Shame File Music - http://ShameFileMusic.com
New in the Shame File Music online shop
It's the season of vinyl pre-orders from both Australian labels and overseas imports. Pre-order the following to assure you get one of the limited copies available:
Will Guthrie "People Please: pt II" LP - follow-up to his riotous collage/edit work of a few years ago.
Chris Abrahams, Clayton Thomas, Miles Thomas "Words Fail" 2LP - new shit-hot trio featuring Abrahams of The Necks.
Music of Transparent Means "Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn/Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth" LP - staggering live recording from maximalist Adelaide group. First batch already sold out, taking pre-orders for more. One of the records of the year.
Barney McAll "Transitive Cycles" LP - Melbourne cosmic jazz/prog.
United Color Of Black Metal “Synchronicités” LP - not black metal, but glitched minimal percussion electronica.
Also new and available now:
Stephen Whittington "Final Fragments: piano music of David Kotlowy" LP - minimalist compositions in the style of Feldman from Adelaide composer.
Red Wine and Sugar "Donkeys Are Led by Donkeys" 10" - new work from duo of Mark Groves and Samaan Fieck.
Candlesnuffer "Apsomeophone" LP - ltd edition green vinyl reissue of classic 2005 album from Dave Brown.
Various Artists "All My Sins Remembered II: The Sonic Worlds of John Murphy" 2CD - second archival set of rare recordings from the late industrial music pioneer/maverick.
Recent reviews of Shame File Music releases
From Vital Weekly:
Behind Astasie-Abasie we find Ian Andrews, whom we also know (may know) as such early underground as an act from Australia as The Horse He's Sick, Kurt Volentine, and as Atasie-abasie he explores small sounds from small metal objects such as washers. He worked before on this with Garry Bradbury (erstwhile of Severed Heads) and out those performances grew this. Modified and prepared turntables are used to play these objects, along with hand drills, film winders and motorized drills/screwdrivers and throughout there is a random aspect to all of this. With all the mechanics at play here one might think this is some heavy industrial music, but it is not. Far from it, actually. Think of wind chimes, waving gently in the summer wind on your porch and you have something more like what I hear here. However, there is more to enjoy, as I would think (and might be wrong) there are also delicate electronics at work here. It sounds as if some of this is recorded on some very unstable piece of tape loop, feeding as random back into the mix. There is no such thing mentioned anywhere, so I might be entirely wrong of course. In 'Steam Room In Buitenzorg' for instance, these electronics blend with field recordings and the metal objects take the backseat. In the ten pieces on this album, there is a natural progression, a continuous exploration of the same sounds in various constructions, so it is the same thing over and over in a totally different way. The pieces have titles, but just as easily this is enjoyed as a forty-four-minute piece of music. I found all beautiful, the Zen-like music, the stylish execution and it all made one great CD.
The label boss here is Clinton Green, who presents a new LP and again the turntables play an important role, like in much of his recent work. Interestingly his work is close to that of Atasie-Abasie and the approach to the use of turntable is as much as it is fresh as well as the same. Unlike in the work of many other musicians with the same apparatus, it too is here to hit upon objects around it. In Green's case, this is mostly percussion objects, drums, and bells. The cover has a better wording for this process; "beaters and objects suspended from an overhead swaying horizontal pole strike percussive objects on three rotating turntables". I assume Green moving around these turntables, placing new objects, removing old and keep the music vibrant and energetic. The one thing this is not is static. One may suspect that the rotation of the turntable leads to a steady rhythm, which Thomas Brinkman once cleverly turned into dance music, but none such is the case here. On this LP we find four pieces, two on each side. It is difficult to tell the two per side apart; on the first side everything is fast and on the other side everything is slow. That is an interesting choice, I think but it works very well. Side A is a wild ride, chaotic mostly, from moving and removing all these objects around the three turntables, a hybrid of sound, ants crawling around sort of thing. The two on the other side are meditative touches, scratches upon a surface and is of delicate sparseness. Here too nothing stays the same for very long, or, maybe not at all. It shares, however, the same love for the chaos as on the other side, which curiously ties both ends together. This is another most enjoyable record from Green, and like the Astasie-Abasie record, a fine example of the sort of turntable usage I enjoy very much. (FdW)
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