Retail Drugs
Moor Mother/Wooden Elephant/Beethoven Orchestra Bonn/Dirk Kaftan
G Lucas Crane
Die Spitz
Jung An Tagen
Abhorrent Expanse
Eric Wetherell
Authentically Plastic
Patriarchy
The Bug vs Ghost Dubs
Rip Van Winkle
purity olympics

 

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Retail Drugs Black Tie
‘There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.’ — Hayley Scott

 

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Moor Mother, Wooden Elephant, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Dirk Kaftan Don’t Die
‘For around a decade, Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa has been constructing sonically experimental and thematically radical works of art. As Moor Mother, the musician and poet’s art often offers searing takedowns of structures of oppression and on the imperialism, colonialism and brutality that has resulted in generations of Black trauma. She delves deep into this on her 2019 album Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, the sense of widespread socio-political discontent illustrated by the record’s brutal, auditory chaos. Now, in her latest release, Moor Mother reissues that same album as a brand new orchestrated edition, featuring the string quintet Wooden Elephant and The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, conducted by Dirk Kaftan, once again blurring the boundaries between genre and art to present something viscerally powerful.’ — Arusa Qureshi

 

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G Lucas Crane Vortex Technique
‘G Lucas warps, mashes, unspools, hacks, grinds and morphs his archive of cassettes and manipulated field recordings into a tapestry of lovecraftian horror-audio, where ghosts speak in machine language, crypto grannies cross state lines, petty jewels are heisted, dogs are licked, tubs are thumped, wizards are thrown from their carts, caves exude their swampy ichor, and a quivering host of live performances and radio remixes are finger-painted together like an adorable sound centipede.’ — Artsy

 

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Die Spitz I Hate When Girls Die
‘Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter are part of a generation that came of age in the shadows of endless consumption. Their songs gnash their teeth at that reality, the band trading instruments and vocals with abandon and a refusal to be contained in a singular genre box that mirrors the album’s restless themes. What emerges is a somewhat slippery and kaleidoscopic sound, chewing from punk, doom, grunge and shoegaze, but not sitting comfortably inside any of them. Their sound shifts tones, colours, and levels of intensity without losing momentum and it’s underpinned by cohesion as well as the sense that each track is part of a larger, unruly organism.’ — Diana Revell

 

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Jung An Tagen Revenge of the Speaker People
‘Stefan Juster aka Jung An Tagen is known for conceptual works and has a large back catalogue of intriguing ideas and sounds. Revenge of the Speaker People is another adventurous release, one which takes the Otoacoustic discoveries of David T. Kemp and applies them to a techno framework. OAEs are fragile and can collapse quickly when combined with other elements. Jung An Tagen’s success in combining OAEs with beats is therefore quite an achievement, without precedent.’ — Editions Mego

 

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Abhorrent Expanse Enter the Misanthropocene
‘Arriving from the Midwest by way of R’lyeh, Abhorrent Expanse‘s journey began with 2022’s Gateways to Resplendence, a stunning hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde improvised music. The title track opens the album with requisite madness. For a few seconds, dissonant death metal seems the order of the day. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that these guys are operating at a different level of madness than most. Where Imperial Triumphant are twisting their riffs into insane jazz configurations, Abhorrent Expanse are foregoing riffs altogether. Instead, they create horrifying atmospheres with pure improvisation. Blasting drums complement the stream-of-conscious guitar work the way free jazz is supposed to, only this time it’s drenched in metal.’ — Todd Manning

 

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Eric Wetherell: Sky (1975)
‘An eerie, unsettling benchmark for wyrd television in the 1970s, Sky was created by Doctor Who writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin. The series is widely acknowledged as one of several outstanding children’s dramas produced by HTV alongside Children Of The Stones, King Of The Castle and Into The Labyrinth. A brooding atmosphere is sustained across Sky‘s seven episodes, aided by Eric Wetherell’s stark score. Featuring harpsichord, glockenspiel, timpani, cello and primitive electronics, the music is tense and atonal, verging on experimental.’ — Buried Treasure

 

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Authentically Plastic Baksimba Simulacrum
‘Authentically Plastic’s sophomore album is a dense mass of oozing rhythms and viscous harmonies that surges in all directions at once. Its predecessor, 2022’s critically acclaimed ‘Raw Space’, had prioritized a level of intensity that Authentically Plastic dubbed “sonic flatness”, developed in response to Western art’s obsession with depth of field. ‘Rococo Ruine’ doesn’t go back to the drawing board, but refines and widens the concept even further – without deepening it. The potent, austere rhythms that grounded ‘Raw Space’ have been stabilized and shredded, pasted into more consistent repetitions that act as an anchor for Authentically Plastic’s surprising melodic hallucinations.’ — HAKUNA KULALA

 

