Compilation of later trio recordings with Dan Hosker on 2nd guitar from 1997. "All high energy music tends towards the omega point that would see it escape form altogether, where the jam is the thing and the song a mere excuse for getting there. Even hardcore, the most doctrinaire of rebel musics, planted the seeds of its own overthrow in its urge-to-accelerate, with each successive wave of groups battling the last in terms of speed of execution, of hyper-exaggerated moves, in order to be the ones that even time couldn’t hold back. Where psychedelia was all about leaving your body behind, hardcore posited a muscular oblivion by way of a punishing physicality, one that went hand-in-hand with a puritanical aesthetic, a skinhead form of scourging to ecstasy. Harry Pussy were the most extreme hardcore group of the post-punk era. They were hyper everything, hyper-fast, hyper-crude, hyper-free, hyper-dexterous, hyper a-musical. They boasted a once-ina-lifetime line-up, straight out of Miami: Bill Orcutt on electric guitar, a weird film maker and prodigiously talented instrumentalist; Adris Hoyos, first-time drummer and vocalist, a goofy tough-attitude chick from Cuba with a feral performance style; and Mark Feehan and Dan Hosker, two separate second guitarists, the presence of one or the other serving to define the group’s two distinct eras.It’s the later Hosker-era that this new 42 track compilation of rare and unreleased recordings is drawn from. The main difference between the line-ups is that Harry Pussy actually got faster as they evolved, tracking the opposite trajectory of normal punk groups. When Feehan was playing with them they could still get strung out, still play more obviously ‘free’. But by the time of these recordings Harry Pussy were playing 60 second bursts of chaotic rock ’n’ roll that barbarise whole histories of freakout style, from free jazz through classic hardcore, boogie, blues, Black Flag, Germs, most explicitly through Beefheart, but all hyper-condensed into ultra-kranky riffs that Orcutt plays at hallucinatory speed, compressing Zoot Horn Rollo-style avant confusion into lighting runs and metallic two note knock-outs. Hoyos’s style is so primitive that it’s wildly avant garde, with an instinctive feel for time that confounds the most advanced improvisatory strategies with the most hysterical. And her vocals are post-Yoko in the truest sense, not directly informed by her but sharing the same spontaneous energy and a-musical appeal, sometimes breaking from songs completely to expand on barely articulated vocal rants and fever pitched bouts of screaming. During the Hosker period the whole group existed in a zone that was constantly beyond technique. You’ll Never Play This Town Again features some of the best Harry Pussy recordings, the Untitled/Tour/Fuck You LP, the live 10”, the split singles with Pelt and Frosty (what the hell happened to them?) and the Radiation Nation single on De Stijl alongside seven unreleased tracks, all expertly remastered. The May 1997 studio tracks are as formally staggering as anything on Trout Mask Replica. “Ice Cream Man” is “Dali’s Car” at four times the speed, just as “Smash The Mirror” is “Ella Guru”. The tracks are also cut in an extremely appealing audio-verite style. Hoyos is nasty, sarcastic, infectiously funny. Despite the improvised feel of most of the tracks, Harry Pussy were an ultra-tight performance unit and played actual songs, with out-takes and live versions sounding just as rigorously conceived as the originals. The live recordings are important both for successfully capturing the insane energy of the group and for including their legendary version of Kraftwerk’s “Showroom Dummies”, where Orcutt’s irresistible “Big Eyed Beans” groove and Hoyos’s mad vocals and drums create a reading