DICK STUSSO - 'S.P.'

Formats

• HAR162 - LP

  098787316209

Details

Dick Stusso’s third album is a document of slow mental unravelling with a world in perpetual decay as its backdrop. With S.P., California-based singer and songwriter Nic Russo has created his most out-there and toothsome record to date, plunging his listeners into a strange and thrilling new world at every opportunity. S.P. is the first Dick Stusso record in four years, following his stellar Hardly Art debut In Heaven from 2018—but this latest missive is more of an indirect sequel to the buzz-building 2015 release Nashville Dreams / Sings the Blues, diving deeper into the fictional character Dick Stusso’s crumbling psyche and dystopian surroundings. If our introduction to Dick was someone trying to pursue their dreams and turning into a failure as a result, S.P. reflects the moment where, in Russo’s words, “The character is becoming unlikable. He’s succumbing to what is taking place around him. ”Nearly half of its 18 songs—spanning countrified rock duets, Guided by Voices-recalling anthems, and outro noise-burst sound experiments—were completed before the pandemic, when Russo decided to take a beat and allow the music to sprout new, weird buds in his rehearsal space. With mixer Andrew Oswald accentuating the record’s unique feel, S.P. bridges the gap between the ultra lo-fi confines of his 2015 debut Nashville Dreams / Sings the Blues and the lush echoes of In Heaven, with a few helping hands to fully flesh out Russo’s vision. Grace Cooper (The Sandwitches, Grace Sings Sludge) contributes vocals to “Dinner for Two” and “Self Reflection (Deep),” while his father Marc Russo—a Grammy-winning saxophonist who’s currently touring with the Doobie Brothers—lays down expert horn arrangements on “Garbagedump #1.” The myriad of twists and turns on S.P. further establish Russo as a fascinating craftsman who’s never bound to do the same thing twice.

Tracks

01. Rocking Machine
02. Part-time Apocalypse
03. The Check In
04. Convenient Life
05. Garbagedump #1
06. A Fairly Normal Guy
07. Dinner For Two
08. The Masterwork
09.Self Reflection (Deep)
10. Big Money
11. Haunted Hotel
12. Checking Back
13. How Do You Spell Success?
14. Doubt
15. Failure
16. Hell
17. Twilight At The Shareholders' Meeting
18. Tears Of Love

Press

Second album on Hardly Art by oddball Oakland songwriter/enigma Nic Russo, aka Dick Stusso. Something akin to a deranged 21st century Elvis, Dick Stusso?s work throws classic singer-songwriter and country influences into the confusion of the modern world.

Audio & Video

LAUREL CANYON - 'S/T'

Formats

• AGIT067 - LP (COLOURED)

  5060446128299

• AGIT067CD - CD

  5060446128282

Details

*LTD RED VINYL* Strap yourself in people, we have here the debut full length from Philly’s Laurel Canyon; after some online EP releases, and a (now) sold out 7” with Savage Pencil, Agitated Records is excited to announce the release of their s/t album! Guitars are drenched in an Asheton worshipping haze and pummel, melded alongside a Velvets chug and mid-to-late 80s Pacific Northwest guttural / primal howl... this is American primitive music at its most powerful. Pigeonholers beware, this album takes its cues from all the most potent places… Funhouse, Loaded, Green River, early Sub Pop, all providing valid reference points. In amongst this over-amped harmonious murk are 10 visceral and catchy pop songs practically screaming for attention, the core members of Serg, Nick, and Dylan have created a beast of a record. Some tracks were recorded with Steve Albini, some with Bryce Goggin and all were mastered by Howie Weinberg. The band played 40 chaotic shows in 2022 alone from New York City to Los Angeles, where they opened for Agent Orange and Strawberry Alarm Clock on two separate occasions at the Whisky a Go Go. BAND BIO: Punk rock band Laurel Canyon formed in 2019 when Nick and Serg met through a mutual friend in their hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. After connecting over a shared interest in both Arthur Rimbaud and The Stooges, the two began to rehearse together in Serg’s garage. By October 2020, Serg and Nick began composing original songs together as Laurel Canyon, the first of which, “Two Times Emptiness,” was released on May 1, 2021. Following the release of “Two Times Emptiness” b/w “Enemy Lines,” Nick and Serg traded in their characteristic jangle for fuzz pedals and established a relationship with veteran producer Bryce Goggin (Pavement, The Lemonheads) at Trout Recording in Brooklyn. Between July and November of 2021 the group recorded a 5-track EP “Victim,” released on January 14, 2022, rounding out the line-up with bassist Dylan Loccarini. 

