KFJC 89.7FM

Presley, Vincent & The Secret Creeps – “Vol. 1” – [Secret Records]

Ms. Conduct   9/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

If you weren’t weird or couldn’t feel it before, this album will convert you. Sing any of these songs in a public setting (while gently rocking yourself) and you will most likely lose friends and find yourself banned from the space. That should not prevent you from enjoying these songs. A slow dive into the wreckage. Uncanny earth reverberations. Submarine stealth protocols. Nefarious agents. Olden times goth-y feels. Yay, darkness!

Body Shame – “Quiet Pills” – [Bento Records]

Ms. Conduct   9/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

A crooning evacuation from the tumult of embodied life. Noisy, but not arhythmic. Calamitous, but not abjectly so.  Lulling vocalics overhang the distortive alarms in an autonomic nervous dream glitch.  The pills aren’t quiet, after all, but maybe that’s the ask?

De Bons En Pierre – “Card Short of a Full Deck” – [Dark Entries]

Ms. Conduct   9/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

Demented dark. Ghoul voiced. Motivated by infection. Succumbing to its burnout rave-mind reduced to a crappy xerox reproduction. There’s subtle fat whimsy on some tracks like ‘Le R​â​le du M​â​le Alpha’ which might sound baddest at 45RPM. At times dance haunt-y post-apocalyptic jams. What will you do with the monster after you’ve summoned it directly from the lairs of hell on your shatter-screened Android? 

Code Industry – “Structure” – [Dark Entries]

Ms. Conduct   9/15/2024   12-inch, A Library

Real Skinny Puppy skins (feels). Rats-against-the-race style, but instead, in confrontation with racism, media evils and vain nationalisms from the perspective of Black industrial and EBM artistry from Detroit. Cold gray color palate with probably some neon flares. One could argue tankin’ turquoise and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong (or right). Pairs well with the confusing euphoric existential despair of sunny autumn evenings and expensive French grandma perfume (surprisingly). Beat along the greens with color track ‘Ail’ (recommended). Synth and sample-worthy dystopian rider musique.

Moss, Jessica – “Galaxy Heart” – [Constellation]

Ms. Conduct   8/7/2023   A Library, CD

The second installment of Moss’s isolatory deliberations composed, performed and self-produced in 2020’s cloud of uncertainty, these works explicate existential peril & promise. The topos of cosmic and terrestrial worlds enfold in an affectively balanced register of agony and resilience while revealing through sonic lyricism the paradox of opposing conditions resigned to coexist. With post-classical inheritance, Galaxy Heart finds a mature synthesis between improvisation and composition proving a channel for the uncanny sublime.  The album bears the signatory style of Montreal’s Constellation label with collaborations from Jim White (of Dirty Three) and contrebassist Thierry Amar (of Godspeed You! Black Emperor).

Mono No Aware – “Mujoo” – [Hands]

Ms. Conduct   8/7/2023   A Library, CD

Inspired by the concept of impermanence, Mujoo is a boisterous, raw and rowdy sonic transmission for listeners with fiery assholes that just can’t sit still. Departing from rhythm’n’noise conventions to embrace the industrial techno experiment more freely, this plutonic joyride sings like an amphetaminic robot at risk of total meltdown. Hell is part of the agenda for this album, but in a fun/riotous manner where listeners grow cybernetic titanium appendages and conspire to wreck heavy matter magnificently.

Porcelain Hammer – “The Dreamer’s Wheel” – [Neoteric Music]

Ms. Conduct   8/7/2023   A Library, Cassette

An ensemble of baritone guitar, violin, and misc. percussion elevates the dreamsongs of Ben Miller as he transitions from a solo career of multiphonic guitar work to sonic collaboration. Porcelain Hammer constructs an urbane dreamscape that merges psychedelia with art noise and global influences oscillating between the registers of hypnogogic submersion and fever dream.

Living Room – “Hang Onto the Gold Jim” – [Rural Isolation Project]

Ms. Conduct   8/7/2023   A Library, CD

Prompted to compose a review of this release in my namesake style, ChatGPT scribed: “Ms. Conduct here, bringing you a scintillating review of an album that has left me utterly spellbound: Hold Onto the Gold Jim by the enigmatic band Living Room. Released just last week, this 12-track masterpiece has me bobbing my head and tapping my feet like there’s no tomorrow.

