QASIM NAQVI - 'ENDLING'

Formats

• ERATP176LE - LP (COLOURED)

  3700551786282

Details

An endling is the final member of a species. When an endling dies, the species is extinct. Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi returns with Endling, his newest album for Erased Tapes Records, set for release 30th May. Written as a modular synth prequel to his 2023 BBC Concert Orchestral work, God Docks at Death Harbor, Endling takes the listener on a 43-minute odyssey through an intense and beautiful landscape, set hundreds of years into the future. “One morning my wife woke up from a dream with a phrase in her mind — “God Docks at Death Harbor, explains Naqvi. I was just starting to write a new work for the BBC Concert Orchestra, and when she told me about this dream of words, it very quickly seeped into the fabric of the music. Her words were a poem to me, evoking very specific imagery. I imagined our planet hundreds of years into the future, where the human race no longer exists. I imagined a world peacefully restoring itself in the absence of us, because we’re no longer around to destroy it and ourselves. This became the tenet of the work. It was like a scenic mural that I could look at for inspiration, as I was writing this tone poem. After God Docks at Death Harbor premiered in the spring of 2023 in London, the feeling stayed with me, and when it came time to think about a new record I felt compelled to continue this narrative. I imagined a prequel, about the last human on the planet — an endling, traversing a world centuries into the future. A world decayed and mutated into a strange amalgam of the natural and artificial. I envisioned the music as chapters, following this human through the crumbling landscape of the future, that was now being overtaken and absorbed by the natural world. In keeping with the tone poem tradition of God Docks, I created the track titles first, and their meanings became more defined as the music began to take shape On the album’s centrepiece “Power Down the Heart,” featuring Moor Mother, our character stumbles upon an A.I. being that is in the final moments of its life. As a kind of last rites, this ancient artificial consciousness describes the beauty, sadness and horror it has observed for hundreds of years. I wanted the music to feel like the inside of this being’s mind. I shared the music and this narrative with Camae and asked if she would be the voice of this A.I., and she came back with the perfect contribution. All of the music on Endling was made with an ARP Odyssey, Minimoog and modular synthesizer. For me, one of the many challenging and satisfying aspects of modular synthesizers involves the development of complex timbrel ideas from the ground up, which can rarely ever be repeated perfectly. The device can be organically unstable and fallible. It can feel like an organism and as the performer, you’re in control of the flow of its energy, or voltage. This machine approach to Endling was the perfect compliment to its orchestral predecessor, it felt like a different kind of orchestra from this album’s future – with the organic consuming and transmuting the artificial. Qasim Naqvi is a percussionist, composer and synthesist. Along with being the drummer of lauded cult minimalist trio, Dawn of Midi, Naqvi is an accomplished solo artist and his passion for multidisciplinary work has brought him into the world of film, dance, installation art, and the stage of orchestral and chamber music. His concert music has been commissioned and performed by The London Contemporary Orchestra, The BBC Concert Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Bang on a Can All Stars, Jennifer Koh, Stargaze, The Cello Octet of Amsterdam, The Helsinki Chamber Choir and others.

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**ON LTD TRANSLUCENT VINYL**

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ZIG ZAGS - 'DEADBEAT AT DAWN'

