|
|
|
|
viewing 1 To 10 of 10 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 016CD
|
"Community Library is proud to bring you the first ever legitimate reissue of San Francisco's synth-punk legends, Units! You can finally get rid of the crappy bootlegs: this is the definitive remastered collection of the band's most sought-after early singles and selections from their first LP, Digital Stimulation. It also includes unreleased material culled from early demos, recordings made for art happenings and film, and more. This anthology is a view not only into the Units' seminal years, but is also a step into the rich and under-reissued history of San Francisco's punk, new wave and post punk years. The end of the 1970s saw Units and their compatriots (Pink Section, Voice Farm, Tuxedomoon, and Screamers) storming punk clubs like the Mabuhay with a new electronic punk sound. The co-opted, predictable guitar rock of the era had given way to aggressive synthesizers, film collage, and punk DIY ingenuity. Units were a cornerstone of this unofficial movement, later called 'synth punk' and which would come to define a greater west coast DIY culture combining new synthetic sounds, ranging from Nervous Gender, Screamers and Monitor, to The Blackouts. Units' tight keyboard riffing, raw electronic texture, monotone delivery, raging synth arpeggios and growling Moog basslines practically define synthpunk's futuristic, alienated disposition. Thematically, Units' music explored and exploded the very nature of 'unit-like' conformity- perhaps using their synth blasts to tear away the very fabric of it. This compilation includes 'High Pressure Days,' a testament to the loneliness and urgency of the times, and one of synthpunk's greatest anthems. Like other bands of their era, Units' musical language did not end with the three chords of punk or the drama of new wave. Many of the songs here clairvoyantly anticipate the rise of underground pulse driven electronic dance music ('Cannibals,' 'Warm Moving Bodies'). Others feature complex arrangements, almost embodying an epic prog-rock ethic ('I-5,' 'Tight Fit.') Unlike Suicide and DEVO--their contemporaries from the east coast--San Francisco's Units are overwhelmingly Californian in their sound and ideas - whether it's a satire of drag-racing car culture ('Go') or a celebration of SF's Mission district ('The Mission is Bitchin'). The demos and film soundtracks included here further highlight the band's significant influence from experimental synthesizer music from a community that bore Buchla synths and Chris Burden's performance art at the height of the 60's, ten years earlier. Even Californian heavy guitar/hair rockers Trakstod Station get an ironic nod in the rare Units cover of 'Contemporary Emotions.' We hope you enjoy this anthology, the results of over three years of negotiation, selection, and remastering." Includes an amazingly assembled 32-page booklet with a wealth of info, full-color band photos, artwork and more.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
12"
|
|
CL 022EP
|
"The dynamic duo of DJ C and MC Zulu hook up again for another rugged bashment squeeze on Darling. The title cut tracks a similar route to their killer 'body work' riddim, rolling on the same mid-paced bashment tempo, but this time adding a rude, grinding electro riff and industrial cowbell to rough it up some more in vocal and instrumental versions. Ghislain Poirier steps in on remix duties, adding a much-needed slab of bottom end pressure and tweaking the rhythm with subtle phasing and flanging killer 12"."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
12"
|
|
CL 015EP
|
"Following hot on the heels of his breakthrough Future Rock CD album for Kranky, Community Library is proud to bring you a proper vinyl single containing two of its key tunes. Future Rock is simply Strategy's breakthrough album -- a pastiche of hundreds of musicological reference points tied together in massive swells of bass, spring reverb, vocoded haze, and echoes; the album seems to play on every field, being a functional ambient experimental pop record on low volume, and bass heavy dance-dub when cranked up to full volume. Following on the latter idea, we took two of the CD's most propulsive cuts and sent them over to Berlin's D&M to be rendered as a proper clubmusicplatter. The album's title track 'Future Rock' takes the A-side, welding techno, Afrobeat, and outer space jazz elements to a rocking core of breaks, live drumming, and a superlow bassline. Backed by a curtain of sound that is virtually a tribute to Vladislav Delay's or Basic Channel's most classic, blue moments, this song is the missing link between live drum syncopation and dub-techno spectra. 