★Feeding Tube Records
Briars On A Dewdrop
Turner Williams Jr is a string-player out of the same Alabama surrealist scene that gave us Rev. Fred Lane & the Say Day Bew gang, Davey Williams & LaDonna Smith’s Trans Museq universe, and the Sweet Wreath madmen (who have been working with Johnny Coley, Silica Gel and others). Some crazy shit has gone on down there, and Mr. Williams soaked it all in before heading up to NYC, where he fell in with some of the Sound @ One scene. Which added another layer to the freak potential of his playing. Af…
Live In Fishtown
"On a hot night in Philly -- Saturday August 9, 1998 -- Brooke Sietsons's backyard hosted the No More Bush tour. The line-up that evening was Zaïmph, Jack Rose, MV+EE, Tom Carter & Willie Lane, 50 Foot Women with Axolotl, and the sole known appearance of the Mike Watt/Charles Plymell duo. Plymell and Watt had met a year earlier at the Festival Ecstatique in Western Mass, and they hit it off like crazy. So, when this tour was coming together, and Charley agreed to reprise the work he did on the M…
Dark Ride
The debut album by Western Mass trio, Mozzaleum, is an unholy union of hot cheese pie, cool Italian prog, and wanton horror movie lust. One gets the feeling this's the sort of band that Roky Erickson dreams about after a few mugs of cocoa and a slasher flick watch-a-thon. The three tracks on the first side all take their names from actual films (none related to the films' music as far as I can tell), the five on the flip carry on in a more thematic manner. But the music on side two -- keys, samp…
Jaw Guzzi
Jaw Guzzi is the ninth LP Melted Men have released since 1995. This is reportedly the year they formed, but as with all Melted Things, there is little hard information to back this up. Like an earlier experimental 'rock' band from Northern California (by way of Louisiana), Melted Men have embraced something akin to Nigel Senada'sTheory of Obscurity. Facts regarding the band's details are smudgy at best, and that's the way they like it. About all I could get out my contact for the group is that t…
Sun Cycle / Elk Jam
Two mind-bending slabs of acoustic and electric guitars, wandering into corners of acid-logic only accessible to bravest explorers. Elkhorn is a duo -- Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner -- from NYC. Their earlier records (Elkhorn on Beyond Is Beyond, The Black River on Debacle) would have blown us away, even if we didn't know Jesse from his work as a film-maker (he directed the Glenn Jones/Jack Rose doc,The Things That We Used to Do) and organizer (he put together the 1,000 Incarnations of the Ros…
Time Machine
Time Machine is a reissue of a 2017 cassette, and represents the first vinyl issued by Wendy Eisenberg, a peripatetic improviser and composer currently based in Amherst. We first heard of Wendy when she was playing with a blasted quartet called Birthing Hips, whose NNA cassette was an instant classic. Since then she's begun a solo career that branches off in a lot of directions simultaneously. She has an album of post-form noise-metal (in trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith) due soon on John Zo…
Pastry
2025 stock "Jonny Kosmo, the Los Angeles (via New England) registered therapist and home recordist is a card-carrying expert in the shape of your desire and the horizon of meanings your dreams catalyze. In his briefcase lives his weapons grade kaleidoscope, a 1972 Mayfair recorder, and a neatly folded pair of pants that fits seamlessly to the shape of your longing. His armchair prescriptions for the zeitgeist hover ever present on his most recent LP Pastry which hits you Like 69 cc of heady nost…
KTB
2015 release ** Edition of 150. KTB are Shawnie from Bugs & Rats, and Arian from Guerilla Toss playing an aggressive, stripped down game of noise rock Shenanigans® while lazy young people fall down all around them, scrunching up their faces and mewling. There is something very non-Bostonian about the duo’s sound. This doesn’t mean it sounds Belgian or anything (although I suppose there are Belgian precedents in terms of guitar/thump/voice blending), more that its muscularity is diffused in a way…
Next
LP version. "While they have collaborated a good many times, Next is the first recorded evidence of Danish guitarist (or more properly Bastardist) Jørgen Teller playing with American ex-pat multi-instrumentalist Mark Cunningham. The pair both have long histories on the fringes of known sounds. I first heard Teller as a member of the dizzily freakoid Tzarina Q Cut and Cunningham's decades of musical adventurism with Mars, Don King, Bestia Ferida, Blood Quartet, etc. have been well documented, not…
Jokes And Trials
What a pleasure it is to bring you the first vinyl version of Jokes and Trials, the 2006 solo debut by Melbourne's Ned Collette, whose incredible song cycle Old Chestnut (FTR 362-2LP, 2018) and brilliant instrumental album Afternoon-Dusk (FTR 468LP, 2019) have been widely and correctly lauded as classics. As Mark Harwood explains in his excellent liner notes, Ned emerged from the Melbourne improv underground along with people like Will Guthrie and Joe Talia. Indeed, it was Talia who turned Ned o…
The Portrait You Painted Of Me
