Cruudeuces - "Bird Calling In The Ghetto" (Wet Merchants)

Freakish and frequently blasted guttural rumblings and ramblings emerge out of Cruudeuces "Bird Calling In The
Ghetto", one of the new tapes from a batch of releases on the fresh "Wet Merchants" label. The first side opens with a pitchin' bitchin' rattle and a trotting giant beckoning in the tired moan that works on the soft parts of your grey matter throughout. Don't be fooled by the fry, this is careful stuff. Nathaniel Brennan throws down as many thin slices of sound as he does slabs, and it just keeps coming. The buzz grows fuzz on it, never breaking from its initial impulse. This release manages intensity as well as a kind of simplicity and hoody-up, head boppin' to the smell of burning watt blow-outs chilldom. The lobe shattering on side A continues with visions of day to day life... too busted to hear its own footsteps. Layers fuse together and then split apart again. It is hard to tell, but most of the time it feels like he is working with just a couple of pieces of sound at once, which makes for a very direct transmission.

Side B opens with a duet between said bird and a stoned bumble-bee. The rattle bitches a little, and then an orator sweeps through. This is straight tape music, but served up in the best way. What sound like horns, move like worms, burrowing through the dirty drone and then suddenly hitting upon something worthy of a holler. The resounding call of???? Think: Dune. The drone continues and gets colder and colder, descending into sub-terrestrial zoner land - accompanied consistently by wrecked commentary. The final bit of stripped down syrup smear jams, moves away from the cyclical, rhythmic groove just in time for you to put your pants back on.

The sounds here are surprisingly organic. The way that Brennan attends to rhythm and pulse and where he chooses to place his layers, allow the piece to grow on its own in a really free way. There is no question that he is guiding this ship - but it is one hell of a jungle ark that he is steering through the streets.

Sick Llama is Heath Moreland from Michigan. He flings Fag Tapes.

"Heath aka Juice aka Fag Heath aka Morellama is just a ball of huge eyeballing goodness... how can you be mad at him? We used to have heavy skate shred sessions with the goofball and he would destroy the streetz, and still be smiling at the end, never breaking a sweat. You want this dude on your team."
- John Olson

"No one sounds like Heath--almost feel like he's managed to grab that whole basement aesthetic and take it into some twisted, psyched out land, welcome to the stone zone style."
- Henry Smith (Ear Conditioned Nightmare)

"I mean it's electronics, tape hiss, and ....?????? Heath really doesn't get any better or more refined, just....... stranger and more strange. My man Connelly says every Fag Tape has at least a 30% 'hands off' factor, meaning, seems like Llama has a nice mutant groove going on and then just jets for 10min, leaving the machine motionless. If you can tell what the hell is going on inside these grooves...bottle it and sell it, it would be ideal to have on tap.......it could be like taking a skinny dip inside the caverns of a black pool filled to the brim with soul-frying electricity waves."
- John Olson

A Thousand Colours Blaze 6xC60 boxset [Gods Of Tundra, 2007]
Sick Llama's 30 minute tape side from this epic boz set..........................................................download tape 3, side e

...And some more really cruddy constructions here on this 2003 Sick Llama release from Olson's American Tapes imprint. Sick Llama - Put Down

Moreland also decays, twists and distorts ad nausea in project called Slither. They describe themselves as follows: Slither is the brutal collaboration of Chris Pottinger (Cotton Museum) and Heath Moreland. Both reside in the Metro-Detroit area and both conjure sonic demons using horns, electronics and effects.

SLITHER - FROM A FADING AGE

Side A
Side B











Stay stoned.

I want to kick off this blog with a post about a guy who I have been listening to a lot recently. His name is Christopher Riggs. He plays guitar. You can glimpse his stuff here.
Riggs and Hall (Trauma) in Cincinnati at the Art Damage Lodge
Trauma

Here are some other chunks/ slabs/ fragments of his: brainwashed, dead in michigan side A, side B.

Here is a review of the Dead in Michigan tape: Ear Conditioned Nightmare.
Henry (the guy who runs ECN) writes about Riggs quite a bit. His ear is frightening and his coverage is definitely equivocal in the best sense of haze.

John Olson on Chris Riggs:
a brief history of the ax=6-string jump: d. bailey - dancehall jazzbox player from the jump heard webern and got it in his idea box that he could get the same timbre fx (=constructing a melody by switching instruments every note) by treating harmonics, fretted notes, open strings all equal and then lays a slab o anton's trichords over top. killer. joe morris up next. does the opposite. total post-bop style. only fretted notes. staying in one left-hand position = gradual timbre changes within the tone-row. two mugs on opposites side o the same wavelength. outta they mindz. keith "fancy a hunder?" rowe comes along and fucks it up. disregards technique, says "fuck you" to the paradigm set up by d. bailey and joe "joe" morris, and opens the door for hundreds of fuckin copycats who love buying fx pedals on ebay. bullshit but it had to happen. looked like it was time to say r.i.p. to the 6-string. nothin new outta that mugg. then comes along chris "nacho" riggs. thinks he can resurrect that dead horse with an fx pedal-less 2-string (side a has just 2 strings on it?!!?!) guitar all the while applying lachenmann's obsession for extendo technique toward the goal of sounding like a dillo tape loop. root scoot

- olzone

Personally, I am a sucker for the searching/ going no-where absence of epic sounds that guys like Riggs and Heath Moreland (more on him later) go for. I think what "olzone" is smacking towards up there is that Riggs does not use effects pedals. His sound is refreshingly free of the oceans of reverb that so many are drenching their shit in these days. It comes at you literally without delay, it is strangely present for a drone from wierdo twangs-ville, dutsy robot pony-ride down to yesterday. He is not fucking around while he fucks around.

Riggs' label is called holy cheever church. It doesn't stop at Riggs sounds. He puts out heaps of metallic medicinal offerings. Here are a few that I think rise to the top: Ben Hall, Lifetones, Skingraft, Analog Concept .
http://www.last.fm/music/Christopher+Riggs
Riggs sometimes plays in Graveyards, a Michigan based experimental/ new music/ free jazz group consisting of Ben Hall, Hans Buetow, and John Olson.
Graveyards @ allaboutjazz.com
Poster (above) ... see more olson artwork at art by john olson... which is connected to the hub label of the Michigan experimental scene of which Christopher Riggs is a part: American Tapes
Movie of Hall and Olson (below)


But you probably know about Graveyards already if you are here reading this.