Monorail Trespassing, End Of 2014
10.29.14 by Mike Haley

After over a year of lying dormant, Jonathan Borges is blowing the cobwebs off his Monorail Trespassing imprint. Borges spent a good chunk of 2014 roving the states with his Pedestrian Deposit and Vasculae projects, and next week (Monday, November 3rd to pinpoint it) he’ll drop the first, last, and only MT releases this year. Specifically a C30 by British experimental veteran All Brentnall’s Mlehst and a C32 from the Mazza/Castro duo Lettera 22 from Italy. Both tapes will be available in editions of 100 copies (physically) and virtually unlimited (digitally). Stream excerpts of both below.

Sights And Sounds From The Deepest Basement
10.24.14 by Mike Haley

When it comes to ingenious cassette packaging there isn’t anyone out there really keeping up with No Basement Is Deep Enough. Their handcrafted curios cross the line into straight up works of art, each with it’s own unique vibe and medium. And bonus: Turbulent sounds are housed inside. It’s a huge win / win situation. The label is brought to life by the brains of Ignace de Bruyn and Milja Radovanovic. Here are ten highlights from their insane inventory to fall in love with.

Cave Bears ‎– D.I.Y. Spells “DIE”
Comes in a plush replica of “Werner Herzog”

B.R. Garm ‎– GarmSquirm2012
assembled by Vladimir Lenhart

Dve Bajage ‎– Ne Diraj Zgaziće Te Tenk / Hard Core Tapes

Bang! Bros. ‎– Hard Rocks Vol.13. “3rd Degree Birthday”
wrapped in a handmade textile mask

Ludo Mich & Blue Yodel & Roman Nose & Ross Parfitt & Jennifer Iker ‎– The Clurichaun’s Naked Cheat With Sour Wine

Alone In Heaven – Poslednja Muzika

De Vogelen Des Velds – Collected Jingles

Remörk – Symphonie Monotrone

Magma Trakt – s/t
housed in a green-gold ‘pataphysical grotto

Horaflora ‎– No Roof Is High Enough

More sounds are available on NBIDE’s Soundcloud and more images on Flickr.

Dog In The Evening
10.23.14 by Mike Haley

I have a huge problem with wet dogs. Mostly the smell. I would honestly rather plunge my head deep into a sack full of gremlin diapers than deal with the scent of a pup that’s been out in the rain. Even giving them baths is somehow bad, which almost makes no sense. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking LOVE dogs. Huge fan. The damp ones are just a major menace to my senses. Quite odd then how much I’m enjoying 夕方の犬, translated to Dog In The Evening, who’s miniature melodies released today on Patient Sounds are incredibly drenched.

The “mb_s_4_ch” C48 [program repeats], released in an edition of 50 copies, is Japanese producer / underscore fanatic taro_yamada’s first release. All the tracks here are submerged deeply and thoroughly in liquid, giving the tip toe piano and tender sampling used a beyond soggy motif. The tracks are more than appropriately named, like the second cut “h2o___frm_____faucet” which is pretty much that. Languorous drips of water patting over even more leisurely paced keys. And “forest of slime______”, a syrupy variant on that same theme. It’s a shortish cassette (like I said earlier, program repeats), but provides more than enough moments of chill and chilliness. Plus I’m a sucker for those blue shells.

You can pick up “mb_s_4_ch” this very second from the Patient Sound shop, along with new tapes by Mukqs and Gawain. You can stream it below.

Tales From The Crypt or Hive Mind?
10.31.14 by Mike Haley

Boo!

Did I spook ya? Yeah, I spooked ya. It’s Halloween time, man. A time for ghouls, and critters, and wolf persons and such. So let’s get creepy with a Tales From The Crypt or Hive Mind quiz. See if you can tell which titles are names of TFTC episodes, the classic HBO series featuring the lovable animatronic Cryptkeeper,  and which are Hive Mind cassettes released by Greh Holger’s Chondritic Sound imprint.

Ghoul’d Luck…[WpProQuiz 2]

Sun Drain – Trapped In Plaster
10.18.14 by Tabs Out

The next Tabs Out Subscription Series tape is a collaboration between Tabs Outers Dave Doyen (Sound Out Light/Vales) and Ian Franklin (Shredderghost) as Sun Drain. The only way to get a copy is to make a chrome donation to Tabs Out, which will score you this and 3 more limited cassettes. The only way to hear it is to crack open the plaster brick that the tape is trapped in. How it got in there we may never know.

Each copy will be hand numbered / named, and strictly limited to people who make chrome donations. So get it done ASAP!

Ohio Taste Test
10.15.14 by Mike Haley

Ohio! The 7th most populous, and the 10th most densely populated, of the 50 United States. State fruit: Tomatoes. State reptile: The Black Racer. And now we welcome the unofficial state double cassette, “Ohio Volume One”, released this month by native sons Polar Envy and SKSK.

16 artists either currently living in, or native to, The Buckeye State contributed tracks to this beast of a compilation that spans a C42 and C36. Top shelf ambassadors from Cleveland (Collapsed Arc, Witchbeam, Plague Mother, Blackfire), Dayton (Developer, Shredded Nerve, Being, Inbreeder), Columbus (Imvixor, John Also Bennett, Mark Van Fleet, Ryan Jewell), and various zones like Oberlin and Kent (C. Kirkendall, The Nevari Butchers, interstates (etc.), and Moth Cock) all stepping up to do their hometown good with a heavy focus on desolate sounds.

