer of slickness we’re not ready to digest.

61. SIXES – Cursed Beast – LP (Enterruption / Solipsist) Old schoolers who came up through the ranks of Crash Worship and the lesser known but just as skull collapsing Azog . This LP is either an inspiration from or to contemporary Wolf Eyes moves. We imagine it has to be both as Sixes have been in the trenches and were making gutter snipe noise brawl when most noise kids were sucking on mamma’s electric teat.

62. LOREN CONNORS – Night Through 3CD (Family Vineyard) A brilliant collection of tracks from singles & unreleased sessions by this great NY guitarist. Gorgeous artistry throughout, and a wonderful document by any standard.

63. PAINTING PETALS ON PLANET GHOST – Oounabara LP/DVD (Opax) Gorgeous Lathe cut w/ original copper-gold ink drawing on one side of the disc by PPOPG’s Ramona Ponzini . From Italy, Ramona is a collaborator w/   the incredible My Cat Is An Alien who have been issuing varying series’ of small press vinyl LPs that run from amazing to astounding. Like the previous PPOPG LP on Time-Lag this one goes for the spirit sky of light and energy. Ethereal vocals and droning amp action make this a sweet ride. Other member Roberto Opalio offers a DVD of silent films to be watched while listening if one is so inclined.

64. POCAHAUNTED – Moccasinging cassette (Not Not Fun) The Skaters and their howling tongue-amp majestix are one of the more far-reaching inspirations of the noise/whatsis underground these last five years. Whether Pocahaunted, a member of L.A.’s awesome Quintana Roo , has any debt to them may be worth noting; but since we’re all brothers in the flow of noise inspiration anyway who cares? And anyone that can conceive of this kinda Indian War-Whoop take on a great long flowing tone and tom-tom raindance drone w/ a tape packaged in an Indian pouch w/ feathers attached is totally welcome here. Does Pocahaunted perform live in full native American dress? One can only hope.

65. BROADFIELD MARCHERS – When the Lifted Connive LP (St. Ives) Totally addictive lo-fi power pop trio from Louisville w/   lotsa moves lifted from the Wilson brothers and Sell Out -era Who, but assembled w/   the ham-fisted “precision” that made Salvation Army SO MUCH BETTER than the Three O’Clock. Often such bands “mature” into something a bit too evolved for our own tastes, so sample early. Edition of 300.

66. DO IT BIG – Coke Dick cassette (milk tart records) From what we can tell the members of this elusive outfit are heralded as “murder,” “kuss,” “blood,” “creampuff” and “brookie g.” They are supremely addled. This, presumably their debut recording, sounds like an LSD playground riot which runs through a good trip/bad trip journey unlike anything we’ve encountered in a while. Regardless it’s outstanding in its wastedness.

67. 40 BANDS 80 MINUTES DVD – director: Sean Carnage (Sounds Are Active) Pretty interesting concept – 40 L.A. bands playing 2 minute (max) sets at some place in Hollywood. The music’s all over the map and most of it’s pretty good, but even the lousy stuff is over fast, so what the heck? So underground that the “big name” bands are on the order of Abe Vigoda and Fireworks . Anyway, what’s the deal on this trio, The Amazements ? Their tune came off like a cross between Demo Moe & the Cheater Slicks. Nice.

68. PALMER IS BEAUTIFUL: THE OLD STORE & THE SHED VIDEO COLLECTION DVD (The Old Store) (Similar but different to the above, this documents 70+ shows that took place at a few cooperative venues in Palmer, Mass, between 1998 & 2005. There are some names ( XBXRX , Friends Forever , Partyline , etc.) but most is homegrown, lo-tech thud. And it makes for an interesting three hours of viewing (although the very end part was screwed up on our copy).

69. 6majik9 – The Majik House cassette (Cauliflower Dreams) Another outstanding find by this Belgian label. 6majik9 are considered an output of the newest strain of Australian psychedelia but they are way more outside the margins than that. Real homefire mood blankouts that drag down into bursts of sunshine lung goop.

70. GETTING RID OF THE GLUE – LP (Pendu Sound) Good, non-standard BKLN comp album w/   a few “known” names ( Excepter , Daniel Carter ) and a very nice handle on how to sniff between the cracks. This packs a variety of “free rock” approaches into 12 inches of space that are tasty and surprisingly coherent.

71. SLITHER   – Cut Scales cassette (Fag Tapes) If a recording of two improvising horns in fug-mind gut interplay is not jazz then the form is dead. We say it is more alive than anyone in moldy fig land will ever know at this point. Slither is excellent reed street waste. Today’s jazz for today’s playboys. Heath Moerland still kills. (51 E. Willis St. #11 Detroit MI 48201)

72. L’OIE DE CRAVAN - Benoit Chaput’s wonderful Montreal-based press had another great year, finishing off w/   beautiful art book by Richard Deschenes, and a wild CD3 of sound-poems by Julie Doucet and Anne-Francoise Jacques.

 73. O’NANCY IN FRENCH – cassette (AQM) Weird lost artifact from the mid-80s. Two Japanese guys who perform by creating feedback w/   amplified oil barrels, then controlling it by gently touching the barrels at various points. First heard on John Duncan’s radio show back in the day. Now available and it’s boss.

74. DON’T NEED YOU – dir. Kerri Koch (Urban Cowgirl) Very good documentary on the history of the American Riot Grrrl scene, warts & all. Live footage & interviews, assembled w/   a very graceful touch.

75. ORPHAN FAIRYTALE – Anything by Eva , the most awesome living creature of Antwerp, is essential. Her Mother Mummy cassette on Bill Nace’s Open Mouth label, the Let’s Glow in the Dark cassette on Imvated and, most recently, the Big Bear cassette on Jelle Crama’s Puik label were astounding as was her duo LP Let It Be A Nightingale Then / Whose Words Are My Words- Meditation Vol. One w/   the mysterious Providence freako Mudboy on Cauliflower Dreams . Keep yr antennae tuned for more future wax and wonder. Other-worldly improvisatory sound dream at its newest and nicest.

76. DEATH CHANTS – As above, just about anything findable from Death Chants is worth yr while if into new underground American drone realizations from places Earthbound and skyward. The self released cassette duology called Ether Works is a good place to start. Yr best bet is to query Time-Lag Records as Nemo has pretty much anything extant on this horde ready to rip into yr space-brain.

77. NIGHT WOUNDS – Allergic to Heat LP (Woodsist) Nice, L.A.-based noise-spasmo trio, recorded live a the practice space and doing a cover of VOM’s “Electrocute Your Cock” in everything but name! Semi-harsh guitar-stun dynamics and some no-waved based simple ass rhythm charts.

78. ETHAN RILLY – The Nervous Party   (Ethan Rilly) Great little comic by Rilly, perhaps best known for the fliers he has done for Montreal’s Casa del Popolo & Sala Rossa clubs. This is a simple, beautifully rendered tale of medium slackness & drunken whatsis that’ll no doubt resonate w/   many readers.

79. IRENE MOON & CHRISTOPHER CPREK – History of Darker Florida Volume 2 cassette (arrosa zuria sarea) A collaborative effort from two people heavily involved w/   the long running Kalamazooo artist/theatre underground. At least we know Irene is. Cprek we don’t know too much about except his last name is kinda like Ptak in a way which is interesting. Regardless the varying disciplines and groupings of individuals from this scene have been releasing and performing consistently great actions for years and this under the radar release is, like most of their work, a cool as hell listen.

80. ATP NIGHTMARE BEFORE XMAS – The heaviest trailer park crack party of the decade. Thus far, anyway.