Dissonant Plane

Carpet Floor has released 4 pressed CD (not CDRs) of crisply recorded free rock instrumentals.  Garry Davis (editor of Arcane Candy magazine) and Matt Crane (former Seattle resident) play guitar and drums respectively, but occasionally branch out on other instruments.  One of the variations are Garry’s steel rod and steel spring guitar which add said objects to the strings on the neck.  The music was all recorded over a period of several years and this is obviously a distillation of the best moments onto 4 CDs.  The works are all instrumental and have a kind of Southern California desert soundtrack vibe to them  It reminds me a little of early Sonic Youth or Savage Republic.  I say this not only for the grooves they freely move through, but also the variety to explore more abstract soundscapes once in a while.  They themselves describe the music as “heavy psychedelic rock and abstract improvisation with plenty of free-jazz-influenced drumming and fuzz guitar destruction.”  “Blow Out” does in fact have some free jazz moments with guest saxophone player Adam Diller on 5 tracks, but overall the music leans more heavily to the rock side and is easily accessible.  It seems like great music for a road trip.  Packaged simply in paper sleeves, the discs only sell for $7.00, inviting you to explore their wares.  That’s all the same price as the little 64-page book of full color photographs by Garry Davis called “Point and Shoot”.  With basically no text except the index at the back, this is a pocket sized collection of concert shots taken between 1999 and 2008.  It is a rock photo book for the weirdo set with Ya Ho Wa 13, Keiji Haino + Fushitsusha, James Cecil Davis, Tony Conrad, Stereolab, Don Bolles, James Chance and the Contortions, Rebekah Raff + Just Strings, Val Bertoia, Bardo Pond, Danielson Famile, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Stefano Scodanibbio and Terry Riley, Rod Poole, Sir Richard Bishop, The Wives, Dos, Thurston Moore + White Out, Slint, Carpet Floor, Custom Floor, Lavender Diamond, Pole, Merzbow, Brad Laner, Matt Crane and Tom Swafford, Sonic Youth, Partch, Lance Mountain, White Magic, The Brothers Unconnected and 88 Broadrum.  I think Garry said he made only 50 copies of this. - Eric

Latest batch of used goodies:

• 3/4 Had Been Eliminated  “A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation”  CD  (Häpna)  $10  - gentle filmic rock with nice little sounds
• Badalamenti, Angelo  “Soundtrack from Twin Peaks”  CD  (Warner Bros.)  $8  - Eric stopped watching TV when this went off the air
• Balmorhea  “Like Water in a Dream of Thaw”  CD  $7  - soft instrumental post rock with acoustic instruments
• Balmorhea  “Tour EP”  CDR EP  $3  - CDR EP, instrumental post rock, ltd. 175
• Circle  “Sunrise”  CD  (No Quarter)  $10  - like a psychedelic Motorhead
• Dif Juz  “Extractions”  CD  (4AD)  $8  - jazzy instrumental rock produced by Robin Guthrie
• Eckhart, Eric  “Lost and Found”  CD  $2  - slickly produced folk songs & indie rock
• Electronicat  “21st Century Toy”  CD  (Disko B)  $7  - ‘electric-glam-rock n roll’; promo w/no tray
• Galbraith, Alastair  “Cry”  CD  (Emperor Jones Records)  $10  - guitar, drones, loops, vocals in a dreamy combination
• Galbraith, Alastair / De Gennaro, Matt  “From the Dark (South Island)”  CD  (Xeric)  $9  - awesome acoustic long string drones
• Grouper  “Wide”  LP  (Weird Forest)  $8  - fragile lo-fi echos, clear & black vinyl mix, only 500 made
• House of Cosy Cushions  “Animal Dream”  CD  (Seadog Records)  $7
• Jeck, Philip  “Surf”  CD  (Touch)  $9  - subtle textures created from vinyl and loops
• Kemialliset Ystävät CD  (Fonal)  $10  - wild freak folk from Finland
• Mountain High  “Co-Op Shmo-Op”  7″  (Hot Dog City Record Co.)  $2  - garage / indie rock
• My Cat Is An Alien / Roden, Steve  “Cosmic Debris Volume II”  CD  (A Silent Place)  $10  - split of quiet sound, reissue of extremely ltd art LP
• No Land’s Band  “Percolating Joys”  CDR  (Ero)  $2  - CDR, ambient noise electronics
• Oracle  “Doomed to Reign Volume Two”  CDR  (Scatalogical Liberation Front)  $5  - CDR, ltd. 100, Seattle black metal
• Oval  “Ovalprocess”  CD  (Thrill Jockey)  $7  - glitchy ambient electronica
• Pink Floyd  “More”  CD  (Capitol)  $8  - originally releaed in 1969
• Popol Vuh  “In Den Gärten Pharaos”  CD  (SPV)  $8  - essential ‘71 album of Moog ambiance w/bonus tracks
• Pretty Things, The  “S.F. Sorrow”  CD  (Edsel Records)  $10  - very psychedelic pop from 1967
• Various  “KVRX Local Live, Vol. 13″  CD  $2  - w/Donkeys, Half Japanese, Akron/Family, Balmorhea
• Weirdlords  “The Book of Weird Vol. 1″  CDR  (Council of Serpentry Music)  $2  - experimental & lo-fi rock from Seattle
• Weirdlords  “Zizlore’s Mansion”  CD EP  (Council of Serpentry Music)  $2  - heavy rock from Seattle; 26 minutes
• Whitman, Keith Fullerton  “Playthroughs”  CD  (Kranky)  $8  - pretty drones
• Zorn, John  “Cartoon S&M”  2 x CD  (Tzadik)  $12

