Film score for the 2021 documentary RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! by SWISH BLADE on LOVERS WEEKEND RECORDS.  Available at www.loversweekendrecords.com.

RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! chronicles the rise and fall of homegrown gay porn studio Palm Drive Video, and explores how a devoted couple helped battle a devastating health crisis by promoting kinky sex.

Legendary leatherman Jack Fritscher met Mark Hemry in 1979 at Harvey Milk’s birthday party – and the two fell head over heels in love. When the AIDS epidemic swept through San Francisco, the couple left the city to begin a new venture: turning a rural ranch in Sonoma County into a safe-sex porn studio that offered viewers new sexual possibilities in an age of plague. Casting rugged non-professional models to explore their unique erotic fantasies onscreen, the studio explored a wild array of queer kinks – and helped champion sex-positivity in the porn industry.

Directed and Produced by Ryan A. White and Alex Clausen

Produced by Todd Verow, Charles Lum and Paul Lee 

Original Music by SWISH BLADE

05 - LOW BUDGET SEX

01 - LOAD

five minutes before (r.s.stropharia) 26.06.2023

Memory Waves

Kicking off with "Forest Floor" which he produced together with Yani. The chilled and floating quality here is exceptionally. Everything evolves in a natural way like in nature. 

Waywell "Hangpan Series" (Traum V292) is available in high audio quality on your favorite sales and streaming platforms: https://geni.us/traumv292

Hangpan Series

Forest Floor

Waywell, Yani - Forest Floor (Traum V292)

Josh Cheon grew up in New Jersey, just outside New York City where he spent his weekends dancing at goth clubs and digging for records. He moved to San Francisco in 2006 and joined gay DJ collective Honey Soundsystem. His love of underground ‘80s music pushed him to start Dark Entries in 2009, a record label specializing in reissuing lost music from that era as well as contemporary bands referencing those analog sounds.

Nico  - All Tomorrow's Parties
Starting off with the saddest piece of music Martin Hannett ever produced and played bass and guitar on? Nico was thick in the throes of despair (basically creating the Goth movement) when she relocated to Manchester in the early eighties.

Russya - Білий сніг
Ukrainian pop goddess with winter tale of sadness "White Snow" about waiting for a lost love to return in the spring. The opening lines translate to, "Between us the wall of separation has grown again, the heart is sad."

Loveshadow - Another Dream
San Francisco DIY pop duo smear the lines between past and present, pop and avant, immanent and transcendent on their their sophomore album 'II'
"closer – not within reach, touching, never feeling, walking all alone again"

Corinne Tell  - Histoire de coeur
French chanteuse sings "Story of the heart" in her darkest Birkin delivery. You want to dance but end up crying. "The thirst to love you is fatal to me, my blood freezes"

Valerie Dore - Get Closer
If there is one song that captures the melancholic mood of the mid-80s this is it!
I picture Valerie sitting on her balcony in Milan singing to the sky, "When the world is running down, get closer."

Chris & Cosey - Silent Cry
"Is it true what they've said about love?" Chris & Cosey's 1987 Animal Liberation Anthem for PETA could also be a funerary love song.

Martin L. Gore - In A Manner Of Speaking
This song has been with me since my teenage years in New Jersey. One of the best covers ever done. Written by Winston Tong of Tuxedomoon, simply the best love song ever.

Brazil - Tvoj Svijet
Croatian synthpop cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World”. Originally self-released on cassette in 1990. The eerily faithful production belies Brazil’s re-working of the song’s lyrics about getting lost in an imaginary dream world.

The Cure - A Strange Day
According to Robert Smith this song is about, “how I would feel if it would only be the end of the world.” Easily one of my favorite Cure songs, the drama after the waves crash in and a sudden hush across the water...

Pink Industry - Don't Let Go
Goosebumps from the first drum kick. Downtempo shoegaze from Liverpool 1983 re-recorded in 1987. Pleading never sounded so dreamy.

Escape From N.Y. - Save Our Love
Mournful melodic synthpop / Italo from London, sign me up! If you were to distill the 1980s emotions into one song, this would be it.

Anything Box - Do You Hear Me Anymore?
New Jersey's finest output this song was a b-side from 1989 and captures yearning at its finest. How it just tears at my heartstrings all these years later.
"Every part of me is losing ground."

Xymox - Imagination
Clan of Xymox is arguably the best Darkwave band of all time, and this song has followed me since I was 16 and bought Twist Of Shadows on St Marks Place.
"Every day I've been without you, every shadow follows me."

TASCAM DR-40X

Sad Girl Summer: A Beach Goth Megamix by Dark Entries Records

Naks - Mechanical Breakdown Guest Mix

Guest Mix for Mechanical Breakdown on KEXP, hosted by Sharlese

01. KafkaCtrl - Theta Activity [Vortex Traks]
02. Deceptions - Orbitrek (Live) [Bunker Records]
03. VCS2600 - Computer Bass [VCS2600]
04. Ultradyne - Dominatrix [Pi Gao Movement]
05. Analogous Doom - Brackish Beings [Vortex Traks]
06. Kuldaboli - Vakan Endalausa [Stilleben Records]
07. Shifted Phases - The Freak Show [Tresor]
08. Resident Alien - Signal Loss [Frajile Records]
09. Blastromen - Sexy Droid [X0X Records]
10. Feeders - Scratch Your Eeeyes Out [Käften]
11. DJ Dijital - Technohop [Direct Beat]
12. Br.Beta & Dataintrång - Pirr I Magen [Stilleben Records]
13. Dynarec - Eisodual [Vaporwave]
14. Luke Eargoggle - 7 Days A Week [Return To Disorder]
15. Labyrinthine - Adventu Princeps [WéMè Records]
16. Sekter .17 - Avoid All Contact (DJ Godfather Remix) [Twilight 76 Records]

