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BRD 040LP
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New one by Montreal singer-songwriter Deb Edison, working once again as The Submissives and willfully unchanged from 2016's Do You Really Love Me? cassette (Fixture). Six years into the most tumultuous period in global history since WWII -- a pandemic, right-wing infiltration, attempts at government overthrow, climate catastrophe looming, a near-complete loss of the moral compass, conspiracies lording over facts natural resources running out -- and Deb's still here, staring a hole through the floor/your head. "No one ever changes," she coos on "In A Pinch", and these songs are a textbook example of that sentiment, and her artistic embodiment of psychosexual desire, ready to shatter some lives and walk away looking for the next one. "I'm waiting for your signal/I'm several years older," she drones on "Sick Kinda Love", further reinforcing a long-held stance that the obsession, internalization of feelings, and the human power dynamic of The Submissives are on the menu once again. You'll find whatever it is you want to find in here, just dig in. Deb might even be talking about you, though there's a good chance she's not, and if you don't have the goods you can be sure she's gonna be doing all she can to passively drive you away. "Chirp Like a Bird" reads as Deb's bottom-looking-up retort to Whitehouse's "Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel", and might even be more severe, because she doesn't need microphonic feedback and screaming to intimidate. If you're in for surface thrills, scrape up the Shaggs-esque rock stumble, swooping viola, and behind-the-beat bash tapping out each of these eleven tracks. This is how it is; you get what you get, and you might be upset, but that's all on you. You'll never get to the bottom of this sketch.
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BRD 038LP
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"A bad torrent file for the theme from Miami Vice rings in your ears as you struggle to get out of an elevator that's crashing real fast while you were waiting for a phone call from Bill Orcutt. Enjoy life while it lasts." --Guy Mercier
"It starts very simply. March 1988. The birth of an elephant. Basically, not exactly. Hair and teeth, we were told, it's like that, it happens more often than you think. He was hungry and he was dirty. There he sucks the vacuum cleaner. We couldn't stop laughing! There he purrs. Time flies so fast and he has grown. 'Aggression, like love,' he used to say, 'is first projected onto an individual who then introject them.' In the introjected phases, identification with the stool, the paranoid character is experienced as dirt; in the projective phases, of alienation, he feels himself superior and it is the world that he regards as filth. We read too! He said: 'In your fairy tales, the wolf symbolizes introjection, it swallows whole or pretends to be.' I don't think he was mad at us. 'The whole thing was of course mobile,' he said the other day, 'finally, I dumped it, finding that I preferred to look for whatever effects I might need through technique.' We do appreciate his work, we are proud of him, he has come a long way. 'The individual can talk for a long time without swallowing anything,' he answered. 'Does the intelligent stomach even have the capacity to resist word-of-mouth?,' we were just about to retort. But no more quarrel, listen and enjoy without evaluating; you will taste good, you will stop introjecting your physical food and hence your mental food, you will." --Laetitia Paviani
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BRD 039LP
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"Beyond riot music from the MC5 to Sham 69, in front of Arthur Russell's Death and after Klein's Lifetime, Al Karpenter and Mattin come out from behind the mask of Lou Reed's Lulu." --Guy Mercier
In this moment of uncertainty and environmental trauma, as you recoil in the face of an emotional overload that demands retreat or even flight, a certain use of solitude in confinement has generated the possibility of taking it all on, of being with others again while still listening in solitude. Music From A Private Hell describes an understanding of sound as a habitable substance from this degree-zero of isolation. A handful of songs written in iron and dust, that allow just enough fiction or myth as to turn technology into a weapon. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us in On The Line: "run away, but when you run, bring a weapon." A remedy for mass fatalism, Hell begins with the first song, in which a tambourine of some sort plays an ostinato rhythm, punctuating each phrase with a long note that communes with the shadows. Of interest here are not the rhythms that recur throughout the record but their relationship to colors and timbres. The different harmonic openings and resonances evoke the different kinds of tension that occur when skin touches flame. "We'll burn it down before you land here," says a disembodied voice, and various noises and sound effects cut through it, indifferent to the threat, as futuristic today as they were at their inception. Al Karpenter's voice is a weapon. His inexpressive whisper is a weapon. On this record, the human voice is an excess, a surplus of the body; it is at once outside and inside. It can be listened to peacefully, but it can also generate the anguish of a voice attempting to escape from language, setting the logos free in the wilderness, scavenging in the semiotic debris.
