Maksymenko, Michael - “BusinessCide ” - [ReR Usa]

Retrospective (1977-89) of this crazed drummer/vocalist, who is either Russian, Swedish, or perhaps both. His music is an energetic sort of Beefheart-inspired dada-blues-rock played by some technically incredible musicians on guitar, bass, and drums. Maksymenko???s singing style is mostly talk/yelling and his drumming is hyperactive with an element of silliness in just the right places. Yes, silliness; no question this man has a sense of humor. Tracks 1-8: his young Trout Mask Replica-worshipping trio Kr??ldjursanstalten, based in Sweden. Tracks 9-11: from his 1985 solo record. Tracks 12-14: Crazy Backwards Alphabet, the amazing project that teamed Maksymenko with (for the most part) inventive guitarist Henry Kaiser and the bass player???s bass player Andy West. Guitarist Bob Adams and drummer John ???Drumbo??? French are also in the CBA mix. This is not easy material to digest, as it is full of hairpin turns and manic playing; in fact this CD is somewhat exhausting to listen to all in one sitting. But there are many delights to be found in this man???s strange musical world. So check this out.

Ex-Cocaine / Yellow Swans [coll] - [Not Not Fun]

Ex-Cocaine, from Montana, send you on a magical, mystical mind peyote desert psych trip. Instrumental, psychedelic moods. Sounds of banging bongos, tapping drums, sifting cymbals and soft droning electric guitars. The second track is a take of the Meat Puppets ‘Sexy Music’. Floaty rolling hills with mellow male vocals.
Yellow Swans trick you into having a magical, mystical trip, but halfway through it turns sour. Feedbacking, moaning, loudness, noise - but not in the overwhelming static walls of noise way. More of a metal wind tunnel, with constant wheels shifting and turning.
Artwork by Maya Miller of Religious Knives.

Gay Beast / Twin [coll] - [Saf Records]

Gay Beast says: Music for Gay Bosses who use their gayness to get more out of their gay employees. Two dudes and a chick drummer from Minneapolis. Guitar & Roland keys. Very angular, along the lines of Numbers, Erase Errata, etc…male vox.
Twin is a duo from Olympia, and they have the whole grrl femme sound going. High female vox, guitar and drums. They go by the names of Ghost & Ribs. Rough fuzzy guitar, a little bit prog-rocky, with a few metal riffs. Special guest Allie on guitar also. Fades out!

Quintana Roo/Family Underground [coll] - [Not Not Fun]

Family Underground hails from Denmark, while Quintana Roo is from Eagle Rock I think. Originally pressed for their West Coast tour that fell through. Two sides of drone-scapes. FU soars through clouds, sounding like a jet-powered mosquito. Low hums and buzzes intertwined. Quintana Roo is more like a deep sea exploration, with moaning whales and slow moving frozen ice.
Limited to 300 copies. BTW - I like it at 33, more droney that way.

Ackerman, Blaster Al ??? I Am Drunk {Ehse}

Blaster Al Ackerman pumped out bizarre mail art pieces starting in the 1970???s that caught Genesis P-Orridge???s attention enough to inspire the song ???Hamburger Lady.????? I Am Drunk is Blaster???s spoken word performances entailing strangeness & intrigue on weirdo subjects.?? The Crab side has two cuts.?? One tackles a long but kinda hilarious story about how he got to be called the Crab following an incident where turns in bogus job application under an assumed name to jobs he had no experience for & fucking with the job interviewer.?? Second cut deals with his Pepper Young translations of works with a bar of soap in his mouth.?? The Gobbling Side is a black humored & randomly strange poetry live poetry reading of the John Eaton recommendations.?? It doesn???t seem that funny though the audience seems to get the jokes.?? Perhaps they???re catching the visual aspect of the performance.?? Pretty weird stuff, but I dig the Crab side way more.

FCC:?? THE GOBBLING SIDE!!!

Intelligence, The - Debt & ESP {Plastic Idol}

Incredibly catchy lo-fi Beatles-esque post punk noise pop outta Seattle.?? Lars Finberg of A-Frames kick started this bitch into a gruesome go go groove on Side A.?? Flip the record over & Side B gets that Brotherhood of Electricity in & out speed fluctuation or a slowed down heat warped Strate Coats.?? It???s kinda has that queasy manic ???I???m gonna lose control??? vibe like the Ramones song Psycho Therapy but it???s more cracked.?? Goddamned good if you ask me & primed for sick action.?? Limimted to 600 copies & mastered by Weasel Walter.

