Crash Symbols

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[annesophielecreurer]

Dès fois, je fais de la musique et aujourd'hui sort la nouvelle K7 de mon projet son Saintes chez Crash Symbols! Artwork par @rhubarbsloth ❤️ En écoute sur bandcamp : https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/melancholia

#k7 #saintes #crashsymbols #westvirginia #pop #lofi #baroque #psych #melancholia #onegirlband #nantes

[crashsymbols]

Sorry again Tumblr peeps, our website revamp is still a ways off. As of now we're settling into Iowa and planning one of our first trips back to West Virginia, but we've also got a slew of new tapes queuing up -- an amazing surprise dose of heady hypnosis and psych courtesy of Al Lover, a sophomore cassette from New York's Julia Bloop (joining fellow Rotifer veteran Ratkiller on our agenda for 2017), more from the now northeasterly Ma Turner, and holy cow there's a lot more than that. We'll try to keep pace with ourselves. Expect updates soon.

In the meantime, check out the last copies of our fall trio (photo'd above). As of my writing we have one recently added Fletcher Pratt remainder available, a few Matt Valentine & Sun Hoods splits, and a steadily shrinking stack of YlangYlang up on our Bandcamp. If you'd like to pick up any of those, check out details on our December sale via Facebook.

2016 has been an undeniably bonkers year but we're so deeply grateful for the support that's made Crash Symbols and our new label Easy Bay such a joy for us to organize this year... thank you for your music and thank you for listening.

Dwight + Liz

[crashsymbols]

In case you hadn't already gleaned, we're mostly exhausted trying to use Tumblr as a serious platform... writing here, using HTML in particular, is a deeply not thrilling experience... and I came of age with some seriously banal HTML routines. Soldiering on, though we didn't have time to get in depth posts up here, last month we released some wonderful tapes with Estonian sound collagist Ratkiller and Kentucky guitardood Ma Turner, aka Mazozma... we're mostly down to our last copies of those and Guyer's Connection, but you can find them on Bandcamp alongside our latest, 'Up the Country with Hillboggle,' the debut standalone cassette from SF-based experimental recorder Derek Gedalecia's Hillboggle collaboration with his father banjoist David Gedalecia. We had the chance to catch one of their live sets at last year's Voice of the Valley in Millstone, WV, and we're honored to have the chance to present that as part of this tape -- which is rounded about by an equally awesome set recorded in Columbus, OH. https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/up-the-country-with-hillboggle https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/odor-orienting https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/wake-up-baby If you'd like to sign up for our (somewhat more long-winded) e-mailing list, feel free to get in touch via our Contact page.

[crashsymbols]

Last week's blizzard is slowly melting and we're queuing up a trio of new releases for next month: the second cassette from Lexington-based Mazozma (following his debut on A.H.E.M.), the latest from Estonian sound-collagist Ratkiller, and a top-shelf live tape courtesy of Hillboggle. The latter is Derek Gedalecia, aka Headboggle's occasional side-project, engrossing synth-and-noise-scrying with his father David on banjo.

In the meantime, we're pulling together bits for a few farther-off releases -- including, believe it or not, a new guided meditation series, among others. We also have Guyer's Connection on hand via Bandcamp, and streaming below. As for older releases though, we're down to our last copy of Voyage, the second release from Frank De Gallo (aka Hobo Cubes) and Rémi Boudrias-Dussault's (aka Velvet Glacier) Arrows collaboration.

Last week we also mailed out the first of our new label newsletters, so send an email to flyingrecords [at] gmail [dot] com with the word "NEWSLETTER" if you'd like us to add you to our list.

Guyer's Connection by Guyer's Connection

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Arrows - Voyage (PBUH075)

We were a bit slow tumbling this new bit, but Arrows is Canadian experimental producers Francesco De Gallo (aka Hobo Cubes) and Rémi Boudrias-Dussault (aka Velvet Glacier) -- a collaboration they debuted in 2014 with a set of abstract beat-collages for Digitalis Recordings. Voyage is their second release together, a similarly dense collection slowly accreted through a haze of warped field recordings, street sounds, and "spiritual" jazz. Though the outcome is a somewhat airier miasma than its predecessor, it shares the same heavy sense of obtuse, absorbing presence.

Grab a tape via Bandcamp.

Voyage by Arrows

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HITS - Sunshine Baby (PBUH097)

HITS is a percussion-based trio hailing from Portland, OR, comprising multi-instrumentalist Allan Wilson, a founding member of !!! (chk chk chk), and drummers Lisa Schonberg and Heather Treadway, two thirds of the brilliant (and sadly defunct) Explode Into Colors. Leaping at the chance to explore their disciplines together, the three collaborators created HITS for a month-long residency in the fall of 2012 at artist Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West compound in the rocky hills of Joshua Tree. To realize the sound pieces in a performance context, the band employed a multi-channel speaker array designed by Wilson, and donned gowns designed and crafted by Treadway with dyes inspired by desert soils and plants.

