*300 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* 23 years after his EP for Drone Records (DR-28, as Crawl Unit) we are proud to release another / new work of conceptual / minimal / object drone artist Joe Colley from California. We think Joe Colley (*1972) is a master of using mechanical object sounds and electronic static, but also strange low fi found sources and field recordings, creating alienating, surrealistic effects, similar to the likes of Small Cruel Party, Jim Haynes, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe or even the more experimental side of Zoviet France...
His newer compositions seem always to be filled with electro-magnetic hummings, strange hissing and the pourings of metallic objects as a basis, but you never find the use real instruments, synths, or masses of effect procession. Thus a very own scent of mystery appears, as all of these radiations are not really from this planet, without any "cosmic" connotations.... For the creator, these sounds are connected with unreal emotions of "Being Lost", a mistrust in what may be called reality, and a general feeling of alienation... - you can only wonder how this can result in such beautiful droning expanses.. Presented here are over 30 minutes of very best new Colley material (entitled "Limit / Limit" und "Always I / Always II") => through these drones of strangeness the mind is thrown inside an unrecognizable and confusing realm of broken electricity and something like audible-made atmospheric pressure..
"When Joe Colley speaks about his work and even about his life, he shrugs in an awkward attempt to stave off an existential frustration that not only his work addresses but also seems to consume his identity. There are numerous metaphors through his titles that allude to endless failures and a nihilism full of contempt, but Colley also implores a desperate urgency to express these poetics no matter how painful they may be. For three decades now, Colley has been a central and persistent figure in the California noise community. First recording under the moniker Crawl Unit and running the short-lived Povertech label, Colley presented a preternaturally strong acumen of electro-acoustic techniques and abstraction through a vast language of blistered textures, atonal noise, and gnarled drone. By 2000, he dropped the Crawl Unit moniker in favor of his own name with an ongoing discography of damaged yet exploratory electronics.
Colley returns to Drone Records for this 10" on the Substantia Innominata series, many years after his Crawl Unit "Tuscon Mon Amour" 7." In describing "Acting As If," Colley offers a vague series of descriptors: unheimlich, terror of the familiar, and no faith in what is "real." Within the sustained movements of scrabbling textures, motorized abrasions, and uncomfortable harmonics, such conditions are made manifest and Colley amplifies them into something eeriely sublime.
All of that held within a self-contained logic that works within and against his deep knowledge of drone-on minimalism, musique concrete dynamics, and the explosiveness of noise culture. His swarming masses, throttled rumbling, and smoldering tension are all encircling and folding in on themselves. Rhizomes of sound that speak poison. Drink up, if it doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger." - Jim Haynes
