| Everything on this page is GONE. However, lots of rad distros & dudes carry NNF stuff from time to time, so feel free to explore some of these places, as there's a chance they've still got a stray copy or 2. if you'd like specific help, go ahead and write presents@notnotfun.com Revolver/Midheaven Forte (UK) Bis Auf's Messer (GERMANY) Tomentosa Fusetron Sound Eclipse DNT Records Carrot Top Forced Exposure Volcanic Tongue (UK) Release the Bats (SWEDEN) Discriminate Music Gilgongo Morphius Chicago Independent Staalplaat (GERMANY) Aquarius Time-Lag Family Rainbow Conspiracy (BELGIUM) Insound |
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Science & Industry NNF184—CS Got to see this hairy chain gang of Manchester cosmos-manglers bulldoze a hole in the sky at the Islington Mill last summer when Pocahaunted and Sun Araw were on tour in the UK, and the experience left an impression. Jamming their self-released LP was a nice forced flashback but we wanted more and, fortunately, Gnod are obliging types (they spearheaded the post-show dance party when we were in town). That said, we weren’t braced for the 60-minute astral sludge opus Science & Industry when it landed in our mailbox. Opening with a low-end raga of wah guitar, spoken word, and spaghetti western trumpet trills, the piece gradually builds in volume, density, and desperation, finally exploding at the 10-minute mark into a pummeling storm of drums and heavily delayed horns that sounds like the soundtrack to a movie about post-apocalyptic galaxies at war. From there things get intense. There’s stomping bruiser anthems (think Motorhead on elephant tranquilizers), swirling space rock rituals, crushing Loop-style (circa Fade Out) downer ballads, zoned motorik rhythm workouts, biker howling, black holes, science, industry, infinity, whatever. In short: this is your brain on Gnod. Can’t even describe what a magnetic wrecking ball this album is, an April European tour should help spread the word. Pro-dubbed and imprinted tapes in ghost-face J-cards designed by Amanda. Edition of 100. |
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Sun Ark NNF183—7" Left coast karaoke machine enthusiast Cameron Stallones leaves no loop unturned in his endless questing for the ultimate kaleidoscopic island-psych cocktail, and relocating from the LBC to Glen Rock (half Glendale, half Eagle Rock) freed him up to construct his own hermetic jam cove – dubbed Sun Ark Studio – thereby ratcheting up his workaholic-ism several levels. And so this Sun Ark 33 RPM single serves as both a love letter to his new musical HQ and a curious vinyl document of Araw’s next next-wave. Dubby basslines and reverbed drum pad action still reign hard but the song construction is less western and more liberated than ever before (echoing his new all-solo live set up), with micro-cycles of flute, voice, FX, and organ cascading down like fuchsia sunset light across the plastic rhythm section. “Bump Up (High Step)” is a warped reggae club heartbreaker, flangy cheese guitar leads and jungle rattles, a constant chorus. “Live Mind” is the B side, and it’s descended from the Heavy Deeds lineage, lots of equatorial sweat, low end pulse, dry funk guitar, bucket percussion, etc. A cool new boat trip on an evolved vessel. Black vinyl 7 inches in glue-pocket jackets with art by Stallones. Edition of 500. |
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Towers Of Spines NNF182—CS Don’t even bother trying to fathom the name, it’s a bottomless game. Here’s what we do know: Topping Bottoms are a loose liberated squad of itinerant Tokyo drifters that traffic in a billowing, burned out brand of post-millenial psych-loitering that feels like someone slow-motion shattering a lava lamp over yr skull and letting the fluorescent slime drip-drop into yr eyes. That good/weird. Featuring sometime members of an odd constellation of other projects (Ainotamenishis, Evangelista, Duchesses, etc), the semi-steady TB line-up (Kate, Masaki, Tracy, Ryo) wields shadow-sleaze PSF guitar licks over dark drugged drumming lightly splattered with Bore-junk electronic sludge. Towers Of Spines is actually a reconfigured and re-sequenced version of an earlier OOP self-released CDR (on Ryo’s own Create Evil imprint) but packed out with a fresh unreleased live cut tracked at a riotous spring 2008 performance. Tapes come in insane double-sided fold-out silkscreened j-cards designed by Ryo which are in turn housed in stunning exterior cassingle-style art shells, all done up in a spectrum of shades and art-paper variations. Basically: the visual quotient on this tape is huge. Edition of 150. |