2025 stock Orange vinyl (US exclusive). Here we have the third solo LP by London's Alison Cotton, following on previous successes, All Quiet at the Ancient Theatre (FTR 424LP, 2019) and Only Darkness Now (FTR 564LP, 2020). And as with each of Cotton's projects it is a stylistic advance as well as another example of her dark signature sound. Alison's work with bands is well documented by recordings with Saloon, 18th Day of May, Trimdon Grange Explosion, and her current, ecstatic folk/psych duo, T…
Hazy Road
2025 stock Hazy Road is the debut album from Bong Wish, the solo project of Palestinian-American artist Mariam Saleh. Former bassist for beloved garage rock band Fat Creeps, Saleh got her start in the Boston music scene of the early 2010s. While living above a music venue, where she was also employed, she was exposed to a myriad of jazz, psych, and experimental music. In turn, Bong Wish incorporates both the high-energy and distortion of garage alongside kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and folds them…
As Seen In Your Wildest Dreams
2025 stock If Coley can do anything and, I assure you, he can do a few things, some very well indeed -- cooking, drinking, smoking, chortling, collecting, dissecting, inspecting, sniffing, gassing, pranking -- to name but a few, he can, without a beat gone by, make you wanna listen to the goddamn records he's criteeking whether it be in old ishes of Forced Exposure, Boston Rock, New York Rocker, or the LA Weekly or his nugget column in Wire. For many his obscurant references to what is already a…
Low Effort Social Events
2025 stock Creative Healing is a new Massachusetts combo mixing the folks from Hollow Deck (Andy Allen and Mia Friedman) with three old pals who also passed through the Ran Blake Paddle Tunnel at NE Conservatory (Katie McShane, Jesse Heasly and Nick Neuberg). The results are, as the old men say, a real gas. Although it's not a constant, there are moments throughout this album where the swonky collision of sax, guitar and drums puts me in mind of several classic versions of Beefheart's Magic Band…
Mystery Meet
2025 stock Vinylization of an insane and legendary CDR that Nashville's Cherry Blossoms collective issued when they did a 2007 tour of Upper and Lower Rangoon with Josephine Foster as a special guest member. The Cherry Blossoms are a musical entity not easily described, but I feel as though their essential whatsis was grasped by Michael Hurley. We were talking a few weeks ago and when the Blossoms were mentioned, Mike said, 'Oh Yeah. I remember the last time I played a gig with those guys. Their…
Wake In Fright
2025 stock "Finely thuggish debut LP by a trio led by guitarist Micah Blue Smaldone, a well-known figure in the same South Portland Maine scene that gave us Big Blood and other treats. Indeed, Micah's fourth solo album was a split with Big Blood, but the fingerpicking sound of his solo recordings is a far cry from Wake in Fright. WIF are a trio. Micah plays guitar, Greg Bazinet plays bass, Jonas Eule plays drums, and all of them add vocals. It was Greg who sort of got things going when he convin…
What Strange Flowers Grow In The Shade
2025 stock Tennessee-based string bender, Joseph Allred likes to change things up from album to album. But usually, he does this one element or instrument at a time. On What Strange Flowers Grow in the Shade, Joseph adds a whole heck of a lot of elements. And he does so without ever really disguising the identity of his music. The six tracks here were all recorded with different line-ups. 'The Valley' features Chris Davis (Cherry Blossoms) and the Magic Tuber Stringband. 'The Ruins' is a Basho-e…
Convalescence
2025 stock Another splendid album of avant hi-jinx and shreddery from keyboard whiz, Liz Durette. Primordial Soup is her fourth album (first was a cassette), and the second for Feeding Tube. It is the follow-up to 2020's most excellent Delight (FTR 504LP) and heads into somewhat different stylistic turf, whilst maintaining Durette's high levels of keyboard invention. If Delight was created while Liz was thinking about Romantic-era waltzes, then Primordial Soup owes some of its strategic approach…
Primordial Soup
2025 stock Another splendid album of avant hi-jinx and shreddery from keyboard whiz, Liz Durette. Primordial Soup is her fourth album (first was a cassette), and the second for Feeding Tube. It is the follow-up to 2020's most excellent Delight (FTR 504LP) and heads into somewhat different stylistic turf, whilst maintaining Durette's high levels of keyboard invention. If Delight was created while Liz was thinking about Romantic-era waltzes, then Primordial Soup owes some of its strategic approach…
Well Up
2025 stock Liz Durette returns with a gorgeous fourth LP (her third for Feeding Tube) and not a moment too soon! With Well Up, Liz delivers a bright and sparkling sonic gem to illuminate our days and nights. Liz is an artist, keyboardist, improviser, and deep thinker based in Massachusetts, after many years in Baltimore. She has created an uncanny body of musical work of keyboard improvisations. Her style strikes me as utterly unique, and this latest album offers an entirely new example of her v…