that’s more pneumatic than motorik while spearing the very heart of the tune. It’s still one of the all-time great cover versions. Teenage Jesus And The Jerks are the group that Harry Pussy most often get compared to, but hearing them covering that group’s “Orphans” on a bonus live track (coincidentally the last track from their last live performance), it’s clear that Harry Pussy were of a much more rock/roll bent than any of the No Wave groups, making music that wasn’t so much a refusal of previous rock modes as an exaggerated celebration of all of its most outlaw attributes. Of the rest of the unreleased material the most interesting track is “Velvet Pussy”, a take on a Velvet Underground-style rocker that sounds uncannily like your dream VU bootleg. But it’s the officially released material that’s the real attraction, tracks like “Sex Problem”, “Smash The Mirror” and “Chuck!”, with Hoyos pulverising time and Orcutt out-stripping it completely. The closing extended take on “Smash The Mirror” is one of the great free jazz-inspired electric guitar freakouts, up there with The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, Television’s live reading of “Fire Engine”, The Blue Humans’ Clear To Higher Time and The Dead C’s Helen Said This. Harry Pussy formed in 1992 and imploded in 1997, played a bunch of legendarily riotous shows, got barred from a whole bunch more, released a string of amazing LPs and 7”s and then disappeared. Hoyos is currently married with two children, working in computers, living with musician and artist Graham Lambkin and seemingly retired from music. Rumours persist of Bill Orcutt making a return to the stage but outside of reports of a shady uncredited 7” nothing has been heard of him since. The arc of their career was perfect, the mission truly accomplished, and all that’s left is this amazing series of recordings, a body of work that has had a disproportionate effect on the minds, if rarely the actual sound of the underground."David Keenan, the WireDylan Nyoukis from a blindfold test in The WireHarry Pussy “Mandolin” From You’ll Never Play This Town Again (Load) 2008 Beefheart? No, it’s Harry Pussy, man. I should’ve known it straight away. This, to me, is what punk music should have been. I discovered punk music ten years after the fact and I think I was doubly disappointed. I imagine, if my life had been a different throw of the dice, I might have been a kid in 1980 or 1979 discovering punk and being so disappointed with how it sounded: so boring, so absolutely fucking objectionable pub rock. Terrible. I just leapfrogged that shit to Metal, which is in itself just goofball shit, and then into weirdo shit. And then I heard Harry Pussy. This is what I thought punk should sound like. It’s wild shit. It’s visceral. It’s about where you are at the moment. It’s about where your fucking stomach is, on the moment. Where is your belly positioned? Chocolate Monk released Harry Pussy quite early on. We released Vigilance, on a C120: two hours of jams, but I guess the recording mechanism was a bit goofed up so a gap keeps appearing.  Dan Hosker: guitar, Adris Hoyos: drums and vocals, Bill Orcutt: guitar and vocals. Blake Eden: drums on “New Song.” Robert Price: synthesizer on “Velvet Pussy” and “MS20.”Everything by Hosker/Hoyos/Orcutt except “New Song” by Nip Drivers, “Showroom Dummies” by Kraftwerk and “Orphans” by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.Tracks 1-17 recorded January 1997 by the band at Anvil Rehearsal Studios, Miami, FL. Tracks 18-31 recorded 5/5/97 by Rat Bastard at Churchill’s Hideaway, Miami FL and mixed by Rat Bastard and Tom Smith. Track 32 recorded 4/16/97 at Salon Zwerge, Chicago IL by Emil Hagstrom. Tracks 33-42 recorded 5/4/97 and mixed by Tom Smith at Microgroove Studio, Atanta, GA.