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Solar Meditations NNF181—CS Deep Magic means many things to many people (two seconds of internet research reveals one of those things to be a Chronicles Of Narnia “fanlisting collective”), but to us and many So-Cal dwellers it means the solo orb of Dreamcolour drummer/figurehead Alex Gray. Since fragmenting out into his own DM sphere with two self-released tapes, Gray’s grasp of spatial composition and celestial cloaking devices has matured and expanded into a totally unique stargazing expedition worth its weight in ether. Solar Meditations is what it sounds like: 90 minutes of deep-sky holistic crystal healing. Melodic clouds of keyboards, chiming guitar, tubular bells, field recordings, moonlit piano, and amplifier gauze all shimmering down across stop-motion images of suns rising and vanishing into the Pacific. This is music for observatories; endless and nameless. Pro-dubbed tapes in double-sided full-color fold-out J-cards designed by Amanda. Edition of 100. |
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Bringin' The Heat NNF180—cassingle Companion cassingle to the Smokin’ 7 inch (NNF177) finds Ettinger out on his own, sans The Heat, but even without back-up he still brings it. “Bringin’ The Heat” is a killer coast guard coda, searchlights fanning out, SWAT Team guitar licks, hypnotized Kevlar keyboard prisms, delicate synth wah surf spray misting up your teal iridium Oakleys. It’s make-it-or-break-it time; be a pro. The other song on here is “Cancer,” which washes over the closing credits as the cast and info scroll down and people leave the theater. A melancholic cocaine-y synth-pop outro ode with multiple micro-solos and some defeated echo vocals crooning out the final fade-to-black vibes: we did what we could, it was what it was, but forget it Jake that’s life on the squad, another day another dollar (or something). Material repeats on both sides to save you some flipping. Pro-imprinted cassettes in full-color J-cards with art by NNF. Edition of 125. |
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The Labor Of Love NNF178—LP Still waters run deep but wild waters run deeper. Both when fronting San Fran free-punk body-music trio Mi Ami or performing angst-dance psycho-dramas under his solo alias, Sex Worker, Daniel Martin-McCormick always succeeds in generating total motion (and emotion) and breaking the fourth wall. His vision of tranced/anguished rhythm questing hits an apex on The Labor Of Love, his LP debut under the Sex Worker guise, and we’ve been soaking in its dark arts for months. Pulsing, lo-fi kraut electronics bubble and sputter under hazy arcs of weirdo vocal smear. Escapist disco drum machines cruise into the horizon under a canopy of dubby accents and FX percussion, sometimes peaking in harsh frenzies of echo-scream meltdowns. All three pieces function as anthems or elegies or protest songs articulating Daniel’s heavy anti-sex trafficking/enslaved bodies activist agenda but you don’t have to know the depths of the ethical framework to grasp the vibe. An intensely unique and hyper-personal statement from one of our favorite west coast music-dreamers. Black vinyl LPs in jackets designed by the artist. Edition of 450. |
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Dirty Ark NNF176A—CS Killer C33 companion album called Dirty Ark (culled from the same sessions as the Heatless Ark LP) housed in yet another radical silkscreened J-card courtesy of Ryo from Topping Bottoms. |
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Heatless Ark NNF176—LP We’ve touted this Brisbane clan on multiple occasions in the past (the Mind Peril and The Returner tapes on NNF) but they say the third time’s the charm and clearly that’s true because not only is Heatless Ark Blank Realm’s vinyl debut, it’s also by far the weirdest, deepest, punkest, freakiest, aka BEST album the band’s ever made. And so for all these reasons (and more) we are happy as heaven to offer it up for the world. The porous BR line-up allows for a lot of instrumentation flux and this transience translates on record here to a strange range of agendas: open electric ecstasies (“Fabulous Terror Index”), dissonant outsider-wave art-punk (“Saint Tegram,” “Heatless Ark”), loner Jandek-y demos (“Blues Helix,” “Blues Helix 2”), slow-diving femme-sung dream-gaze (“Till I Clear My Own Name”), and beyond. Varied, wild, and intensely ambitious, this LP establishes Blank Realm as high on the high heap of the rich Australian underground, with miles more expansion potential. Hopefully western world touring plans can congeal soonishly to drive the point home. Black vinyl LPs in beautiful metallic ink smoke-ritual jackets (these jpegs don't do them justice) screenprinted by art-wizard Ryo from Topping Bottoms. Edition of 400. |