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BRD 037LP
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"I am sitting in a room crying over an episode of Les Shadoks. A machine springs out of the TV and wipes the tears away to the sound of Sweet Exorcist's 'Test Four'. All my friends hate Autechre and I am laughing in a room." --Guy Mercier
"The unfamiliar life with other children is wonderful, it almost takes out of your head, the silence of automatic checkouts in grocery stores."
"With the punishment of their magical talent, pickles may well make an old man's voice as tender as the city sludge."
Music critic Androïd Aquila ran in Amiens for seven years. What experience has he had in this country? Who accompanied him to avoid as much as possible the fear of the canals, the terror of the hills? These children had wits to hear neglect and ears to understand inaction. A large number of mouths for drinking and singing. "Their music releases pressure drops and predicts even greater possibilities." Aquila took them seriously, even when they formed groups with some crazy names, Sniff Nasal, Coto Vêlage, and especially Le Donneur. But soon, the vague judgments of Aquila escalated into an active protest. "Hope is the key to action, not flying high, not the void, not alone. I hear a broken voice -- it's mine! -- I hear laughter." The children weren't listening to him anymore. Living music, as a whole, sometimes hides behind dirty old planes. A captain is called into the arms of a soldier and the two have to sit happily on the dance floor, shoes are hidden in the trash. Instead of competing, we do things. Before being recycled, Androïd Aquila wrote: "With so many resources and projects, Les Problèmes Urbains, Terrine's latest album, is certainly one of the most demanding (comical) in the world." Features Jean Cronier and Jean Detrémont.
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BRD 034LP
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Here's a document of a Paris now gone. The city was yours and ours. Strolling down the streets in your tired jeans and bright red polo shirt, a gentle breeze rustles a girl's long hair or maybe it was a boy, passing by in the aluminum sun. Sitting at your neighborhood café, talking with your friends, one of them a traitor, about the last football match, you are French and also maybe support Chelsea, a good move will enchant the evening. Now you work, now you don't, measly government money spent on instruments and chemicals. Drinking a can of beer outside the noise gig Are you 15 years old? Or are you 35? Maybe you're 62 all of a sudden. Laughing out loud in the street, at some joke that, at some point, was on you. Maybe start a fight, too much of this and too much of that under a bright white moon. You move along and there's no reason for concern, everything is wrong anyway. It's Paris and it's the suburbs, a seamless grey landscape that is your past and present, it's a reverie, might as well kill yourself again tonight. The city's now locked down and maybe it's best to leave it to die. The law can't erase the memories of what will come back anyway, against it. Paris still jingling in our heads, it's a stretch from Françoise Hardy's timid voice to the best French indie pop band you've never heard of, Freluquets. It's a stretch, still fighting in the streets over the capitalist laws or over a girl, or was it a boy? Gentle strumming, lonely notes for lonely garçons, now men. Going nowhere in your head, still hearing The Go-Betweens, a bit of quirk and crunch à la Monochrome set. How that makes for an imaginary Paris of 2020 going head on at a very slow speed, very slowly and maybe a bit numb but never limping, stumbling over, head over heels at a backwards pace. There is one smile, the dissolving smile of the future, neither here nor there. The City is always yours and ours for the taking, in a slow punch, our raison d'être.
