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Updated 9/26/02 Release dates [among other things] subject to change. Our mailorder pages feature all the titles below-- and more-- sorted by release date at the following links:
9/9/02
9/16/02,
9/23/02,
and 9/30/02.
Our August 2002 new release page can be found here.
 DANUBIUSs/t (MIMICRY WOM010) CD Released the week of September 9th, 2002
order from Midheaven mailorder Danubius specialize in Hungarian, Romanian, Transylvanian, Moldavian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and many other types of Balkan folk and gypsy music. Based around the San Francisco Bay Area, they enjoys access to a great deal of difficult musical terrain. Fans of Taraf de Haidouks, Muzsikas or Fanfare Ciocarlia and other Balkan musics already know that an aspiring musician couldn't merely dabble on the weekends and expect to produce anything (other than his own shame and embarassment). Danubius soars way above the hurdle. Their collective passion for doing things right yields a special intensity and remarkable musical payoffs. Whether bringing the house down and dropping jaws with their marvels or bickering over arrangement details, Danubius is destined to emerge from obscurity. Biographical Details Budapest-born Jutka Mándoki grew up mostly in Oakland, has played keyboard and accordian instruments since childhood, and recently took up koboz (a lute, played in Romania, also known as cobza), viola, bass, tekeršlant (hurdy-gurdy or wheel fiddle, played in Hungary), and źtšgardon ("beaten cello" played by Hungarians in Romania). Since stumbling upon Hungarian / Romanian / Gypsy fiddle, Danubius director David Skuse has not wanted to do anything else. Skuse co-founded The Klezmorim, and has played with The Silver String Macedonian Band, The Balkanizers, and groups in Hungary. Roman Titcu is a virtuoso player of the cymbalom, or "tsambal" - Born in Moldova, he founded and directed Doina Besarabia. As a student at Chisinau's Music Conservatory, he majored in tsambal, conducting, and composition, performed on many recordings, (including two singles, "Roma Babalile" and "Cafe Concert"), conducted the ensemble Oleandra and became principal arranger for Roma, an ensemble with whom he toured Europe and other parts of the world. Marin County native Clark Welsh has amazed audiences for years with an inexhaustible supply of exotic instruments. With Danubius he plays tárogató (single-reed wind instrument, played in Hungary and Romania), peasant flutes, cimpoi (Romanian bagpipe), cobza, tamburitsa, tambura, and bass. Welsh has performed with Hatsegana, Nicolai Massenkoff and Neva, to name just a few. Accomplished classical violinist David Nebenzahl turned his considerable musical talents to Eastern European genres several years ago after a trip to Hungary and Bulgaria with a Bay Area folk-dance ensemble (playing mostly American bluegrass). Now fluent in Romanian and Hungarian folk violin styles, he has put his flatpicking expertise to use on the Bulgarian tambura.
 GILES, GILES AND FRIPPBrondesbury Tapes (MISTER E MRE01) CD Released the week of September 16th, 2002
order from Midheaven mailorder 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.
 HAYDENLive At Convocation Hall (BADMAN 977) CD Released the week of September 9th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder After a three-year hiatus, Hayden delivered the highly acclaimed full-length Skyscraper National Park in March 2002. Two previous albums on Outpost/Geffen garnered him "vital" status by the tastemakers at Spin, and his contribution of the title track to Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge cemented his cult following. He brought his magic on the road for several months, storming through sold-out theater shows in Canada and packed venues in the US. Live At Convocation Hall is a performance of songs from Hayden's three domestic releases, as well his limited edition Canadian EP, and the title track from Trees Lounge. The performance is from his March 2002 sold-out show in Toronto, Ontario. Though it was recorded live, it remains intimate and engaging, showcasing both his moving bravura and legendary razor-sharp wit. Hayden plays acoustic guitar and piano, and is joined by string and horns on several of the tracks. Julie Doiron and Howie Beck sing along on his cover of Neil Young's "Tell Me Why." Live At Convocation Hall documents a remarkable show that received glowing reviews in the Canadian press. The Toronto Star remarked on the unbridled affection Hayden fans display for the singer-songwriter's short, sombre, reflective songs, while The Globe & Mail summed it up, "Slickness rules in most pop, and Hayden is part of the antidote."