Sunshine Baby, their first recorded offering, features six songs that highlight the group’s careful balance between field recordings and a kaleidoscopic range of live drums and percussion. The intensity and variety of sounds reflect the character of the desert in which it was made: stark, strong rhythms and kosmische tone washes echo the dry, windy landscape of the California desert. Ephemeral voices and samples appear from nooks and shady turns, while others seem to emerge from great depths, like the roots of the joshua tree itself. The range of affected audio, ear-catching vocal turns, and trance-like focus adds dimension throughout, standing out all the more for having been recorded entirely in Wilson’s attic and mixed in his closet.

The tape will be out officially on May 26, but you can preorder it at our Bandcamp for now. If you're on the west coast, they'll also be at the Women's Center for Creative Work tomorrow night in LA and the Portland Museum of Modern Art's 'Outside Museum' event in Joshua Tree, CA on the 23rd.

Sunshine Baby by HITS

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Afraid - Sinister Vibes (PBUH088)

Afraid are a trio from Portland, Maine that make paranoid, slowww pop, and though their debut long-player 'Sinister Vibes' is a distinctive album - it sounds unlike anything they or many others have made before. Building on a pair of distended slipstream r&b releases, these new tracks drift away from contemporary pop culture and back into the mid 70s and early 80s. Their more 'refined' acoustics invoke the end of a national cultural adolescence, half-hallucinations of murder and deprivation not unlike the actual, slow revelation mid-century that the American Dream had become grotesquely complicated. Afraid encase a collective vision of a dirtied golden age in amber, alongside all its echoes and acolytes, somberly scrutinizing each vein and whoever stumbles forward within.

Pick it up digitally, on tape, or with a limited edition print version of the j-card artwork at our Bandcamp.

Sinister Vibes by Afraid

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Cambo - Patronage & Pork (PBUH094)

'Patronage & Pork' is the latest from New York based producer Cam Curran, aka Cambo. Arriving roughly a year and a half after his warped cassette debut for Further Records - where you'll also spot the debut for his Fossil project with SUS collaborator Phil Tortoroli, aka James Place - Cambo offers gritty but urbane electronica full of thumping bass and hypnotic beats across his lengthiest release to date.

Recorded in the guts of a pre-war brownstone while bouncing between jobs, 'Patronage & Pork' is looser and more experimental than the music Curran and Tortoroli release on SUS, but it shares in the kith's characteristic minimalism. If you're familiar with the Tortoroli's James Place recordings though, Cambo should seem like an even more colorful contrast. When 'Patronage & Pork' isn't burning up slowly in restrained psychedelia, it squiggles confidently through heady acid techno with a peppering of more distinctly urban grit thrown in to keep your teeth on edge. Though these tracks are primarily personal experiments, as a collection of songs they contemplate the potentially corrosive forces that gather at the heart of civilization.

Pick up a tape or digital copy from our Bandcamp.

Patronage & Pork by Cambo

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Aphasiacs - Debtor's Paradise (PBUH085)

Taking their name from a spectrum of language disorders caused by brain damage, Aphasiacs is Bill Corrigan and Nick George of Detroit. Together they conjure refracted lo-fi house from scavenged piles of broken equipment, making layers of shambolic, textured color that spasm and move through a syrup-soaked kaleidoscope. Each of their tracks is a unique progression, so violently self-determining that shifting bass and beats become the only common thread to follow through the (very welcome) barrage of more and newer sounds. 'Debtor's Paradise' is rounded out by a b-side trio of alternative edits courtesy of Rawaat, A Sacred Cloud, and Coyote Clean Up.

Check it out on our Bandcamp. We've also got preorders up there for our AFRAID and Cambo tapes, officially out March 24th and March 17th respectively.

Debtor's Paradise by Aphasiacs

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Cumin soon...

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Fishers - Under the Sheepherder Bridge (PBUH095)

Fishers is the solo-project of New York based writer and musician Dale Eisinger, one of the principals at GODMODE and usually the drumming half of the duo responsible for YVETTE. His debut under the new name, Under the Sheepherder Bridge, is a far softer touch; less harsh than his recordings as Horselover Fats or YVETTE, and more directly evocative thanks to a varied tonality and emotional palette. Inspired by noise and no-wave, but tied to a deeper structural order, these new tracks chart the creative and terrestrial peregrinations of a deeply talented artist... Eisinger's voice can be arresting when it rises out of the dark tectonics he conjures, embedded in a particularly organic range of 'inhuman' noise, brushing, and the heavier invocations of enterprise. That force is as clear in the cold lines of recitation and elsewhere when the warmer licks of a distant troubadour song still manage to set themselves off against cold mechanics... the resulting album in its entirety is an experiment in "folk" perhaps, but for those with very different manners.

Check out the first single "Arizona Broke" on Impose and buy the album on cassette from our Bandcamp.

