★The Helen Scarsdale Agency

Pasar Fosil is classic Fosil Sangiran (Matt Shoemaker). At the core to this album is an ur-drone sculpted from electro-acoustics, analog synthesis, and most probably a radically altered field recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations. Elegant harmonics with golden, clarion hues set the stage to this album, but Shoemaker would never allow for any his compositions to merely stand as pol…

The Fossil Aerosol Mining project continues their post-industrial dialectics through their "songs of enhanced decay and faked resurrection." this cryptic ensemble from the american midwest has been quietly producing such works since the '80s, with a deep catalogue highlighting a uniform brilliance in the exquisite reconstruction of exhumed cassette tapes and moldering 35mm film stock.On august 53rd, fossil aerosol has collaged their reclamations of found sounds into an inquisitive, dynamic cinem…

The core tracks of The Unlistening Place were recorded in 2015. At the time, these were intended to be part of what was to be the final Fossil Aerosol album, scheduled for a distant release. But history circled back on itself and the result was a reworking of future tracks, alongside more new material. Historiography eating its own tail. Tradition, referents, and resolute nothing from the place that does not hear.

In 2015, Jim Haynes accepted a residency at MoKS in the village of Mooste, Estonia to collaborate and contribute to Simon Whetham's Active Crossover series. For this particular incarnation of Active Crossover, well over a dozen international artists were invited to this region of Estonia to collect field recordings and engage in a cross-pollination of ideas, strategies, and concepts that spawned from those recordings. The refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of ae…

Stelzer/Murray is the duo of Brendan Murray and Howard Stelzer, two stalwarts of the Boston noise / experimental scene over the past two decades. Both artists have long been friends and both artists have never shied away from collaborating with avant-garde musicians hither and yon. Yet, this marks their first collaborative work together. Better late than never, we say. Stelzer brings to the table an array of mangled and partially demagnetized tape; and Murray brings his knack for compacted…

Istanbul's drone-pop producer Ekin Fil turns her sites to the big screen for the first soundtrack in her impressive catalogue of recordings. Inflame (2017) is a psychological thriller laced with paranoia and nightmares, directed by Ceylan Özgün Özçelik and was showcased at the Berlin International Film Festival and the SXSW Film Festival, amongst others. In making her cinematic debut, Ekil Fil turns synths and electronics, in building the score that in part is brimming with tension and c…

Ekin Fil is the acclaimed drone-pop chanteuse working with the sparest of materials in her ethereal, shoegaze deconstructions. Her sound developed out of a healthy obsession with Cranes, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and many other bands that she discovered in the tattered back issues of NME and the home-dubbed tapes that were passed around when she was growing up in Turkey. Upon a fortuitous invitation to perform alongside Grouper in Istanbul in the late oughts, Ekin Fil (nee Ekin Üzeltüzenci) began …

2016 release ** Relay For Death are the twin sisters Rachal and Roxann Spikula, whose noise mantras transcribe the harsh realities of urban blight that complicate and threaten their own survival. It was in the context of two month medical study that the Spikulas composed their debut album in 2009, amplifying the emptiness of hospital rooms into a ghostly pall worthy of the classic works by Maurizio Bianchi. Natural Incapacity sprouts from a similar research and development, manifesting from the …

Had the titular contest in guy maddin's "the saddest music in the world" not been rigged from the onset, turkey could have delivered an impeccable contestant in ekin fil. for many years now, her spectral dream-pop deconstructions hold a thousand-yard stare of an unconsolable melancholy; and she's drawn the highly favorable comparisons to grouper and lovesliecrushing thanks to her understated yet beloved catalogue of releases on root strata, students of decay, no kings, and sacred phrases. helen …

First and foremost, Surrender, Render, End is an electro-acoustic dialectic, unremittingly engaged in a pugilist conflict between art and accident. The Swiss noise-composer Francisco Meirino began working on the skeleton for this piece in 2014 as a multi-channel, modular synth patch, which has been in an ongoing state of modification through public diffusions and private rumination. Meirino posits the album as a metaphysical puzzle of manipulated tape, atonal synthesis, and concrete sound. He is…

Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in the tape-on-tape monolith that is Richard Garet's 60' Cassette, with the Uruguayan born resident of New York declaring his intentions as such: "100% treated audio cassette material. some blank. some erased. some demagnetized. etc." The conceptualization of this work as a reframing of one particular medium through its applied / accelerated disintegration is only the album's beginning. There is an implied history in this form destruction, as Garet p…

The field recordist and lucid-dream composer Kate Carr conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigation…

With this album, Fossil Aerosol returns to the damaged media and decomposing mediums of the late 20th century. The basic tracks were recorded in 2010, and were remixed and remastered in 2014. The source material for the work consists of dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks. The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 was released on vinyl by the Helen Scarsdale Agency in 2015. The first 200 copies o…

The first Fossil Aerosol Mining Project audio recordings were made 30 years ago this year. In the observation of three decades of obscure, faked resurrection, we are pleased to announce the release of the new CD Revisionist History. The recordings on this album are hybrids, created by the grafting of old artifacts onto new material using recently devised studio processes. New sounds of the past, articulated through the devices of an unimagined future. In addition to the 69-minute CD, each packag…

With a detached curiosity, Grant Evans drops us into his petri dish of mud, bacteria, and fetid slop. At first, we have no roadmap to the drowning noise that slowly trickles down the throat and presses against the ear drums; but Evans is no sadist. Yes, volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning to each of the side-long works to Brittle -- itself a vibrant landmark in the Evans\' rhizomatic back catalogue that slips through harsh wall noise, kosmische explorati…

A journey through time, perhaps, for a daydreamer floating in a small boat amidst the radiant hues of a midnight sun. that daydreamer in this instance is the icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in stilluppsteypa. he has long been an artist of extremes and absurdities -- mania fueled performances, wildly scribbled drawings, and haflerian audio shock-therapy, on one side; and on the other, a profound meditation on austere shape, form, and mood cast th…

Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tap…

Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted curator of globe trotting / time traveling esoterica, amongst other accolades.ÊIn the former category, Millis and Jeffery Taylor steadily release some of the most headscratching amalgamations of avant-rock, decontextualized temple music, heightened-state minimalism, and collaged field recordings this side of the Sun City Girls (including the soundtrack to the cult film Session Nine); and in the latter, Millis has published a number of acclaimed …

It was a cavernous tone that broadcast from a ventilator duct that inspired Patrick McGinley to begin collecting field recordings and working them into his slow-arc compositions. At the time when he heard that particular tone in that particular city at that particular time, he had no gear to recording device on hand. Over the next fifteen years (and counting) McGinley has eased into a peripatetic lifestyle, wandering the European countryside and forests (but never straying too far from th…

Ass-flatteningly great duo cosmo drone visions from Barbara Kinzle and Birch Cooper of Portland, Oregon that takes dream-pop and devotional choral ascensions to the very edge of euphoric body/gnosis: originally issued as a CD-R in 2010 this beautifully presented vinyl set upgrades the album with two LPs mastered at 45rpm for maximal immersion. Ocean On Ocean feels like the logic of Blinda-era My Bloody Valentine pushed to true post-rock limits, with song-forms exploded in favour of a profound, c…

Parapsychology introduced the notion of the decline effect as a statistical phenomenon of diminishing results whilst investigating extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. Where initial findings might substantiate proof of such abilities, further studies would almost always demonstrate the contrary. As such, this ontological disappearing act stands in allegorical parallel to the entropic art of Jim Haynes and frames his 2011 opus of the corroded drone and a compacted disintegration of …

"After producing their frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen have ventured into more absurdist territories through fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. It is in this context that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa present the apparitional Big Shadow Montana, an album of slow-motion delirium manifested in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Amidst the n…

