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New Releases for date: 9/16/02
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ANTICON
Artist: THEMSELVES Title: The No Music
Format: 2xLP Catalog
Number:		 ABR025
Price: $13.00 Label: Anticon
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
Artist: THEMSELVES Title: The No Music
Format: CD Catalog
Number:		 ABR025CD
Price: $13.00 Label: Anticon
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
***themselves, formerly them, are doseone and jel- the former a nowhere man out to make the world small and his neuroses something lovely, an artist who is free of form and slave to his own scatterbrained genius; the latter the drum machine's premier musician, whose distinct few-bit sound and rhythmic sensibility get him coveted by vocalists far and wide.

the no music. is dose and jel's second full length, an American ode to the exposed nerve. At times the soundscape is layered to the point of opacity, only to peel away and reveal the sometimes buried drum bone and sick sung skeleton beneath. the no music. sounds like the polyphony of all the machines in the factory that turn fetus heads into skulls. The project is dark, maybe morose in parts, but it never takes itself too seriously for too long. Although the words are sometimes cloaked beneath layers of noise, they are consistent, confidently self-aware, and deliberately interrelated. the no music. is part composition, part organized chaos.

MISTER E
Artist: GILES, GILES AND FRIPP Title: Brondesbury Tapes
Format: CD Catalog
Number:		 MRE01
Price: $12.00 Label: Mister E
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
***It was Michael and Peter Giles who recruited guitarist Robert Fripp to join their band, whose inventiveness and competence as a guitarist the fraternal rhythm section found quite attractive. The Brondesbury Tapes, a unique set of domestic recordings which have languished for over thirty years in a private collection, were the swan song of this provincial trio who moved to London to seek fame and fortune with their music. The spirit of the Giles and Giles & Fripp survived, of course, and was reincarnated as the legendary King Crimson.

This is the first time that these recordings have been available on CD. They've been digitally remastered and incorporate previously unreleased material. Sleeve notes by Peter Giles are highly detailed and feature previously unpublished photographs.

While Robert Fripp is certainly a key drawing card of this title, The Giles brothers had played in no fewer than seven predominately singles bands by the time of this late '60s recording - Johnny King And The Raiders, Dave Anthony and The Rebels, The Dowland Brothers and The Soundtracks, The Sands, The Interns, Trendsetters Ltd., and The Brain.

TIGERBEAT 6
Artist: MICHEL, NATHAN Title: Abc Def
Format: CD Catalog
Number:		 MEOW046
Price: $6.75 Label: Tigerbeat 6
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
***Continuing the tradition of classically trained musicians forsaking their Ph.Ds for the more immediate inspiration of free electronic music and laptronica, Tigerbeat6 brings you the pure and vibrantly enjoyable songs of Nathan Michel, a mix of twangy guitars and simple little bleep-beats, lush organ chords, squeaky toys, catchy melodies and sweet nothings - all performed, assembled, disassembled and reassembled into zig-zag structures, beats and hooks that give new meaning to the words "lo-fi." Trapped in the hallowed and isolated halls of East Coast academe (hey, Yale and Princeton, what's up?) Michel looks for inspiration in the work Captain Beefheart, DAT Politics, the Akan people of Ghana, Scratch Pet Land, Steely Dan, Igor Stravinsky, Thelonius Monk, Conlon Nancarrow, Kid6ye6, Nobukazu Takemura, Josquin des Prez, Christian Fennesz, J.S. Bach, Kraftwerk, John Coltrane, Oval and many others. Because he doesn't understand some of the most basic principles of the software he uses, he is forced to rely on his own musical instincts, which, although at occasional odds with his computer, serve him pretty well.
Artist: WOBBLY Title: Wild Why
Format: CD Catalog
Number:		 MEOW055
Price: $4.00 Label: Tigerbeat 6
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
***Drawing inspiration from John Oswald's classic acts of sonic appropriation, Wobbly responds to an increasingly corporate radio landscape by personalizing the popular. Sidestepping the info-glut, Wobbly gets jiggy with a jigsaw, hurls house anthems down the stairs, and commits acts of cut-and-paste ventriloquism that are creepily accurate and hilarious. As stand-alone blasts or as an extended composition, Wild Why has the structural rigor of New Music from the academy and the sue-me bravado of label-mate Kid 6ye6.

