Browse by Label: VOLCANIC TONGUE (UK)

Artist:	DREAM/AKTION UNIT
Title:	Blood Shadow Rampage
Label:	VOLCANIC TONGUE (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	VT 003CD

"Volcanic Tongue is proud to present the first ever release by the Dream/Aktion Unit, a free-thinking avant garage Ur-kestra based around the central kernel of guitarist Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano (Six Organs Of Admittance, Sunburned Hand Of The Man et al) and featuring Heather Leigh Murray (Taurpis Tula/Jandek/Charalambides) on pedal steel and vocals and Matt Heyner (No-Neck Blues Band/Test/Angelblood) on upright bass. In May 2005 Moore, Flaherty and Corsano brought the Dream/Aktion Unit to Stirling, Scotland, for the final Le Weekend festival to be curated by David Keenan/Volcanic Tongue. With O'Rourke permanently out of the picture due to various film and musical commitments, Matt Heyner aka Count Hejnowski of NNCK and Heather Leigh of Taurpis Tula stepped up. The results were mind-blowing, with the quintet tearing through a non-stop gush of energy/ideas without resorting to base musical concerns like dialogue or listening with your ears. This was pure simultaneity at some kind of peak of flux. Moore's role was key. He would move from these kind of suggestive, shepherding chords that would work lubes of motion into the back line, where Corsano and Heyner hooked up to such a degree that it was hard to separate their individual tonal and percussive points. They sounded like a friggin combine harvester. Murray and Flaherty were floating on their own particular plane, one that worked to reconcile the insane pulse of blood from the base of their spine with the juice of pure vision. Flaherty's sound touches on a whole bunch of jazz modes while re-situating the tradition somewhere way upwind of contemporary sound-as-thought while Heather Leigh's exquisitely violent pedal steel stylings and free vocal improvisations seemed to touch on aspects of both Patty Waters, Lydia Lunch and Keiji Haino's flesh-extensions while resolutely refusing anything approaching previously-articulated tongue. The whole thing was recorded and mixed straight to 24 track and the results are what you have in your hands. The first ever document of the collective thought of what's easily the cream of the subterranean cup."

Artist:	ZAIMPH
Title:	The Undetermined Dyad
Label:	VOLCANIC TONGUE (UK)
Format:	LP
Price:	$26.00
Catalog #:	VT 006LP

"Edition of 300 copies, with sleeves featuring original artwork by Marcia Bassett, all silkscreened by Alan Sherry of SIWA and with a full-color insert. Expertly mastered by Tom Carter of Charalambides. Zaīmph is working cover for the solo experiments of Marcia Bassett, formerly of Un and Double Leopards, currently of GHQ and Hototogisu. The Undetermined Dyad functions as the fulcrum of her career to date, looking back towards her experiments in group levitation with Double Leopards while extrapolating on her recent solo work. Most of all it's a 'guitar' record and one that sits comfortably alongside previous six-string monoliths like John Fahey's Days Have Gone By, Donald Miller's A Little Treatise On Morals and Masayuki Takayanagi's Live At Zojoji Hall while sounding quite unlike any of them. Bassett's re-imagining of the instrument pushes it to the point of almost translucence, where the physical fact of the guitar itself is almost completely subsumed by echo, F/X, loops and the kind of improvisatory logic that prizes infinite expansion and organic growth over repeated tropes or riffs. Aspects of the first side -- the eerie ghost voices, the deep space echo -- recall the electrified ritual of nomadic Japanese avant gardists Taj Mahal Travellers but more immediately it sounds like a magnification of her individual contribution to Double Leopards, generating towers of electricity that move from malevolent arcs of anti-gravity and spumes of throttled single notes through to deep wormholes that do violence to feeble notions of time and space. The B-side is a little more aggressive, with the tactile sound of strings on pick-ups anchoring a gorgeous wash of all-consuming drone and garage band fuzz before Bassett cranks the tone into realms of total sonic reducer. If your concept of the guitar begins with Jimi Hendrix setting the fucking thing on fire and ends with the sound of voltage completely liberated from any kind of tonal or harmonic anchor whatsoever, then this record may well be the girl you've been praying for. But you won't wanna introduce her to your parents." --David Keenan, Glasgow, April 2008.

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