[coll]: Octis / Child Abuse {Forge Records}

Child Abuse: Ultra NYC spazz heads tweakin??? keys, drilling drums & going fuckin??? balls out bonkers. Assaulting, rhythmically chaotic & rippin???. Strange, cuz the first cut is this flipped instrumental freak out. Cool! But, the second cut finds supercharged grim reaper synth explosions, grizzly death bass & demonic black industrial howls & electronic mayhem. Both cuts fuckin??? slay big time!

Octis: Remember when your 8-bit Nintendo video cartridge froze up & got caught in some fucked loop? Mick Barr does that shit on guitar & somehow gets this malicious black metal atom bomb attack going. Avant terrorism & double kick drum machine gun fires behind his precision riffage. 5 short fused megaton blasts show no mercy & take things into an Orthrelm.

Blanketship ??? Teen Sounds {Gigante Sound}

Blanketship (a.k.a. Jared Blum) is a sucker for experi-mentalized sound collages running the sample gamut & plunging it into a pop mix.?? He lives in San Francisco & digs KFJC & WFMU.?? He???s also played on WFMU too so it was no wonder I thought this could be influenced by John Schnall???s soundtrack cut ups.?? Whether it is or ain???t Blanketship???s got diverse manipulations playing strangely together.?? It can delve into warped dark psychedelics, it scores like some soundtrack, and it lounges & lolls out funny record cuts & conversations.?? You???ll catch subtle drop-ins like the Jetson???s doorbell or Kurt Russell from Big Trouble in Little China, screaming HA!?? Well, that???s what I get.?? There???s lotsa fun sound samples, grooves & eeriness all over.?? It most closely resembles a deranged collaborative kooky score by Tipsy, DJ Female Convict Scorpion, M???Lumbo, Twink and Frank Comstock.?? Fuckin??? weird but wildly imaginative & extremely well done!

Death In June ??? The Rule Of Thirds A-Library CD {NER}

Douglas P(earce) emerges with this New European Recording called the Rule of Thirds.?? Generally, this rule optimizes pleasing aesthetics, emphasizes off center points of interest and also works to minimize excessive empty space.?? Seems that Death In June does precisely this throughout each song.?? The militaristic masked one strums out acoustic erstwhile lovelies accompanied by reverb drizzled hand claps, crepuscular bird chirps, and calmly detached & almost deadpan harmonies.?? Pearce???s lyricism occasionally harkens to his early Crisis (U.K.) days delving into the politics of bloody war though he leans more towards halcyon yet bittersweet reflections upon God, religion, self-reflection, romantic criticisms & more.?? Death In June has always seemed to evince serenely stripped down & sentimental neofolk alongside tenaciously sensible concepts.??

Living Is Hard [coll] - [Honest Jon’s]

[coll] Living Is Hard: West African Music in Britain, 1927-1929
33-1/3

Much as ???Race Records??? in the US were opportunities for record companies to pursue niche markets by recording and promoting early blues artists, this Honest Jons collection compiles 78 rpm releases from the Zonophone label in the UK drawn from their recordings of West African immigrants. The musical styles here focus on specific regions of Africa, and the promo materials in the sleeve show how carefully Zonophone was courting the West African communities, with a huge catalog of releases in specific dialects. Recorded some eighty years ago, this lively African folk music performed in the UK draws from the styles of these immigrant’s homelands, while also considering life in the ???Modern World???. The liner notes, although fascinating regarding details of the Zonophone label and some of the key African artists of the time, are not strong on specific track information, but translations are provided for a number of tracks.

Uw Hypotheekavies ??? Nature Or Nurture {Beta-lactum Ring}

Nurture these three Netherlands brothers (also in Girlfriends) who needle at your noddle & nerves whilst having drum seizures & panic attacks on guitar.?? Their nature is spastic & untamed shredded rock & tonal discord.?? A thrashy improvised avant punk vibe plus a stylized maximum aggro jazz epilepsy.?? Feedback & freakouts aren???t uncommon during these instrumental outbursts.?? Perhaps if you Melt Banana over John Zorn???s DNA the resulting creature could be cultured on Anthony Braxton or Nels Cline before undergoing Battles.?? Go for the gusto guitar spazz!?? Limited to 400 copies & mastered by Legendary Pink Dot???s Erik Drost and Raymond Steeg