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Silver Sea Surfer School NNF175—LP Eva Saelens’ life quest has taken her from Michigan to Oregon to Oakland back to Portland and back again, with several overseas explorations and inner journey road trips thrown in for good measure. Whatever path she’s on is long and winding and hidden in the shadow of overhanging cherimoya trees. Fortunately she maps her migrations with haunted, exotic breath-and-electricity sphinxes ranging from 2006’s Brute Nature Vs. Wild Magic to last year’s brainwashing Birthday Of Bless You LP. 2009 finds her offering up another psychic harvest unto the world, Silver Sea Surfer School, a new nine-song pipeline ride that floats through a whole new web of voice orbs and tape hiss and keyboard balladry. If anything, Silver Sea is Saelens’ weirdest hour, layered in abstract environments, whispers, distant poetry, free percussion loops, with sudden passages of heart-dissolving ghost-piano beauty (“Shine On From The Heaven Above,” “Adventure In Light”). Heavily impressive, and a brave pearl-dive into even more personal waters for the Inca Ore lifeforce. LPs come in jackets with art by Saelens, plus a full-color insert. Edition of 500 (40 on clear ocean-water vinyl, 180 on marbled blue/white, 280 on black). CD edition available on Acuarela. |
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How Is Hell Fact Met? All Of Them Witches NNF171—CS Hello, history lesson: those who forget the past are condemned to check it out via limited cassette reissues. Or something like that. Malibu Falcon was an early aughts act from Portland, Oregon that existed sporadically in impulsive electrical fires of shows and recording sessions and starred west coast lifers like Eva Inca Ore and Nick Bindeman (plus others) amongst its ranks. Shows were rare, releases even more so, and the combined forces of life and other band commitments soon dissolved the Falcon before a wider awareness could be achieved. Alas. So we are lucky to have on hand this salvaged anthology of 60 minutes of prime time heart-of-weirdness MF legacy. Low basement bass lines pulse under primitive sheets of guitar feedback while Eva alternately whispers, banshee screams, and rants fucked up poetry stories about LSD, boa constrictors, and stealing babies. Their general audio vibe is so heavily art-damaged it’s impossible to tether to any specific scene; too mind-fried and visceral for experimentalism but way too raw and psychotic for any kind of psych rock/pop association either. Total crevasse music, lost in limbo, PSF DIY dreams, dead end riffs, untapped, unconscious, confusion isn’t sex. For fans of freaks. Pro-dubbed tapes with collage art J-cards by Eva Saelens copied on metallic paper. Edition of 100. |
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Live From The New Age NNF170—CS Bands are people are jobs/schools are cities are lives are lifestyles. Paths veer, verge, converge, diverge. And so it comes to pass: Live From The New Age is the final Pocahaunted release with the original Amanda/Bethany arrangement, before the band evolved onwards to the new line-up. It is what it is. And Live From The New Age is a 40-minute cassette collecting 3 vintage live performances showcasing their classic shapeshift spellbind powers, backed by an array of beloved collaborators: Bobb Bruno, Jeremy Earl, Cameron Stallones, Jarvis Taveniere, Andy Spore, Ged Gengras, etc. The whole family tree is here, stretching against the sky, sunlight, storms, lightning, laughter. Soak it in or shut it out. Pro-dubbed and imprinted cassettes in cases with psychic healer J-card artwork designed by Amanda. Edition of 200. |