A 100-page hardcover compendium of David Berman's (Silver Jews) best-loved black and white cartoons, priced for the laughter-adjacent commuter bus-and-train reading crew. The New Yorker missed out, don't you do it too! “The drawings are pitched into some rudimentary space of public art, a place we might think of as between and below Gary Larson and Raymond Pettibon.”

Transamorem - Transmortem was premiered on March 9, 1974 at The Kitchen in NYC, where the music programmer at the time was Rhys Chatham - this was right before his guitar phase. During this period, Transamorem - Transmortem was presented along with other compositions by Eliane Radigue in a linear mode of listening, although the piece had originally been conceived, during its composition, as a sound installation. Of course, both modes of listening are possible, and each works marvelously in its own way. In their original form, Eliane Radigue's works are magnetic tapes. After being played a few times in public, the tape disappears to its case until a release proposal makes it available again through a disc.During this period Eliane Radigue's compositions became fairly long, some lasting over an hour. Because the tracks could not be edited for some obvious reasons, a vinyl release was unthinkable. It was only in the 90s, with the advent of the CD format, that the long compositions of Eliane Radigue were made available (with the exception of the Song of Milarepa LP on Lovely Music, a work already divided into multiple movements and thus able to be fit onto two sides of an LP).  For these reasons, the work of Eliane Radigue remained virtually unknown for twenty years - from the 70s to the 90s.It was in 2004, when she accepted my aid in digitizing her archives, along with Lionel Marchetti, that I discovered Transamoren - Transmortem.  Immediately, I was awed by the majestic grace of this very long tangle of frequencies, this set of seemingly unchanging tones, whose variations are of a delicate subtlety.  Transamoren - Transmorten is recognizable as one of the most radical of Radigue's compositions, comparable to the first Adnos, the work that follows Transamoren - Transmortem chronologically.  Very few transformations, an apparent formal aridity that is then contradicted by the physical play of the frequencies as the listener turns her head gently from right to left, or better yet as the listener moves slowly throughout the music space.  Moving through zones of specific frequencies, the listener's body experiences localized zones of low, medium and treble frequencies which vary according to the acoustic properties of the space.  As Radigue wrote of Adnos: "to displace stones in the bed of a river does not affect the course of water, but rather modifies the way the water flows."  Here, we find the same meditative tension proposing a peaceful movement through the spaces created by the different frequencies that compose Transamoren - Transmortem.Very well-organized, Eliane Radigue's archives are a pleasure to explore, and Transamorem - Transmortem's case contained a mine of information. What excited me most was the short text entitled Inner Space, which described the ideal conditions under which Transamorem - Transmortem should be presented. That is to say, as a sound installation."Inner Space -This monophonic tape should be played on 4 speakers placed in the four corners of an empty room.  Carpet on the floor. The impression of different points of origin of the sound is produced by the localization of the various zones of frequencies, and by the displacements produced by simple movements of the head within the acoustic space of the room.  A low point of light on the ceiling, in the center of the room, produced by indirect lighting.  Several white light projectors of very weak intensity whose rays, coming from different angles, meet at a single point." ~ Eliane Radigue, 1973 I immediately felt that it was necessary to make Transamoren-Transmorten available once again, and this time in its ideal form, in trying to follow Radigue's recommendations word for word. It was with this idea in mind that the Cumulus collective (also responsible for the contemporary music festival Why Note) organized the Continuum festival in Dijon along with the art space Le Consortium (one of the founders of which had persuaded the group Circle X to record their first, mythic EP in Dijon in 1979 - but that's another story!). The goal was to correctly present some of Eliane Radigue's sound installations, an aspect of her work now completely forgotten.  And yet, between 1967 and 1971 her work was often exhibited in galleries of contemporary art, mostly in Paris (Lara Vincy, Yvon Lambert, etc.), a reflection of the fact that French people have had a harder time than Americans placing the work of Radigue.  She herself hesitated for quite a while to use the word "music" to describe her work, a complex that is familiar to this generation of musicians, and which is now no longer really a problem.  Who would claim that the work of Eliane Radigue is not musical?  That would be strange .... The 2006 Continuum festival in Dijon saved four sound installations from the dust (an expression that Radigue uses to describe her archives): S=a=b=a+b (1969), Omnht (1970), Labyrinthe Sonore (1970) and Transamorem - Transmortem (1973).  The first two installations are composed with feedback, the two others with the sounds of the ARP 2500 synthesizer.  Each one is based on a strategy of specific spatial presentation, but that's also another story ....

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distils a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior and inexpressible. ‘How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.’ – Dionne Brand Softcover, 111pp Spiral House, 2026

This is the real Japanese Noise bible. published: 2020Through extensive interviews, and his own knowledge as a first-hand observer, KD Hopkins provides a roadmap for heretofore totally uncharted territory in the history of extreme sonic exploration. Featuring the likes of Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Hanatarash alongside a bevy of lesser known freaks, Rumors Of Noizu compiles anecdotes and memories alongside flyers and photographs from the time, in an attempt to contextualize what is perhaps the most bewildering music scene in the history of the modern underground. Many critics have discussed the genre of noizu as a strange subculture arising in a strange place, Japan. In this book, Noizu is discussed as a natural organic expression arising in a country full of experimental culture. Tracing the earliest stirrings of noizu in various places, this micro-history, based on extensive interviews with participants and witnesses, will provide context to make sense of something that intentionally has no meaning.

Recorded Jan 2024 at SHUNK II, Edinburgh. Overdubs at TERT PALACE Edinburgh + MARSHALL TOWER, Falkirk.Cowboy Builder is Kieron, Mani, Jordan, JoshCowboy Builder is Drums, Metal, Prepared Guitar, Organ, Melodica, Megaphone, Sampler, DelayAll music written by Cowboy Builder 2020-25Dan Mutch from The Leg plays Wooden Flute on TOURIST, recorded in his living room.Recorded + mixed by Plastic Cowboy Builder. Mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Cowboy Builder. Design by Jeroen Wille.Thanks to: Mike + Ruaridh, Musty Shed, Kangoo, P.A.J.McGhee, S.Frickleton, Caledonian Produce, Settlement ProjectsSince the emergence of their falling-down-around-you sound documented on The Name of the Demon is… (2021), Cowboy Builder have gotten slower and steadier. Organs EP (2023) saw the addition of, well, organs, and strange harmonies started to blend with their double drums. On COLD, Cowboy Builder are even more unhurried - disconsolate, see-sawing melodica and flattened bongos giving a stoic, funereal repetitiousness somewhere between Kurt Weill and Augustus Pablo. Their signature wok clang and clatter is treated with delay, the guitar’s strings crossed and warped; another bell to ring us back to earth. It’s bleak, industrial music for a time where ‘industry’ is working nightshifts for Amazon and drinking Lidl box wine. And yet, side-stepping the trappings of hauntology in favour of science fiction, the endurance of it all and its relentless pursuit gives welcome relief midst a nation of thumbs.