In stock
10"
Joe COLLEY
“Acting As If”
*** 2022 release ***
Joe Colley is a master of using mechanical object sounds and electronic static, but also strange lo-fi found sources and field recordings, creating alienating, surrealistic effects, similar to the likes of Small Cruel Party, Jim Haynes, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, or even the more experimental side of Zoviet France.
His newer compositions are filled with electro-magnetic hummings, strange hissing and the pourings of metallic objects as a basis, but you never find the use real instruments, synths, or masses of effect procession. Thus a very own scent of mystery appears, as all of these radiations are not really from this planet, without any "cosmic" connotations.
For the creator, these sounds are connected with unreal emotions of "Being Lost", a mistrust in what may be called reality, and a general feeling of alienation. You can only wonder how this can result in such beautiful droning expanses. Through these strange 30 minutes of drones, the mind is thrown inside an unrecognizable and confusing realm of broken electricity and something like audible-made atmospheric pressure.
"His swarming masses, throttled rumbling, and smoldering tension are all encircling and folding in on themselves. Rhizomes of sound that speak poison. Drink up, if it doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger" (Jim Haynes). Ltd x 300 copies with artwork by MEEUW, featuring special silver print on reverse board sleeve.
18,00€
Out of stock
LP
Joe COLLEY
“Deformation Of Tone”
Joe Colley’s skeleton key is an intra-dimensional sense of humor. It exists in a place between and beyond dry, deadpan, and defeatist, and is not actually funny. He has a knack for unlocking the essence of the absurdly uncomplicated, elevating it to a place of near-iconic significance and leaving it there. Hovering in a void. Or mashed in the jowl of an insect getting doused with regurgitated chyme and rumen bacteria. Consistent with his past efforts, Deformation Of Tone contains no sturm und drang or exhausting drama. This spectacle-free album delivers abrasive-adjacent electronic judders cloaked in a feeling of intimacy distilled from primordial ooze. Opening voices dissolve into Lucierian mosaic yammer, and plummet into a negative space populated by an unadorned clicking, that most elemental physical manifestation of audio phenomena, the antithesis of awareness and enlightenment and transcendence. Of sentience, even. A quintessential example of his streamlined, efficient hilarity. The episodes continue without pause, as if one is moving through an exhibition. Compared to Colley’s work, which he once described as “little noises arranged on a piece of plastic,” a lot of other noise seems hell-bent on shameless over-compensation. Embarrassingly so. His material has always been low-key, and Deformation Of Tone finds him shuffling in a colder, harsher, more desolate direction. The single-malt rasp of an unnamed conspiracy theorist / motivational speaker, present more for his intonation than anything else, punctuates this rather sculptural 33 minutes of machines whirring, devices beeping, blank-face rotary drones swelling and merging with unnaturally regimented hive rustlings and perfectly unpleasant high-gain squelch — all constructed with a master’s timing and sense of scale.
- Seymour Glass / Bananafish
21,00€
In stock
2 LP
Joe COLLEY
“Psychic Stress Soundtracks”
First time vinyl pressing of Joe Colley’s Prix Ars Electronica award winning album. Mastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed across 2 LPs, packaged in gatefold jacket with expanded artwork.
"Failure, self-loathing and abject monstrosity continue unabated as the primary themes for Joe Colley's electro-shock minimalism. as with his previous, equally impressive Desperate Attempts At Beauty, he shifts through a seemingly endless supply of antiquated electric gear and forces these dilapidated machines to grind, crush, whirl and twist under conditions they were not originally designed for. On Psychic Stress Soundtracks, Colley astutely transcribes the machines' smouldering march to oblivion, granting them the emphatic capacity for pain and the recognition of existential despair. The ozone smell of melting circuity lingers above the nervous Geiger counter clicks and toxic hums of his electric dynamos. Colley is a gifted, if sometimes under-appreciated composer whose successes rely upon the manifestation of the paradox of building something extraordinary out of junk." - Jim Haynes (The Wire)
28,00€