In stock
LP
RELAY FOR DEATH
“Mutual Consuming”
Relay For Death is the noise project of the twin sisters Roxann and Rachal Spikula. Their hermetic works consistently reflect a bleak nihilism, all the while carving an autonomous space for survival as the rest of the existence crumbles. Previous works have been published by Hanson, No Rent, Total Black, and RRRecords.
The twins offered the consideration that "Mutual Consuming comes from a concept in the philosophies that underpin traditional Chinese medicine theory, where the two opposing states (yin and yang) are 2 states on a continuum and their interactions produce an infinite possible number of states of aggregation. Within this interplay, there is a dynamic balance that is maintained by a constant adjustment of their relative levels. So an excess of yin consumes yang and vice versa." We asked if this has anything to do with the concept of the Ouroboros, to which they responded, "we hadn't thought about Ouroboros, but the eternal cycle of things makes sense too. The gorge fest of existence." Does this relate to previous works? The twins concisely respond to that question in a rare interview in Untitled, "No."
Mutual Consuming is a dire piece of isolationist thrum, spectral caterwaul, and heavy gloom through an oblique and abstracted coupling of electronics, noise, and ominous field recordings. As immersive as Thomas Köner’s haunting ambience but fully entrenched in the industrial meditations of MB. Originally published as part of the instantly out of print boxset, On Corrosion - a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
26,50€
In stock
LP
NEUTRAL
“Lågliv”
Neutral is the no wave / anti-rock duo of Dan Johansson (Sewer Election, Ättestupa, Amateur Hour, etc.) and Sofie Herner (Leda, Enhet För Fri Musik), both with deep connections to the Swedish noise scene. As Neutral, the two smear voice, guitar, organ, and smoldering noise into narcoleptic songs that rewire the strategies of Dome by way of Gate and Mars. Lågliv translates to ‘lowlife,’ an apt metaphor for neutral’s subterranean murk and shambolic discontent that they languidly manifest as a punk dourness emptied of all rock ’n’ roll theatrics. Desperate, demolished, and dejected.
Lågliv was originally published as part of the instantly out of print boxset, On Corrosion - a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
27,00€
In stock
LP
Jim HAYNES
“Inauspicious”
In a recent interview, the California artist Jim Haynes was asked to name his top five noise albums. In quick fashion, he listed off Kill The King, Send, Desnos, Persona, and Carcinosi. Since then, he's equivocated on which albums to choose, but the artists behind such works remain as the adjacent signposts and landmarks to his own constructions of industrial noise. How those records connect to the output from Haynes is found in their unique combination of smoldering dynamism and psychological inquest. For over twenty five years, Haynes has been an autodidactic clinician into the processes of corrosion, decay, and rust, turning his attention away from visual practices and more to the metaphoric crucible of noise and sound. By now, it seems like a cliche that the pandemic changed everything; but since that viral encroachment, there is a noticeable shift in Haynes' work post 2020. It's more aggressive and yet more controlled: a rarification and telescoping of the research into decay for more potent noise and more potent metaphor.
The tools for Haynes' work remain limited: motors, electronics, shortwave radio, found objects, all applied with considerable pressure. Compositionally, Inauspicious is a very rough moire pattern from overlapping elliptical structures that can negate and obfuscate just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. The album surges and collapses upon the two twenty minute chunks of controlled noise that follow an internal logic that snakes from brooding power drones, spectral radio transmission, and an aktionist demolition cast upon metal, glass, and unfortunate wooden objects. Rupture and release. Purge and pulse.
26,00€
In stock
LP
MURMER
“Tether”
Murmer is the long-standing project for Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and in Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as begin fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that which alien, sublime, and profound. Here lies the tremendous prowess of the contact microphone, as wielded by an accomplished musician! The source material cited by McGinley includes cables, fences, wires, and vents.
There is a heft to many of these sounds as heard throughout all of "Taevast" with deep throbbing pulsations from arctic wind generating subharmonic patterns upon thick high-tension wires. Elsewhere the subtle dissonance from a rasping cooling fan blooms into a brooding ambience that is sublimely rich in its metallic timbres and complex reverberations. McGingley has long been an exemplary artist in the field of phonography even as he is less prolific than others. On Tether, he has produced a majestic if occasionally foreboding work on par with the mythic wire recordings of Alan Lamb, Jacob Kirkegaard's haunted resonance from Chernobyl, and much of the Touch catalogue for that matter!
26,00€
In stock
LP
KLEISTWAHR
“Winter”
Kleistwahr is the solo project of Gary Mundy, the legendary power electronic and noise-rock musician who is a founding member of Ramleh and runs the highly influential Broken Flag label. Solemn drones and elegiac long-form passages gird Kleistwahr’s Winter, which often chimes, glistens, and glows through a unhurried constructs for organ, synth, guitar, and electronics. Yet Mundy pivots throughout with triumphant explosions of shrill noise, redlined overload, and harrowingly anguished vocals from the great unknown. Quintessential Kleistwahr.
