Recent New Bin Faves

Dial / 168K (Cede)
Latest from the group featuring Jacqui Ham (Ut) in a killer post-No Wave mash of grimy guitar, drum machine, bass, synth and Jacqui on buried sneering and druggy/alien-sounding vox. It seems at first that you've heard all that 1000 times post-Teenage Jesus, but the sheer burn of this sets it above the usual copyists and certainly evokes Dead C, Mouthus, or Ex-Cocaine in its rumbling, looped tonalities and the way certain unidentifyable instruments jabber and saw away at your skull. I'd be curious to see this band live, as the lo-fidelity of the recordings is certainly key to definite ideas rising to the top of this murk. a boozier, bluesier Half Machine Lip Moves by Chrome and you get somewhat of the picture. Real Audio: "Soda Wars".

Squidlaunch - "Live" 7" (Interplanetary/Spooky Tree/Cardboard/1fa/Moneytree)
I am guessing this is a Pat Duncan production as the info just says Live WFMU 1995 - the pics therein reveal mohawked freaks bugging out on trombones and such and there's like 6 or 7 labels co-releasing this. Someone aptly said this was like the sound of Greg Ginn jamming out with Man is the Bastard and I couldn't be more in harmony with that. Since the time this happened it's been a bummer to see so many experimental hardcore kids just dropping the ball perhaps to do something less wild (perhaps to maintain health/sanity, so who can blame 'em; one of these guys is in the very fine Parts and Labor these days however), and while there is certainly a contingent to pick up that ball, I wish more would. In an ideal Bush world, every kid should be studying up on Mens Recovery Project and taking it to the streets, dammit. This thing is aggro freedom personified. Very limited but check here, in the meantime some Real Audio.

The Dragons - BFI (Ninja Tune)
The Dragon Brothers (Doug, Daryl, Dennis) gigged around LA in the late 60's doing your standard lounge gigs, mostly hopped up on the Beach Boys (whom several brothers became session musicians for), Beatles, Hendrix, the Doors; they decided to go into a studio after hours in 1969 with pal Don Landee behind the board and explore some of the outer realms of his production techniques and the result was BFI, which inexplicably stood for "Blue Forces Intelligence." Since it had no commercial appeal, it pretty much got shelved, and almost tossed if not for Landee, and when Ninja Tune's DJ Food got wind of the track "Food For My Soul" the ball started rolling to get this disc out properly. It's a pretty snazzy collection of acid-fried jazzrock, variable tape speeds, and tons of effects that scream 1969 and a funky clavinet that sounds oddly AM-radio familiar mainly becuase one of the Dragons went on to become, yes, the Captain of Captain and Tennille (who now have even more avant cred after the discovery that LAFMS/Medicine member Brad Laner played bass with them at age 14!)  Some pretty nice lost grooves all in all.

Comments

[MrFab]

And some of the other (non-Captain) Dragons became the Surf Punks.

[Holland Oats]

is it just me, or does 'cosmosis' sound like the devo corporate anthem?

[Col3E]

Wow, What A Mind Blower.
Squidlaunch.
I didn't realize that it would take me so long to understand.
They were like THE opening band at every UMASS Amherst college basment non-jam band hipster rawk show in the mid-1990's. They could clear out a room of XXXstraightedgersXXX like nobodys business.
This is such a blast from the past.
Then to find out that this was put out by a kid I used to work with. Rad.
Thanks for the post!

I can't wait to share these recorded memories with my friends.