Formats

• EZRDR206 - LP

  788362909307

• EZRDR206CD - CD

  788362909338

Details

Zig Zags have been an L.A. institution for over a decade, never veering from their hard-riffin punk/metal mission statement. They’ve gigged all over the globe with underground luminaries such Mike Watt, Neurosis, Pig Destroyer, Oh Sees and Feral Ohms and recorded collaborations with icons like Iggy Pop. Now the power trio is set to release their fifth incendiary full-length album, Deadbeat At Dawn, named in honor of the beloved B-movie, a no-budget action revenge flick set in the mean streets of suburban Ohio. Cult cinema is an enduring Zig Zags inspiration, with the band frequently calling out exploitation films in their lyrics, odes to teen-delinquent classics like “Over the Edge” and dystopian sci-fi such as, “Terminator” and “Total Recall”. The new album sticks to this obsession with the cultural underground, riffing on everything from demonic minions to apocalyptic visions and alien attacks. The result is the most focused, intense, and catchy Zig Zags album yet, with the timing perfect for their distinctly melodic and maniacal call to arms. Finalizing recording and mixing just as the catastrophic fires hit their hometown in L.A., Deadbeat At Dawn is the perfect soundtrack for a city rising up from the ashes of destruction. “I feel lucky that we got to put out this record when we did,” Maheu said, “It’s heavy and gnarly and kind of fucked up, but it’s also a lot of fun—which is how we feel about Los Angeles.”

Tracks

1. Not Of This World 2. Altered States 3. Deadbeat At Dawn 4. At War With Hell 5. Take Me To Your Leader 6. Rats In Love 7. Above The Law 8. Get Loud 9. Metal To Metal 10. Say It To My Face

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TRIGGER - 'SECOND ROUND'

Formats

• BING217CD - CD

  600197021729

• BING217LP - LP

  600197021712

Details

After 45 years, Trigger’s never-released second album, Second Round, invites listeners to rediscover the hard rock sound that made the band a standout act of the 1970s. In early 1979, Trigger walked out of Electric Ladyland Studios with a completed second album. Mere months had passed since their self-titled debut came out on Casablanca Records, home to KISS and Parliament. The band had toured with Cheap Trick and The Godz, met Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell, and things were looking bright. But Casablanca unexpectedly went bankrupt, and the label’s artists went into freefall. Trigger unsuccessfully sought interested parties, shelved the recordings and disbanded; a disappointing end for a band who dominated the Jersey Shore club scene on their way up with fiery, kick ass live shows. RIP Trigger: 1973-1979. Jump to 2024. Guitarist Richie House is living in Northern New Jersey with his wife, enjoying a relaxing afternoon at the community pool with neighbors. One of them, Andrew Wexler is shocked to discover his friend had a band in the ’70s. He listens to their recordings, and as an avid record collector, assumes the mission of getting that unheard second album released. He writes to Ba Da Bing, a label with Jersey roots. Much excitement ensues. Second Round’s long-awaited release will now be available. All original members—Derek Remington (vocals/drums), Jimmy Duggan (guitar/vocals), Tom Nigra (bass guitar/backing vocals), and Richie House (lead guitar/vocals)—are present on the recordings. Sadly, Duggan and Nigra have passed away, but Remington and House have overseen this reissue, with songs sourced directly from the analog masters.. The Trigger of today maintains a high level of quality, albeit with a bit less flair, and even less hair. And there’s more going on here than at first listen. While the band carries the earmarks of their era—melodic hard-rock fashioned for Saturday night parties—they override the cliché with incredibly catchy songs. How would a ripping song like “Back Talk” have been received in 1979? It’s a question we’ll never be able to answer, but the raw energy of the track spans generations. “One In A Million,” however, with its full harmonies and forceful chorus, could have easily made the soundtrack for Fast Times. Celebrate the discovery of this lost gem by giving it a listen. You’ll be Trigger happy…

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BILL ORCUTT - 'THE FOUR LOUIES'

