While in the widely neglected 39 Clocks, he made records that never sold and played gigs that few ever saw, Juergen Gleue has arguably been the most important exponent of electrified German sound since the late 1970s. Phantom Payn Daze was made in the mid to late 90s and has never been released. It's his final LP and is overflowing with all the elements that romanticized, loner / stoner music claims, an encoded expression of highly private feelings, an ambiguous, emotional quotient, and a dark, murkily melodic vibe. It's a record that first and foremost lives and breathes with an endless stream of great songs. But perhaps it's most curious component is it's amazingly prescient sound, a precursor to so many of today's lo fi acts, all wrapped up in their San Francisco hair. 

Phantom Payn Days : That's Far Beyond Being Funny, Dear

The first public appearance pairing Christian Henjes and Juergen Gleue (inspired by and with names derived from LSD-25, they would become CH-39 and JG-39) was in 1976, at the Dada Nova (a space occupied by Otto Mühl’s AAO commune) in midtown Hannover, Germany. Dada Nova would be a space of enduring clash. From the subtlety of a shat upon organ to the ejection from communal meetings by bodily force, the AAO would display that the presence of the 39 Clocks was one of their constant grief. Known for pranksterism and the destruction of the clubs in which they would perform, friction in every form would continually follow the band. In 1979 they were thrown out of a show in Kassel at Dokumenta (their sounds had disturbed Joseph Beuys). They created an outrage (they wrote a tune with the title “Art Minus Idiots”) at the Filmtage Hannover with their avant-garde Super 8 movies made under the disguise of director Zachius Lipschitz. Rumour claims that at a Hannover show at the Cafe Glocksee, they played the vacuum cleaner and a circular saw instead of guitars, and there was even a knife throwing incident in Bremen.

Inspired, then, clearly, by protest in the broadest and most romantic sense (they wrote a tune with the title “Radical Student Mob In Satin Boots”) their’s was a sound attuned to classic American Punk / Nuggets. Although, this is not Bomp Rock; theirs was a thrust that purposed deconstruction and reassembly in the most modern sense. This collection was put together with the non completeist in mind (originals of some of these records are as rare as Italian underwear), intending to display the general 39 Clocks vibe, but also some of their more curious wrinkles. And as the Clocks were always interested in where they were going and not where they’d been, the chronology here is strictly reversed. Diedrich Diedrichsen wrote the first review of the band (in Spex), and we at DeStijl are very pleased to have had him scribe liner notes.

39 Clocks : DNS

Anyone who was keeping an eye to the flashes of English language print in alla those early issues of PSF’s in-house magazine, G-Modern, might’ve followed the trails to this private press monster, first championed in those pages by You Ishihara, legendary record collector and vocalist/guitarist with White Heaven and Stars. Virgin Insanity’s sole 1971 LP, Illusions Of The Maintenance Man has been termed “the fucking king of American folk privates” and one spin of this supremely bent session will have you heading for the hills with nothing but a microphone in your hand, a gob of star-seed in your hair and a tuning-fork up your ass. Virgin Insanity were a ‘project’ of one Bert Long, an (at the time) itinerant musician who had just returned from a bust of a trip to Laurel Canyon Blvd, where he had unsuccessfully tried to hawk a bunch of original songs to alla the manicured hippies then making the scene. Crashing back to earth/Dallas, Long and his wife Eve decided to take things into their own hands and turned their apartment into a primitive home studio with the intent of nailing the muse before it escaped via their third eye for good. After recruiting two friends, Wayne Lamar Boogs the third (vocals/madness) and Jud Chapin (drums/vocals), Bob and Eve set to recording Illusions Of The Maintenance Man while the first gush of anything-could-happen was still upon them, building up Bob’s songs by bouncing down track by track. The results were beyond anything they could’ve hoped for, beautiful teenage-tribe-in-America anthems that would’ve sat just *there* on The Velvet Underground’s Loaded or Hackamore Brick’s One Kiss Leads To Another, the same lost/utopian garage band spirit that animated holy grail sides by The Bachs, Index and The Rising Storm and a creepy sunblinded/cultic edge that tastes of acid and neural backroads in a way that brings to mind the Manson Family Jams. Originally pressed in an edition of 200 in 1971 – copies of which are now impossible to score – this beautiful one-time pressing from De Stijl is an authorized exact-repro with stuck-on/stickered sleeve, insert and label repros. Edition of only 500 copies. Highest recommendation..
~ david keenan
Volcanic Tongue

