Thursday, April 23, 2009

PHILIP SANDERSON-CARRIAGE RETURN-SNATCH TAPES 1979-1999, 2009, UK (WEB-ONLY RELEASE)




The latest missive from Snatch Tapes/Storm Bugs mastermind Philip Sanderson, whom Jim has covered at length previously via posts of his Telephone Music, Through A Telephone Box Darkly and Verdenskang projects is a web-only release of gobsmackingly great surrealist clusterfuckery refashioned from vivisected fragments sourced from the entirety of the Snatch tapes archive. Swarming subterranean electronic malevolence bleeds into antiquated Hauntological ghostings that are then sheared at right angles by a Cupol-like and hermetically bleak species of minimal synthiness. An apex of queasy delirium for your predilection, it can be found by heading over to Sanderson's site Here

PTA'S-A LONG GOOD-BYE, 8" E.P., 1982, JAPAN






Long forgotten Japanese crew who issued a handful of odd sized and odd sounding vinyls on the Cragale imprint, a label (and, I believe, record store) associated with the Minor Club that birthed so much of the 80's Japanese underground (think Fushitsusha, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Kousokuya etc) that would go on to be associated with the PSF label and it's a scene that The PTA's deserve to be considered more than a footnote of. The A side establishes a sexily seasick post punk saunter with cod-ethnic overtones and weaves snake-y strands of sax through the results to riveting ends while the B-side's lays out some Idiot O'Clock-like post-Velvets motion and rubs it against the grain of Phew style art pop eccentricity.

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CECCARELLI/CHANTEREAU/PADOVAN/PEZIN-C.C.P.P., LP, 1975, FRANCE



Hard burning funky French fusion from a unit featuring occasional Jean Pierrre Massiera consort and frequent period session musician Andre Ceccarelli, here joined by several Francois Bernheim collaborators. Think Hugh Hopper circa Hoppertunity Box, Isotope and Gilgamesh, but juiced up by a lubricious horn charting funkiness in the mode of Airto Fogo, the whole creating an irresistible sleazy listening experience that whips up an unctuous lather worthy of the best of the late 70's Yugoslavian scene. The link for this died on another blog a while back, but as this has been soundtracking the better part of the last several days for both my VDO bandmate and moi, I felt compelled to enlighten those among you not yet hepped to this gem.

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ZIMMERMAN-S/T, 10", 2001 (RECORDED: 1987), NETHERLANDS






Quite fine minimal synth moves from Dutchman Aldomir Zimmerman that does a bang up job (despite the worryingly late date for this sorta thing) of carrying on from the aesthetic stances set forth a few years earlier by his precursors in Van Kaye & Ignit and Ende Schneafliet, while also tacking sharply at times in the direction of the smirky zaniness of Swiss Casio-poppers Guyer's Connection.

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SOLIS LACUS-S/T, LP, 1975, BELGIUM





Supple and subtly devastating jazz rock that seems to float a few feet off the ground from this offshoot of Placebo, who were effectively Belgium's answer to Nucleus, something that could equally be said about Solis Lacus as well. Thats the sort of factoid guaranteed to assure pricked ears and plastered grins in my social orbit and these cats make it all just sound so bloody effortless; their liquidly expanding and contracting rhythmic sense, elegiac Ian Carr-like trumpet phrasing and overall aerated Rhodes-washed atmospherics causing this at different times to glance off of both Transit Express and Hal Galper as well. Monster caliber.


note: pictured are front covers of both pressings of this album.

Note: link removed as this has now been reissued on Heavenly Sweetness.

NIMAL-DIS TANZ, CD, 1991, VARIOUS



Following my post of this multinational R.I.O. unit's second album "Voix De Surface", here's their gorgeous swan song form the following year, the line-up here narrowing down to a three piece of Bratko Bibic of Begnagrad, Momo Roussel of Switzerland's inimitable Debile Menthol and Pippin Barnett (Orthotonics, No Safety etc) who was a principal mover on the 80's/90's Downtown NY scene. The jubilantly cockeyed strain of R.I.O. at hand here folds together folkloric elements and art rock eccentricity in a manner first mapped by Fred Frith circa Gravity and Speechless. It's a faultless template that still holds sway with contempo R.I.O. merchants like Alamaailman Vasarat and Daau and it's masterfully articulated here. Thanks to an anonymous blog friend for this treasure!

NOTE: both links went down shortly after this was posted, so evidently the band did not care to have this one shared...

