Copper Glove "Surviving the Garden of Hate" (Arbor, 2010)

Part two of my two-part Baltimore 7" bonanza: it's Door! "Fuck cops."

Ecstatic Peace

Ecstatic Peace! / Father Yod (1995)

I know the labels are wicked crooked. It is better this way, given we are dealing with Destroy All Monsters. I was going to have to represent for the home state (Michigan) eventually. So I decided the original music destroyers fronted by now LA-based artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, with still Michiganders Cary Loren and Niagara, covering, in a matter of speaking, "Detroit: Rock City" live in Detroit was the logical choice.

(Warning: If you have never been to Cary's Book Beat in Oak Park, MI you have no idea what you are missing.)

Recorded at one of the sporadic Destroy All Monster reunions, this single always gets the evening off to a strange start. I love playing this for guests, and asking them to tell me if it sounds better played at 33 1/3 or 45. The voting is split pretty even to date--which isn't so surprising. My copy came in a screen-printed cardboard box, faux fur-lined on the inside, and accompanied by a random assortment of stickers, photos, paper scraps and misbegottens. No two copies are exactly the same. This is sometimes known as the "Monkey Fur Box," but I have to admit I don't know when those times are. Edition of 250.

Make yourself a Motor City Mule. Fire up the Hi-Fi. Put the feet up and let the bastardized tones curl your toes you Peanut Butter Motherfuckers!

By the way... I don't want to ignore the A-Side here. Lest you forget the immortal words popularized by Roberta Flack, here they are:

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him
And listen for a while
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes

I felt all flushed with fever
Embarrassed by the crowd
I felt he found my letters
And read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish
But he just kept right on

He sang as if he knew me
In all my dark despair
And then he looked right through me
As if I wasn't there
And he just kept on singing
Singing clear and strong

Multhipla (1982)

Among my favorite audio artifacts of the first wave of artists associated with Fluxus is Wolf Vostell's dé-coll/age issued in 1982 on Gino Di Maggio's Italian Multhipla label.

The label's chief image is the classically beguiling 'aztec' logo designed decades before by George Maciunas, rendered here in silver with a light overlay of red text atop; it's at once vacant & animated - a backwards looking pop emblem of the trickster movement that inextricably linked Vostell to Fluxus and Maciunas to Vostell (in spite of Maciunas' rejection of Vostell's dé-coll/ages). So much for unity. Long live the unity of design.

Taking its name from Vostell's magazine of the same name and the mag's call to disorganization- dé-coll/age collates happenings recorded on location from Monaco to Los Angeles between 1959 and 1981 all clocking in at around the 3 minute mark, the length of a typical pop song which these are not. Rather: a hairy, noisy, living, breathing documentary of unmounted industry prodded, poked and picked at.

Uhlklang, 1983

Uhlklang was a short-lived imprint run by the Swiss duo of Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang and manufactured and distributed by the great German free jazz label FMP--the design templates of both labels were similar, but the wavy text and the owl, who winks on side 2, distinguished Uhlklang from its parent company. Guhl and Möslang were eventually known better as Voice Crack--the title of a 1984 album, which they then adapted as their own moniker--and who were usually credited with "cracked everyday electronics," a catchall for the bricolage of busted, salvaged, and repurposed electronic devices they adapted into noise-making instruments. Knack On was reissued on CD by John Corbett's Unheard Music Series label.

Animal Disguise

Richie (2010)