The album kicks off with a powerful anthem, ‘Golden Days,’ immediately setting the tone for the nostalgic journey we are about to embark on. The lead vocalist’s hauntingly soulful voice takes center stage, backed by a tight-knit ensemble of musicians who display an impressive range of talent throughout the record.”

Ms. Conduct writes, “Soundscapes from a Rust Belt city shattered by an opioid epidemic and conspiratorial politics soundtracked: industrial distortion meets screamo vocalics in a blighted family sonic discourse. Downtown importations merry make the melodic machine, especially on the shard bounce track ‘FRITH ATARI CONCRETE PARTY PART 110’ (personal fav).

Ancestral lineage: Big Black, Orchid, DNA, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Melt Banana, etc.” 

ChatGPT continues, “To put it simply, this album is an emotional rollercoaster that takes us on a transformative journey. Living Room has struck gold with this release, and I can’t help but feel fortunate to witness their artistry unfolding. So, if you’re looking for an album that transports you to another dimension and tugs at your heartstrings, Hold Onto the Gold Jim is a must-listen.”

Vhorb – “Adversary” – [Primitive Temples]

Ms. Conduct   8/7/2023   A Library

This limited release is a chamber pit of industrial white noise (“Inverted,” “Vile Insect People”), machinic echoes (“Omisoz”) and the occasional phantom swirl (“Mirrors and Mirrors”). Somewhere near the end of the cold cosmos lies Vhorb’s sonic address at the intersections of noise, drone, and experimental black metal. Unlike other drone work, Adversary has enough energy output for life after death instead of assuming the defeat of a black hole. The result is a more intensely layered brood of listening expanse with a blanket of charnel warmth skunking from the peripheries of the habitable universe to a bleak void.

P.S. I didn’t break the cassette case; it was already like that.

—Conduct

Cowley, Patrick – “Malebox” – [Dark Entries]

Ms. Conduct   8/6/2023   A Library, CD

Malebox is a commemorative album released from Dark Entries of San Francisco-based hi-NRG, disco-funk and early electronic dance music pioneer, Patrick Cowley. Recorded between 1979-1981 the work showcased here harkens back to all of the sleazy-spacey enthusiasm of early Parisian discotheques and San Franciscan mother-god Castro clubs of the related period. These tracks deliver another nature; admire as the lights transform through the cybernetic sheen of refracted histories and surrender to the teleportation.

Eeek! – “Move Real Slow” – [Kingfisher Bluez]

Ms. Conduct   12/7/2022   12-inch, A Library

A variety of influences converge in this 2012 release that most obviously echo David Byrne vocals from the Talking Heads era with garage rock instrumentation that jangles triumphantly in ascents and troughs. There are arguably strong moments of sonic force that emerge & electrify. Although with tracks titled like “A Will and Grace Period,” it is easy to locate the Canadian in this rock. An especially apt description I found online of the outfit reads, “a bunch of (overly kind) dudes you would invite to your family reunion only to have them show up with a taco buffet.” For those of us who wouldn’t attend a family reunion or might be more inclined to avoid the ‘bunch of dudes’ who brought the buffet: We’ll be with the other relatives overly suspicious of kind gestures from strangers.

Pas Musique – “Phoenix, The” – [Alrealon Musique]

Ms. Conduct   12/7/2022   12-inch, A Library

Experimental electronic music from veteran Brooklyn-based outfit Pas Musique, The Phoenix delivers seven rhythmically-driven tracks that make use of various layering techniques, a meandering beat-driven propulsion, discordant departures in equilibria, and various vocal samplings which evoke scientific novelties of yesteryear.  Together these elements combine to construct an elevating tunnel-trance that flirts with the evocations of scientific-transcendence.  Many times, the album feels like a close cousin to The Silver Apples, Electric Orange, Can and other krautwork relatives.

Cazzadio – “Il Tempo Della Locusta” – [Black Plagve Productions]

Ms. Conduct   11/16/2022   A Library, CD

A reissue of a seminal early beat-driven power electronics album from an obscure, influential and shadowy Italian outfit.  This work is immersed in the heavy machinery of war technologies.  Espionage telemetries in the black waters of conspiracy-driven wars throb with bombastic rhythmics driven from black-on-black weaponry. Despite the heavy militaristic/war thematics it is possible to side-slip into an adjacent imaginary universe while listening and allow this album to soundtrack one’s favorite post-apocalyptic superstate scenario or simply enjoy the metallic acoustics.