Virgin Insanity : Touch The Sky

1971 heavy private press free blues/psych from the left coast cortical geo zone of the US underground chain spearheaded by Don Campau and essentially the Californian amalgam of the Gate 5 as ESP disk punk/jazz 3rd eye. A higher key farrago of hypercosmic extended runs that oscillate between the tubular philosophy of the Sun City Girls sound/art and the aloneness of stoned blues concréte. A refreshing lost artifact of pure American fizz resurrected from the iconoclasm void and perfectly reissued in a joint effort from De Stijl and Child Of Microtones. An essential LP for anyone concerned with the paramount energy fields of all the above ground sound subterrains.
~ Matthew Valentine 

Roots of Madness : Flight Of The Ocka Bird

"Lose Today" wields the ethereal meditative power leftover from The Velvet Underground’s "Sweet Sister Ray" epic bootleg. The result: a melodious somnolent grievance that leaves the listener to feast on a curiously endless and internal banquet. Young snarls and writhes in irritated spiraling pronouncements that trail off in regretful, pained fashion, producing the same eventual something-isn’t-right that The Velvet Underground secured, but set aside to allow the Michigan basement bluesmen to borrow. Also, here is Young’s virgin performance on bass, a venture that proves suiting as his sparse yet stable meanderings are the backbone to a jam lost in the arcane. At times the bass lines seem to be counting off the seconds until an eventual meltdown. Meanwhile, Olson wanders off on woodwinds, seemingly tangled in wavelengths, letting his own sounds guide him through a brassy chilling darkness. He follows scales—Indian scales, blues scales—though the subtlety of Olson’s discipline fosters to an expansive intimacy,

Stare Case : Days like Faces

Jakob Olausson : Riding on the Wind

De Stijl's excavation of The Parasites Of The Western World turns up the lead single for their second album in the form of an exact reissue. Originally released circa 1980-81, 'Politico' opened the B-side to Substrata with a rippin' New Wave roller full of glam stomp, proggy arrangement and punky attitude. The synth-fuelled instrumental B-side was exclusive to the single, and as tradition dictates, far more interesting, featuring Terry Censky and Patrick Burke in an ebullient symphony of synths, drums and guitar. 

The Parasites of the Western World : Politico

A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration.

I was introduced to the Citizens for Interplanetary Activity (C.I.A.) through my old friend Ted Berk. Ted was a poet and occultist, and lived in Brooklyn near the Pratt Institute in the early 60s while I was living on St. Marks Place in the Village. I lived down the street from what became the Electric Circus, around the corner from the Fillmore East and across the street from The Five Spot. From 1961 to 1964, I had done several early film projects, in regular 8mm and in 16mm, with Ted before he had gone to Mexico, and then moved to California.

The C.I.A. (I believe they added the “Change” to their name when they went on the road to come to New York) was founded some time in early 1966, Ted and I believe, by Win Hardy, the lead guitarist and vocalist. He was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, where his father owned a funeral home. Ted first performed his poetry with the band at a gig in Portland, Oregon at the Pythian Hall on Friday, March 3, 1966, on a bill with The Jook Savages and the Multnoman Electric Band, with lights being done by the Retinal Circus. Later, from March 21-26, the band performed at the Rock Garden on Mission Street in San Francisco, on a bill with Big Brother and the Holding Company and Arthur Lee’s Love. 