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BRD 036LP
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Kariu Kenji, the leader of the Tokyo-based band OWKMJ, has released his third solo album in nine years. It is a masterpiece/problematic piece of work that took its time and was produced almost entirely by one person in the midst of the corona crisis, and is a significant leap forward in terms of sound design, composition, and vocals. If OWKMJ is a "dynamic" sound that crosses various genres, then this album is a "quiet", an expression of the various performances/listening experiences internalized in the memory of its creator. It is not a spontaneous attempt to integrate any kind of genres, but rather a work in which a variety of genres sprout up intrinsically, and you can feel a sense of awesomeness as if you were catching a glimpse of the songwriter's own musical history in the group of songs recorded on this album. The album's sound has a modern sound texture that evokes pop, rock, folk, electro, soul and other genres of recent years' hip-hop/r n' b and beyond, but there is a gradual deviation from all of them, and the album is packed full of musical intricacies, gaps and discrepancies. The "vocals" in this album are just as, if not more, appealing than the sound. According to him, "I took advantage of the fact that it's not a singer's voice and recorded it to make the most of the potential of my humble voice", but when you listen to this singing with its flat, almost calm intonation, and not trying to sound like a pretender, it gives you a strange, foreign feeling. The lyrics, which expand the song's imagery in multiple layers, are also wonderful, and have a universal power, as if the song (or words) grow in the listener's mind as they follow the words. The introspective moods of the Covid-19 ravages and the quiet landscape of the city under the declaration of the state of emergency overlap, and at the same time, the towering figure of a musician who never stops creating/imagining his own music comes to the fore in this raw, contemporaneous music.
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LP
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BRD 033LP
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After their critically acclaimed Chroma LP (BRD 024LP, 2017), Femme -- the group of Arno Bruil (France Sauvage, Descendeur) and Jo Tanz (Opéra Mort, Fusiller) -- release Ruderal Exotique augmenting their psychedelic electronics explorations in reconceived territories, this time an artificial growth of urban decay on irradiated nature as experienced within Ken Russel's intoxicated and prodigious mind directing Altered States (1981). Best experienced in an isolation tank, an airport capsule hotel or on a silent electric car chase buzzing through Tim Buckley's snapshot of smoggy-out L.A., Ruderal Exotique is a flourish of slow burning synapses, the tiny magnetic connections that desperately cling and look for each other when your mind expects the hammer to finally conclude the ordeal while your body languishes on a stone in the bright sun of Midsommar. Ruderal Exotique is lounge music for Bob, or Bruce, or Fred, growing Mors Ontologica on the farm, in Dick's A Scanner Darkly (1977), a new-path laid out by Throbbing Gristle's Chris Carter now twisted and tangled even further, branching out from the future of technology back into the present of Zelazny's 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai (1985). Growing new species as a result of destroying older species, life emerges from the industrial rubble that looks like scar tissue and smells like steel laced with lichen. To the biotech DIY apprentices of Femme, immersing in this cesspool of environmental data is a joy and their music glows in the dark of globalized waste as a symphony of gleaming flora and strident fauna. It is as reassuring as Virginia Astley's gardens, as vibrant as Steve Reich's big city collages and as evocative as the Gerogerigegege's Uguisudani Apocalypse (2019). It is a world of its own, yet it is also our world as it is today, AI machines advancing thru genetically modified corn fields, shredding up cicadas and worms, planting steel shards in their place that will rust and give way to the new machine, documented by Stephen Mallinder and Richard H. Kirk. Long live the new flesh of the Femme realist resistance!