---------------------------------------------

Listen to Mechanical Breakdown on KEXP, hosted by https://soundcloud.com/sharlese, every Saturday AM (Friday night) from 1-3 AM PST // 10 AM - 12 PM CET || www.kexp.org/shows/mechanical-breakdown/

Mechanical Breakdown Guest Mix

BUY VINYL http://www.darkentriesrecords.com/store/vinyl/smersh-selected-deep-house-anthems-ep/

Dark Entries returns to the New Jersey basement studio of Smersh to unearth a 4-track selection from the ‘Deep House Anthems’ cassette. Smersh was the duo of Mike Mangino and Chris Shepard, who began making music together in 1978. They were uninterested in traditional notions of songwriting or live performance. Recording in a domestic setting necessitated the abandonment of live drums for rhythm machines, and the Smersh sound would gradually change with each new bit of gear they acquired. The Electro-Harmonic Rhythm 12 gave way to TR606, TB303, and SH-09. Most Monday nights, they would write a new song from scratch. A couple hours later, the song was recorded, never to be performed again.

By 1988, they had already put out at least 16 different tapes on their own Atlas King imprint. They would be followed by as many more. “Some of those [subsequent] tapes there were less than 10 copies that got made because nobody wanted them. They couldn’t get reviewed,” says Mike Mangino. As these tapes traded their way across continents, Smersh developed a devoted following in places far beyond Piscataway, leading to releases on dozens of other labels from around the globe. Smersh’s sound is a lush hybrid of techno, industrial, dance, and experimental. Most songs revolve around driving EBM style beats, intricate industrial noise manipulation and synth melodies. For ‘Selected Deep House Anthems’ we selected 4 tracks of pulsating acid techno, which were recorded live, direct to DAT. All songs were originally recorded and released in 1991, and this the first time all but one of these songs are appearing on vinyl.

Each song has been carefully remastered from the cassette originals for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The vinyl comes housed in a replica of the ‘Deep House Anthems’ sleeve which designer Eloise Leigh modified using art motifs and textures sourced from the original cassette, plus an oversized postcard with notes.

Selected Deep House Anthems

The Home Circus

by Paul Gonzenbach, from the forthcoming album Holy Joy, available Fall 2019

Holy Joy unmastered

A Part of Everything Else

BUY VINYL: http://www.darkentriesrecords.com/store/vinyl/patrick-cowley-mechanical-fantasy-box
Patrick Cowley was one of the most revolutionary and influential figures in the canon of electronic dance music. Born in Buffalo, NY on October 19, 1950, Patrick moved to San Francisco in 1971 to study music at the City College of San Francisco. By the mid ’70s, Patrick’s synthesizer techniques landed him a job composing and producing songs for disco diva Sylvester, including hits like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “I Need Somebody To Love Tonight.” This helped Patrick obtain more work as a remixer and producer. Cowley created his own brand of peak time party music known as Hi-NRG, also dubbed “The San Francisco Sound.” By 1981, Patrick had released a string of his own dance 12″ singles, like “Menergy” and “Megatron Man”. He also co-founded Megatone Records, the label upon which he released his debut album, Megatron Man. Around this time Patrick was hospitalized and diagnosed with an unknown illness: that which would later be called AIDS. Throughout 1982, he composed two more Hi-NRG hits, “Do You Wanna Funk” for Sylvester, and “Right On Target” for Paul Parker, as well as a second solo album Mind Warp. His life was cut short on November 12, 1982, when he passed away 24 days after his 32nd birthday from AIDS-related illness. 
Mechanical Fantasy Box is a new collection of 13 unreleased songs recorded between 1973-80 released in tandem with Cowley’s homoerotic journal of the same title. Featuring Patrick’s first electronic compositions in the Electronic Music Lab at CCSF when synthesizers were new technology to songs made at his semi-professional studio on Minna Street equipped with an Oberheim DS-2 digital sequencer. The sounds flows from funk to kraut to psychedelic ambient electronics inspired by Tomita and Krafterwerk. As Maurice Tani wrote in the liner notes that accompany this release, “What you hold in your hand is a collection of Cowley's work from the years preceding his meteoric rise as a pioneer of Hi-NRG dance music. This was before drum machines. Before programmable, polyphonic digital synthesis. This was before “cutting edge”. This was experimental music in every sense.” 
Some songs were mixed from 4-track stems by Joe Tarantino and all songs have been remastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studio in Berkeley, CA. The vinyl comes housed in a black and white gatefold jacket designed by Gwenaël Rattke featuring a photograph by Susan Middleton and include an essay from music partner Maurice Tani and an 8.5x11 insert with notes. Proceeds from Mechanical Fantasy Box will be donated to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, who have been committed to ending the pandemic and human suffering caused by HIV since 1982.

Memory Waves

The Envelope Man