Winter was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion - a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some.
With the necessary reissue of Winter, The Helen Scarsdale Agency will embark upon the reissue of much of that material from On Corrosion.
20,00€
In stock
LP
Francisco MEIRINO
“A new instability”
in 2019, the swiss power-acoustic musician francisco meirino presented 'a new instability' a commission for the venerable ina-grm in paris. of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to founding of groupe de recherches musicales in 1958 by pierre schaeffer. to this day, ina-grm continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for meirino to receive such a commission.
this recording for 'a new instability' condenses the 32-channel original piece down to a still very active stereo version. here, meirino continues to amplify and refine his compositions that walk a fine tightrope between raw expressivity of brutalist noise and conceptual rigor of more academic pursuits. such a work ranks him in with the likes of zbigniew karkowski, dave phillips, puce mary, and illusion of safety.
field recordings from a martial arts dojo in his hometown of lausanne cast a pugilistic, combative arch to these recordings which snap, burst, explode, and erupt with utterances of men and women engaged in hand-to-hand combat. seering frequencies build, swarm, and amass out of these episodes rise to psychologically tense crescendo that rupture at their heights, quickly turning attention towards a violence that originates from within. it is as if the objective observations of those martial arts recordings are sublimated within a subjective experience of psychic unease, disquiet, and imbalance.
'a new instability' is another magnificent chapter in the ongoing body of work for this accomplished composer of electro-acoustic noise.
crédits
photography by francisco meirino
design by jim haynes
mastering by james plotkin
20,00€
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
Ekin FIL
“Being Near”
Had the titular contest in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music In The World not been rigged from the onset, Turkey could have delivered an impeccable contestant in Ekin Fil. For many years now, her spectral dream-pop deconstructions hold a thousand-yard stare of an unconsolable melancholy; and she's drawn the highly favorable comparisons to Grouper and lovesliecrushing thanks to her understated yet beloved catalogue of releases on Root Strata, Students Of Decay, No Kings, and Sacred Phrases. Helen Scarsdale has long been a fan of Ekin Fil’s work, and we are delighted to have her in our constellation of artists here at The Agency.
Born Ekin Üzeltüzenci and based in her native Istanbul, she cites the shoegazing classics (Cocteau Twins, Cranes, Slowdive, etc.) as her earliest influence, seeking out worn issues of Melody Maker or NME from second hand shops and trading cassettes with friends and fellow enthusiasts. This Proustian obsession with rainsoaked melodies from the British Isles blossomed into a foundation for her own art. Being Near stands as the pinnacle in her luminous career, with achingly beautiful and elegantly simple arrangements for guitar and electronics saturated in cavernous amounts of reverb, whose semi-mystical blur extends well into the vocal melodies. Ekin Fil’s songs emote a timelessness of human desire and longing, albeit constrained to this plane of existence. For Üzeltüzenci, her music is not an escape valve from the patriarchal hammer of the dominant culture in Turkey, but a reflection through her own condition, in her own context, from her own body that may have actualized what Helene Cixous theorized as “écriture féminine” but through sound and not language.
Original price was: 19,00€.10,00€Current price is: 10,00€.
In stock
2 CD
OMIT
“Interceptor”
2008. Back in stock.
“Omit is the nom de plume for Clinton Williams, an electronic musician who has been quietly toiling in New Zealand for a good portion of the past two decades. His work has appeared alongside such luminaries of the NZ free noise community as Birchville Cat Motel, The Dead C, Flies Inside The Sun, Dean Roberts, Surface Of The Earth, etc.; however, Omit’s home-spun constructs widely detour from the sculpted grit and mottled distortion found in the work of his countrymen and -women. In listening to his masterful Quad (a 3CD opus released in 1998 through Corpus Hermeticum), one gets the very palpable sense of an artist in a contentious argument with his own unwieldy mousetrap of tape-loops, modular electronics, effects pedals, drum machines, and the creaking sounds of his house. That internal debate with himself through his machine exudes an existential melancholy, which could be applied to any number of grander metaphors of the dependency of electronics, cybernetics, and technology upon mankind. Interceptor is the result of an experiment whereby Williams worked with a portable studio away from his longtime home of Blenheim. He possessed two suitcases of drum machines, effects, and analog synths; and, Williams recalls being “pissed off with myself wasting time recording this stuff when I was trying to find a job”. His frustrations stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom. Williams has always been at odds with his own work, yet his self-doubt continues to deliver magnificent albums which thrive in a symbiotic struggle with mechanical disintegration. Interceptor conjures the best offered by Mika Vainio, Klaus Schulze, and the Throbbing Gristle tracks authored by Chris Carter. Always the pessimist, Williams grumbles, “In many ways, it’s a document of my failure to do the most simplest things in life”. If only all of our failures could be this brilliant.”