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BRD 032LP
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"While he's known alternately as David (La Familia) & Mr. Loayza (La Abogados) to the gravity-clutchers of the world, for us Falstaffian iota's what inhabit the non-boundaried scrub out here in wire-brush country, he is always and forever Oso El Roto. My first encounter with the man's multi-faceted snert was on the LP, Mojon Po'l Agua back in 2007. Housed inside a brutish sheath of fabricated, hand-painted, cardboard was an album brimming with aberrant, gibbering, genius. Since then a dozen or so releases have spunked into the discography, the latest being this one on the estimable Bruit Direct Disques label. On Pop De Cuchillo our hero has returned to his native Chile (after years in Paris) and not surprisingly, hasn't lost a step in the transition. If anything, Oso El Roto may have 'mellowed', which is to say he's moving at 1,000,000,000 mph instead of 1,000,000,001. It's hard not to draw comparisons to that other great and prolific Chilean of the absurd, Alvaro, but Oso El Roto has never broken from his native tongue, so the elitists-for once-are not Anglais. While Oso El Roto trucks most assuredly in the lurch of lo-fi, the way he grinds those gears is spectacularly kaleidoscopic. The aural offerings brought forth on Pop De Cuchillo are a smorgasbord of charred delicacies to feed your head. Some artists go their whole lives trying to catch lightning in a bottle once. Then there's Oso El Roto, who seems to absorb it at will. Impervious is not born, it's earned. For fans of The Rebel, Jerry Solomon, Pierre Schaeffer, Sun Ra, Eye Yamatsuka, Made For Chickens By Robots, Waste Sausage, Leather Donut, Chocolate Monk, Bananafish magazine, NWW list, Llama kababs, Borgona, Yage, Gary Panter, Yoko Ono & Ono." --Tom Lax, Catbird, Ohio
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LP
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BRD 031LP
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Stefan Christensen swamps delicate threads of melody in a muted squall of distortion. Waves of agitated noise, tamped down but still fractious, roll over the structures of his songs, so that it's hard to tell whether the song or the dissonant scree of sound is the main thing. A current member of Headroom and frequent collaborator with members of Mountain Movers, Alexander, and Nagual, Christensen layers haunted sung imagery over slow looped constructions of guitar and percussion. Here on The Upcoming Flame, the melodic fire flickers amid smoke, haze, and hum. The pretty folk strumming of "Arrows" provides a sharp contrast to the blistering roar of "Unkempt Power (This City's Hold)", whose wild guitar distortion edges close to Dinosaur Jr. territory. The stark, minimal power of "G. Roberts", where a single electric guitar line carves through echo-shrouded hiss and hum is quite unlike the dystopian hypnotics of "Like Factories" a wavery chant weaving through mechanical assembly-line stomp.
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LP
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BRD 030LP
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"Cheat Days is the new release by Terrine (aka Claire Gapenne, also in Headwar), part techno noise and part bedroom freak électronique. Cheat Days is pressed at 45RPM for maximum heaviness and delight. Nothing ever really runs like clockwork in Gapenne's weird and wonderful world. The Tinker Bell of French noise, her magic whip has the power to turn one into a horse drawn carriage or an old pumpkin. A hyperactive activist and artist, she has been part of Accueil Froid for the past seven years in Amiens. This collective has invited the best of experimental rock to their town, eyes and ears wide open in a place where there is (almost) nothing except pretty canals and unemployment. Her music releases pressure valves and opens a perspective onto infinite possibilities. Though known for manhandling her bass as part of Headwar and has made her mark in numerous groups with delightfully silly names (Snif Nazal, Couteau Twins, and Me Donner), the riotous Terrine has paved a path for herself with constancy and determination. Turning up where least expected, she changes the game plan according to her art and the people she meets, increasingly preoccupied with defying genre, nimbly and tactfully skipping from one style to the next. With the aptly titled Cheat Days, she has concocted a disorientating mix of stunted techno, limping dub and piano-wave improv. Though one could imagine she would dive head first into EBM and post-industrial techno, she now takes a completely different direction with this album; everything is guarded, the approach is minimalist and intensely personal. Between gusts of peripheral noise captured on the go, she dares to combine Cabaret Voltaire and Pascal Comelade, and The Shadow Ring, a St Vitus' dance and a disembodied rave, slow-burning dub and digital crackle, electronic no-wave and jumble sale tech. Too subtle to jerk about on the BPM assembly line, her music is etched upon a backdrop behind which an old piano is hidden, dusty and busted. The only captain of her ship, she uses modest means to fashion cutting edge sound design and summon heavy dancefloor artillery. Stacked with resources and buzzing with a wealth of projects, Claire Gapenne has progressively become one of the most crucial (and jovial) figures of the DIY underground." --Julien Bécourt RIYL: Cabaret Voltaire, Wolf Eyes, Pascal Comelade.
