Twittering Machines

Loren Connors
Moonyean

Originally released in 1994 on CD, Enabling Works does this music the honor of a vinyl release for our benefit. Featuring Suzanne Langille on vocals on the last track and on the cover, this sure sounds like another slow burning soul scorcher from Connors. “Even though it is not clear what Loren is saying exactly with the untitled tracks on the album, it is certain there is pureness and truth in it. Maybe one day, a thousand years from now, when men have evolved into more sensible beings, Moonyean will frequently be heard on national radio all over the world and people will understand what this one man meant all along.“

Ólafur Arnalds
Eulogy for Evolution

Originally released in 2008, deluxe repress of Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds debut LP. Give her a listen (it sounds like a her) and see if his quiet icy electronic-tinged chamber storms float your boat. They do mine. On Erased Tapes.

Harappian Night Recordings / Kommissar Hhjüler
6 Reviews in Psycopathic Alchemy b/w Karawane

From Mimaroglu Music Sales: “this one’s a split between the komissar & syed kamran ali’s harappian night recordings … while the former’s in-situ garble & room-tone tomfoolery is, of course, all well & good, i’m once again floored by syed’s side ; a gain-destroyed suite of “ethnic” improv that lays waste a great many things …” Sounds blistering. From Shamanic Trance, naturally.

Clara Rockmore
Lost Theramin Album

Yea, it’s a CD but oh what a CD it be (and that cover is a hard sell if I’ve seen one). Lithuanian-born child musical prodigy Clara Rockmore rocks the theramin. She’s the original theramin hero. Robert Moog begged Sara to come out of retirement in 1975 to record these tracks (and others released on a Delos CD and LP as The Art of the Theremin) and we all owe Mr. Moog a big spooky thank you as well as Bridge Records for finding these. I’ll also mention that Mississippi Records released Ms Rockmore and her quavering theramin on LP (in mono!) but its long out of print. Sigh.

Sanso Xtro
Fountain, Fountain Joyous Mountain

You had me at Fountain. Australian “alien-folk” artist Melissa Agate aka Sanso Xtro spins a beautiful web of otherworldly haunted lullabies. I so want must have this record. On Digitalis.

Melissa Agate

Mater Suspiria Vision
Exorcism of the Hippies

How heavy and horror-filled can a tiny 7″ be? Spin this and see. Aquarius says: “A two parter titled provocatively “Exorcism Of The Hippies”, it’s all fat fuzzed out woozy warbly bass, thick low end swells, strange stuttery handclap rhythms, swooping spaced out effects, creepy dubbed out slo-mo atmospherics, strange voices, vocal snippets and samples, all blurred and smeared, a hazy, gauzy lysergic psychedelic trip out, the soundtrack to some strange foreign horror film from the seventies, coupled to some primitive old school techno 12″, both spinning at 16rpm, the whole thing doused in cough syrup and left in the sun, cursed by a witch, buried in a graveyard, only to be dug up, melted down and mixed with liquid thorazine and a handful of horse tranquilizers and then pressed into this here 7″. SO GOOD!” On Pendu Sound limited to 300 copies.

Group Ongaku
Music of Group Ongaku (1960-1961)

Japanese live improv from 1960/61 (!) from Takehisa Kosugi (violin, sax, tape), Chieko Shiomi (piano), Mikio Tojima (cello), Yasunao Tone (sax, tape), Genichi Tsuge (guitar) and Shukou Mizuno (cello, drums tape). Recorded in Shukuo Mizuno’s house and also features some of his household items like electric vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, dolls, and a set of dishes. Listen for the kitchen sink. Here’s what Julian Cope has to say (from his Japrocksampler), “Simply put, this collective was edenic as the foundation of fusing avant classical input with organic, improvisational output, thus forging a singular Minimalist sound on par w/similar, radical outre composition that was taking place in the West at the same time (Cage & Stockhausens work in particular).“

Masami Kawaguchi’s New Rock Syndicate
The Psychedelic Sounds Of New Rock Syndicate

Don’t let that tiny cover image fool ya – this is a new full-length LP released on 8MM in an edition of 250 and from the sound of it, The Psychedelic Sounds Of New Rock Syndicate is all its name suggests and then some. Kawaguchi Masami has been around playing with bands like LSD March and Broomdusters but this new record sounds like its swimming in the even deeper end.

“The Psychedelic Sounds of the New Rock Syndicate is the definitive statement of Masami as songwriter and ferocious guitar player, finding in Kikuchi Akira (bass), Kiyasu (drums) and Hasegawa Yohei (guitar on ‘Dazzling Light’ and ‘(Theme From) New Rock Syndicate’) the perfect partners in crime for this unbelievable new studio work. The album opens with an almost sabbattesque anthem (‘Why’) where a heavy riffage is accompanied by lamentous vocals; second piece (‘Affected Dance’) is a deconstructed blues jam, with a touch of narcoleptic magic and simply beautiful. Side b is where the miracle actually happens: every single track is a banger, a compendium of 50 years of rock music compressed in 18 minutes of fire on wax.”

Note: these last two records are from Volcanic Tongue’s Tip of the Tongue and I’d highly recommend checking out that list which could easily double as my Want List.