16,50€
Out of stock
CD
Francisco MEIRINO
“Surrender, Render, End”
First and foremost, Surrender, Render, End is an electro-acoustic dialectic, unremittingly engaged in a pugilist conflict between art and accident. The Swiss noise-composer Francisco Meirino began working on the skeleton for this piece in 2014 as a multi-channel, modular synth patch, which has been in an ongoing state of modification through public diffusions and private rumination. Meirino posits the album as a metaphysical puzzle of manipulated tape, atonal synthesis, and concrete sound. He is quick to point out that these are more than field recordings, better stated as an extreme amplification of natural phenomena. All of this twists and turns through a shifting of perspective, akin to the cinematic tropes of objectivity and subjectivity in the framing of the image; but here it is with hostile topography of sound interacting with the human mind, body, and spirit. The allusions within Surrender, Render, End are numerous and for the most part are fleetingly abstract, like the fragments of a nightmare that linger days after. The research laboratory, abandoned with all of the instruments running after an experiment became toxic and started to metastasize. Nerve-endings rupturing from sensory overload. The residual psychic violence of a time and place that’s forgotten history. The one recognizable human utterance: “I’ll never know anything.” Meirino’s work has long been at the forefront of sonic exploration, with Surrender, Render, End being a masterful work built upon many years of dedication to his craft, with countless performances, residencies, collaborations, and publications. Think Luc Ferrari, Peter Tscherkassky, and the aktions of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe.
15,00€
In stock
LP
BJ NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA
“Big shadow Montana”
“After producing their frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen have ventured into more absurdist territories through fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. It is in this context that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa present the apparitional Big Shadow Montana, an album of slow-motion delirium manifested in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Amidst the near constant wash of bleary-eyed etherialism, Big Shadow Montana cycles through several sonic themes and leitmotifs, displayed in varying states of clarity. In these transitions between half-remembered phrases and bleary-eyed thrumming, the album emerges as if it were the aftermath from a protracted bout of metaphysical channel surfing. Flickered impressions flash in conjunction with Breton’s manifesto of Surrealism in the form of the memories from happily drunk escapades in the heart of winter, the sidereal spells cast by the innerspace travelers Klaus Schulze and Coil, and the nagging questions of existential portent: "Was that bassline from Goblin, or was it German Oak? Maybe something from Faust IV?"
The trio of Nilsen, Sigmarsson, and Thorsson elegantly twist and bend these fleeting images into a spiraling symphony of bubbling electronics and spectral drones that mutate on both sides of the record into lugubrious yet carnivalesque waltzes. When this first appears, it is the echoing undercarriage of a simple melody, bobbing amidst rattling chains and cascading cymbal crashes only to dissolve into sequences of cold-war era tone beacons and empathic swaths of maudlin sound design. At the second occurrence, the melody washes ashore on the Iceland beach, where nude Viking men and women try in vain to get a tan when the sun is just barely going to rise above the horizon in the winter months. It is a pyrrhic jubilation of calliope harmonies set down by organs and synths turning a pale-blue hue in the wake of all that white skin shivering underneath the arctic sky. A hauntological album? Quite certainly. And yes, the vinyl does come with a download code.” label info
15,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
OMIT
“Tracer”
clinton williams admits that he has never been particularly keen in marketing the obsessive electronic constructions he's produced under the moniker omit over the past two decades. williams once infamously quipped to nick cain that he should simply print a couple pages of zeros in lieu of the failing interview that cain was conducting for his own opprobrium magazine a little over a decade ago. while such actions may be confused with those of a curmudgeonly hermit, williams is concerned with his impeccable battery of synthetic sounds intent on psychological dislocation.
having released the bulk of his work in tiny self-published editions of lathe-cut singles and hand-dubbed cassettes, omit has enjoyed several high-profile releases thanks to the diligence of corpus hermeticum and anomalous records who both rescued some of omit's finest work from terminal obscurity. the helen scarsdale agency is proud to announce the arrival of his latest recording tracer a double disc set.
as with all of his previous work, tracer is an antiquated behemoth, constructed from analogue synthesizers, primitive drum machines, homespun electronics, and numerous effects pedals. simple wooden rhythms trot, trudge, and even glide along taut metric grids hotwired with bursts of mechanical splutter and the occasional creak from pierre henry's wooden door. an occasionally menacing, but more often melancholic orchestration of synthetic tones ripple, flex, and dissolve across the uniform structuralism, creating an ecstatic paranoia rarely heard with such splendor, rigor, and sublime blackness. if sonic references are required, then the klaus schulze masterpiece cyborg remains the closest analogy to what may be found in tracer.