Shit and Shine ??? Kuss Mich, Meine Liebe {Load}

Try polishing this turd & it???ll explode straight into your face smearing feral feces across your chapped lips, diseased gums, & inside the crevices between your tartar build up & slimy yellow choppers.?? Go ahead & smooch your lovey dovey after that sexy scat fest & see what you???ve been missing.?? Shit and Shine wanna show you how to pipe the shit outta the U.K. & unleash unholy excrement.?? This starts off simple enough; a rhythmic intestinal cleansing wrought with slightly uncomfortable bouts of mild groaning diarrhea.?? Suddenly an inflamed anus blows out bowel obliterating black blood sphincter metal.?? Slather on infected sloppy mucus coating & you get this septic Pepto Bismol colon clenching enema.?? Its noisy & violently aggressive episodes subside into experiments in eerie crepitating flatus.?? Hold your nose & hop head first into this glimmering septic mess.?? (QUICK REVIEW: occasional bursts of black metal riffage, noise rock with squelchy bombs & speaker blasting bass, plus weirdo rhythmic experimental heavy darkness.)

FCC:?? #7 (FUCK @ - 8:15)

Kolkhoze Printanium - “Kolkhoznitsa ” - [D’Autres Cordes]

Not an easy CD to describe musically, but that???s no surprise as forward-thinking musical hybrids are D???Autres Cordes??? stock in trade. For the sake of a rough reference point we???ll go with that old standby jazz-rock; in this case, however, we get a complex modern version of it en Fran??ais. Keyboardist Paul Brousseau composed everything here and appears to be the leader of this quintet, an ensemble perfectly suited to his material; first-rate musicians playing compositions that are anything but predictable. We hear exploratory world-jazz that recalls Weather Report, angular Zu-style thrash, free jazz blowing over pulsing electronics, a dash of prog-rock drama??? a little bit of everything, basically. Weird samples and voices spice things up even further. I like it all, but I???m especially fond of the passages where the band gets to tearing things up. The drummer and bassist in particular bring a hard, brutal edge to the band when they get going. Overall, this CD is quite an adventure and well worth checking out, if you hadn???t already guessed that.

Tenney, James - “Selected Works: 1961-1969″ - [New World]

James Tenney (1934-2006) was deeply entrenched in all things musical && stochastic && perceptual && electronic && American. His star will continue to rise, to the point that generations from now he???ll be recognized as a pioneer if not in composition, then certainly in compositional attitudes and theory. This is a reissue of a 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact Recordings release. To give you an idea of Tenney???s influence, here are just some of the KFJC-friendly names responsible for the original remastering and release: Tom Erbe, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, and Larry Polansky.

Collage #1 (???Blue Suede???): Tape collage of the signature Elvis number put together at the University of Illinois in 1961. At this time, the only places in the world you could produce something like this were San Francisco (Subotnick), Illinois (Hiller), Columbia/Princeton (Sessions/Babbitt/Luening/Ussachevsky), Koln (Stockhausen/Eimert), and Milan (Berio/Maderna). Like spinning a radio dial in a city populated only with Blue Suede-airing radio stations, some of them playing with echo, some in reverse. This has a nice dramatic arc to it, and it sounds sweet.

Analog #1 (???Noise Study???)
Dialogue
Phases (for Edgard Varese)
Music for Player Piano
Ergodos II (for John Cage)
The above five pieces are the result of Tenney???s 2.5 year tenure as composer at Bell Labs in New Jersey — as the first composer to turn to and dedicate oneself to computer music! Follow Polansky???s extensive liner notes carefully and in these 5 pieces you can trace the development of both Max Mathews??? MUSIC IV program???s abilities and Tenney???s stochastic processes. Try to listen along as Tenney stops defining parameters like timbre, pitch, and timing absolutely, instead giving them statistical values of mean, range, and standard deviation. This also happens moving up hierarchically, so things like phrases and sequences and even entire pieces have their own such freedoms.

It???s of note that Tenney had a well documented relationship with player piano king Nancarrow (see the liner notes to the Wergo complete Nancarrow studies release, and also Tenney???s piece Spectral CANON for CONLON), but the piece included was punched before they had known of each other.

Fabric for Che: Inspired by the sounds of tunnel traffic, this sounds like a motorcycle racing diary. Lots of whizzing and noise and possibly stereo effects?

For Ann (rising): clever application of Risset scales results in shimmering Tinkerbell lights. Let your mind wander… marvel how your focus fades between following tones up the scale and the illusion as a whole. Strangely optimistic.