The C.I.A. Change came to New York perhaps around September 1967, just as I was finishing up the editing of the visual for the “Kusama’s Self Obliteration” film, which was scheduled to be premiered at the Fourth International Experimental Film Festival in Knokk-Le-Zoute, Belgium, that December. As we remember, the band came to perform at the Fillmore East with another group, from San Francisco called the Salvation Army. C.I.A. Change stayed on to perform at the Fillmore as an opening act for Procol Harem, and then later for Simon and Garfunkel. (!) After my meeting with the band, they agreed to do a soundtrack for the edited film. I arranged an after-hours session at the Apostolic Studios of Vanguard Records with Matt Hoffman, and old friend and fellow filmmaker, who worked as a sound engineer there.

We screened the film in the studio on a 16mm Bell and Howell and the band improvised as we ran the film a second time. We recorded it on 1/4” tape. On piano, sitting in with the band, was Paul Kilb, an actor / writer / friend, who was the star in “Twice A Man”, a short film by Gregory Markopoulos. One or two others, whose names we cannot recall, who occasionally worked with lighting behind the band as “aurora Glory Alice”, provided “Liquid Sounds” for the mix. What these “liquid sounds” consisted of, we have no idea. We were prepared to record other takes and do remixes, but upon hearing playback, everyone agreed that the track was perfect as it was. That track was what was married to the visual in the release print and it is what you have on this record. The band returned to San Francisco after this, and their spell at the Fillmore “self-obliterated” there, as it were.

~ jud yalkut
dayton ohio, august 2000


The Citizens for Interplanetary Activity

Black To Comm
EARTH
IND 098 LP/CD

De Stijl is proud to announce the March 6 release of EARTH, Black to Comm’s music for the film of the same name. EARTH is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore’s foremost artists. The visually arresting film has been live-soundtracked by a number of artists (including Oren Ambarchi) in several locales, and after Black to Comm, a.k.a. Marc Richter’s accompaniment at Berlin’s Asian Film Festival and the Unsound Festival in Krakow (both in 2010), he decided to commit it to record. In Marc’s own words:

“Most of the music was composed under the influence of heavy pain killers while recovering from a broken leg. The music (like the film) is about slowness and decay, states of unconsciousness, sleeping and waking up, dying and being reborn. The film basically is a post-apocalyptic collage based on paintings by classical European painters (Caravaggio, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Géricault) — the music tries to translate that concept employing similar collage-based sampling techniques using loops made from vintage vinyl and shellac records combined with acoustic and electronic instrumentation and voice.”

Richter’s already formidable expressive power stretches over all of EARTH. Reflecting the countless cyclical forces that make up, oh, more or less everything we know and are, the music on EARTH is bracing, lovely, bustling and still, and at times bittersweet, a commingling of sensations and emotions that can’t be neatly separated from one another. (EARTH is complex, as you know.) Guests on EARTH include David Aird, a.k.a Vindicatrix (on the Mordant Music label), contributing startling vocal work; Renate Nikolaus on an array of instruments and noise devices; Rutger Zuydervelt (singing bowls); and Christopher Kline (singing saw). EARTH is Black to Comm’s seventh album and his debut for De Stijl, following the acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (on Type) and last year’s vinyl-only collaboration with Mike Kelley of Destroy All Monsters (on the En/Of label).

http://destijlrecs.com/098.html

Black to Comm : Water

Turn Me (The Watkins / Patricia B McGarry (Harleman) / Peter Harleman)

Poetry Out Loud was a series of ten LPs released between 1969 and 1977 as a sort of “magazine of oral poetry.” The driving forces behind Poetry Out Loud were two couples: Peter Harleman and Patricia Bebe McGarry (Harleman), from St Louis Missouri, and Klyd and Linda Watkins, from Nashville Tennessee; together they followed their muse of “taking poetry off the page,” seeking a centuries-long end-around back to the oral tradition. As Peter said it then, “The poem on the page has no relationship to the poet. There has to be an integral relationship between poet, performer and audience.” In other words, this is word-as-sound art, a heavy trip.

