Bunnybrains 88 – “88 Demo”
a recent discovery by me, apparently now going by the name Ultrabunny… they tell their own story here… what you can expect to hear within is a sort of avant-punk-mutant-mish-mash that falls somewhere between Butthole Surfers, Happy Flowers and early Ween; with a bit of Dead Milkmen and maybe a dash of no-wave for good measure… in other words, exactly what you’d expect from a group who started out aspiring to be “the worst band in the history of music” and ended up being anything but…
so, you can get it one-track-at-a-time from the band themselves here
or take my easier way out and get the whole thing at once here
V/A – “A Blind Man’s Gallery of Mirrors”
here’s the other Freedom In A Vacuum comp. I promised when I posted Unbecoming… took me a bit longer than I’d anticipated to figure out which box it was in. FIAV used to run an annual and eponymous festival at Toronto’s Music Gallery (pretty much the central venue in the city for avant/experimental/etc performances and events, even to this day although it has changed locations from what I understand). the tracks on this disc are all excerpts from performances by of some of the artists who participated over the years that the festival took place. includes a few legendary Canuck groups such as Violence and the Sacred and Mind Skelp-cher… shares a couple of the same international artists (Randy Greif, Plecid) who appeared on Unbecoming… some other luminaries of the day’s experimental scene (Illusion of Safety, 1 A.M. Umbrella, Sigillum S)… and an unfortunate track from the personally-reviled Edward Ka-Spel – oh well, ya can’t win ’em all.
Pitchblende – “Kill Atom Smasher”… a ton of nice myspace links… and a shout-out to Jake
another one first brought to us by the defunct Fun With Earholes blog… anyone who’s checked this band out – we posted some other things by them here and here – knows that they were doing the whole prog-tinged-indie thing way before the cool kids embraced it… and that’s prolly all we need to say about that. let’s welcome this fantastic album to the blogosphere again
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after you’ve digested that, surf on back and spend some time clicking on the myspace links for all of these excellent, currently-active bands we recently discovered thanks to their coverage in the also-excellent Drop Dead magazine. while they may not have coined the term per-se (I think that honor belongs here), DDM aptly refer to most of these as “mutant” bands – i.e. mixing elements of no-wave, post-punk, NDW, noise-rock, early industrial/electronic/experimental, folk, whatever to come up with interesting hybrids defying any other type of description. I’m not normally one to do “aggregator”-type posts, but these bands are all worth your attention if you enjoy the noiser rock and no-wave-ish stuff we’ve posted around here in times past:
(ok, I already knew about those four. in fact, I posted T.I.T.S. a looooong time ago)
A Woman’s Weapon (check out their awesome Misfits cover)
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last but definitely not least, when you’re in the mood for something heavy check out Jake’s recent post for some excellent material from Zeni Geva and the Grave/Deviated Instinct/Devolution 3-way split .
ok. that should keep everyone busy. enjoy.
Mori-Quinne-Ribot – “Painted Desert”
another Avant outing, though apparently there was legal wrangling over whose names actually wound up on it… the story goes that Quinne put the sessions together, but that one or both of the others refused to allow it to be released without their name adorning it… whatever the case might be, it’s a nice one – sort of an “easy listening” version of the whole Downtown-NY aesthetic, I suppose.
Johnboy – “Pistolswing”
the departure of great blogs like Lost In Tyme and Fun With Earholes has left me realizing that, in addition to the “Avant resuurection project” I’m slowly trying to complete, there was some great material on those blogs that’s also no longer available (AFAIK, at least)… so with that in mind I bring you this, one of my favorite noise-rock records of the 90s, which was originally brought to us by Fun With Earholes.
V.A. – “Unbecoming (An International Compilation)”
I was originally planning this for the next post on Wednesday, but with No-Longer-Forgotten-Music having just posted the original Freedom In A Vacuum comp. LP today, the timing was just too good to ignore… so my faithful readers get a bonus post today as well. F.I.A.V. was a Canadian label in the late-80s/early-90s who specialized in the experimental/noise side of things. being Canadian myself, I fell into contact with some of the artists involved with F.I.A.V. and the whole scene in general when my own interest in such things was piqued… and thus I wound up with my own copies of most of the F.I.A.V. comps (I’ll be perusing some boxes for the “Blind Man’s Gallery of Mirrors” comp. over the next few days for Wednesday’s post if I can find it)… although this one claims to be international, exactly half of the 10 artists who appear are, in fact, Canadian (Empirical Sleeping Consort, W.A. Davison, Crawl/Child, Dead Masochistic Gut and Pierre-André Arcand). the rest comprised of some highly-regarded names from the international noise scene of the time: John Duncan, Randy Greif, PGR, Allegory Chapel Ltd. and Plecid. it’s been a while since I posted anything in this vein, so…
Kinderzimmer Productions – “Wir Sind Da Wo Oben Ist”
I don’t often post hip-hop ’round these parts. and not because I dislike it. it’s true that my exposure to it has been more limited than other genres. it’s also true that I generally tend to sway more toward the type of hip-hop that other noise/rock/avant/whatever fans like myself usually enjoy (i.e. Dalek, MF Doom, stuff on Anticon, etc). what originally intrigued me about these guys is the fact that they’re a German hip-hop group. what kept me coming back to them is that they’re an excellent hip-hop group, regardless of any (initial) language-related novelty.
call it a by-product of growing up in the 80s, but for a long time I’ve kind of unconsciously associated the sound of “good” hip-hop with a certain tone that comes out of most 80’s (and some 90s) models of Akai samplers. in particular, the older 12-bit and early 16-bit ones (up to about the S-3000). any idiot knows the MPC-series – which have those same sampling engines inside more of a beat-box housing – are pretty popular pieces of gear in hip-hop land. I really have zero idea what kind of gear Kinderzimmer actually uses for production, but there’s still a similar “grit” here that really comes close to those same tones… to my ear anyway. and that “grit” is what really endeared them to me.
as far as I can tell, this was the only major-label release from this group – the rest have been on smaller/indie labels. this one was released in ’02. I originally discovered them on another blog that has long since gone by the wayside – I won’t mention names in this case, for reasons that would be obvious if I did.
I can’t seem to locate any new copies available (though some sites are in German, which I can’t read) – if anyone knows otherwise let me know and I’ll remove this post. until/unless that happens,
get it here
and you can also enjoy some fun “interactive” activity with Kinderzimmer themselves here
Samus – “Desengano”
I’m not normally one to nick stuff from other blogs and re-post it, but I had to make an exception here. I found this a little over a week ago at Sludge Swamp, where posts are so frequent that they disappear from the front page quickly, usually in a matter of three days tops. since I’m, um, a little less frequent, I figured it would get some additional well-deserved attention here. this came out in ’01 or ’02 IIRC but isn’t in print as far as I can tell – which is a shame. incorporating varied styles from Grief/Corrupted-style sludge to the noisier side of indie rock to the collage trappings of plunderers like The Tape Beatles, it’s an all-over-the-place genre-hopper of the kind I adore.
get it here
Steroid Maximus – “Gondwanaland”
thankfully someone did ask for this, so I get to have a bit of a “phone it in” day today. equally brilliant if not even better than the previously posted “!Quilombo!”, the awesome title-track from which also leads off this opus.
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Steroid Maximus – “!Quilombo!”
whether or not you enjoy the majority of Jim Thirwell‘s work, there’s no denying the absolute genius of this project, particularly the title track (this track also leads off the also-excellent “Gondwanaland”, which I’ll make the next post if this one goes over well).
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Sector 2814 