Executed with a strong sense of humor and without a laptop in sight, Wild Why is a brilliantly ambitious guerilla strike on popular music. Sounding like every hip hop battle record ever made playing angrily at once, Wild Why pummels the unwary listener with a Niagara Falls of sonic information. Several thousand hours of raw audio were gathered from corporate hip hop radio stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, digested and broken down to micro-samples of their constituent tics, gasps, and stabs. Wobbly has created the plunderphonic bastard child of Grandmaster Flash and Charles Ives, the result of three years of painstaking downtime with the sampler. The relentless cut-up frenzy on Wild Why has been edited down to the nanosecond with speed-freak precision. Ninety-nine percent of the source material is brutally familiar, a popular playlist of hits everyone's been bombarded with for the last ten years as mandated by focus groups, lawyers and taste-makers. Occasional strategic counter-blasts of sampled '60s free jazz and 1920s Cotton Club pop music lace Wobbly's fragmentation of today's hit parade with unsettling anachronism and/or historical context. The result is both an obsessive-compulsive love letter to hip hop radio and a withering assault on its clichés and formulas.

Growing up in the suburbs on a solid diet of Henry Cow and Faust records, Wobbly now lives in San Francisco and works as a tester for a large music / technology company. He crashes software for a living. Not just another glitch poster child, he is currently involved in collaborations with People Like Us, Chopping Channel (a live improv project featuring Don Joyce and Peter Conheim of Negativland) and Bay Area noise guru Thomas Dimuzio.

  • Longtime cohort and collaborator with Bay Area electronic arts luminaries
  • Wide appeal to fans of electronica, glitch, experimental music and crazed cutup plunderphonics
  • Wobbly is a regular presence at highly acclaimed festivals all over the world and at local and national gigs from coast to coast

    30-second RealAudio excerpts:

    [excerpt]

    If you have a recent version of iTunes software on your computer, clicking on the link immediately below should open the iTunes application and take you to the iTunes Music Service page-- where you can listen to samples and buy this album, or individual tracks:

    Wobbly "Wild Why" (Tigerbeat6)

    For a complete listing of Midheaven exclusive albums available for download from the iTunes Music service, please visit the Midheaven Mailorder/Revolver USA Downloadables page.
ZERO TO ONE
Artist: STEEL POLE BATHTUB Title: Unlistenable
Format: CD Catalog
Number:		 0TOO03
Price: $12.00 Label: Zero To One
Release
Date:		 9/16/02
***In the fall of 1996, Darren Mor-X, Mike Morasky and Dale Flattum began making recordings for what was scheduled to be their second album on a major label with offices in Los Angeles and New York. The trio first spent 72 hours holed up in guitarist Morasky's living room, and later moved the operation to a small recording studio behind an auto repair shop in downtown San Francisco. The results were regarded by the band as its crowning achievement, and by the label as an unmitigated disaster. Why, there wasn't one track that could even possibly be considered a single. Can you imagine? The official word was that the album was "unlistenable," that the band had completely lost focus and created a "soundtrack to nothing." A loophole was found, the band was dropped, and the recordings remained unheard until now. Pathologically stark. -Discorder

No music in anything they play at all. - idiot Faith No More fan, etext.org

Steel Pole Bathtub must've fallen down an awful lot [as kids]. Their [music] sounds like the musical manifestation of some very scarred minds.... [V]ery depressing ... discordant guitars and resonating feedback create an aura of frustration.... [T]heir anarchic, guitar-driven, feedback-and-sampling-infused indie rock sounds much like ... a product of Seattle ... [but] what distinguishes their ... grueling engine noise, squeals, drum beats and fuzzy feedback ... according to drummer Darren Mor-X in an interview with Rolling Stone, is that "we're not patriotic flannel. -Ann Abel, Thresher

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