     While the ensuing years have pushed Poetry Out Loud toward the fringes of crate-digging awareness, they won over some significant fans in their day. Robert Palmer (author of Deep Blues, among other works) wrote about Poetry Out Loud at length in Rolling Stone more than once during the ’70s. “Such sounds, with their welter of enharmonic pitches, stimulate most of the surface of the basilar membrane, thus ensuring the transmission of as many simultaneous neural impulses as possible to as much of the brain as possible,” he wrote in the notes for Poetry Out Loud Number Nine, getting at the physio-mystical heart of things. “And the neurons are able to rest between firings because of the rapid decay time of the sounds, thus insuring continuing peak effects for the sound and allowing changed or other sung material to periodically resume its own hypnotic pattern. In other words, the shaman’s basic equipment – voice, drum, rattle – is actually a sophisticated tool for self-induced hypnosis, or trance.” That (and much more) said, no written words are going to prepare you for the experience of hearing what might be one of our most visionary releases. 

http://destijlrecs.com/104113.html

Poetry Out Loud : Ocean (Patricia B McGarry (Harleman) / Peter Harleman, Klyd and Linda Watkins)

I am the Crow (Patricia B McGarry (Harleman) / Peter Harleman)

Open Your Flower (Klyd & Linda Watkins)

Ride 'em Ranger (Linda Watkins)

New York (Bernard Heidseick, Francoise Janicot, Patricia B McGarry / Peter Harleman )

W/ violinists Marc Sabat and Johnny Chang.

Tashi Wada : Duet

WET HAIR
Spill Into Atmosphere
IND 114 CD/LP/MP3

Hey kid, need a lift? Like, right up off the ground? Spill into Atmosphere is the freshest whitecap in the crashing-upward wave known as Wet Hair, the Midwestern duo-cum-trio that’s been holding it down for years as a multi-stop repeat-shop-’n-hop psych-pop pin-drop right there in the dead center of everything and/or nothing, Iowa City. The Wet Hair discography having spired itself to a respectable vantage – shared releases with such powers as Rene Hell, Naked on the Vague and Peaking Lights, both via frontmensch Shawn Reed’s Night People imprint and others – Spill into Atmosphere becomes the band’s second full-length with De Stijl. There is motion here, oh yeah – circling swirls of lighter-than-air energy, born aloft on propellers of foam yet anchored to earth with thunder-clap rhythms and Reed’s heady bellow. Spill into Atmosphere gives you that feeling you had when you finally mastered the controls on your hovercraft: You’re both in it and above it.

Augmenting the core of singist-synther Reed and drummer Ryan Garbes is Justin Tye (replacing Matt Fenner, from previous album In Vogue Spirit-era), no mere third wheel but Wet Hair’s very own sort of Peter Hook (not counting all the Judas stuff), his unique melodic signature flying in formation with the band’s but also peeling off into flights that relate to the silk wheels of the synths but compliment them, guide them, support and distort and report to them. No longer is the only way up – the only way is every way. And from this altitude, Wet Hair can hear for miles. 

Wet Hair : Camouflage

Between the Valleys (Patricia B McGarry (Harleman))

Attica (Peter Harleman)

Hello Morning (The Watkins / Patricia B McGarry (Harleman) / Peter Harleman)

DAVID KILGOUR
Here Come The Cars
IND 121 LP / FNLP527

A year after the Clean's reunion LP Vehicle (also their first proper album ever) put them back on the international-pop radar in 1990, guitarist David Kilgour retreated with his new Revox tape machine (which he'd been singing about rapturously in his side-project Stephen and elsewhere: "Have you seen my new tape machine?!") and cut his first solo album, Here Come the Cars, issued by Flying Nun in 1991. From the jarring cover image of David through to the last note, Here Come the Cars is a special pop album, even on a label that had no shortage of them. A sparkling gem cloaked in achingly atmospheric production (courtesy of Nick Roughan), Here Come the Cars has haunted us since its release -- it's just one of those albums that exists outside of time, the opening chords of the title track never fail to draw you out of the world you're in and into its own magical space. The album was remastered and rereleased on CD by Flying Nun in 2004, but has never before been on vinyl -- which De Stijl is happy to rectify here in 2012. 