Another fantastic documentation of the Ohio noise scene to go along with past offerings like the Clevo documentary “City/Ruins: Art in the Face of Industrial Decay” (Live Bait Recordings), “1913 Flood Collective” 6xCS box set (Community College), and the “Ohio Feathers” split cassettes from Pizza Night to name a few. “Ohio Volume One” is limited to 200 copies and available for $15 to Americans, $18 to Canadians, and $23 to everyone else. Ordering info is available here, full stream below.

Colin Potter’s First Six Albums Reissues, Reissued
10.14.14 by Mike Haley

Unless you have the reflexes of a cougar, and/or a gold plated internet connection, you probably were not one of the lucky sixty people who snagged Colin Potter’s “The First Six Albums” cassette set late last month. Reissues of the Nurse With Wound / Current 93 contributor’s long gone solo recordings from the early 80’s (“The Ghost Office”, “Two Nights”, “The Where House?”, “Here”, “The Scythe”, and “A Gain”) came and went in about an hour. Well, it looks like you’ll have a second chance to snag all six tapes, as another edition is being made available.

From Integrated Circuits:

“Due to the upsurge in interest in the cassette format, ICR goes back to it’s roots with a limited edition of Colin Potter’s first six tapes from the early 80s – The Ghost Office, The Scythe, Here, The Where House?, Two Nights and A Gain. The set is priced at £28.00 plus postage. This was a special release for Cassette Store Day (September 27th) so most of the copies went to other dealers. There were only 60 of each, but we had a small number to sell directly. The edition of 60 sets sold out within a few hours, which was a real surprise. Boomkat took a batch of them and sent out a very nice enthusiastic mailout about the release to their very substantial list of customers, which resulted in them selling out very quickly. A large number of those customers then went to the ICR website to reserve a set and before we knew it we had loads more orders than we could fulfill. After discussing the problem with various people, the decision was made to do another run of copies, which will have different coloured artwork. Apologies if this annoys anyone, who may only wish to buy this as an extremely limited edition, but hopefully the people who genuinely want to get hold of these tapes so they can listen to them will understand. If anyone who has already bought them is offended by this ‘breach of contract’ then we will be quite happy to offer them a full refund. The extra money we will make from the additional copies will not, be assured, go towards financing a luxury lifestyle. There are some new releases from ICR that can now move forward. We’ve even decided to release another cassette of unreleased and rare tracks! So if you still wish to order the set, please email colinpotter@icrdistribution.com to reserve one and we’ll email you back with shipping and payment details.”

So there ya go. Email Colin Potter, reserve a copy, and for £28.00 + shipping (about $45 + shipping) all will be right in the world. Feel free to stream a few tracks while you wait.

Out-Of-Body Hi Fi Stereo VHS
10.11.14 by Mike Haley

Now that Blockbuster is out of the picture, Out-Of-Body Recs seems fully prepared to ease in and fill the hole in the VHS world. But before they get around to dubbing the classics like Water World, Short Circuit, and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (the one with Tony Hawk), they’re gonna deal with a few more obscure titles. The list of future VHS’s on their site looks pretty sweet, with names like Alberich, Profligate, and label-head Rob Buttrum’s Filth project all on board for some hot VHS action. The first two, due out later this month, will be from Regosphere and Somnaphon, complete with sick artwork that mimics (or maybe steals from??) old, cult horror flicks.

While you prep your VCR, check out the glitched-out trailer for Somnaphon’s “Anthology Of Errors” below. Hit up Out-Of-Body’s website and/or Facebook for news, as preorders should be up soon (this weekend?). And don’t be afraid to order pretty much every cassette they have released so far.

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.

Orange Milk Launches Split Series
10.5.14 by Mike Haley

Orange Milk has been beyond consistent in their campaign of finding unique and misfit sounds, sheltering them in head-juicing aesthetics, and releasing them upon the Earth. Or at least a few hundred of it’s inhabitants, depending on edition sizes. Today they came as close as a cassette label can at creating a universe all of it’s own with the Orange Milk Split Series. The initial four denizen of this nutso zone are Drut PD, Larry Wish, Elegance, and CH Rom, each seeing how far they can stretch pop music before it snaps. That’s the theme here, as it reads on the Orange Milk site: “experimentation within the pop music setting. Each song question the meaning of pop music in 2014 by employing sparkling electronics, bizarre baritone vocals, tangential song structure, and a sense of freedom and joy at the prospect of manipulating a catchy tune”. And a boulder-sized “bravo” is deserved by everyone involved here for injecting severe imagination into what can so easily be a stale mold.

From the moment Drut PD breaks ground with three awkwardly wonderful songs, a bubbly fantasy with anxious crooning (Drut delivers lines like “Cant believe it. Here she is falling. Falling all over the barn” like a congested Thomas Dolby), to CH Rom’s sexy cyborg rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s Fire, you know you’re in a good place. Sandwiched between is Larry Wish, who has graced the Orange Milk roster before, spending almost ten minutes in a curious cloud of triumphant upsurges and fruit fly swooshes and Guerrilla Toss alum Kassie and Peter busting a trio of Julie Ruin-esque weird wave hits. This inaugural volume of OM’s split series is a spectacle of playful vibes for ears that want to be challenged, and a dope sign for future installments. No doubt.

Oh, and the artwork. Don’t get me fucking started on the artwork. I mean, seriously, don’t your eyes feel so happy just looking at that orange wizard and space ninja or whatever the hell those lil’ guys are!? Gorgeous. Maybe that is how everyone will look when entering this world Orange Milk has created. If so, I want some sort of half hawk / half warrior situation going on. Are request even being taken? Oh yeah, it was designed by Jordan Speer.

Listen now! Buy now! Repeat.