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Acid Seven: New Local Releases, More Bootlegs, Non-Local Picks

An old friend once told me that in the spring, everyone starts coming together. Maybe I wasn’t checked in to what was going on before, but I don’t think people have stopped coming together since then. While you all have been hard at work together, I have rediscovered napping (shit rocks!). As a result, there are tons of new releases here, and I am well-rested and ready to hear them.

NEW RELEASES

Tellum’s Body
Bitcrushed synth, a fuzz wall guitar, meandering and heartfelt vocals. The instrumental timbre is something I’m more accustomed to hearing in the setting of a drawn-out drone piece, so it’s refreshing to hear it reigned in and repurposed as a more downtempo pop accompaniment. Throughout I’m reminded of some of my favorite Phil Elverum compositions, but the subtleties are always more understated than overplayed here -- if you listen closely you can barely make out a shimmer here, a clean tone plucking a slow country tune there. I’m excited to see where they go from here.

Rosé Perez / Period Bomb’s Born in a Bag Split I can now proudly say I have seen (and will continue seeing) Rosé Perez live, but this split leaves me with another act I need to see. This is not the worst problem to have! The Rosé Perez set, like this record, started with “Megan’s Wedding,” whose cut-up introduction calls to mind the immortal art of YouTube Poop videos. It’s a good introduction to the straight-shooting, irreverent humor of their lyrics. This blends very well with the Period Bomb side of the split; the two acts are working in a similar register narratively, and draw from the same post-punk sensibilities. It’s really fucking fun.

Stem Cell Uterus’s Sonata for Feminine Solidarity It’s Real Lina Hours in this column, y’all. From the voice of the excerpts in the first movement of Sonata, I would say they have been culled from a YouTube comments section. Set against the backdrop of a number of generative arpeggiations, the understood distinctions between funny and crass are suspended, leaving a threadbare depiction of a woman held to the intense scrutiny of a celebrity (with all of the cultural prejudice that entails). What’s implied, to me, is that the scrutiny occurs absent any of the traditional riches associated with celebrity; this is an ordinary person. The final two movements are a jarring contrast -- the first a horror-tinged Tinder scenario, and the conclusion a dreamy, Terry Riley-esque instrumental. All three are as varied as they could be, but they make intuitive sense. Essential listening.

Tim J Harte’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Essays
I've only made my way thru these recordings once over, but I feel the call to return to them already. The 80 track selection could easily be mistaken for a single, extended piece, but this is far from a bad thing; it's fitting, even, for a thinker so singular and uncompromising. My favorite portion is the 'Conduct of Life' section, which segues comfortably into a pop-aesthetic towards the tail end, fizzling out of 'Beauty' and into the sporadic 'Illusions.'

Reanimator’s Decorpsinator
So crunchy. I love these recordings. Wherever one is instinctively taken during an experimental recording, I think it is important to take note. The vernacular we inherit to understand all that we hear pales so often to the real thing. I'm especially taken with how the delay timing plays into the improvisation here; a meter is partially dictated by repeated notes ringing out. Silence only lasts a measure or so. It's meditative in a way that betrays the body-horror image of its name.

BOOTLEG NEWS 

I’ve come into possession of another box of cassettes… Old romantic classical music. Once I’m out of blanks, these tapes are gonna sound... interesting. The tape duplicator is in for repairs, and in the meantime I’m going to sort out a distribution method. More on that next month. Meanwhile, all of the recordings are available on YouTube, and if you want a copy of one, hit me on uh, Facebook or something. Here’s what’s new from last time, but there are also releases from Rosé Perez, Tellum, Sacra Saturni, and various others -- including an unmarked “Ghost” acetate record that I haven’t been able to identify. I think it’s mid-aughts post-rock, but I could be wrong. I might add some stuff to make it more interesting.

decorpsinator - live at revolution records 10/27/19
The real glory, of course, is in their actual release, but this is a good documentation of their live performance -- which, given both Seth and Lina's involvement in numerous projects, might be a rare occurrence.

free music - live at revolution records 10/27/19
This was a truly special performance. Explaining it too much would feel wrong, but suffice it to say it’s vulnerable in a way I don’t often see. The commentary throughout is fractured but intuitive, never reaching too far to explain. A leap in logic is met with faith that the audience understands... it sounds nice!

NON-LOCAL LISTENING

 Yuri Morozov’s Strange Angels (70s/80s)

This is a new find. According to the label in charge of the reissue, the KGB prevented Yuri from releasing the record due to its “esoteric content and references to forbidden spiritual texts.” Even without the label hype, though, these are fantastic recordings. There are some nice Schaeffer-esque tape manipulations, vocal contortions that call Oliveros to mind, and an opener featuring the sound of a soviet analog synth warming up (I fell into the pit of trying to find out what kind of synthesizer he used, but only found this website: http://www.ruskeys.net/eng/synths.php ).

Julia Holter’s Maria (2011)


I think this was my first Julia record. Years ago I listened once and was slightly put off by the grating high end of the lo-fi recordings, but something stuck with me. Most of it, I remembered, was just voice and organ with cheap reverb bouncing from one end of a singletrack to the other. It occupied a space in my mind wherein I forgot who it was that made it. I sought it out only passively. I don’t remember how or when I came back to it, but it’s brilliant, and it haunts me.

Lucrecia Dalt’s Syzgy (2013)

I subscribe to a YouTube channel called “Saturn Archives” that uploads an impressive amount of experimental music. I can’t say it’s mostly any one sort of music, but I think that the trajectory is generally based in minimalist composers. I would highly recommend checking this out if you’ve got time to kill; on Sundays at the record store I play this channel almost exclusively. This is one release I’ve been taken with recently, which is a sparse assemblage of raw signal synth drums, electroacoustics, and gorgeous trilingual vocals.

 Les Rallizes Denudes & Be (Yellow)'s House Session at Fussa

I obsessively fixate on certain bands, and repeatedly return to this one. They have no complete studio recordings, but hundreds of bootleg recordings of their handful of songs. As I was browsing the (documented) catalog, I noticed that for one year there was a synthesizer player, Taisuke Morishita. It turns out that the gang recorded a session at their house as a side project. This does not disappoint -- wonderfully noisy psych drone, and a neat little change of pace for anyone who, like me, has spun Live '77 a hundred too many times.

Return to Shuttlecock on the seventh day of each month (give or take) for a transmission from Patrick’s ongoing journey into the experimental and genreless music of Kansas City. Follow him on Twitter.

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