<a href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/under-the-sheepherder-bridge" data-mce-href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/under-the-sheepherder-bridge">Under the Sheepherder Bridge by Fishers</a>

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Window - Strands/Immersed (PBUH074)

Strands/Immersed collects producer Igor Ivanov's first releases as Window, released digitally in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Though Ivanov's frequent collaborator Sami Blanco featured on the closer to Strands, these tracks are a warped forerunner to the pair's more ambient AT/NU recordings for 1080p. Both EPs are tightly wound explorations of the urban tilt to electronica, juke and psychedelic beatwork that build into a hallucination of colorful cyborg muzak.

Check out Matrixxman's remix from the a-side on XLR8R and grab a copy via Bandcamp.

<a href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/strands-immersed" data-mce-href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/strands-immersed">Strands/Immersed by Window</a>

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Pregnant - John Raw (PBUH073)

Daniel Trudeau and the expanded Pregnant crew are back with us for their latest album, John Raw, a first segue into more conceptual songwriting. Exotic production and frenetic loops form a backdrop for Trudeau's characteristic weirdo-pop, and the character of 'John Raw' emerges in the album's pointed puns and in the infinitely delicate blending of audio influences; jazz, rap, R&B, spoken word, and free-form beats abound, with accents and vocal novelties making for unusually rich margins. The Sacramento News & Review ran a wonderful summary of the project this morning...

"Two years ago, Daniel Trudeau received a weird, cryptic email. Someone—or something—named John Raw needed help committing suicide from the digital world. It starts like this: 'I am John Raw. I am an intern at presence. My existence is a test that will display the symbiotic experiences of lives that can co-mingle within two social experiences/lives.'

John Raw then went on to define a few terms. 'One Duo' means a person who lives physically and digitally. 'Buried in the Garden' is someone completely submerged in the Internet. 'Kid Need' is the physical world. John Raw is 'Buried in the Garden' and wants to experience 'Kid Need' and therefore requires the help of 'One Duos.'

Trudeau is a 'One Duo' and sought the assistance of other 'One Duos,' those 20 other artists, to fabricate John Raw in the physical world so that John Raw can die in the digital world.

Who is John Raw? That’s a layered question. Let’s start with something slightly simpler: Who sent that first email? A person? A spambot?"

Read the entire article here, and grab the album for freeze over at our Bandcamp. Thanks for everything this season, to everyone whose grabbed a tape or download... we've got at least a couple more tapes for you before year's end, so thanks again for staying tuned.

<a href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/john-raw" data-mce-href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/john-raw">John Raw by Pregnant</a>

[crashsymbols]

"Soil Creep is Irish producer Aidan Wall, also the proprietor of tape and zine imprint Long Lost Records. His music is a slipstream exploration of the emerging form of post-pop production; eccentric lo-fi beats and synths swirl variously around Wall's voice, loops, and sampled vocals, with a few enigmatic interludes. While his debut 'Small Death' experimented heavily with tone, texture, etc., 'True Enough' has an even more assured color and flow. Recorded half while Wall studied abroad in Germany and half at home in Dublin, the tracks draw more directly than any of his past work on the influence of German techno and house music. Nonetheless, Wall's latest bears his Irish home heavily in mind, born in part from meditations on the flight of the country's youth — 'True Enough' is a subtle effort with a complex play of implication and no one true character."

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This week we're proud to share Lxus Shaq, the latest EP from Sacramento based experimental producer Michael RJ Saalman. He describes the EP as '... the album I've been searching for inside myself. It's a manifestation of all my inspirations . . . the beginning of my most deeply conceived direction.' It draws on almost all of Michael's closest friends, with vocal contributions from Alak and a truly meticulously prepared collection of b-side remixes including virtually all of his longtime collaborators. On Ripe Hymns Saalman used pop production to create a series of evocative vignettes, complex and twisted beat passages, whimsical, but that often resolved into more. Lxus Shaq is a step beyond those recordings, full of unusual vocal treatments, surreal lyrics, and a much more confidently open style of production. His overriding interest in the minuscule components, even the minutiae of mainstream pop remains, but here Saalman does more to extrapolate those novelties into complete gestures, breaking their components down and assembling them seamlessly into something simultaneously familiar and foreign.

Click through to the Crash Symbols or Illuminated Paths bandcamps to grab the EP, though in this case IP is handling the cassette!

<a href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/lxus-shaq" data-mce-href="http://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/lxus-shaq">Lxus Shaq by Michael RJ Saalman</a>

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Tomorrow Al Lover begins his European tour in Norway at the Oslo Psych Fest, and a couple weeks afterward, he'll be in Angers for Levitation France, another psych fest - this one presented by Austin Psych Fest. In keeping with his role as Austin Psych Fest DJ, he's got mixtapes in the wings for both days of the festival. 

Check the mixes out out below and scope the 'Sacred Drugs' preorder at Bandcamp. Also a big thanks to the folks who covered the single last week; Boston Hassle and Creative Loafing had great write-ups.