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2LP
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BRD 025LP
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Tom Lax on Mamitri Yulith Empress Yonagunisan's Yulith Lilith: "The world of Mamitori is as beguiling as it is unchartered. Their, just previous to this, live album Mamitori Ulithi Empress Yonaguni San-25/12/20/13 (also on Bruit Direct Disques) fizzled the ears of pine-tops with its staggeringly great execution of outsider ramble gnashing with no wave rumble, creating a sound so unique, scribes stuttered on hiccups of comparison. Trying to 'get it right'. If copies still exist, plonk down some cabbage and see what I mean. So when the check writers at Bruit said they were issuing forth a 2LP of new material, all one could do was wait and wonder. It's the line in the sand many dare not cross. The double LP format, in its purest distillation, exists as the medium to convey realizations of the most sprawling and unconventional design. And by God, if Mamitri Yulith Empress Yonagunisan latest deuce, Yulith Lilith, doesn't ding all the right dongs, then ladies and gentlemen, I will cook your goose. The heart of their sound is beyond words, it's more chaos theory, transmuting inside the eye of a hurricane. Imagine 10,000 blackbirds, perched in the trees above Tompkins Square Park, their shrill natter suffocating the air, while below Arto Lindsay spanges in tap shoes, his voice wavering fugue-like over the birds, while the clicking of his gait keeps a rhythm out of sync-yet completely on point-with the overall scheme. Or if '70s era Faust had become outlaws, exiled themselves deep inside the Hokkaido landscape and for the rest of eternity tooled around Akkeshi Bay on speedboats, lustily consuming wild ales, sustaining themselves solely on plankton and oysters. Mamitri Yulith Empress Yonagunisan are Bushido code Circuit Rider and Yulith Lilith is an unimpeachable masterpiece extolling the marauding valor of a band incapable of succumbing to convention. Housed inside transparent screen-printed sleeves-resembling alien x-rays. It's like the future just opened up. And guess what? It's full of stars. One of my top picks of 2018 by a mile. Not to be missed." Double gatefold album; clear vinyl with a custom made transparent sleeve; two quadri stickers; plastic insert; all hand made in Japan. [all copies of this plastic sleeve have split-seam damage from transit -- approximately 2" -- and cannot be replaced. Accept them "as is" if you are ordering this]
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7"
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BRD 028EP
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Forming in the same sweaty nucleus of Brisbane, Australia, the music of Thigh Master and Dag has long been intertwined, sharing an interchangeable roster of members and a mutual passion for bright and beautiful guitar pop sounds. On the road, Thigh Master and Dag have covered a considerable distance together, at home and abroad, traversing endless kilometers through Outback Australia and sharing the journey overseas to play for audiences in Japan. Having both recently released debut LPs, the two bands are joining forces yet again to play a slew of dates across Europe in January of 2018.
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2LP+CD
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BRD 027LP
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Three levels of sound, based on an inspiration by Kudo Tori, with material added from the voicemail of Hashizaka Ai and her family, from a Maher Shalal Hash Baz 30th anniversary show in Shinjuku. Hashizaka's sounds are full of the highly entropic sadness of northern Wakayama and Maher at Shinjuku sounds like they were a little angry. Kudo says that he picked up a sense of blankness and kindness from these fragments. Something like the feeling you get at an out-of-the-way bookstore that has a nice collection of books, or at a small cheap bar that has fried organ meat, or a bakery, or taking a long trip, or when you're extremely busy with cooking, cleaning, housework, and child care, or other real experiences that make life worth living. RIYL: Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, Pastels.
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LP
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BRD 024LP
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When it comes to head-scratchers, no one plows into the scalp like Bruit Direct Disques. For their 24th release, they've ponied up this mélange by the duo Femme. Chroma summons forth a soundscape of stellar post trance, electro magma. As dense as it is deft. The ten gurgling innards effortlessly spewed out here rank it alongside other Moltenadelic CO-2 snuffers such as Ilitch's Periodik Mindtrouble (1978) or Junji Hirose + Yoshihide Otomo's Silanganan Ingay (1989). Lush, foreboding, and fantastical, Chroma's pocket universe of seductive dread could spook the sheen right off've Moebius's Airtight Garage and there ain't a damn thing Major Grubert or Jerry Cornelius is gonna do about it. The future doesn't get any more Untopian than this.