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Heavy Deeds NNF169—CD Heavy Deeds, indeed man. One of our So-Cal hometown heroes steps back up to the vinyl plate with a new set of songs that are at once loftier, sweatier, deeper, groovier, and wilder than anything he’s done before (and that’s not said lightly, cause we were stupid-huge fans already). Five focused tracks meshing together the cosmic feedback of The Phynx with the sunshine ecstasy of Beach Head and the equatorial swelter of Boat Trip, plus a potent mainline of primitive rhythm, drug funk, and broken glass, it’s a sick step sideways for the Sun Araw solar system, and an easy contender for Album-of-’09 status. Check the blazing wah streetfight that breaks out mid-way through “Get Low,” the magic brainbath haze soaking into the joints of “Hustle And Bustle,” or the endless feel-good float-away of the climax of “All Night Long;” these are mountaintops, these are trophies, these are heavy deeds. Here’s to hoping the Araw-iverse keeps on keeping on. Mastered by James Plotkin with lil’ Stevie screengrab artwork designed by Stallones. CD digipak version also contains "Hey Mandala!" (Sun Araw's side from the split 12" with Predator Vision) as a bonus track. Edition of 500. |
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Heavy Deeds NNF169—LP Heavy Deeds, indeed man. One of our So-Cal hometown heroes steps back up to the vinyl plate with a new set of songs that are at once loftier, sweatier, deeper, groovier, and wilder than anything he’s done before (and that’s not said lightly, cause we were stupid-huge fans already). Five focused tracks meshing together the cosmic feedback of The Phynx with the sunshine ecstasy of Beach Head and the equatorial swelter of Boat Trip, plus a potent mainline of primitive rhythm, drug funk, and broken glass, it’s a sick step sideways for the Sun Araw solar system, and an easy contender for Album-of-’09 status. Check the blazing wah streetfight that breaks out mid-way through “Get Low,” the magic brainbath haze soaking into the joints of “Hustle And Bustle,” or the endless feel-good float-away of the climax of “All Night Long;” these are mountaintops, these are trophies, these are heavy deeds. Here’s to hoping the Araw-iverse keeps on keeping on. Mastered by James Plotkin with lil’ Stevie screengrab jacket artwork designed by Stallones, plus a full-color pro-printed double-sided insert. Edition of 600, 400 on marbled blue wax, 200 on black. |
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Low Cut Fades NNF168—CS This west coaster coasted into our worldview semi-recently with a long, loopy tape of tape hissy guitar anthems (that should see the light of vinyl on Future Sound Recordings later this summer) and we were immediately on board the Rangers zamboni. Low Cut Fades is an even fresher work, loaded to the tip-top with bedroom fantasy riffing, home-tracked keyboard trips, and teenage pop haze. It’s got a lot of that post-Ariel Pink ghost radiowaves mood, and here he chooses to ditch the vocals (there’s a decent bit of singing on his earlier album) in favor of getting down and loose and lost, and the glove fits, man. Expect more from this Bay Area time-traveler. Pro-dubbed tapes with full-color labels in J-cards with art designed by Mr. Rangers himself. Edition of 100. |
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Raiders NNF167—CS Following their 2008 East Coast tour with Woods and Pocahaunted the Robedoor agenda has mainly been: hibernating in the City Terrace zone above east LA, adding a drummer/modular synth dealer, and letting the smoke rise. Raiders is the first RBDR LP since 2008’s Endlessly Blazing and is the result of almost six months of slow-burn transformative tape machine meditation helmed by Mr. Ged Gengras. Bummed guitars, loner drone tones, low caverns of reverbed drums and rumble, echo dislocation, and dead voices cascade down into the isolated highways. Song modes are carved out and then left to rot. Features early trio live set staples like “Indo Shadow” and “The Downcast Eye.” You can’t stick your hand in the same black river twice. Change or be changed. Pro-imprinted cassettes in J-card appropriation of LP artwork. Edition of 100. |
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Bermuda Telepaths NNF166—LP Bermuda Telepaths is the latest title lifted out of the fruit-and-photocopy-strewn Outer Limits Recordings archive and into the ears of the world at large. Recorded under the never-again-used Explorers moniker and first edited into album form about a year ago, this hallucinatory patchwork trip into the ether synthesizes all of OLR’s deepest loves – boombox fidelity, quick cuts, keyboard loop sorcery, underwater pop, general mind surfing – into a humbly hypnotic whirlpool of energies. Apparently there was a concept/thesis behind the album’s genesis somehow involving psychic powers, lizard people, and the Bermuda Triangle, but the details are hazy. Which befits the audio in question. Read your palm. Take a walk in your thoughts. Explore away. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with artwork designed by the artist, plus a copy shop poem insert. Edition of 330. |