Tracks

01. Drop Out
02. A Man About Town
03. Madame Hit The Wire
04. Eczema
05. Victim
06. Daddy's Honey
07. Tangiers
08. Shove
09. Take Your Cut
10. Sade

Press

Recommended to fans of: The Stooges, Green River, Screaming Trees, Tad, Fluid, The Velvet Underground, Mudhoney, The Birthday Party

Audio & Video

THE VEILS - 'NUX VOMICA'

Formats

• BING190 - LP

  600197019016

Details

600 copies for EU / UK only .. The rawness of The Veils' Nux Vomica can be enjoyed to a degree never heard before, with Ba Da Bing's limited edition pressing of the records with the original mixes by Nick Rainey left intact. Originally released in 2006, The Veils sophomore album Nux Vomica was praised for its “Herculean intensity” by The Guardian, and called “a heady blast of gothic psychodrama” by The Observer, while Pitchfork praised leader Finn Andrews’ “magnetic, outsize persona.” Long out of print, the vinyl version was resuscitated by Music on Vinyl in 2017 and quickly sold out. Now, The Veils present the definitive version of their most heralded album to date, which dusts off the original mixes by legendary producer Nick Launay (Public Image Limited, The Birthday Party, INXS and Midnight Oil) and offers them to fans here for the first time. Taken from the original two-inch analog tape reels, each song was carefully remastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios in London. Nux Vomica was the first of many creative reinventions for Andrews, who at 22 had already released an album on Rough Trade, moved from New Zealand to London to form a band, then back to New Zealand where he once again started the band anew. The creative progression is clear in Andrews’ incisive lyricism and knack for hell-fire dramatics. From the positively mirthful “Advice for Young Mothers to Be” to the simmering ominousness of “Nux Vomica,” from the ornate spectacle of “Calliope!” to the Grand Guignol of “Jesus for the Jugular”, Nux Vomica is a remarkably accomplished album for a musician so young who was facing the pressures of British musical stardom. All intentions to release this dark and raw set of recordings were dashed upon submission to Rough Trade for approval, who didn't like the results. They hired mixing engineer Bill Price to adjust the sound and add additional instrumentation. Launey’s mixes were shelved and forgotten about, while the album nonetheless went on to be a critical highpoint for the band and is much loved to this day. To celebrate the release of The Veils’ massive new double album, …And Out Of The Void Came Love, Ba Da Bing is issuing a limited-to-1200-LPs simultaneous run of Nux Vomica in a form you have never heard it before. The brilliance of Andrews’ talents come through all the more clear in this version, which strips his songs to the core and allows the holes to show. Here’s where the seeds of a lifelong artistic talent really began to first take root.

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

LA MONTE YOUNG / MARIAN ZAZEELA - '31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM THE VOLGA DELTA'

Formats

• SV198 - LP

  857661008988

• SV198CD - CD

  857661008957

Details

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day. Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script. Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Tracks

1. 31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
2. 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM
The Volga Delta

Press

First time reissue of the first album by composer La Monte Young
Originally released in 1969 on Edition X

Audio & Video

HELENA CELLE - 'IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE YOU AT YOUR WORST, THEN I DON'T DESERVE ME AT MY BEST'

Formats

• LSSN080 - LP

  5060446128404

Details

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date. Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If “I Can’t Handle” was lo fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit revelling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern. Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled. Opener I Did It My Way pokes fun at Sinatra but the message is clear, Helena Celle has no regrets. Sounding like a Jungle track shorn of a MC and deep fried in greasy acid, it uses cassette compression effects to push the sound far beyond the red. A breakbeat suffers multiple lashings of noise solos, heavily filtered synths and white noise blowing a crazy gale across the stereo pan. Ennobled Reception Of The Excellector (My Face When Mix) approximates French House perhaps or 90s dance chart music as performed by a rotting homunculus gurgling down the phone. It’s really that fun and carefree. Real Time... takes a stab at a kind of Techno EBM Cold Wave with no desire to sound like any of it, with waves of tape hiss rising up from some dark shore to wash over proceedings. Fellow sound artist and musician Jennifer Walton guests on the last track on Side A, an epic, fuzzed out Noise and rhythm excursion into cyber breakdown. Snow-Filled Chalice Of My Magonian Exile (titles of the year so far, right?) builds into a wall of beats, pads, manic, haywire synth patterns and a world-ending, distorted riff that points to an appreciation of Metal. The track posits all of reality as one massive computer game played by gods and this is the track played at the Game Over screen. A pixelated, fantastical club track that would simply eviscerate any club it was played in. The whole of Side B is given over to a 20 minute epic, Original Besttrack (Abe’s Oddysee Extended Mix). A cohesive summation of the previous 4 tracks but stretched out, it recalls Aphex Twin’s furthest out tracks albeit boiled underwater, every element blown out so that even the ambient passages scramble brains and re-wire expectations. The restless, overwhelming music is glazed with a patina of hiss that renders the whole almost meditative: over the 20 minutes there is so much information to digest your brain starts plugging in directly to the music, settling in and accepting the mania as it comes. At the other end you’re wondering how you coped without it.