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LP
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BRD 026LP
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Solo project by Lise Sutter who is active in the Geneva/Leipzig axis, that includes Couteau Latex -- an all women band with two bass mixing very early New Order and screechy synth ESG -- and The Staches. They have the energy. They have the spit. They play, in disguise, and smiling as they pulse through their short melodic punk outbursts, like Malaria or Bush Tetras or maybe even Prag Vec. File under: rock, synth-punk.
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12"
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BRD 017EP
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A tribute to the peaks of low-budget Italian crime novels and to lubed-up synth-wave, Scorpion Violente feel up their synths with all the vigor of a manic depressive on a downward slope. Scorpion Violente emit their dirty feedback-washed discharge, adding Ich Bin and Le Syndicat Electronique to their holiday activity books. The tempo is even slower than before, with echoes more distant than In Aeternum Vale and Ike Yard dripping from their stabbing loops. Cold cyclo-rhythmic blues, sure to make Alan Vega turn in his grave.
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LP
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BRD 023LP
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Thigh Master have been mainstays of Brisbane's thriving underground guitar scene for years now, building up a formidable reputation for both their fierce live shows and their early recorded output. Their first two singles Head Of The Witch (2014) and Songs To Wipe Your Mouth To (2015) both sold out their initial runs after charming fans both in Australia and abroad with their urgent and catchy tales of inner-city malaise. They have already played with Guitar Wolf, The Coathangers, Ty Segall, Ariel Pink, The Clean, Real Estate and Courtney Barnett. Early Times, their debut LP, was recorded and mixed by Blank Realm guitarist, Luke Walsh. Once more Matthew Ford and company turn this introspection and angst into high art, with another infectious offering which is sure to turn heads in all the right places. RIYL: Kitchen's Floor, Buzzcocks, Blank Realm. "I haven't been excited about guitar pop like this in a while, transporting a presence of Polvo/Archers-style string bend, plus huge riff from some 8000 miles away, familiar but still vital, and given exuberant, shook-up life." --Doug Mosurock, Still-Single.
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LP
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BRD 016LP
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Bruit Direct Disques continues down the path of no-fucks-given with yet another ace from a deck already heaping with bewildering gems. In much the same way as Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Theoreme (1968) once fizzled the corneas of the prim, Theoreme, the artist, is here to singe ears on this blistering solo debut. Laying down all the instrumentation and vocals herself, Theoreme posits that spectres of the past continue to resonate in the contemporaneous milieu of the underground. This isn't some Erik Von Daniken Chariots Of The Gods bullshit - it's the fucking truth. Deep inside the angular ingenuity of this chef d'oeuvre are subtle sonic vectors, analogous to Gutura, SIC and the corrosive side of the German label Zickzack; Channeled or not, the adage remains, "Great minds think alike". It's not definite that the French invented propositional logic, but they sure do guzzle it down. And Theoreme's right there - two-fisted, bellied up and ready for guzzling. You want a cold war? Well son, here it is. Have at it.
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LP
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BRD 020LP
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The pataphysical toy music of Klimperei, a collective project led since 1985 by Christophe Petchanatz, gets a lot out of many small things - dismantled toys, organs with burst pipes, squeaking detuned guitars, loose broom. Sung in English by Eric Chabert, the songs on Dealings are adaptations of poems by John B. Cornaway (1957-1994), author of Heligoland. Over Chabert's scratchy voice, still manifesting all its vigor, Klimperei unload its makeshift bric-a-brac, convoking melodica, banjo and metallophone. Child-like without infantilism, these pieces sometimes show their teeth, but the bite is never violent. Woozy cabaret cantata ("Cup of Tea"), Potluck Canterbury School ("Spoil"), punk waltz under a sad sun ("Hard"), acoustic free-blues ("Solution", "Wear On") or haywire krautrock ("Soon"). Mind dust in a stormy mouth, black candy dispenser - broken bottle et verre brisé . The glottis shaking sobs are quickly repressed. Because, yes, despite everything, life is good at Klimperei's. And the wind, Cornaway says, will never die.