14,00€
In stock
LP
TAIGA REMAINS
“Works for cassette”
Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb - also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tape hiss, and whatnot. A sadness of things hangs in the air for Cobb's suspended mantras as these pieces evolve through a state of perpetual (un)becoming. For Cobb, the decaying sound is a steady dissolution of one chromatically rippling pattern into another which in turn diffuses into another and the cycle continues; but for every slippery note that pools into watery aquifers, Cobb distances himself from discursive and didactic languages that affix specific meanings onto work. He prefers a mystery and an ambiguousness to hang upon his crepuscular minimalism where the audience can entertain guided excursions of subjective thought. For us, these radiant guitar drones flecked with impressionist melodies bath in the snow of a thousand radios placed throughout Easter Island offering forth their eerie, luminous and beautiful sound that floats amongst those stoic heads that gaze beyond the horizon of the pacific ocean towards infinity, or oblivion if you prefer a more sublime reading. As the title to the album states, this album originally published in small cassette editions, long out of print. The material has been gloriously mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin.
Those with an ear for Andrew Chalk, William Basinski and those long-form passages from Natural Snow Buildings will find much to celebrate in Taiga Remains.
10,00€
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€
In stock
CD
M.S. WALDRON-Steven STAPLETON-S.B. SIGMARSSON-Jim HAINES-R.K. FAULHABER
“The sleeping moustache”
Let’s begin with the introductions. M.S. Waldron may be best known for his work as irr. app. (ext.), an unwieldy moniker that begets uncanny, hallucinatory sound. Steven Stapleton is the genius behind Nurse With Wound, the consistently unpredictable project that scrambles musical obsessions for krautrock, surrealism, and avant-garde composition into a brash quest for expressionism through experimentation. Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson hails from the Icelandic electro-absurdist duo Stilluppsteypa, which continues to investigate the finer points of drunken minimalism. Jim Haynes prefers to merely state that he rusts things. R.K. Faulhaber is something of a mysterious figure, looming around Mr. Waldron’s irr. app. (ext.) recordings and performances while keeping his own work a hermetic secret. Each with a peculiar understanding of the audio arts, these five artists came to the proverbial table and thought it a good idea to collaborate. Given the predilection for the surreal and the sidereal that each of these five employ in their many audio and visual projects, those agendas oozed from the recordings that became known as The Sleeping Moustache. An epiphany of controlled disorder, a convulsion of beauty, a cascade of thought from delirious minds, The Sleeping Moustache is an exquisite manifestation of sound poetry scattered into a tortuous collage mired in an oblique melancholy. Magnetic tones extracted from the ether, mechanical sounds smeared into a lugubrious growls, horns trumpeting straight out of John’s Book of Revelation, ululations sliced into information overload that Schwitters himself would be proud of. The Sleeping Moustache presents a psychically instable landscape, where dreams and nightmares wreak havoc upon the drudgery of daily life. The closest audible territory for The Sleeping Moustache might be the psychoactive constructions of Nurse With Wound’s Homotopy To Marie, although the characters in this drama happened upon an entirely different map of that terrain. The artwork for the first edition of The Sleeping Moustache features five letterpress prints from each of the artists with an edition of 1700.
15,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
RELAY FOR DEATH
“Natural Incapacity”
Relay For Death are the twin sisters Rachal and Roxann Spikula, whose noise mantras transcribe the harsh realities of urban blight that complicate and threaten their own survival. It was in the context of two month medical study that the Spikulas composed their debut album in 2009, amplifying the emptiness of hospital rooms into a ghostly pall worthy of the classic works by Maurizio Bianchi.
Natural Incapacity sprouts from a similar research and development, manifesting from the sonic pollution that proliferates in their current residence of Richmond, California. Clocking in at well over two hours, Natural Incapacity was composed as a seamless, glacial accretion of locomotive grind, subharmonic environmental rumble, nocturnal street sweeping, and the quavering hum of toxic chemicals perpetually leached into the water table. By design, Natural Incapacity’s oil-stained drone is completely relentless, implying neither beginning nor end to this cycle of contamination. Relay For Death’s industrial meditation recognizes abjection, horror, and defeat as the prevalent conditions to existence. Even as a declared rejection to those conditions, Natural Incapacity is engulfed in a bleak nihilism constantly churning back upon itself. Grizzled antecedents can be found in the apocalyptic works of Maurizio Bianchi, Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion, and Organum’s Vacant Lights.
While intended to be a seamless document, Natural Incapacity is split over two CDs and does feature a download of the composition in unedited form. The physical edition features hand-rusted metal covers by the noted corrosion artist Jim Haynes and is strictly limited to 150 copies.
20,00€