Tracks

1. I Did It My Way
2. Ennobled Reception of The Excellector (My Face When
Mix)
3. Real Time (Five Track Pentangle Edgelord Mix)
4. Snow-Filled Chalice of My Magonian Exile (ft Jennifer
Walton)
5. Original Besttrack (Abe's Oddysee Extended Mix)

Press

#8 THE QUIETUS: New Weird Britain releases of 2023

Audio & Video

IVAN THE TOLERABLE QUARTET - 'TOFT HOUSE SESSION'

Formats

• SBR095 - LP (COLOURED)

Details

Available on Limited Edition ‘History Blurs’ Vinyl. Limited to 330 copies worldwide.Stolen Body is delighted to announce yet another Ivan The Tolerable release. This one was a long time coming as you will read below. A failed Astral Session that somehow turned out well. Oli says it better… This album began with an email back in late 2021, Al at Stolen Body Records asked if I wanted to come and record an Astral Session in Bristol to promote an album id just released called Out Of Season. I roped in the three people who play on my records that lived the closest to me (Neil Turpin from Bilge Pump/Objections, Robbie Major from Benefits and piano and saxophone wizard Ben Hopkinson) and we had a couple of rehearsals to get a set together - half improvised around songs off my last couple of records. It sounded good so off we went to Bristol. Did the session, had a night out and drove home the next day. All good? WRONG - the tape fucked up and nothing recorded properly. Oh well, we had a nice day out but I’m not going back to do it again - its a 6 hour drive each way! But we DID enjoy it so when Al asked us again to play his Astral Festival in 2022 - we went down and did it, and again, a great time was had - and when we got back I decided we should record the set we had been playing in case we never did it again. Where shall we do it? The back room of the social club in Middlesbrough that i spend half my life and half my money in, obviously We spent the morning recording the set we had been playing and the afternoon recording new totally improvised stuff. It was then all chopped up and edited - a re-recorded sax and synth here and there, some extra guitars added in places - then off to Anthony Chapman to mix and it was finished. This LP is a 50/50 mix of tracks we have been playing live and new pieces recorded that afternoon, which feature guest vocals by Mike Watt (Minutemen, Stooges), Jad Fair (Half Japanese, Daniel Johnston) and Kevin Branstetter (Trumans Water) reading the words of Karen Schoemer - all of whom i have a long history of making records with and are some of the finest humans you could encounter. The album release is timed to coincide with us playing this years Astral Festival - a full one year journey... and in true 'just to be awkward' fashion - I doubt we will play any of this stuff live, life is too short so will play a whole new set, and then probably record it, and release another album. Full circle. Peace. Oli Heffernan February 202

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

DOUG MCKECHNIE - 'THE COMPLETE SAN FRANCISCO MOOG 1968-72'

Formats

• VGDMCD1 - CD

  795154138920

Details

***CD format contains both LP volumes!!!*** In 1968, Bay Area native Doug McKechnie got hold of one the very first modular Moog synthesizers ever made and began finding his own way to play it. Soon, he was hauling the finicky instrument around to perform improvised concerts at colleges and psychedelic ballrooms, as well as an ill-fated appearance on the bill at Altamont. Some of the performances were recorded, and the surviving tapes—never before released—capture a free-flowing, transportive sound that fills in the gap between the austere mid-century academic avant garde and the expansive cosmic suites of Tangerine Dream and the rest of the Berlin School in the ’70s.

Tracks

Press

'...glimpse of an age when pioneering technology and a spirit of curiosity intersected to bring a new sound into being.' - 8/10 Uncut
Presages both Tangerine Dream's soundtracks and, in its most grimy moments, Acid Tracks.- The Wire

Audio & Video