Private Release

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Alex Zhang Hungtai, David Maranha, Gabriel Ferrandini - (2018) Eight Black Horses Crown Snake CD

Violante Do Céu ‎– none

"Through me you go into the city of grief, through me you go into the pain that is eternal, through me you go among people lost.

Justice moved my exalted creator; the divine power made me, the supreme wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me all created things were eternal, and eternal I will last.

Abandon every hope, you who enter here.

...after he had taken me by the hand, with a cheerful look which comforted me, he drew me within the secret place [the eternal world]."

-Dante, Canto III, The Divine Comedy

credits

released September 10, 2018

Alex Zhang Hungtai - Voice, Saxophone and Drums
David Maranha - Organ and Drums
Gabriel Ferrandini - Drums

Recorded in Cinema Passos Manuel 10th of March 2017
Mixed by Alex, David and Gabriel in Violante do Céu Studio
Mastered by Tó Pinheiro da Silva in Oeiras on 10th of November 2017
Cover photo from White Noise Book, Interior photo taken at Conservatório de Lisboa, both by António Júlio Duarte

Black Pus - (2020) DEF VESPER

Self Released ‎– none

A series of improvised songs, first thought/best thought, recorded over a few days from 2/18-2/28/20 by Black Pus in LEGO-CITY, Providence RI on a Tascam 424 cassette 4 track. last thoughts from a pandemic-free reality about to dramatically shift. Mixing, minimal editing, mastering and one overdub done with Thee Zebby Manchester at Machine with Magnets. Black Pus 2020
credits
released November 6, 2020

one person band, drums vocals oscillator live document, real time loops. no memory cards no working actually brain memory lots of sugar

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Black Pus - (2013) All My Relations

Thrill Jockey ‎– THRILL 322

Black Pus is Brian Chippendale, who rose to prominence as the drummer of noise rock titans Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer. The first Black Pus CD-R was self released in early 2006, and was a collection of ferocious free jazz, multi-tracked on Chippendale’s cassette four-track. Enamored of the control of recording solo, Chippendale followed with more CD-Rs, and began playing live under the Black Pus moniker. He refined the Black Pus sound over numerous self-released CDs and 2011’s Primordial Pus on Load Records, replacing the saxophone with a drum-mounted oscillator and experimenting with pop structures. The oscillator creates gigantic bass tones that are then fed through a series of pedals. Over the course of the past several years Chippendale has been hand-picked by Bjo?rk and The Flaming Lips as a collaborator, and recruited by Andrew W.K. for Lee “Scratch” Perry’s 2008 album Repentance.

All My Relations is constant forward motion and audible physicality. Chippendale’s furious drumming style is ever present and instantly recognizable, but the pop element, which Chippendale explored in more contained ways on earlier Black Pus releases, is more fully integrated. Tracks like “1000 Years” and “Hear No Evil” bear a snarl and a smile, the sound of wild abandon that is both aggressive and inviting. Chippendale creates maximalist music out of the simple elements of drums, vocals, and an oscillator triggered by the kick drum, looping and repeating phrases and rhythms in a way that can only be called meditative. The album closes with “A Better Man,” an almost ten minute epic that expertly alternates between the minimal pulse of the kick drum and oscillator and some of the most voracious and unrestrained drumming on the album.

For the first time with any group he’s been a part of, Chippendale fully embraced the studio to realize All My Relations. He entrusted recording and producing to Keith Souza and Seth Manchester (who have worked with The Body, Battles and Skull Defekts) at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI. All My Relations retains the expansive, primal sound of Chippendale’s earlier recordings, enhanced by the clarity of the studio. Black Pus has attained vicious transcendence.

Bob Mould - (2020) Blue Hearts

Merge Records ‎– MRG730

Legendary singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleader Bob Mould has announced the release of an explosive new album. BLUE HEARTS arrives via Merge Records on Friday, September 25
BLUE HEARTS is perhaps the most directly confrontational work of Bob Mould’s four-decade career, a raging 14-track collection described by its creator as “the catchiest batch of protest songs I’ve ever written in one sitting.” Produced by Mould at Chicago’s famed Electrical Audio with longtime collaborator Beau Sorenson engineering, the album – which once again features backing from the crack rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy – nods to the veteran singer-songwriter’s groundbreaking past while remaining firmly planted in the issues of the day. Where SUNSHINE ROCK captured Mould at his most “violently happy” (according to Rolling Stone), BLUE HEARTS is both seething and pointed, the raging yin to the previous album’s positive yang. The acoustic opener, “Heart on My Sleeve” catalogues the ravages of climate change, while “American Crisis” – written initially for SUNSHINE ROCK but deemed “too heavy” by its writer – spits plainspoken fire at the people who fomented this catastrophic moment in history: “I never thought I’d see this bullshit again / To come of age in the ’80s was bad enough / We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of my generation die / Welcome back to American crisis.”

Elsewhere, the political and personal collide on songs like “Everyth!ng to You,” “The Ocean,” and the salaciously autobiographical “Leather Dreams,” the latter two composed earlier this year during an epic three-day writing binge prior to January 2020’s sold-out Solo Electric tour. As volatile, hook-laden, and aggressively honest as anything in Mould’s remarkable canon, BLUE HEARTS is fueled by a pervasive sense of déjà vu, its angry anthems of today equally informed by his experiences and memories of the early 1980s. Back then, Mould was a self-described “22-year-old closeted gay man” touring with the one and only Hüsker Dü as AIDS consumed his community. Leaders – including the one in the White House – seemed content to let the epidemic kill a generation. No wonder Bob Mould found his mind wandering back…

“We have a charismatic, telegenic, say-anything leader being propped up by evangelicals,” he says. “These fuckers tried to kill me once. They didn’t do it. They scared me. I didn’t do enough. Guess what? I’m back, and we’re back here again. And I’m not going to sit quietly this time and worry about alienating anyone.”