Haunted House activity / Edgar Allen "Poecast" / Pleasure Tunnel reviewed by Heathen Harvest

Poe portrait by Marilyn Manson

I have contributed unreleased music to a DIY haunted house that is being built by my friend Brian Klein.
There is a great deal of unreleased material of mine happening.  I may also act in said haunted house, if time prevails.  More information as it's available.

I have also contributed a reading of an Edgar Allen Poe story to the Undressing Underground Podcast (Edgar Allen Poecast).  I'm told it will air on October 27th.

ALSO, Heathen Harvest has just reviewed the collaboration with Bryan Lewis Saunders.  It is reviewed by Jacob DeRaadt, who performs under the name "Sterile Garden".  HH is getting to have an all-star cast of sorts, for reviewers on experimental music.  One thing though, I was the one reading BLS's transcript upon waking near the end of Side B there, but otherwise the review is golden.  Thanks HH!!

Breathing is one of the most metaphorically loaded sounds in the human audial repertoire. The connotations are scattered throughout various psychological/physiological states: sexual activity, heavy physical labor, asthma/emphysema, the experience of focusing on one’s own breath cycle during meditation, the respiratory system being exposed to hostile or poisonous conditions, air supplies to the human body in outer space or deep-sea diving, fear, anticipation, etc.  The A-side of this tape is almost exclusively composed of this primal element.  It’s a dense, constant loop that slowly morphs over the course of the entire side.  Hypnotic approaches a description of the overall effect on the listener.  I tried to listen to this while driving through the countryside of Maine and had to pull the tape out of the stereo.  The internal environments were overwhelming my external experience of the changing pastoral landscape.

Where “The Pleasure Tunnel” slowly builds upon itself, “The Temple of Paradise” is full of twisted passageways and abrupt turns.  Creeping, cold, vaporous drones emanate from the depths of the subconscious, worked into a cut-up style the brings to mind early works ofNurse with Wound.  Only halfway through this seemingly endless hallway do we hear Bryan Lewis Saunders’ twin stereo vocals begin to describe this fractured dreamscape.  Finally, there’s the startling payoff of white-hot harsh frequencies evaporating the memory of dreamstate.

The liner notes for this collaboration are illuminating and thought-provoking; seldom is a working process explained in such detail.  Rather than robbing the mystery from the work, it operates on a curatorial level of providing a specific context and deeper appreciation for the circumstances contributing to such a superb end product.  Here’s an excerpt:

“One time while I was ill with a severe lung infection I had extremely similar dreams on two consecutive nights.  Both nights I entered the most vibrant and wonderful places ever created but they were now totally vacant, desolate, voids of despair and in ruin and disrepair.  Amazingly, the recordings I made of them were almost equal in length as well as being extremely similar in sound quality.  Over the course of 2 nights my subconscious had become a reflection of my phlegm and I was drowning in it.” —Bryan Lewis Saunders

_____________________________________________________

Track List:

A1) The Pleasure Tunnel
B1) The Temple of Paradise

Rating: 9/10
Written by: Jacob DeRaadt
Label: No Part of It (United States) / None / Tape
Experimental / Noise

Guest podcast, Reviews, Velcro Bismol added on Bandcamp

Guests From Chaos 1: Arvo Zylo by Otomo_Hava on Mixcloud

I did a guest podcast for a series in Greece.  Normally the show is called "Notes From Chaos", and I had the pleasure of being the first of a series of guests; "Guests from Chaos".  The theme is industrial, but rooted in the experimental, cerebral qualities that began with the movement.  Otomo Hava, the host, has a knack for incorporating the raw and abrasive with the particularly ratty compositional avante-garde and classical elements.  

PLAYLIST

1.  Delia Derbyshire / Barry Bermange ‎– Falling - Inventions For Radio: The Dreams 

2.  Haus Arafna - Today You Died [Did You Know Who I Am]

3.  Women of the SS - Silent Weapon 

4.  COIL - The Gimp, Sometimes 

5.  DOME - Danse - Dome 3 

6.  GLOD - Black Song For A Dead Sun 

7.  State Research Bureau - Non-Place  S/T CDR self released

8.  Ptôse - Stalking in the Dark 

9.  RUTH - She Brings The Rain 

10. Theatre of Ice - excerpt from The Haunting cassette Side A 

11. Ono - Ennui  

12. Illusion of Safety - Fade-N-Die - More Violence and Geography CD 

13. Throbbing Gristle - Catholic Sex - Journey Through A Body 

14. dave phillips - The Possibility of Life's Destruction - Collection of Hair 2CD 