Formats

• FAKE018 - LP

  843563188071

Details

2025 repress. In 1957, R&B singer Richard Berry scrawled a few crude stanzas on a strip of toilet paper, and chant-sung them in fake patois over a shuffling rhythm to capitalize on the Latin craze tearing up the charts. "Louie Louie" didn't make much of a dent in the national consciousness in its first iteration, but when Berry and the Pharaohs took the song on the road up and down the West Coast, it became something of a regional sensation. In 1962, the Kingsmen carved their mush-mouthed, barely-pubescent first take of the nascent standard into acetate. The resulting 45 was a mega-hit (although Berry remained a pauper until legal wrangling finally made him rich shortly before his death in 1997). No one could quite decipher the words, so grown-ups assumed the worst, and the resulting hysteria culminated in an FBI obscenity investigation and trial ("Unintelligible at any speed," concluded the judge). The countless cover versions that followed the original hit mangled the song's blurry text into guesstimated verse with varying shades of angst and filthiness. Less than a decade later, Steve Reich's Four Organs (built from a stacked dominant-11th chord with wayward pitches gradually trickling out either side like pancake syrup) made its concert debut. Its introductory staccato fanfare poleaxed unsuspecting uptown highbrows in an almost rockist fashion, and while the piece was tolerated by the art mob, Reich's work didn't fare so well in uptown concert halls. At a Carnegie Hall performance in 1971, one listener repeatedly slammed her head into the stage, shouting "Stop, stop, I confess!" Nonetheless, the work's relentless progression, melting into Farfisa dreamscapes, would eventually inspire some of the most palatable manifestations of American minimalism. Bill Orcutt's latest release for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly melds these audio landmarks. Fittingly, Reich described Four Organs as "the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music," and as such, it neatly envelops all of Louie Louie within its single chord. Intuiting this, Orcutt deftly overlays the opening salvos of these sonic cognates into a zig-zagging 4/4 cadence, which unfolds over side one with an incongruously conventional rock dynamic structure. The Four Organs' sustained organ threads suggest Louie Louie's vocal line, whether by accident or Orcutt's design. Organ drones dominate Side 2, with Louie Louie forced into counterpoint. We can hear just how out of tune the Kingsmen were, unsalvageable by any pitch correction software, with that damned maraca inexplicably sliding into a pulsing but syncopated 6-beat bar ending with the door-slam finality of the original Kingsmen 45. Taken together, Louie Louie and The Four Organs represent key signposts in musical evolution: proto-punk, proto new age; reviled by the squares, yet efficacious in blowing forward-looking minds. In 2025, Orcutt has reinvigorated both well-worn standards with some of their old mojo, and their novel, pulsing setting provides a whiff of what made them revolutionary in the first place.

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BILL ORCUTT - 'A MECHANICAL JOEY'

Formats

• FAKE015 - LP

  843563188095

Details

2025 repress. "Bill Orcutt is of course famous for his bluesy free improv acoustic guitar playing, which he has been performing since he re-emerged with the 2009 solo album A New Way To Pay Old Debts, 12 years after the dissolution of his seminal noise rock band Harry Pussy. He has also held down day jobs as a software engineer at various Silicon Valley companies for the last two decades. Apart from certain errant excursions such as Harry Pussy’s final album Let’s Build A Pussy, which consists of Orcutt timestretching a second of the voice of Harry Pussy drummer Adris Hoyos into an hour, and notwithstanding the fact that since 2011 his albums have been released by electronic music label Editions Mego, there was previously a marked divergence between the computers of Orcutt’s career and the eschewal of digital manipulation in the uncompromisingly visceral playing of his vocation, in which the pluck of every string is palpable. This changed in 2016, when he released the avowedly primitive open source live coding audio program Cracked, which consists only of a window in which commands are typed. Since then, Orcutt has been intermittently releasing music made with the app on his DIY label Fake Estates, A Mechanical Joey being the latest. Its two sides comprise one continuous track, lasting 35 minutes in total, during which Orcutt creates the illusion that a sample of Joey Ramone counting in a song accompanied by drumbeats is moving forwards and backwards in space. It is a sequel of sorts to last year’s Pure Genius, another release by Orcutt made on Cracked, which consists of various computer generated voices counting, accompanied by bleeps ascending the chromatic scale. The blurb for that record claims that it was borne of the fact that 'while stuck out on the left coast surrounded by braying tech bros,' Orcutt 'realized that we, the plebs, will eventually be here only to serve the machines'. But perhaps the return of the human voice on A Mechanical Joey is his indication that we might be able to resist after all.”—Daniel Neofetou, Wire