Available on May 22. 
Preorder here : http://destijlrecs.com/121.html

David Kilgour : You Forget

VOLUNTEERS PARK
Jerusalem Stone
IND 122 7"/MP3

Aviram Cohen is a jerk. Who cares if he was in SIlk Flowers, Soiled Mattress and The Springs, or that he has a new project called Volunteers Park ? You can tell that his parents are immigrants. He’s a suburbanite from New Jersey, and now, another New Yorker with an attitude, who learned how to use a sequencer to program synths and drum machines, so that he can sing about how boring life can be. It’s like he’s creating all this atmosphere because it’s lacking in his life. It sounds like someone is blasting the 80’s station out of their car, while parked under the subway overpass and the train is roaring by overhead. Nobody gives a fuck so we jumped in and put some money behind it. That’s how we roll in a most general sense.


Volunteers Park : Tragic Pote

ROBUST WORLDS
Emotional Planet
IND 117 CD/LP/MP3

Chris Rose's Robust Worlds has impressed us since first glimpse. He was actually barefoot, if you can believe that, and his set had the feel of a way more lysergic Kevin Ayers. It was freezing fucking cold and I'm pretty sure he wore a Hawaiian shirt. His debut LP is called Emotional Planet, and it's deceptively simple. Voice, guitar, some noisey shit, whatever. His playing is sick -- fluid, unforced, warm, soothed and soothing. It's a bath you don't want to exit. Seriously, if yr going to play guitar, play it like he does. With a trick in his back pocket and a Heavy Moon on his mind, Rose utilizes the sort of neo-noir narratives that you hear thru Neil Michael Hagerty, James Jackson Toth, Kurt Vile and other keen observers. Handguns, b&e, two-lane black tops, love, lust, and hard drugs. Life: summed up ! 

Robust Worlds : Best Wishes

SAMARA LUBELSKI
Wavelength
IND 115 CD/LP/MP3

First Lady of Winds and Stars Samara Lubelski returns to her once and future label home for her sixth album, Wavelength, and the spheres harmonize at the news. Wavelength comprises a dozen new arrowed whispers, Samara's feathery touch on guitar and microphone now so at balance with the elements that the whole, her music and the air it enters, become inseparable. Don't be fooled by the persistent "psych-folk" labels she gets -- oh, they may be accurate as far as modern usage goes, and that scene is now as it was then, but Wavelength is an electric record through and through: Everything comes to life in light, the guitar speaking in radiant strums and felt-tip leads, her violin calling up everything that glows and grows in the dark. Funny how Nature always seemed to work everything out fine on Her own before we showed up, huh?

Wavelength features the playing of a number of Samara’s fellow travelers, from NYC to Degenfeld, Germany: Metal Mountains bandmates PG Six on guitars and Helen Rush on Casio; Steve Shelley on drums; Moritz Finkbeiner on keyboards; Thilo Kuhn on Mellotron and vibraphone; Werner Notzel on organ guitar; and Willie Lane and Brian Sullivan contributed guitar parts as well. Wavelength was engineered and recorded by Samara herself at Sumsilobatem in Germany, aside from the drums being set down by Aaron Mullan at Echo Canyon; Nicolas Vernhes mixed at Rare Book Room. While Wavelength arrives three years after her previous studio LP, Future Slip (Ecstatic Peace), trust that Samara's kept busy in the since, playing violin all over the map (and a fair ways off it) with Thurston Moore's band; sharing stages and an album, Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon (on Graham Lambkin's Kye label), with Marcia Bassett; being one third of Metal Mountains; adding to Unrock's series of live CD-R's in 2010; and having hand and wand in countless engineering projects. Samara has been a quietly reliable presence in New York's underground realm for a good many years; if you're in music in NYC and haven't crossed paths with her, we think you might be doing it wrong. But a Wavelength is always there for you, all you need do is get on it. 

