Out of stock
CD
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“Scaath Catfish”
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approach to a post-industrial sound design, offers their own variant on this topic with considerable differences. It is not only the sediment, the debris, the waste, the scum, the mud, and the rot that are the source materials in Scaath Catfish, but also what is preserved in those elements and new forms of life fostered in this conceptual framework. Sibilant mutations from Fossil Aerosol's multiple sources (field recordings, found sounds, etc.) spill forth as dilated tones, mesmerizing echos, clattering loops, and harmonic distortions. Floods of dense sonic accretion give way to languid mirages with human intervention complicating matters. Fossil Aerosol gives a preternatural language to the river, one that parallels their occasional collaborators in :zoviet*france: as well as the environmental ruminations of Biospshere and the practitioners of power ambient (Rafael Anton Irisarri, Fennesz, Tim Hecker, etc.).
14,50€
Out of stock
CD
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“The Recounting Of Night Time”
"For over three decades now, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has patiently sifted through the damaged remains and bygone refuse from the late 20th century pop culture of America. Mining the snippets of audio found from abandoned drive-in theaters, mangled VHS tapes, and discarded cassettes, Fossil Aerosol studiously pieces together empathic, haunted abstractions of their original source material. their cryptic sound collages address the continued ramifications of the inherent paranoia from the cold war dissonance of stark morality and nuclear apocalypse.
The Recounting of Night Time begins and ends with the scratchy melodies from a well-worn violin. echoes and their amplifications from this instrument gradually subsume the original amidst cascades of tape manipulations and time-delay techniques. This motif repeats through the album with profound emotional torpor through fossil aerosol's hypnotic cycles of foggy ambience and back-masked rhythmic events that intertwine with varispeed-pitched dilations of melancholy melody. It makes for a beautifully corroded smear of sound, recalling the works of William Basinski and Fossil Aerosol's occasional collaborators :zoviet*france:
Fossil Aerosol addresses the album this way:
The Recounting of Night Time was composed and mixed in October of 2014. The source material focuses principally on a certain piece of German gothic cinema made during the late 1970s. This material was culled from both VHS audio tracks, as well a “field recording” made at a poorly-attended screening of the film in a decaying theater in St. Louis, Missouri sometime during the mid-1980s. Evidence of video control track glitches are present, while the scent of the acutely mildewed theater is recollected and implied.
A special edition of the CD, limited to only 50 copies, will also be available via Helen Scarsdale, and also from Afterdays Media. This edition consists of shrink-wrapped CDs overpainted in chalkboard resurfacing paint, erased chalk, acrylic, and a hand-lettered Bandcamp download code for an additional 18+ minute track."
14,50€
In stock
LP
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“August 53rd”
The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project continues their post-industrial dialectics through their “songs of enhanced decay and faked resurrection.” This cryptic ensemble from the American Midwest has been quietly producing such works since the ‘80s, with a deep catalogue highlighting a uniform brilliance in the exquisite reconstruction of exhumed cassette tapes and moldering 35mm film stock.
On August 53rd, Fossil Aerosol has collaged their reclamations of found sounds into an inquisitive, dynamic cinema of the ear. The tape loops and recombinant samples create elliptical orbits and vertiginous spirals. Down-pitched, disquieting rumbles form the foundations for much of Fossil Aerosol’s compositions, which mutate the fractured, crumbled, and mildewed artifacts into patterned yet shifting phrases. The result seems like hybrid, time-compressed mimicry of the evolution of our media-driven language.
The official statement from the ensemble reads as such:
“This album, arranged specifically for Helen Scarsdale, might be considered a prequel to The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, featuring the damaged remains of certain pop culture pleasantries in a less decomposed state than found on the previous vinyl release. August 53rd, a month extended to accommodate a changing climate, predates the day 1982 contaminated 1971.”
Such inquiries characterize the many non/fictions that contextualize the work of Fossil Aerosol. Through the process of decoding lost melodies and dialog of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Fossil Aerosol intentionally or unintentionally deflates the vanity of consumerism while at the same time providing an archaeological view of contemporary culture.
These conceptual frameworks would be meaningless if Fossil Aerosol did not deliver on the aesthetics. And deliver the Project most certainly does. August 53rd harbors the rich enigmas of distressed sound collages found in the work of likeminded artists such as Philip Jeck, Felicia Atkinson, and of course Fossil Aerosol’s occasional collaborators :zoviet*france:.