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Spiritual Celebration NNF164—CS There’s currently a glut of bands dog-paddling around the trans-continental psych-pond with names involving words like ‘color,’ ‘dream,’ and ‘infinity,’ and Ventura County brass-groove arkestra Dreamcolour are smack thick in the middle of this ’08-‘09 nomenclatorial zeitgeist (though to their credit they use the British spelling). Yet, semi-ironically, the mood of the zones they explore on Spiritual Celebration are wonderfully vintage, with a strange, reverential “out of time” quality that seems decidedly non-NOW. Hand-drums beat along with a steady, easy lope, saxes are crooned (not skronked) smoothly up towards the sun, Farfisa trills further brighten the corners. There’s no damaged FX-abuse or lo-fi freakouts; all minds are fused into one gently simmering open-air spiritual jazz homage. Echoes of Don Cherry abound. The tape is split into three chapters: a stunning 20-minute A-side hayride (“Spiritual Celebration”), a briefer horn flurry piece (“Sun Ritual”), and a gorgeous lunar meditation chamber (“Moon Ritual”). A great West Coast force with an exotic back catalogue and a killer live vibe, worth keeping tabs on. Pro-dubbed cassettes in cases with full-color marker/collage J-cards designed by Amanda. Edition of 100. |
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Flamingo Breeze NNF163—CS The Southern California mythology glints in the irises of certain dreamers more radiantly than it does in others, and few crews have begun capturing the imaginary high life of neon Corvette rides, Ray-Bans at night, and sea-breeze mind-surfing better than the Outer Limits Recordings collective. They operate under most radars but their output is a radical Rubik’s Cube of riddles, tape hiss, and tranced pop utopias. Matrix Metals is casually referred to as an “alien lounge music” project, but that’s not even the half of it. A hotwired collection of fringe-vision vignettes that roves from ghost club beats to astral 80s TV theme songs to loopy interdimensional dub-funk and beyond, Flamingo Breeze is a capitalized question mark in the NNF canon, and a recent obsession of ours. Anonymous pro-dubbed white tapes in cases with full-color “VHS box collage” J-cards designed by the artist, plus an insert and 2 tickets to a Matrix Metals performance at a fictional club in the future. Edition of 125. |
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Live On NNF162—LP Bodymore, Murderland has a long and still-living history of wacko art/music loons operating out of cheap warehouses (Tarantula Hill, RIP) and cheaper apartments (The Comfort Dome, etc), and something about the place’s civic/social vibe seems to foster an almost schizophrenic degree of diversity amongst its bands. Needless to say, this is a good good thing. But despite the city’s recent-ish rep as a home to neon strobe light teen party heroes like Daniel Deacon and Ponytail and whatnot, there’s obviously a ton more to the story, and the band that seems to us crucial to this neo-wave B-MORE renaissance is Teeth Mountain. A seven-piece jam crew comprised of 2-3 odd drum kits, sax, clarinet, mixer drones, electric guitar, a pile of pedals, various voices, and probably other unknown mystery junk, they straddle a fine, fucked up line between carefully orchestrated rhythmic psychedelia and total drum-circle-damaged freeform freak-sprawl. To us, it’s a holy zone, and one we hope they continue to linger in. TM’s 2008 LP on SHWDPLY (recently reissued, grab one ASAP) was easily one of our top recs of the year, and so we are obviously awesomely jazzed to offer up Live On, their follow-up. Two all-new sides of artfully interwoven live recordings encompassing all the band’s best moods: outsider world scorch, jittery horn ragas, basement attack trance, etc. Raw and real and alive as life. Future Teeth Mountains will be scaled at NNF, learn the terrain now. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with painted-craft-cathedral artwork by the band, plus an 11x11 full-color double sided insert. Edition of 500. |