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LP
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BRD 015LP
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Bruit Direct Disques presents the first LP by Badaboum, a French all-star girl group that includes Krine (Headwar), Armelle (The Dreams), and Solene (Dudu Geva) and is affiliated with the famous Grande Triple Alliance de l'Est posse (Ah Kraken, Feeling of Love, Scorpion Violente). They play a form of post-punk music akin to Liliput/Kleenex and Malaria!, adding their own reverbed idiosyncrasies and eerie organ lines and chanting in indecipherable Italian, mock German, and plain French. Taking turns on drums and blowing thru severed reeds, Badaboum will bring you as much joy as chaos.
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12"
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BRD 018EP
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This EP began with a newspaper story that tickled the warped funny-bones of Dan Melchior and Graham Lambkin and gave birth to some lyrics. The wonderful keyboard talents of the late Letha Rodman Melchior (1959-2014) were pivotal in the most "musical" of the tracks, the poignant closer "Vaccanti." Glen Rodman Melchior (whose claim for "most recorded budgie" with Guinness World Records is pending at the time of this release) lent his indispensable and unmistakable vocals to "Mower Bath Man." Without too many signposts or safe footholds, this just might scratch that itch you didn't even know you had.
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LP
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BRD 019LP
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Battle of Brisbane is the third album by Kitchen's Floor and their first full-length release since 2011's Look Forward to Nothing (Siltbreeze), which followed 2009's Loneliness Is a Dirty Mattress (R.I.P Society, Bedroom Suck Records). Guitarist and vocalist Matt Kennedy is joined by a new lineup of members including Robert Vagg (Wonderfuls, Meat Thump) on drums and Josh Watson (Sewers) on bass. Sarah Spencer (Blank Realm) also provides additional vocals. The album contains 10 tracks of uncompromisingly nihilistic outsider rock and roll. Inspired by the indifference of the city the band calls home and the sad events that can happen to the characters within it, Battle of Brisbane is a bitter ode to existential dread battered through a minimalist punk façade. Recorded by Luke Walsh (Blank Realm) and mastered by Marly Luske, Battle of Brisbane is a uniquely fucked oddity in the modern rock landscape.
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BRD 014LP
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In keeping with the freer releases in their catalog (Sky Needle, La Ligne Claire, Minitel), Bruit Direct Disques presents 25/12/2013, a live album by Japanese group 真美鳥Ulithi Empress Yonaguni San, often referred to by their nickname, Mamitori. Savagely DIY and autonomous, Mamitori have released only a handful of copies of a privately pressed record, while lead guitarist Aritomo has put out an abundance of self-produced acid-folk records, hand-assembling sleeves for every copy. David Keenan compared the band's 2012 album 一二三 Fairy Tail Chimidoro Phenomenon Satan Inferno Dress Ha Cattlemurarete Yggdrasill ハWa Sasaru to "Isn't Anything being creepy-crawled by Idiot O'Clock or the early Rough Trade singles as curated by Jutok Kaneko and Reiko Kudo." The six tracks offered here (drawn from that 2012 album) were recorded in public and are reproduced accurately, with silences and tuning included at the express request of the band. Guitars are skinned alive, twisted in counterpoint, or played with a cheesegrater; the frail vocal is as exhausted as it is sweet; the trumpet plays its dying breath; the bouncy rhythm section offers a skeleton of rigor; psych-rock is reduced here to fluff, with only a scraggy trunk of the spinal column remaining. Mamitori follows the traces of the ancestral giants of '70s avant-rock (Hendrix, Velvets, Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow, Can, The Red Krayola), except it's an odd post-punk mess that spits from their amps. Accident is king with Mamitori, and their psychotic free rock, loaded with open-tuned guitars, sometimes feels like shreds of sound; limping and out of phase, played obliquely, their music is at once absolutely diaphanous and indecipherable. Nothing is ever in place and everything cracks up and frays; it's an atonal construction that threatens to become melodious at any minute. Ultimately, Mamitori hides a form of twee pop unwittingly battered by no wave, every chord of which could be a blank bullet. One might mistake the sound for My Bloody Valentine violently colliding with The Shaggs, The Pastels attacked by Mars, or Pere Ubu holding paws with Swell Maps. Is a "No Tokyo" emerging decades after No New York? This live set, in front of a ghost-like public, serves as a hint of this Japanese band's profound peculiarity, joyfully perplexing everyone even further by citing alternative j-rock supertars L'Arc-en-Ciel as an influence. Mamitori will have you humming songs you hadn't noticed were there.
