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AZD 004CD
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"With no discernible connection to any current micro-scene or music-making community, Howlin' Magic, aka California free-blues guitarist Jesse Rakusin, works in relative isolation, laying down impossibly heavy blues licks, amp noise, and expressionistic drum tracks at a breathless clip. In early 2006, Rakusin began circulating a self-titled CD-R of twelve private, four-track recordings. Those fortunate to hear it were fairly astonished. This was the sort of record that might have emanated from Siltbreeze or PSF in the early '90s, a devastating set of home-recorded, white-hot splatter-blues, at once formally way-out and ultra-primitive in its execution; and its chief 'architect' was this kid from Santa Cruz whose influences included Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Simply Saucer, White Heaven, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Holy smoke! Rakusin's command of the blues, combined with his seemingly insatiable appetite for psychedelics, has yielded one of the most scorching records to issue from the U.S. underground in years. There's nothing ponderous or 'searching' here -- the hippie affectations and inchoate mysticism that infect our current cultural environment are all but absent from Rakusin's purview. Instead, what we've got here is a successful marriage of raw garage-psych and highly advanced freeform noise."
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AZD 001CD
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"El Pabellón ('The Pavilion') is Fankbonner's first release under his own name. It's also the first document of his electroacoustic compositions for sampler and field recordings. The album was recorded over three months in a small room in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. It is assembled entirely from the sounds filtering through the windows of the apartment: amplified room tone; tape hiss; and heavily treated samples of very small sounds arranged in spacious, richly layered sonic tableaux in which microtextures surface at the threshold of audibility. The eight pieces of El Pabellón represent a dialectical zooming-in and-out between the controlled sonic environment of the composer's workspace and the noise of the environment beyond its walls. Eschewing the documentary aspects of field recordings and sound-walks, the layers of ambient sound at the heart of El Pabellón enter into a dialogue with Fankbonner's more or less intentional music-making process, calling attention to the mediations between the composer, his sonic environment, and the barebones recording equipment at his disposal (four-track tape recorder, sampler, one microphone). The result is an intricate, varied, surprisingly lyrical collection of soundscapes that evoke both AMM and INA/GRM, Francisco López and Ramón Sender."
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