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Diamonds & Wood NNF161—CS These post-everything (noise-rock, kraut-punk, thrash-psych), post-Floridian (they live all over the place now...Canada, East Coast, etc) post-teens (somebody’s 20) have a savvy knack for mainlining that exact slow-burn basement car crash guitar/drums symbiosis that makes us wanna simultaneously mosh, steal a skateboard, and put out a tape. The previous NASA cassette on NNF (Bummer Daze) rolled in more of a groove-damaged Blues Control-on-glue mode, and the production was kinda clean and line-in sounding in places. But Diamonds & Wood (in addition to being the name of a bangin' Underground Kingz song) is in fact an earlier NASA album, recorded back in 2006 and originally released in an edition of 24 on their own H Tapes imprint. We’ve always wanted to reissue it for more ears, and happily that day has come. A staggering hour-long descent into frenzied depths of overdriven riffing, drum abuse, and distortion psychosis that seems to get inexplicably more and more lo-fi as it grinds on, this is what the teenage garage bands of America in our dreams sound like (not far off from a wasted, rawer Heavy Winged). Sloppy, shredding, surreal, sick, and stupid in equal parts, NASA at the height of their Epcot Center-based powers are nothing if not a shining example of low/high/no-art primitivism in its most gutter and uncut form. Take it or leave it. Pro-dubbed and imprinted tapes in silver-misted cases with full-color wood grain/bejeweled artwork designed by Amanda. Hand-numbered edition of 100. |
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Ring Mining NNF160—LP Been waiting multiple years for this mind-melting meeting-of-minds to finally manifest itself in physical form, and there’s actually a story behind it. Rewind to 2006: Heavy Winged is an active, Brooklyn-based psych-rock band who’ve yet to dissolve into the bi-coastal logistical tangle they are now; meanwhile, Eva/Inca Ore is on tour (for The Birds And The Bees maybe); meanwhile, Nick Bindeman happens to also be in NY hanging out. Since all are friends or friends-of-friends, Heavy Winged ask Nick and Eva to come jam with them at a show at Northsix for the heck of it. They do. The set is a charged, psychotropic cyclone of ragged electric weight and possessed pixie shriek, stomping up and down over several damaged mountains of riff-wreckage. Miraculously, someone thinks to record the performance. Jed Bindeman sends us a copy. Our speakers implode, we high five. Fast forward to Fall 2008: Heavy Winged record a new 20-minute epic (“Into The Fog”), send it to Eva, and she records her own hypno-bliss keyboard mirage over the top. Eureka. So goes the nearly three-year history of Ring Mining, a slow-burn triumph of long-distance collaborative patience and alchemy between two of our favorite creative institutions. Mine on, you crazy diamonds. Black vinyl LPs mastered by James Plotkin and housed in jackets with mountain-collage artwork by Eva Saelens, plus a photocopied insert. Edition of 500. |
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Animal Totem NNF158—CS For some reason unexpected pleasures are superior to the expected variety, at least 9 times outta 10. And so it was when we happened upon the dizzy/fizzy music of French loop enthusiast High Wolf for the first time, regarding whom we had zero preconceived notions. Cheers to open minds/ears then, cause the High Wolf audio worldview is weird and wobbly and one that should appeal to all lovers of tripped out, swelter-zone equatorial electronics. Animal Totem is High Wolf’s debut release, and it piles wavy, tranced keyboard melodies one on top of the other into a pulsing ritual heap of colored smoke. Elsewhere he slips in sunset fuzz-guitar lines and temple meditation tones and even dangles down some flanger-flecked synthetic percussion like a bunch of mellow yellow bananas. Take a look up/down/all-around. Overall it’s a rich, ripe rumble in the escapist-psych jungle. Future trips are booked on Long Beach drone/craft emporium Stunned Records, keep an eye open. Pro-dubbed cassettes in cases with full-color animal-collage artwork by Amanda. Hand-numbered edition of 100. |