Thank you everyone for coming down to the wonderful Demian Johnston in store last Friday.    For those of you who missed it, it was great heavy noise drone.  Demian made a special CDR entitled “Coal Lung” for the in store in an edition of 13!  Several lucky souls picked up a copy Friday night, but for those of you that didn’t Demian left us a couple copies to sell in the store.  The music is pretty fantastic noise doom with some guitar picking and each cover is a little different.  This one is released on Demian’s Dead Accents label from which he also brought us the Shining Ones CDR.  This is a live recording from their debut show (I think) at the Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater on February 20 of this year.  Shinings Ones features Demian on vocals and manipulations, Dan LaRochelle of Lesbian on guitars and Andy Crawshaw of Broken Press on percussion and Alesis Micron 1 keyboard.  Their sound is heavy doom with ambient drone intro and outro.  Andy did an amazing job on the covers with a two-color screen print on nice paper with an obi, but there are only 100 of these made.  And since he was bringing us stuff, Demian also left us with one more Playing Enemy title, this one a CD by the name of “Accessory“.  From outside appearances, this might look to be another 2 song EP, but the disc runs a full one hour and eighteen minutes.  Most of the disc is the epic “To Her, To Thank Her” which finds them in much slower and trancy form.  The disc is capped off by a cover The Beatles’ “She So You” which find them in more heavy form, albeit with a more experimental middle section.  It seems fitting that Sam from Debacle Records also brought his latest release that night as it is likewise heavy and noisy.  Not part of the Emerald Debacle series, this 18 minute CDR is by Brent Landon of Brooklyn and is between power electronics and intense metal, or as Sam put it “between Mouthus and Pig Destroyer”.  The kind of thing I could see coming out on Hospital Productions.

Over the weekend, Sam from Debacle Records dropped off the new Hemingway CDR on his label.  It’s a fan CD, which means that there is on 3″ of metal to encode music on, but the disc is a full 5″ across as the empty space is taken up by clear plastic.  So it’s a short EP of a little over 11 minutes.  The two tracks are “Hutterites” and “Dreckolage”.  The first is a doomy slow noise rock song which ends in a blast of noise, which is carried on by the second track.  Just guitars, drums and vocals by Demian Johnston and Shane Mehling, but still a heavy thick sound.  This disc is part of The Emerald City Debacle Vol. 2 and like the others in the series comes in a hand numbered edition of 100 copies.  It’s only $5.00, so grab one while you can.

We sold through our copies of the Zaika “Big Jar” CD pretty quickly, but thankfully have more in stock already.  In addition to this, we also got the other new release on this label by Hiroshi Hasegawa and Aaron Igler.  The label is Archive and their limited releases are all beautifully packaged.  These ones come in heavy weight letterpress folder covers with a die-cut window where a photo has been placed.  Editions of 400 only, the titles on this label are often quickly snatched up.  It’s easy to see why when listening to the great sounds that match the great packaging.  Zaika (Tom from Charalambides and Marcia from Hototogisu) offer up some very stoned out psychedelic guitar / e-bow duets while Hasegawa (C.C.C.C., Astro, etc.) and Igler (Alasehir, Alumbrados, Baikal, LSD Pond, Third Troll) belt out a heavy cosmic drone of analog electronics.  Additional we got the two releases just before these by 500mg (Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond solo) and Paul Metzger.  These are similarly packaged, but screen printed instead of letterpress.  These two focus on solo strings.  Only $11.00 each on these titles while they last.

The first time we got the latest Sun City Girls double LP from Eclipse, it got here really fast and sold out really fast.  We reordered and….  they spent a long time in the post before they got here.  Gotta love our postal system, complete inconsistent, raising the price of postage again in May, AND they are going to stop delivering one day of the week.  Anyhow, we got more of the “Fruit of the Womb / Polite Deception” vinyl.  This is limited to 950 copies and will probably soon be out of print like the previous four volumes released by Eclipse.   About Fruit of the Womb:

“Recorded 1984-85 between the first and second Sun City Girls LPs in mono. The performances on this tape are superb. Near Eastern instrumentals, extended improvisation, ostracized jazz plus impossible versions of Sun City Girls standards.” 

About Polite Deception:

“Side one is a continuation of the previous tape listed (Fruit of the Womb). And side two was described by and Albanian diplomat as: “An industrial Mesopotamian Environmental piece followed by Egyptian Trance Jazz.” Of course, we all know that this description is false.”