Noted photographer Michael Eastman (Vanishing America, Havana) contributed the artwork used for the cover of the album, specifically selecting imagery from decaying landscapes of the American Midwest.
19,00€
In stock
LP
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“The day 1982 contaminated 1971”
An enigmatic cartel of urban spelunkers, ruinous sound ecologists and earnest refuseniks, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project began its collective service in the 1986. Film, sound installation, and audio recordings have all been part of their broader agenda, all of which falls under a wholly unified aesthetic. Their’s is a post-industrial model, sifting detritus from the wastelands located in Midwestern rust-belt communities shuddering in the downward spiral of economic demise. Upon the re-assembly of these materials -- often culled from 35mm film and 1/4” magnetic tape found in abandoned drive-in movie theatres and warehouses -- the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project interweave with ready-mades of their own disintegration. At this site of cultural and anthropological research, forgotten memes and planned obsolesce begin to map previously hidden routes through the psychological and existential landscape of the American psyche -- past, present, and future.
Over the years, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has collaborated with :zoviet*france: -- the semi-anonymous cabal of pseudo-ethnomusicologists into our pre-apocalyptic past that could easily be seen as Fossil Aerosol’s British counterpart. With The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project reconstitutes dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks. Within piles of reversed tape loop miasma and time-lag accumulation, Fossil Aerosol magnifies the grit, the errors, the bad splices, and the dropouts within their mesmerizing and hypnogogic studies of uncanny dislocations. Helen Scarsdale is honored and flattered to be working with Fossil Aerosol for their first solo vinyl release.
19,00€
Out of stock
CD
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“The Unlistening Place”
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project are an enigmatic lot, comprised of sonic archeologists residing the American Midwest. Their work spans several decades and is almost always in flux through the variable states of contextual re-investigation and technological degradation. Aesthetically, FAMP align with the post-industrial research of :zoviet*france:, Cranioclast and Robert Turman. Bacteria damaged tape loops, ghostly time-lag accumulation and the excavation of mediated sound from suburbia’s failures are key components to the Fossil Aerosol’s working process.
The core tracks of The Unlistening Place were recorded in 2015, and at the time were intended to be part of what was to be the final Fossil Aerosol album, scheduled for a distant release. But history circled back on itself, and the result was a reworking of future tracks, alongside more new material. Historiography eating its own tail.
14,50€
Out of stock
CD
FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT
“Revisionist history”
The first Fossil Aerosol Mining Project audio recordings were made 30 years ago this year. In the observation of three decades of obscure, faked resurrection, we are pleased to announce the release of the new CD Revisionist History. The recordings on this album are hybrids, created by the grafting of old artifacts onto new material using recently devised studio processes. New sounds of the past, articulated through the devices of an unimagined future. In addition to the 69-minute CD, each package also includes an exclusive download code for an additional hour of full-resolution tracks via Bandcamp. This bonus material consists of special remixes and reconsiderations of nine of our old favorites. In total, Revisionist History includes over two hours of enhanced decay and mnemonic devices. This artist-edition is limited to 300 specially prepared packages that include a manipulated page of pseudohistorical text (circa 1972), and a souvenir fragment of open-reel dictaphone tape collected as source material in Chicago in 1988.
The anniversary edition of Revisionist History is brought to you through a collaboration between Afterdays Media and The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project began in the mid-1980s as a loose-knit group of artists and collectors interested in exploring the damaged remains of late 20th century popular culture. Of particular appeal were inadvertent examples of the post-industrial, post-apocalyptic landscapes so commonly imagined in Cold War-era media. Places and debris that fostered views of mummified modern pop, and contemporary provisions made artifact. The Project began making audio recordings in 1986. The first studio experimentation employed literal “found sounds” such as fragments of open reel 1/4” tape and 35mm film recovered from burnt out warehouses and abandoned drive-in theaters. The earliest work involved physical tape loops and analog signal processes, which were gradually replaced by digital delay treatments and multi-track manipulation. Fossil Aerosol still works primarily with found materials - audio artifacts and field recordings. Signal processing equipment remains the principal form of instrumentation. Songs of enhanced decay and faked resurrection.
18,00€