Monocube – “Substratum” – [Malignant Records]

Ms. Conduct   11/16/2022   A Library, CD

This album from Monocube mines the psychical landscapes from the descent-worlds in tribute to the bottomless selves who stalk these nether regions in somnambulistic unconsciousness. In the cold & voided domain of vaporous dark drone, synth layers and stirring strings evoke the transient-eternal paradox.  On the geologic side, this is cavernous and uninhabitable terrain save for only the most evolutionarily built: a plutonic dimension for lost souls unliberated and stuck in the orbit of heedless repetition.

Mona Demone – “S3RP3NT” – [Ratskin Records]

Ms. Conduct   11/16/2022   A Library, CD

This album shamelessly relishes in the splicing & synthesizing of various binaries to hybridize its own anthemic animations: Neptunic rainbow-diesel siren songs soundtrack a campy tromp through the soon-to-be-devastated wonderlands of our greenwashed Armageddon while joyfully tripping on psychedelic analogs made with a kitchen table chemistry set. Dance-y in the DIY tradition of ****-off homemade beats, this is an album for listeners who can undertake the moral-aesthetic quest of finding good-in-the-bad and trip inside someone else’s head without judgement.

Pierson, Dax & Horton, Robert – “Pablo Feldman Sun Riley” – [Self Release]

Ms. Conduct   10/23/2022   A Library, CD

This re-release ushers in a season’s worth of plastic suns by Oakland-based composer Dax Pierson with contributions from experimentalist Robert Horton. This music is diurnal: A tribute to atonalist and minimalist classical composers with plenty of influence from the ancestors of experimentalist jazz and avant-garde lineages (a la Steve Reich & family). Drone and phase-shifting animates the elementals lending an earth-bound shamanic field to the compositions. Patterns, electronic pulses and consonant harmony stretch out like refracted beams of crystalline light. This album is solar slow but sunny all-the-same. For immersion in winter and third-eye animations.

Million Brazilians – “Strange Oasis” – [Nonlocal Research]

Ms. Conduct   10/23/2022   A Library, CD

At-once lushly sincere with tribal mysticism and playfully intoxicated with its own comic book-colored exoticism, this release from Nonlocal Research evades unity and easy characterization but travels through the imagined terrains of the pre-colonial Americas to navigate magical topographies with a videogame joystick. Atmospheric, damp, geologic, and aviary, this album probes into various corners of earhole ritualism. 

Burial — “Antidawn” — [Hyperdub]

Ms. Conduct   9/26/2022   A Library

A virtual crepuscular landscape folds into new sonic domain-worlds. Liquid lyrics from the wormhole hyperreal. This album constructs a different relationship to time that is so ordered as to feel immersive.

Ambient synths, various sound effects, blank moments to open the channel. Cross-sections of ambient, game music and composition theory with sampling and field recording imports. A careful balance between natural and synthetic sounds constructs an afterlife inversion of this world. The melancholia feels suspended in a transparency heaven superimposed on common earthly tragedy.

Sándor Vály & Júlia Heéger — Sacred Songs — [Ektro Records]

Ms. Conduct   9/26/2022   A Library

A contemporary re-imagining of the medieval mystic & composer, Hildegard Von Bingen’s soaring monophonic monastic chants replete with heavy reverb feedback and layers of hard drone. Originally scored for an audio-visual artwork seeking to center sacred embodiment through dance, this is a saintly provocation earthbound in stone cloister chamber twisted in poisonous vines.

OurTown — “Here we are” — [Gumbo Studio]

Ms. Conduct   9/26/2022   A Library

This is the kind of art-folk rock music that brings together the wise wonder of the NY Downtown scene with rural New Mexican sensibilities into a post-hallucinogenic dayglow gratitude journal. Both yoga-mat and cigarette-smoke free, this album avoids most cliches that one would expect to find of this kind, but still manages to relish in its idiosyncrasies shamelessly. There is a perennial-perfect-afternoon-mixed-with-life’s-laments-feel to this album for those that can appreciate undressed music which weds desert colors to the urban mundane.

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