15. Nurse with Wound - Futurismo (excerpt) - Merzbild Schwet  UDT/RRR cassette

16. Gyorgy Ligeti - Lontano - The Shining unofficial soundtrack 

17. Frans Zwartjes - Excerpt from Anamnesis film soundtrack extract 

Review on Memory Wave Transmissions, here is the summation...
Falling Tower, Terrible Fountain is a solid release, and Arvo Zylo has proven time and again that his noise is something much deeper than the simple twist and turn of knobs. This tape is like a void, easily sucking the listener into the whir of noise aberrations, and one should attempt to find this tape by contacting punkferret138 AT yahoo.com (since Side of the Sun doesn’t really have a web presence).

Illusion of Safety reviewed at Heathen Harvest.
Now I will say first, that I think this is one of IOS's best albums.  I know I'm biased, but while the writer overall fails to latch onto, it find it to be one of the most engrossing sonic adventures I've heard.  There is a difference between being able to find meaning in something and being able to find substance.  This is a surrealistic journey, a damn near cyber punk outing in digesting the whole, that brings up different subtleties in every listen.  Never the less, I respect this writer's effort.  

....One can only guess at the reasoning behind this down-turn in productivity outside of the obvious, but it’s clear from the onset of Surrender that Burke’s will to craft marvelously complex experimental compositions from a variety of sources is still as intact and impressive as it ever was.  Virtually any element that you’ve ever heard in experimental music can be found interwoven with other assorted, sometimes seemingly incompatible sounds:  mathematical digital beats, distant pipe-organ dirges, feedback loops, squalling disharmonious harsh noise, engulfing bass-end drones, manic shifts in atmosphere and volume, a vast assortment of samples and field recordings, and fragmented electro-acoustic general weirdness.  Impressive in its scope and intricacy, Surrender—at face-value—is an experimental sonic-sculptor’s dream; it is an epic journey through all manner of digital visions and vivid hallucinations, wherein we are led everywhere from the bleak and barren cut-up introduction of “We Numb” as it develops into an EBM-meets-free-jazz freak-out passage to the raging angelic inferno of synthetic choir layers in “Popular Delusions.”






Moving on, "Velcro Bismol" by Arvo Zylo & Dental Work is now on Bandcamp, with a reminder that one can purchase prints of the cover art in numerous sizes and shapes.  

I am working almost entirely with a wide-ranging slew of sounds by Dental Work, from demented disco to coke snorting, all kinds of madness. The result is constantly compared to Nurse with Wound, and at other times, extremely harsh noise. Deep bass medleys, HI SPEED CUT UPS, screwed dirge, splish splash tape loops. I did the cover art, and it was part of a series of collages I did for an art exhibition of the same name. All art is from collaged women's magazines.

credits

Bryan Lewis Saunders & Arvo Zylo - "The Pleasure Tunnel / The Temple of Paradise" now on Bandcamp

Bryan Lewis Saunders is a creative juggernaut.  He's probably best known for his art book of daily self-portraits on various different mind-altering drugs, if not his huge collection of found photography, his aptitude for surrealistic visual art glossolalia and his "Stand Up Tragedy" Performance Art.  He recorded 2 different dreams that took place at the same dream location. He has done dream recordings hundreds of times, including his multi-volume audio book "The Confessor". This was the only time he returned to the same location in his dream, so he put the two audio recordings together, because they also happened to have damn near the same length. Saunders had a severe lung infection at the time, so it's doubly weezy. I did what I could to honor this magical place "The Pleasure Tunnel / The Temple of Paradise", including recording myself reading the transcripts upon waking, and making a soundtrack to it. It comes on pro cassette with 2 colors on clear no liner shells, a full color, double sided 5 panel J card with dream transcript, liner notes from each artist, and is a c40 or so on Chrome tapes. Mastered by Zach Adams.  At this time there are 4 copies remaining.

Bandcamp download includes dream transcript text file and original recording of Bryan Lewis Saunders' two dream speeches fused together.

In the process of digifying things that are still in print since the "off-the-grid" money order/xerox newsletter period for the label, there will be more from Illusion of Safety and WILT, among others, with bonus tracks and other items.