Samara Lubelski : Wavelength

CS YEH
Transitions
IND 102 CD/LP/MP3

Having rattled the hinges with last year’s “In the Blink of an Eye” 7-inch, C S Yeh (C. Spencer Yeh) flings open the door and steps inside with Transitions, his first full-length album of songs after years of establishing himself as one of Earth’s top humans in experimental music and unbound improvisation, both alone and in collaboration, on record and onstage.

The effect Transitions has on you may or may not depend on your familiarity with Yeh’s past work; regardless, his path in music has always been about and rather than or. And the addition to his catalog of work that Transitions represents is nothing short of startling: songs that flit between sculpted guitar riffs and measured, just-shy-of-lush synth-pop; wry lyrics delivered in guileless tones; the remarkable fact that Yeh made every sound on the record. All the same, his most ardent fans will have little trouble understanding the move and recognizing this distinct voice. Its plainspoken confidence and intrepid spirit are as present as when he’s carving drones or emitting speckled and serrated noise; Transitions is simply a different form of Yeh’s unmediated expression. As you’d guess, for a career outside guy really coming inside for the first time, Transitions involved quite a bit more behind the scenes strategizing than it would for some indie band on its third album. Think of how English can sound so jarringly beautiful on the tongue of non-native speakers: Everything fits even when, maybe especially because things might seem ever so slightly off. Thus we have a new language of melodies, ones of a spirit with say, Slapp Happy, but which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Magnetic Fields record. Ultimately, the pop heart on display is characterized by the artful mind behind it — and besides, when we say pop are we talking popular, or populist? Perhaps the space we’re trying to sketch here could be found between the artists covered on Transitions: Father Yod and the Spirit of ’76, and Stevie Nicks. Perhaps citing the varied examples of Jim O’Rourke, Dave Gahan and the aforementioned Peter Blegvad in artful songcraft could be useful (whether or not they were inspirations). Perhaps we’re not talking about a space at all, but instead a particular sort of freedom in a music landscape defined by cages and enclosures. Questions, questions — what do we know, we’re only observers. All that’s really clear is that C. Spencer Yeh is transitioning into, not away from. 

photo : Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net

CS Yeh : Whose Life

Messages : Humid Prolusion

PETER JEFFERIES
"The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World"
IND 123 CD/LP/MP3

Peter Jefferies’s extraordinary debut solo album, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World", first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs – for both the album and a striking 7-inch, “The Fate of the Human Carbine”, released around the same time – it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a handful of years it slipped out of print and out of sight. Roughly 20 years later that situation is being amended by De Stijl with a vinyl reissue that includes the songs from the attendant single and no amount of remastering whatsoever.

Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with "Pink Moon", "I Often Dream of Trains", "Blues Run the Game", "Our Mother the Mountain" and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players. Featuring a small team of South Island heavy-hitters – all three members of the Dead C as well as David Mitchell (3Ds), Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull (Look Blue Go Purple, Cyclops), Nigel Taylor and Robbie Muir (who’s cobilled on the single) – Last Great Challenge provides a pivot point in Jefferies’s formidable recording career, which included two bands he shared with his brother Graeme in the ’80s, Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and four further solo albums, as well as stints in bands here (Mecca Normal, Two Foot Flame) and there (Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie and Chris Smith).

This immediate and affecting album has been a comfort and a guide for me since it came out. Sit a spell and see if it doesn’t speak to you as well.

