condition (record/cover): NM / EX

With original innersleeve.

Small Cruel Party was the solo project of Key Ransone (also known as Keith-Ranson Jones), the American sound artist whose career across the Nineties and 2000s produced one of the most patient and small-scale bodies of electroacoustic improvisation in the American underground. Based variously in the American Northwest and subsequently in Europe, Ransone's method relied on extended improvisations with resonant metal objects, analogue electronics, field recordings, and processed tape, all assembled with the editorial care of a composer rather than the dense maximalism of the period's noise mainstream.

Released on Harbinger Sound (Steve Underwood's long-running British noise and experimental imprint, operating out of Nottingham since 1984 and one of the most consistently rigorous small labels in the European scene), Unroof The House Of The Fishes belongs to the later period of Ransone's activity, when Small Cruel Party had refined its vocabulary toward increasingly spacious drone-and-object compositions that shared ground with Andrew Chalk, Ora, and the extended Organum family.

The album's title, characteristically oblique, reads like a line of translated Japanese poetry or a Zen koan, which would be entirely consistent with Ransone's interests in Asian philosophical and aesthetic traditions. The Small Cruel Party catalogue extends across many small imprints (Banned Production, RRRecords, others), each release pressed in small editions with minimal design. Ransone died in 2017, which has since brought a wider appreciation of the project's quiet but committed working life.