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Imaginary Falcons NNF157—CS Since you asked, here’s a new truism we vibed out of the cosmos: Isolation (not Necessity) is the Mother of Invention. ‘Cause distance makes the heart grow radder, remember? And drift-pop duo Peaking Lights (aka epic newlyweds Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis) have proven this in spades, by beating a sweet retreat from the big city to a cool commune deep in the rolling, wooded hills on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin, where they’re free to bond with the land, breathe easy, and levitate lofty organic magic from their unique analog electronics mainframe. It’s like they say: location, location, location. Apparently the big sky country is hittin’ their bloodstream like an exotic opiate, because their latest full-length, Imaginary Falcons, digs deeper and flies higher than anything else they’ve ever laid to tape by miles (which isn’t to say their early shit isn’t sick too; it is). Seven strung-out sing-song serenades of Suicide-style drum machinery, groovy lost ghost candle crooning, dubby keyboard echoes, gentle guitar gestures, and narcotic harmonia, woven into an expertly sequenced lucid dream you never wanna wake up from. This is the sound of Peaking Lights peaking; hold it yr ear as long as you can. Already dangerously high on our “One To Beat For ‘09” file. Pro-dubbed cassettes in cases with pro-printed full-color J-cards designed by Amanda. Edition of 150. Also available on LP from our friends at Night People. |
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Season's Feast NNF156—CS You don’t need a cassette description to school you on the knowledge that blood is thicker than water, but if that’s what it takes to make the lesson stick, so be it. Or, if you want a shortcut, just peruse the discography of Connecticut-bred brothers Cy and Ged Gengras. They’ve been harvesting jams together under the Antique Bros banner for, shit, almost four years now, and in that span have trawled through a thousand different hybrid strains (creep-folk, math-psych, chaos improv, etc). But the inter-family familiarity hasn’t bred contempt (take THAT, old proverb); on the contrary it’s spawned a secret psychic/musical language the rest of us ain’t privy to. And, despite a hefty local bias (Ged’s an LA/NNF hero, drums for Pocahaunted, Robedoor, AND Vibes), we can still say with honesty and confidence that Season’s Feast is easily our fave Antique B full-length to date. The ragers are dense and bearded, the acoustic passages evocative and hazy, the ambient lulls sticky as fresh resin. There’s a flow and a focus here that’s rare within the AB discog, and it makes for more meat on the bones, more flames in the fire. If yr already a fan, you’re in luck; and if you’re new to the Antique canon, THIS is the place to start. Pro-dubbed tapes with hand-typed/stamped labels in bags with full-color art by Amanda. Edition of 100. |
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...On Sea-Faring Isolation NNF155—LP A casual interweb cruiser could be forgiven for confusing Dolphins Into The Future the “band” (aka the one-man tape-loop blue-age ambient project executed by Belgian Cetacean Nation ambassador Lieven Martens) with Dolphins Into The Future the book (written by dimensional traveler Joan Ocean concerning her 20-year-long real life spirit quest to commune with a school of 200 wild Hawaiian Spinner dolphins). And, to be fair, they’re a LOT alike. Both deal heavily in trippy, drifting logics, vibrational holograms, and an overdose of psychedelic pastel artwork. But Ms. Ocean’s books are out of print so instead we have …On Sea-Faring Isolation, Mr. Dolphin Martens’ vinyl debut under the DITF banner, after a 2-year string of increasingly blissed tapes and CDRs. Composed of three interwoven pieces per side, Isolation is one of those baffling magic eye LPs that seems to dissolve yr memory of it during the very act of listening. Turquoise webs of billowing synth smoke curl and dissipate into grey horizons of open sea field recordings. The wooden mast of a ship creaks quietly while astral bells toll away in morning fog. You are alone. This record could make a sailor homesick, and Joan Ocean weep. Beautifully composed and sequenced, with just the right amount of wobbly porpoise sonar prisms bubbling up from the deep, this LP exceeded all our expectations (and they were high). A fantastic voyage into the pan-dolphinic dawn. Black vinyl LPs in matte jackets with aquatic-loner artwork by Martens himself, plus a photocopied album review/interpretation by DJ Bongo Man. Edition of 375. |