~ Mike Wolf, NYC, 2013

Peter Jefferies : The Fate Of The Human Carbine

THE NO-NECK BLUES BAND
"Online Catalog"
S@1/IND124162

This track, "To You Too" was recorded live at the 79th st boat basin in NYC and ultimately released on "The Birth Of Both Worlds" (S@1#4647SER 3/IND139) as a double CD on Sound@One in 1999.

The No-Neck Blues Band : To You Too

 WOLF EYES
No Answer : Lower Floors
IND 164 CD/LP/MP3

Some say Rock N Roll will never reach the same primitive raw vein hit of Bo Diddley at his more subhuman lurch, or that no unit could ever scramble the marbles left of what brain-boiling suburban electronic punk outsiders did in the mid-’70s: Whatever you think, there is no denying the homemade nuclear war Wolf Eyes has declared on music. Wolf Eyes was birthed in the shadows of late-’90s Michigan by a few like-minded individuals: Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway and John Olson. However, Wolf Eyes has grown beyond a band into a collective mutant ensemble, an art abstraction unit: musicians, print makers, photographers and more, all sharing a primal vision of decoding the wilderness of the humanoid soul using their deep audio arsenals.

Today, Wolf Eyes are pleased to announce their return with a European tour (U.S. dates to follow) and a new record, No Answer : Lower Floors. Wolf Eyes are also returning to longtime friend-base and Interzone of outsider art, De Stijl Records, with whom the band worked on No Face Lives, their collaboration with Smegma, and the loner blues cerebration unit Stare Case’s Lose Today.

The No Answer : Lower Floors material covers all bases: tough to toughest to tangled, all done in the Wolves’ least convoluted smooth-style simple-yet-tangled rhythms. The vocals, delays, primitive electronics, woodwinds and raw guitar of newest member James Baljo create a new destroyed space to crawl through. No Answer was recorded and mixed at the Michigan Underground Group’s gambling/clubhouse/art space, with the usually 2D-flat quality of the drums and electronics given creeping new brightness-life within the hollow echo acoustics of the sacred space’s cinder prisons. No Answer : Lower Floors shares a natural feel with previous Wolf Eyes efforts but goes much further in detailing their underworld of odd melodies and mangled harmonics. Within their system-based economic compositions, there remains zero room for wasted space. The whole record is less internal misery and more colorful, if of a “could be life on Mars” zone more than rainbows and daisies.

No Answer : Lower Floors features former members Aaron Dilloway and Mike Connelly, and thus is a family homecoming of sorts. More important, it’s the dawn of a new Wolf Eyes era. As the desconstructed skull mangled on the cover states: It’s RNR from a waste world of 2001244 A.D. 

Wolf Eyes : Choking Flies

PETER JEFFERIES
"The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World"
IND 123 CD/LP/MP3

Peter Jefferies’s extraordinary debut solo album, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World", first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs – for both the album and a striking 7-inch, “The Fate of the Human Carbine”, released around the same time – it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a handful of years it slipped out of print and out of sight. Roughly 20 years later that situation is being amended by De Stijl with a vinyl reissue that includes the songs from the attendant single and no amount of remastering whatsoever.

Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with "Pink Moon", "I Often Dream of Trains", "Blues Run the Game", "Our Mother the Mountain" and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players. Featuring a small team of South Island heavy-hitters – all three members of the Dead C as well as David Mitchell (3Ds), Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull (Look Blue Go Purple, Cyclops), Nigel Taylor and Robbie Muir (who’s cobilled on the single) – Last Great Challenge provides a pivot point in Jefferies’s formidable recording career, which included two bands he shared with his brother Graeme in the ’80s, Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and four further solo albums, as well as stints in bands here (Mecca Normal, Two Foot Flame) and there (Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie and Chris Smith).

This immediate and affecting album has been a comfort and a guide for me since it came out. Sit a spell and see if it doesn’t speak to you as well.

~ Mike Wolf, NYC, 2013


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