Loren Connors
The Curse of Midnight Mary

On October 15,1872 Mary Hart fainted and remained unconscious. Her loving husband, thinking she was dead and not the kind of man to dilly-dally, had her buried forthwith. That night, the night of the funeral Mary’s sister had a terrible nightmare that Mary was screaming from the grave. So real was her vision she convinced her brother-in-law to have the casket exhumed. When opened, they found Mary’s face fixed in frozen horror, her fingers bloody and her nails torn off from digging at her coffin lid.

The people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away.

Loren Connors: “In 1981 I took my tape recorder to the graveyard where the legendary Midnight Mary’s grave lies. The curse, as I had heard it, is: Anyone who gets caught in her graveyard past midnight will die the next day. But I, like a young fool, taped in that place, making this. Then it got lost for close to 30 years, but was recently found and put out here. But that is why I wouldn’t listen to it if I were you. I’m serious.”

Released in a limited edition of 515 by Family Vineyard in 2009 with pasted on cover art by Loren Connors, I was able to get this copy from the guy that originally bought it. He died! Just kidding. Like a fool I bought and listened (and I haven’t died yet but I have the strangest feeling I might some day) and this is Loren Connors playing and moaning, incessantly, his blues. The tracks are titled “Chants” 1-9 and maybe we’re listening to an aural 20th C version of the Chants du Maldoror – a near-hallucinatory just after midnight one-night-take-to-cassette-tape channeling inspiration from departed voices buried deep in the Mississippi Delta unearthed and transformed by Connors fingers tearing at his six string.

Darin Gray & Loren Connors
The Lost Mariner

I like Loren Connors. We’ve never met but somehow that doesn’t matter. I feel like I like him. I suppose that’s because I also feel like I sort of know him from listening to him play his guitar. Or maybe its because when Loren Connors plays his guitar, slowly searching, I hear his voice.

Recorded in 1998 and originally released on CD the following year, Family Vineyard has done what every record company should do which is to say they released this wonderful record as a record (limited to 700 copies). Since I like Loren Connors, I knew I wanted this record when I read about it but when I actually saw it in the racks at Other Music, and I saw that whopping 12″ x 12″ of unadorned Albert Pinkham Ryder on the cover, I knew I had to have it. It’s like getting a fine art print for free!

Speaking of free…

The Lost Mariner LP comes with a bonus 7″ (33 1/3) a lovely swirling sea of colored vinyl containing two tracks from 1999 recorded live at The Old Factory, NYC and its equally lovely both musically and visually with cover art by Katie Leming (Cro Magnon, Bird). And I should mention that Darin Gray’s bass speaks the same language as Loren Connors’ guitar so it looks like I’ve made another new friend. Bonus!

I don’t know about you, but I love a bonus especially when it contains more music made by Loren Connors and I love an LP when it’s covered in Albert Pinkham Ryder. This particular painting is titled Constance (1896) and it depicts a scene from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Man of Law’s Tale wherein Constance and her infant son are sent adrift in a rudderless sail-less boat after her soon-to-be mother-in-law had her son, the Sultan and Constance’s soon-to-be husband, and all others who’d converted from Muslim to Christian (the Sultan did so to get into beautiful Constance’s Christian pants where according to critic Margaret Schlauch and Claude Lévi-Strauss Constance’s father had already been) chopped to bits.

“The Last Mariner” is one of the case studies in Oliver Sachs’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which is about a man, Jimmie R., who has lost the ability to form new memories so he believes its still 1945 which is when he last had a memory. Jimmie R. is otherwise just like you and me.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all…. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing…. (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s….)
~ Luis Buñuel

Loren Mazzacane Connors
The Stations of the Cross

Recorded 1994 released 1996 on Menlo Park in an edition of 800 copies, double 7″ set from Loren Mazzacane Connors. 6-string electric meditations on death based on texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Loren Connors, The Curse of Midnight Mary
Paul Flaherty, Aria Nativa (a free LP from Family Vinyard to make up for the late delivery and new/lower price of the Loren Connors – nice!)
PJ & John with bonus poster (not shown, why rub it in?)
tUnE-yArDs, BiRd-BrAiNs

Loren Connors
Moon Gone Down

More Loren Connors but still not enough Loren Connors.  2008 7″ The Moon Gone Down has only served to whet my appetite further with its sparse but utterly tasty guitar, bass, metallic clanks, creaky chairs and moonlit howls.

But there’s good news, and the main reason for this post -  you can pre-order Loren’s new LP The Curse of Midnight Mary right now!! from Family Vinyard Records. Recorded in 1981 and recently unearthed, Loren went to the Evergreen Cemetery in downtown New Haven one night, sat next to Midnight Mary’s grave, clicked record and played and sang and howled (I don’t really know if he actually howls but I thought it sounded good). Rumor had it that if you stayed by Mary’s grave past Midnight you’d die. Well thankfully, that just ain’t so and this record is living proof!

I ordered mine and you should order yours soon – LP version limited to 100 copies

 
boo!

Loren Connors
The Moon Last Night

2-part “Guitar Suite” on single-sided yellow translucent 45RPM vinyl (Mmm) . Loren Connors strokes plucks and picks his Strat for some drippy echoed moody beautiful atmosphere conjuring up an indistinct yet compelling place. My only complaint is I want MORE. Recorded in Connors’ Brooklyn apartment winter 2008. Cover painting by Connors as is the Haiku on blank side 2: two sistes / play together / in moonlight. Limited to 500 copies.