Monday, April 13, 2009

MATT CASTILLE & BARRICK WITTMANN-MUTTER IDJOT 2008/CONSULT THE CREATURE OF FLATWOODS, 2 TRACK WEB-EXCLUSIVE E.P., 2009, USA/GERMANY




Though our intention had originally been to withhold the release of new material by both Vas Deferens Organization (the band that I'm in) or it's satellite projects until after the impending release of the debut album by our new band together with Ariel Pink (Shits And Giggles, formal release details of which will be spelled out in the near future), suddenly, the idea of unleashing this particular piece of the puzzle into the bitstream unannounced and apropos of nothing seemed oddly irresistible. At hand is a two track web-only exclusive E.P. comprising material by Vas Deferens Organization's Matt Castille, working in conjunction with his eleven year old German nephew (yes, you read that correctly), who became inspired to collaborate with Matt under the direct influence of Felix Kubin's early teenage misadventures in Neue Deutsche Welle tape culture that was retroactively documented on his Tetchy Teenage Tapes CD and the Die Egozentrischen 2 LP, inclinations toward acts of artistic oddity evidently being a trans-generational impulse within the Castille clan.



Get it as .wav files by going to the download page of Vas Deferens Organization's site
Here

V/A-ALPHABETICAL UPLOADS OF WHACKED OUT SINGLES PT. 13





THE HOMOSEXUALS-BIGGER THAN THE NUMBER BUT MISSING THE DOT, 1979?, UK
The second single from this left field D.I.Y. art pop institution spends 2/3 of it's running time (split over a side and a half) erecting "You're Not Moving The Way You're Supposed To", a crisply tensile post punk exoskeleton garlanded with Andy Gill style guitar razor wire and about as close as this tribe of oddniks ever hewed to accepted post punk signifiers, while the purely breathtaking "Prestel" fills out the remainder with something initially akin to the naif off-the-cuff charm of The Instant Automatons only to unceremoniously deluge the proceedings with a liquid sideswipe of dissociative dream logic pop fracture that has to be heard to be believed.





THE HOUSEKEEPERS-HE'S NOT GOING TO REGISTER/SOLAR FERRIS WHEEL, 1984, USA
Impishly skewed art pop whimsy in the spirit of Tin Huey and Rick Potts from this long forgotten Chicago unit, and amusingly enough given the above, released on Homosexual Records.






H23 NUMBER TWO-MAGAZINE + 7" COMPILATION, 1990, USA
A lurid swath of sex dungeon ambiance from Sleep Chamber middlingly initiates an otherwise stellar assortment of experimental electronic weirdness from artists floating on the periphery of post-industrial culture: Kim Cascone/PGR turning in a fathoms deep drift of what would be called isolationism if it came out five years later, Floating Concrete Octopus (aka Miekal And and Liz Was, two long term fixtures and organizers of the 80's/90's marginal fringe mail art/tape culture scene) unleashing a Shaking Ray Levis-like bout of cartoonish squeak-bonk improv seemingly fashioned from slinkies and party favors and Randy Greif closing out the single in a beautifully seasick symphony of detourned fourth-world-isms and devolving vocal loops.


Track listing:
Sleep Chamber-No Air, No Way (Dreams On A Respirator)
Kim Cascone/PGR-The Spring Of Ruined Days
Floating Concrete Octopus-A Cliff Dweller's Escape
Randy Greif-I'm A Bat






HUGO KLANG-GRAND LIFE FOR FOOLS & IDIOTS/BEAT UP THE OLD SHACK, 1982 + WHEEL OF FAT/MOUSE RUNNER, 1982, AUSTRALIA
Nerve shattering art damage from this brilliant Australian outfit fronted by legendary post punk mover Ollie Olsen (Whirlywirld, Too Fat To Fit Through The Door, Orchestra Of Skin & Bone etc) with a sound pitched precisely between Lemon Kittens deformed hermeticism on one hand and Gallon Drunk cum Birthday Party drunkenly lurching post punk trashiness on the other.





HYBRID KIDS-D'YA THINK I'M SEXY?/CATCH A F-FALLING STAR, 1979, UK
Fissionably overdriven and definitive alternate mixes of Residential lunacy (original versions appear on "A Collection Of Classic Mutants", posted elsewhere on MS) from British mad hatter Morgen Fisher, whose work both under the guise of The Hybrid Kids and under his own identity I've covered extensively in the past.





HYBRYDS-OCTAHEDRON, ONE-SIDED 7", 1988, BELGIUM
Drivingly rhythmic and fairly potent ritual post-industrial sounds from this Belgian group's early era, taking a rather more aggressive stance here than they'd manifest on their equally excellent later work, which I've posted previously.





IDOL DEATH-NEW LESSON/STICKY DEATH, 1980, UK
A beautifully diseased sounding acid mindfuck sonically situated somewhere between The Four Plugs and Metabolist from this queasily lurching and effected-to-the-nines British outfit.