**Edition of 500** RV Paintings were born in California. Humboldt County, to be exact. It is nearly impossible to imagine their origins being elsewhere since the brothers Brian and Jon Pyle, who currently pilot RV Paintings, constantly mine the metaphysical properties of their homeland through a heavy-lidded psychedelia. The redwood trees that majestically rise from the rugged terrain may have been one of the endemic objects that inspired RV Paintings to “jam nature”; but Humboldt County’s other…

**Highly recommended!** Hitoshi Kojo (aka Spiracle) professes to have some difficulties in falling asleep. When sleep comes to him, it can often arrive at dawn, when the colors of the sun begin to break through the darkness of night and when some are just rising after their own good night's sleep. ananta is a twin set of compositions that urge the listener toward a dreamless sleep-state, while reflecting the glowing warmth of a blossoming sunrise. In constructing the two variations of ananta, Ko…

irr. app. (ext.) is the sound-engineering project of Californian M.S. Waldron, whose liminal slippages and detourned croons have been spotted recently on stage in Nurse With Wound. Yet for all of the antics that are required for the NWW spectacle, Mr. Waldron still dedicates himself in the parallel pursuits of irr. app. (ext.) with a discography that reads more like a wunderkammer of uncanny investigations into futility declared as its reverse. Kreiselwelle is the third and final installment to …

Collaborating under the moniker Coelacanth, Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes construct sound to favor empathy, evocation, and transcendence. Initially, Coelacanth's quest may have been to engage the drone supreme, an aesthetic previously sought by C.M. von Hausswolff, Morton Feldman, and :zoviet*france:. Yet, the duo is known to get distracted by the minutae of sound itself, or some instantaneous revelation about the history of decay, or simply the sublime beauty of nature. The drone in fact does go …

The recordings of Loren Chasse and Michael Northam begin and end with the great outdoors. Yet, the well-documented wanderlust of these two kindred sound artists is only part of the equation. Field recordings of wind, water, and stone intertwine and hybridize within private rituals of droning psychedelic ragas that return as a folklore reiterating the mystery of the natural world around us. Through his numerous contributions to the multi-faceted Jewelled Antler as well his solo work, Chasse has l…

Clinton Williams is never a man of just a few words. He doesn't release that much (anymore?) under his banner Omit, but when he does it's usually a 3CD or a 2CD set, and 'Interceptor' is not different. For this release Williams did something other than his usual musical routine. Two suitcases where filled with drum machines, effects, analog synths and a portable studio and in stead of looking for job, which he was supposed to he create this music. The line up of instruments may seem like somethi…

Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is not the terminus of McGinley…

In scandinavia, it's not uncommon to hear of someone's mother, grandfather, uncle, or plumber who drank him-or-herself to death at an early age; and the swedish drone artist bj nilsen has felt the alcoholic pangs which may foreshadow his own demise. in recent years, nilsen has turned to his icelandic neighbors Sigtryggur Berg sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson (collectively known as stilluppsteypa) in existential sympathy over the problems of their collective lust for alcohol. drykkjuvisur ohljodanna…

This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin. The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks. Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtaposi…

Brennivin is an Icelandic liquor vulcanized from the humble potato and flavored with cumin, although you’d be hard pressed to taste much beyond the astringent burn that it leaves in your mouth. Bottled in matte black glass and stamped with ominously simple labels, brennivin appears less like something to imbibe and more like poison; and in that creeping slow death kind of way, it is. For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit Stilluppsteypa, brennivin has soaked into every fiber of their being; …

irr. app. (ext) is the work of California-based sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work is far too important to continue to be forgotten. During the past decade, only two full albums -- Dust Pincher Appliances (2003 on Crouton) and An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation (1997 on Fire, Inc.) -- have seen the light of day despite the fact that perhaps a dozen albums have been completed. The public silence for irr. app. (ext) was never by Waldron's design, a…