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NNF152—CD Plastic palm trees. Beach scene snowglobes. Airbrushed neon sunset hotel paintings. All shining examples of potent Fake Escapism at work, in real life. And if you’ve ever wondered what the audio equivalent of this kind of cheap coastal utopian simulacrum is, take a good listen to the recorded works of Mr. Matt Mondanile aka Ducktails, a crazy talented suburban New Jerseyan who serves up masterpiece after blasterpiece of shimmering, smoke-and-mirrors exotic fantasia, rainbow psych-pop muzak for imaginary helicopter rides over crystal lagoons and lost waterfalls. His self-released tapes dropped over the past year-plus have seen his basement guitar/rhythm hypnosis instincts gently arcing upwards into a total art form, and this, Ducktails’ debut full-length CD, is the absolute zenith of the vision. Lazy island percussion loops under blissed horizons of hovering synth colors, warm jangly wah-wah guitars lap like waves alongside casual hammock-chilling vocals; song titles like “Beach Point Pleasant” and “Dancing With The One You Love” further articulate Mondanile’s mood agenda: maxin’ & relaxin’. A few numbers get a bit more tripped/spaced in a loosely post-Pacific City model, but those parts function less like a drug ride and more just like the hazy time of night after the beach bonfire’s burned out and you pass out on the sand, holding hands with someone special, staring up at the stars. What do you see? Endless blackness? Or a new BFF? CD mastered by Graham Lambkin (of The Shadow Ring) in a 4-panel digipak with cover artwork by Jan Anderzen (of Kemialliset Ystavat/Tomuttontu), plus comes with a bonus song not featured on the vinyl version of the album. Edition of 500. |
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NNF152—LP Plastic palm trees. Beach scene snowglobes. Airbrushed neon sunset hotel paintings. All shining examples of potent Fake Escapism at work, in real life. And if you’ve ever wondered what the audio equivalent of this kind of cheap coastal utopian simulacrum is, take a good listen to the recorded works of Mr. Matt Mondanile aka Ducktails, a crazy talented suburban New Jerseyan who serves up masterpiece after blasterpiece of shimmering, smoke-and-mirrors exotic fantasia, rainbow psych-pop muzak for imaginary helicopter rides over crystal lagoons and lost waterfalls. His self-released tapes dropped over the past year-plus have seen his basement guitar/rhythm hypnosis instincts gently arcing upwards into a total art form, and this, Ducktails’ debut full-length LP, is the absolute zenith of the vision. Lazy island percussion loops under blissed horizons of hovering synth colors, warm jangly wah-wah guitars lap like waves alongside casual hammock-chilling vocals; song titles like “Beach Point Pleasant” and “Dancing With The One You Love” further articulate Mondanile’s mood agenda: maxin’ & relaxin’. A few numbers get a bit more tripped/spaced in a loosely post-Pacific City model, but those parts function less like a drug ride and more just like the hazy time of night after the beach bonfire’s burned out and you pass out on the sand, holding hands with someone special, staring up at the stars. What do you see? Endless blackness? Or a new BFF? Black vinyl LPs mastered by Graham Lambkin (of The Shadow Ring) housed in matte jackets with cover artwork by Jan Anderzen (of Kemialliset Ystavat/Tomuttontu), plus a photocopied insert. Edition of 600. |
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Scales NNF151—LP One of our favorite covens comes home to roost; break out the champagne/goat’s blood. We’ve long been fans-turned-fanatics of nomadic power trio Mythical Beast’s burned-out blackened sabbath songs, but even our mountainous expectations for their long-awaited debut were toppled by the reality of Scales’ reptile alchemy. Financed by Greg Weeks of Espers and tracked in a legit East Coast studio on generous banks of sick vintage gear, this 8-song LP is the aesthetic culmination of nearly four years of tours, trials, and twilit travels to the heart of the heart of the country. The results rip. Drone-ballad classics from their haunting 2006 demo like “Cycle/Circle” and “Chaos Spinner” reappear here in freshly realized forms, alongside a hefty handful of brand new tunes, ranging from quaking soul vox torch trancers to ritual string psych-rock skeletons. All pressure points are hit. The M Beast white magic wonder wheel is alive and hell-bound. Easily the high point in a discography already full of highs. Transparent yellow (streaked with black) vinyl LPs housed in glossy jackets with a pro-printed 11x11 insert. Edition of 500. CD edition available on Language Of Stone. |
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