–Cujo, KFJC, June 2008

Saariaho, Kaija - “Graal Theatre / Solar / Lichtbogen” - [Ondine]

Welcome to the fiercely delicate world of Saariaho???s music. This is KFJC???s first addition of the Finn???s music (and our first from Ondine). Given her love of mixing acoustics and electronics nurtured by an early 1980s stint at IRCAM, there may be more worthy additions yet to come. I believe it???s also our first add from a ???spectral??? composer.

Graal theatre. A violin concerto originally written for Gidon Kremer, so you know this is serious business. In this version, the violin part is intact and tackled by John Storgards, while the orchestra is pared down to chamber orchestra. I have heard Kaija giving a few of her works this kind of treatment, including the Nymphea quartet. Clearly, it makes the music more marketable. Anyhow, it???s a great piece and the tumultuous violin part engages well, especially in the 2^nd part.

Solar. It???s beautiful, but nothing engaged me as I listened. Even the liner notes skip over it.

Lichtbogen. A work based on the results of computer analysis of a particular cello harmonic (this is the ???spectral??? element), but equally inspired by lichtbogen (Swedish for aurora borealis). It???s scored for nine musicians and live electronics, but the integration is practically seamless. There is alien beauty here, fragile and icy. The chiming glockenspiel stays with you long after the coda.

–Cujo, KFJC, June 2008

Monkey Power Trio - “Things Get Ugly ” - [Pochahontas Swamp Machine]

MPT???s legendary 1998 session, and their fourth attempt at being a band. Songwise, the two winners are: A1 ???You Gotta Have Hope???, probably MPT???s best-known song; an uplifting number with a positive message; it also features that recorder sound that immediately identifies this as a MPT endeavor. B1 ???I Spit a Germ??? is a sort of no-wave version of a jazz poetry piece, with spare instrumentation (sax/bass/drums) and vocalist Mark telling it (and yelling it) like it is. I like those two tracks a lot. The other songs??? well, ???Simple Genetic Mutation??? and ???Bionic Liver??? are very short and probably wisely so; and the less said about ???Fatty Rocks??? the better.

Monkey Power Trio - “eMPTy ” - [Pochahontas Swamp Machine]

???Our prettiest songs ever???, boasts the outer sleeve of this, the result of this one-day-a-year band???s third hour (1997) as a band. Side A features occasional vocalist Matt narrating a desperate tale in which he yells like his sister and honks out some crazy sax to get the point across; all of that over a pounding beat and a morass of deranged feedback. One of my fave MPT tracks for sure. Side B really does have pretty songs, both sung by Mark; the first one compares a loved one to insect repellent, but in a good way. The second song is about a guy whose departed lover is still maddeningly present in his mind, as he muses over various household objects. Genius.

Nigeria Disco Funk Special [coll] - [Soundway Records]

[coll] Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound of the Underground Lagos Dancefloor, 1974-1979

Another Soundway collection of Nigerian releases from the 70s, this time concentrating on 70s Funk, with the “Disco” in the title referring to the place, not the musical genre. These are mostly longer tracks that what we heard on Nigeria Special Part 1, as these tracks were from albums rather than singles. There are influences from the US funk scene, with some keyboard touches that wouldn’t be out of place on a late 70s Parliament/Funkadelic track, and the Meters are another reference here (Jay-U Experience’s “Some More”). Most of these tracks immediately lock into a groove and don’t let up, perfect for the dance floor and a great palate cleanser for radio. As is the case with Soundway, ample documentation is included for labels, dates, and some of the original sleeve art.

Hafler Trio - “Being a Firefighter Isn’t Just About Squirting Water ” - [Important Records]

The Hafler Trio is Andrew M. McKenzie from England. This release is a 20 minute long journey through frozen space. Sounds as though you’ve halted in the middle of a flower garden, remembering a thought of your youth. Wind chimes and light glares bang and clatter in slow motion, resonating tones and feedbacking bowls. Droney warm winds. Meditating electronic psychoacoustic soundscapes.

Ratkje, Maja S.k. - “River Mouth Echoes ” - [Tzadik]

Maja Ratkje is a vocalist and composer based in Norway. Also part of the group, Fe-Mail. This release has pieces recorded from over the past 10 years. Electronic noise, beautiful vocal insanities, classical sounding accordians, vivacious violins…very amazing!
From Tzadik: “Her work ranges from orchestral and chamber works to electronics, improvisation and creative combinations of all of the above. This special collection of Maja???s work showcases several aspects of this composer???s unique and intense approach to sound and features two of her most personal chamber works along with electronic and electro-acoustic works for voice, saxophone and more.”