 ill litWACMusic (BADMAN 979) CD Released the week of September 9th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder Containing the best elements of vintage Americana and electronic cut-and-paste pastiches, ill lit's debut album WACMusic turns the perfect pop song on its head. ill lit is the brainchild of D. Ahearn and M. Moser, both veterans of the Brooklyn music scene in their former bands Barakumin and Men. Their unique construct of ambient, home-recorded noise, serving as background to a more traditional rendering of folk and country music, might seem, at first, overly ambitious, but the results are inspired. The album is a sonic marvel -- earnest vocals tinged with honeyed twang rising over the soothing white-noise of loops, beats and a battered boombox. Lyrics seem to have sprung from the mind of Hunter Thompson and Cormac McCarthy's bastard love-child; ill lit makes music that is both fantasy and disillusionment, loyalty and revolution, broken-hearted but ever hopeful. Country harmonies, ambient recorded noise, slow distant melodies, minimal production -- their sound is of sincerity and disaffection. --Vice ill lit gives us songs that are elegies of American lostness, road music for a new breed of pioneers. Any person who is no longer young, and not yet old: rootless human beings of scattered family, no land, and only a home away from no-home. Who are nonetheless burdened with lustful urges to build something, somewhere; to say something, to someone: to call out of the ruins of all this glorious fucked-up American freedom we own. --Sound Collector
 INCAPACITANTS/(IN SPITE OF FLAMING CREATURES)Vitamin Buckfast (STARLIGHT FURNITURE CO ST015) LP Released the week of September 9th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder With the golden age of Japanese noise all but tarnished and rusted, here is one last chunk of atonal screech before the oxidation is totally complete. Consumers of all things brutally loud, relentlessly dissonant and, most importantly, originating from Japan, will not require an introduction to Incapacitants -- the noise duo consisting of Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai. Begun as Mikawa's solo project in 1981 when a homemade noisemaking device called The Mikawa was his prime instrument, evolving to incorporate various concrete sounds, until Kosakai joined and the duo favored the sound of ring modulators and heavily processed Theremins, Incapacitants has always been about "creating pure noise without any abstract musical expression whatsoever." Mikawa states that he hopes to cause his audience to lose the sensation of time. In addition to contributing articles about a number of international noisicians to various Japanese music journals over the years, Mikawa is also a member of Hijo Kaidan, while Kosakai performed with C.C.C.C. and has released a soundtrack of Stan Brakhage's film Of Dogstarman. Everything known about the reclusive Abdul Squeerter of (In Spite of Flaming Creatures) has passed through the conduit of Dylan Nyoukis (Decaer Pinga and the Chocolate Monk label). Apparently uninterested in networking, touring, trading CDRs, appearing on compilations, granting interviews, replying to letters, engaging in any sort of self-promotion, or taking part in the glamorous razzle-dazzle available to all experimental musicians worldwide, Squeerter prefers the solitude of where ever he calls home in the United Kingdom. Apart from a mail collaboration or two - most likely available on cassette for about 15 minutes via Chocolate Monk -- his sole public appearance to date has been a few pages of what he calls "excrete fiction" in Bananafish magazine. The recordings on Vitamin Buckfast are the product of a mail collaboration committed to tape in the mid-'90s and then simply ignored for several years. Dora Doll of Decaer Pinga makes a guest appearance on vocals, but good luck determining exactly where. Cover art is by Karen Lollypop of Ecstatic Peace recording artists Smack Music 7 and Polly Shang Kuan Group.
 KID 606/STARS AS EYES$ Vol. 9 (TIGERBEAT6 MEOW052) 7" Released the week of September 9th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder Provider of techno dub ambience and electonica subtle and serene, Kid606 juxtaposes satanic mid-'90s thrash metal and futurist, dirty south funksploitation of the most mainstream ilk. Ghetto miscreants Stars as Eyes are two youths rooted permanently in traumatic adolescence. This duo invokes the overly melodic spirit of early IDM innovators Black Dog and Autechre in their tumultuous grit-hop dissertation about the hard-knocks life of a hustler.  NATHAN MICHELABC DEF (TIGERBEAT6 MEOW046) CD Released the week of September 16th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder 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, Kid606, 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.
 EMILY SPARKSWhat Could Not Be Buried (WISHING TREE WRT012) CD Released the week of September 9th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder Boston's Emily Sparks is usually found playing solo with her vintage hollow-body Guild which, she will proudly tell you, was the object of her love at first sight, and later selflessly given to her by its owner of twenty-some-odd years. With it she composes simple melodies which alternate between sad sparseness and pure pop. As anyone who enjoyed her contribution to Wishing Tree's The Amos House Collection, Vol II knows, she lays a trail of tones over which she lets her decidedly untrained-sounding voice frolic and glide. Lyrics are the main focus in Emily's mind; her words are honest and personal (can't lie for shit and knows it). And so she sings, a chanted recognition of her ill-masked vulnerability, and her need to be strong, while trying to avoid becoming hopelessly cynical. With help from her friends Drew O'Doherty and members of Wheat, Emily's debut record was lovingly recorded and produced over 11 months by Dave Auchenbach (Wheat / Small Factory).
 STEEL POLE BATHTUBUnlistenable (ZERO TO ONE 0TO003) CD Released the week of September 16th, 2002
order from Midheaven mailorder 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
 themselvesthe no music. (anticon abr0025) CD/2xLP Released the week of September 16th, 2002 order from Midheaven mailorder 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.
 WOBBLYWild Why (TIGERBEAT6 MEOW055) CD Released the week of September 16th, 2002
order from Midheaven mailorder 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 606. 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.
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Click the titles below for details on specific new releases.
September 2002
DANUBIUS
GILES, GILES AND FRIPP
HAYDEN
INCAPACITANTS / IN SPITE OF FLAMING CREATURES
KID 606 / STARS AS EYES
NATHAN MICHEL
EMILY SPARKS
STEEL POLE BATHTUB
themselves
WOBBLY
August 2002 new releases
Coming "soon":
dates subject to change
ABDULLAH
CEX
THE FALL
THE FALL
KID 606 / DÄLEK
LANTERNA
VARIOUS ARTISTS
ALUMINUM GROUP
BOOM BIP
CEX
JEL
LESSER/VARIOUS
REACHING QUIET
STARS AS EYES
THE FALL
THE FALL
THE FALL
THE FALL
THE FALL
DEVENDRA BANHART
DFI
JIM LUTHER DICKINSON
DJ BROKEN WINDOW
J CHURCH
KID 606/XANOPTICON
DAN MELCHIOR'S BROKE REVUE
PALESTINE/COULTER/MATHOUL
DWAYNE SODAHBERK
BLACK DICE
HUNCHES
MAX TUNDRA
PIRANHAS
WARLOCKS
VARIOUS ARTISTS
AWOL ONE AND FATJACK
BUSDRIVERS AND RADIOINACTIVE AS THE WEATHER
CRACK:W.A.R. (WE ARE ROCK)
THE FALL
THE FALL
THE FALL
FROM QUAGMIRE
GUIDED BY VOICES
YOUNGS/BOWER
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The releases above and on the left (as well as over 17,000 other
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