Alien Passengers
10.7.14 by Mike Haley

Quietly bubbling deep in the tasty goo of Midwestern noise labels is Alien Passengers, an operation that has been running for the past year under the steady hand of Mike “The Dog Lady” Collino. It’s been home sweet home to some of the murkiest shit around, with heavily raw output on magnetic tape by Diaphragmatic, Jason Soliday, and Colorguard, an odd amount of stuff from Andrews (Barrett, Scott Young, Kirschner, Coltrane), and of course Collino’s own Dog Lady Island solo project. Each tape comes equipped with some super basic, but super brilliant, artwork. Simple, course images, mainly grey scale or saturated, printed on vellum paper or transparencies. It’s an idea that’s been done a million zillion times over, but somehow has a breath of fresh air in it here. Collino keeps the A.P. mode relatively stealth with a minimal amount of updates and a super basic web setup. Tapes can be gone before you even notice they were around, so if you haven’t made a note to pay attention, now is a good time to do so. Here are five slammers from the catalog you may have missed.

#3: Dog Lady Island – 1938
“There, it falls apart, and still the black stone and slow fear and dead music, or dying in the twists of ghosts. It comes to nothing and tells a story made of stones and no mercy and dull music in the dead of night, counting in the half-lit echo of tessellated moments until voices arrive to examine our mistakes. In 1938, we pass the error of hours into evening, evading the dead currents of a baneful age.”

#6: Khaki Blazer – Vega Mix Volume Three
“We are babbling in the no man’s land of dance, without our betrayals and what disgusts us.”

#7: Blood Stereo – This Creaking Thirst
“The mask will be strange, however like, no order imposed upon the vapors of space and time, and it will be as though you exist, here and elsewhere, in the dim glare of a nightmare mask, in an unfamiliar family, and the stones will be warm from your feet, and you will expect a strange tomorrow.”

#10: Andrew Kirschner – Paranoia
“Worry is a shape in the basement, isolated under the assembly of voices.”

#17: Jason Soliday – Phase Transitions
“Imagine, after a weakness in the sequence, a logic reemerges and an unspeakable object is salvaged at the verge of language.”

You can grab Alien Passenger tapes at a super nice budget price of $6.00pd in the states or $11.00ppd if you live literally anywhere else in the world. Keep your eyes on their Big Cartel for future activity.