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Patriarchy Good Boy
‘A lifelong Los Angeleno, Actually Huixzenga embodies both the hypersexualised spectacle of Hollywood and its seedy underbelly. Actually’s dad is Dr. Robert Huizenga, the doctor for O.J. Simpson during his murder trial and later Charlie Sheen’s physician. Her grandfather helped build the first atomic bomb, and her mom was a Playboy Playmate. Explains a lot.’ — Effective-Part-9419

 

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The Bug vs Ghost Dubs Down
‘Structured in a versus format with each artist trading blows, the album has a tension that makes its otherwise stone-faced music thrilling. If Machine was intended to make audiences physically uncomfortable, Martin’s tracks on Implosion use the same sonic devices for more introspective ends. Each of his contributions is named after a venue or nightclub, and these desolate tracks can feel like they’re reverberating through long-abandoned, decaying spaces. The music is lumbering, even by his standards, with basslines so belligerent they might trigger the lunk alarm.’ — Andrew Ryce

 

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Rip Van Winkle Prose Kaiser
‘Pollard leans harder into indie art territory here, with scratchy textures, jagged guitar lines, and smaller arrangements. The album thrives on spontaneity and grit—each track sounds like it was captured mid-thought, but with a clear melodic backbone. The instrumentation is rough-edged but never lazy, with snappy transitions and that unmistakable Pollard vocal swagger holding it all together.’ — The Fire Note

 

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purity olympics strange earnest noise music
‘aly eleanor is a minneapolis-based musician, editor, journalist, poet, zinemaker, theatre artist, and writer. her criticism, essays, and interviews have been featured in numerous publications. she makes music as purity olympics.’ — a.e.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, At its best, early MTV could be a total gateway to art and video artists and filmmakers. That was a boon. ** Carsten, Hey. I wouldn’t call Hitchcock’s films square or stale. But I do think he did something with Dali. As did Disney. The Disney/Dali stuff, which I don’t think was released officially but is out there on the tubes, is pretty terrific. It would be great to see you. My schedule will be dependent on when I’m traveling with ‘RT’, and I’m not sure about that yet, but chances are I will be around at least once in a while. We can check in about the timing later. Actually, back in the 60s when nudist colonies were a thing in the US, they were actually pretty non-sexual. Not that I ever went to one to verify that. There was one in the hills right behind my junior high school, and sometimes you could hear them chanting and going ‘Ommmm’ and stuff. ** Lucas, She was great. Really under-appreciated when she was alive. I used to go see her work in galleries, and people would say, ‘She’s Robert Longo’s girlfriend’, which I guess she was for a while, like that was the only reason her work was being shown. Even though her work is infinitely more interesting than Longo’s.  Everyone, New poem by Lucas here. Cool, I’ll read it later. Indeed about Myles. Congrats on the smokeless day. Hang in there. Right, stress can = canker sores. That makes sense. ** Hugo, Can one be too addicted to the uncanny? What’s the fallout? I do remember about your friend who’d been sex-trafficked. Crazy story. Well, true story. Thick as hell. My coffee is cold now, but it still works. ** HaRpEr //, Most people start with ‘Anti-Oedipus’, and it’s certainly great. As ‘Difference and Repetition’. But, yeah, you could find a topic of his that you’re into and start there. He covered a lot of bases. His writing on film is great, for one. That is complete nonsense that you have to be gay to really get my work. I think that’s total bullshit. If you’re gay, you have a different slant or focus point maybe, that’s all. A lot of the most exciting responses to my work have been from people who don’t identify as gay, whatever that means. Agreed about the term queer. I feel infinitely more comfortable under that rubric. ** kenley, Perfecting the application: I remember that phase not fondly. Only a day or two’s work, amazing. That waiting a week is probably a really good idea. Maybe not too much longer than that so you don’t lose your obsession. I edit in such a weird, complicated way, it’s hard to even describe in my head. For me, concision, tightness, removing anything that doesn’t absolutely need to be there or is beautiful/inventive enough to be important. Kinda like how I describe filmmaking, yes. Sounds very familiar. Interesting about how you located your singing voice. I had a friend who sang in a Screamo band, and he just went for broke and didn’t take any caution, and now he talks like a how old chainsmokers talk in movies. Cool. Your singing voice is more than sufficiently powerful and intense, in that video at least. ** Uday, Excellent timing: snowstorm. You’re in that class that Zac and I are Zoom visiting? Whoa. I won’t ask you to hold up a sign like at an airport that says Uday. Unless that strikes your fancy. Wild! ** jeestun, Very beautifully put. I have a very hard time imagining non-readers’ life trajectories too, even though I do have a fair number of friends who haven’t opened a book since high school. Sauna, nice. I like them, but after about ten minutes in one I get antsy. Relaxing is not one of my specialties. But the nakedness is nice. Or others’ nakedness at least. Blahblah, enjoy what the swirling water occasions to the max. ** Okay. Today I made you one of my gig posts starring some tracks I’ve been finding interesting of late. See if that occasions any mind melds, and I’ll see you tomorrow.