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BRD 013LP
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Robert Vagg (Meat Thump, Kitchen's Floor) delivers ten confessionals that drift around tragedies, hopelessness, failed systems, nonconformity, and physical/psychological experiences. Set to the minimalist sparse compositions of Dan McGirr and Natasha Buchanan, whose guitar and synthesizer lines entwine around the bleak lyrics and help paint Robert's world of despair and loneliness. Only more downer, time hasn't healed the wounds, they've only become deeper. The Durutti Column meets Lou Reed's Berlin on this Australian band's second LP, far from their shambolic debut single on Negative Guest List.
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BRD 012LP
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First LP by somber Australian chanteuse Elizabeth Downey and instrumentalist Dan Hawkins. Nine bruised vignettes that will take you to the scraped bottom of love. Soft, caressing and subtly disturbing, Frightening Lights' songs move like menace through fog. Singer Elizabeth Downey says she first envisioned the songs as a kind of deathbed confession, their violence is carefully suppressed, modulated perhaps through long penitence. Shreds of instrumental sound -- a funeral organ, an off-kilter accordion, discordant bowing on a borrowed danbo -- flit in and out of the peripheries, creating eerie, flickery landscapes around Downey's sleepy murmurs. Downey formed Frightening Lights with her partner Dan Hawkins in 2007 after a sojourn in Russia, where she went to study fine arts and returned with a fascination for Russian and Polish folk music. Returning home to Melbourne, she found herself as drawn to Slavic influences -- including the Russian poet Bulat Okudzhava and Polish singer Slawa Przybylska -- as to rock artists like The Triffids, Rowland Howard and Marianne Faithfull. Back in Melbourne, Downey and Hawkins began recording at home on an enormous, two-inch reel-to-reel recording deck, working and reworking their spare material. Two of the duo's songs appeared on Melbourne compilations -- The Warm Cupboard from Albert's Basement label in 2009 and the Swan V Raptor on Dan Lewis' Special Awards Records in 2010. The rest evolved gradually into the dream-like textures of this debut full-length. Downey sings and plays guitar on this debut, while Hawkins mans a rack of keyboard instruments -- a Farfisa, a Hammond and an eerie Conn organ -- as well as bass. There are no drums on the album, almost no sense of time at all, as melodies float like smoke over blasted territories. Downey's lyrics trace elliptical connections between the novels she reads, the films she sees and the ordinary experiences of daily life. The opening "Père LaChaise" recalls a hazy interval in Paris, where Downey, sick with pneumonia, wandered nonetheless through the famous cemetery, deathly ill. "The Return of Genghis Khan" conflates her fascination with the Mongol warlord, a kitten that she once named after him and a romantic spat with her partner into a single, slow-moving fever dream. Artist Earl Kuck calls the Frightening Lights "almost Bad Seeds-like with female vox," and this self-titled debut has, indeed, some of the same eerie, subdued resonance as Cave's recent We Know Who You Are. If you like your menace soft, wrapped in lullaby sweetness and still profoundly unsettling, turn on the Frightening Lights.
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