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BILL ORCUTT - 'THE ANXIETY OF SYMMETRY'

Formats

• FAKE017 - LP

  843563188088

Details

2025 repress. "Bill Orcutt’s latest 'counting' album, The Anxiety of Symmetry, completes a trilogy on his Fake Estates label that started with Pure Genius (2020) and A Mechanical Joey (2021), all realized with his own Cracked computer music software. Comprising two 15-minute-long improvisations, the album’s terrain is limited to six samples of female voices singing the number of the corresponding note value in the first six pitches of a major scale. These are fashioned into compact phrases (1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc.) that are looped and layered. As the loops combine in multiple permutations and cycles, their uneven lengths create polyrhythms and syncopations as well as harmonies. On the surface, Anxiety is unusually placid for Orcutt, reminiscent of Minimal classics like the 'Knee Plays' of Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (which also features sung numbers, although without the one-to-one relationship between pitch and interval number) and the breathy soprano voice loops in '2/1' from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. However, the album’s title is adapted from Orcutt’s essay of the same name in the Spectres III anthology about a compulsive behavioral condition known as 'Just Right' and its parallels and possible applications to music, which suggests that this titular music’s inspiration is not trance- inducement, but rather a kind of mental obsession with ordering and re-ordering. In the essay, Orcutt posits that 'for the ‘Just Right’ subject composing or performing with the computer, the fixation with repetition, symmetry and arrangement in sound can be mediated with software, creating new prospects for both therapeutic engagement with their compulsions and the creation of music with a length, density and scale not possible without machines... Offloading one’s 'Just Right' auditory compulsions onto the computer fulfills the promise of automatic art, allowing the full expression of the subconscious by removing the need to focus on anything but the arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and the sounds themselves become merely a byproduct of the process of satisfying these feelings.' The Anxiety of Symmetry might then be comparable to artist Hanne Darboven’s quasi-Minimal compositions and their basis in odd mathematical calculations derived from the calendar, in taking its cue from an extra-musical process. The two pieces’ polyphony is not far off from Orcutt’s recent Music for Four Guitars, but also marks Anxiety as a departure from both Pure Genius and A Mechanical Joey. The latter bypassed melody and harmony altogether; its relentless, phantasmagorical looping and subdivisions of Joey Ramone’s trademark onstage count-offs could be seen as a wry comment on the repetitions within repetitions of rock songs and their ongoing performances, or simply the monomania of years of touring for months on end. Pure Genius presented a male and female voice stolidly reciting the numbers that correspond to the notes of a scale that are simultaneously generated with sine tones (i.e., when a voice says 'one,' the first note of a scale is heard at the same time); Anxiety collapses Pure Genius’ juxtaposition of pitch and counting by having the numbers sung. Stripped down yet excessive (in the tradition of his other works with Cracked), Anxiety seems less like its predecessors’ deconstructions than a new kind of subversive easy listening."— Alan Licht

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PRIMITIVE RING - 'POISONOUS GIFT / TV CITY'

Formats

• ITR408 - 7"

Details

Primitive Ring consists of Bert Hoover (Hoover III, Groop), Jon Modaff (JModaff, Hooveriii, Groop), and Charles Moothart (Fuzz, GØGGS). The three LA based musicians found each other in a collective state of high functioning de evolution, and collectively agreed to bend the knee to the primal instincts of melody and rhythm. Primitive Ring started when the three members realized their worlds were organically converging. Seeking a new well to pitch the mental bucket in search of creative fluidity, the choice became obvious: start a new band. "Bring in the new" is not to say "Out with the old". It is to continue the story and elaborate on the plot. A band of three individuals (ring) tapping in to their collective sound (ring) to form a solid bond (ring) in which to burn away superfluous modernity (ring). Rock and roll is for everyone and belongs to no one.

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