IK-FINAL FREEDOM/I-IK-I-TRIBE, 1982, UK
wonderfully ungainly and down-in-the-mouth sounding art warped British post punk action with an akin to the early era of The Shockheaded Peters (though this proceeds it) modified by a more shambolic D.I.Y. approach reminiscent of Metropak.






IM NAMEN DES VOLKES-S/T E.P., 1981, GERMANY
Stripped, frosty and engagingly rinky-dink sounding minimal synth-y Neue Deutsche Welle, with a sound pitched somewhere between Eurocheque and Keine Ahnung, though without the giddiness of the former or the beefiness of the latter.



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Thursday, April 9, 2009

JPM AND CO.-PHANTASMES, LP, 1977, FRANCE




Following on from my posts of his Les Chats Renaissance and Visitors LP's and Jim's post of his Horrific Child album, here's one more key piece of the puzzle from the mad gallic genius that is Jean Pierre Massiera, here laying out the deliciously wrong and exquisitely questionable cosmic disco template he'd carry to a different set of unforgettable ends in the course of his work with Venus Gang, Rockets and Visitors in their second incarnation. A confounding cavalcade of luridly swelling disco strings, caterwauling choral prog interludes in the post-Magma spacy/smurfy mode of Elohim, horn-y funk charting, queasy diversions into syrupy balladeering, and continuous and fabulously appropos-of-nothing applications of his trademarked histrionic grotesquerie, here manifesting itself in as headscratching a fashion as ever (snarly vocoded spieling interspersed with nazi rally excerpts cross-cut by zapping electronics, anyone?). Oh and watch out for the rapping midget and the smoking penis. They'll get you every time...

Get it via Rapidshare here

***NOTE: THERE'S A MIRRORED MEDIAFIRE LINK IN THE COMMENT FIELD***  

MUZ-BANANA IN PORTUGUESE, CD, 1999, USA






The second solo album by my Vas Deferens Organization bandmate Matt Castille, Banana In Portuguese was conceived amid a rotating and rather sordid cast of characters that were occupying Matt's orbit circa 1999, the year following VDO's temporary split, when Matt headed back to New Orleans from Dallas and assembled this Frankenstein-ian creation and I hooked up with Joel Zoch and formed Sound. Following directly on from the maximalist aesthetic stance of VDO's Drug Bubbles and accompanied in part by our former VDO bandmate Doug Ferguson (aka Frankie Teardrop, also of Yeti and Ohm), Banana In Portuguese finds Matt burrowing ever deeper down the "All channels open...24 hour alert" rabbit hole we'd pried open with Drug Bubbles; here opening portals into successive universes of drug smeared menace and/or inspired idiocy, all invariably leading to a different species of so-wrong-they're-right banana peel wrong-footings that'll leave you desperately in search of your departed equilibrium.

Get it Here

SCIENCE FICTION-TERRIBLE LIZARDS, LP, 1980, USA




This cryptic and little known experimental electronic outfit unfurl two purgatorial and viscous side long drifts of surrealism-charged and cyclically inclined smeary/bleary oleaginous atmospherics, the eponymously titled A side's tenebrous tone and entropic structure both predating and foreshadowing the work of everyone from The Loop Orchestra to The Caretaker to Tom Recchion to Philip Jeck, while side B's "...City Of God" grafts spare acid guitar squall, female vocal loops and a two note piano motif onto this amorphousness for a sound midway between Richard Youngs' Advent and distended 70's French electronic rock in the mode of Fluence and Ilitch. I know one of the world's top collectors who rates this in his top 5. I won't go quite that far, but this IS as eerily prescient and vibe-rich a document of sub-underground weirdity as your likely to encounter for some time, regardless.

Get it via Rapidshare here

DEUTSCHER KAISER-TEMPO! TEMPO!, 10", 1982, GERMANY





Insanely groovy and stupidly fun mutant funkified Neue Deutsche Welle that yokes diamond cut femme vox electropop in the mode of their contemporaries in Originalton and Die Dominas to a slick and elastically percolating chassis directly descended from B.E.F.'s "Groove Thang".

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VIBRACATHEDRAL ORCHESTRA-MMICD, CD, 2001, UK




More ecstatic swarms and glazed harmonic garlands of freeform freakout acid love from this long lived and deservedly revered British trance jam oufit who continue a tradition of psychotropically enhanced third mind improv strategies first deployed by the likes of Taj Mahal Travellers, Parsson Sound and The Theater Of Eternal Music.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

SORRY FOR THE LACK OF ACTIVITY...NEW POSTS COMING ON THURSDAY...

This has been the most relentlessly busy several weeks for me of the past year or so and unfortunately, it's really taken it's toll on my ability to get Mutant Sounds posts up in a timely fashion. By way of remedying this, in addition to my next five posts being up circa Thursday night, I'll have an additional installment of my posts of singles from the vdoandsound archives coming your way over the weekend.