'Can't Roll Back,' is a little more openly referential, throwing a huge number of styles into a 4/4 stomper. Following a spectral vocal intro, percussion, loads of keyboards, and guitar build into a massive track that is part electric-era Miles Davis and part early A Certain Ratio. Reconfigured for dance DJs, this version features a proper bass drum and an extended, dubbed-out outro, including Strategy's first ever searing psych-rock guitar solo. For fans, this represents an exploded view of two of the album's highlights; for DJs who have been in tune with anything that's crossing the line between live and programmed (DFA, Gomma, Nonplace, Kitsune) this single is a totally new angle-casting away stiff standards of punk-funk-disco backbeats in favor of brave new recombinations with dub techno, live syncopation, and arcing riffage."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 014CD
|
"A beguiling, classic new release comes to Community Library this spring: Documentary, the debut album by solo artist, Rolan Vega. Synthesizer expert, art-film aficionado, and enthusiastic upstart of Chicago's vibrant electro/synth scene, he has compiled years' worth of his favorite synthesizer vignettes into a comprehensive debut album. Is Documentary a collection of works for actual short films and media, or an attempt to pay tribute to the synth epics of media music's past? The answer is, ultimately: both. Most of the music in Documentary was written as live scores for short films, including Vega's own Super 8s. But at the core of this effort, one finds his love for 'library music' (the anonymous, public-domain music composed for UK media in the '60s and after), as well as the synthetic, futuristic theme music of 1980s American Public Broadcasting programming. But like all ComLib artists, Vega is too individualistic to simply be re-enacting musics of the past: all kinds of extra elements leak into Documentary, making it a work that straddles the line between classic and alien. Vega's ambiguous, dream-like presentation and tendency to shift between shorter, passing pieces -- as we think of them, vignettes -- gives a sense of constant motion and change. These vignettes are not TV-studio enabled audiophilia; rather, these are home-recorded, four-track-tape inflected morsels of sound. Vega has collided the melancholic, low-fi aesthetic of early '90s Bristol artists like Flying Saucer Attack with the epic, arpeggiating ambience of synth maestros such as Michael Stearns, Richard Pinhas, Biosphere, and TONTO. A few of his tracks even resemble the sand-blasted melodic noise of composers like Tim Hecker or Chris Herbert. Rolan Vega's mixed-up revisions of anonymous media music, and his recombination of lo-fi experimentalism with synthesizer majesty hits a perfect spot for us, and we hope it does for you as well."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
CL 017EP
|
"Quite possibly Community Library's rudest output to date, longtime junglist DJ C winds up some good and proper bouncement styles, alongside mic man Zulu on Bodywork. Side stepping all current trends for anything on a half step tip, DJ C bubbles one up from the underground with a fiercely danceable, steamroller riddim constructed for excited pelvic grindations and wild-out gun finger salutes, drop this in any dancehall from Dakar to Dublin for spontaneous combustion effect."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 010CD
|
"Jefrey Leighton Brown, founder of ComLib's own Evolutionary Jass Band and former key participant in Jackie-o-Motherfucker, steps forth with his fantastic debut CD, Change Has Got to Come! This singular musical statement is as much a manifesto asserting soul-jazz's place in today's underground, as it is a document of Brown's individual songwriting vision. Change Has Got to Come! might seem an anachronism to some, even more marginal still for being an isolated beam of blues light in a major-key, indie-rock world. All the way down to its revolutionary, hopeful title and austere, homespun presentation, Change is a purposeful, careful reinterpretation of '70s-era, introspective avant-jazz and obtuse, small-town R&B (as Brown once described to me himself, 'the sort of soul jazz recorded in jingle studios after hours...'). But in inimitable Community Library style (where the old and new joyfully clash and swap identities), this album is far from being a simple exploration of retro-fantasy. Brown brings his signature swinging-but-casual sensibility to classic composition, as well as unusual, sparkling instrumentation (including vibraphones, sitar, electric bass, deeply layered, multi-tracked saxophones, and vocals). Most importantly, Brown wields a sense of angular deconstruction (both intervallic and rhythmic) that brings his songs into high contrast, modern expressions of tension, calm, and urgency. Free of self-consciousness, Brown brings his unpretentious, careful, abstract songwriting style to an updated soul-jazz idiom and all its moods and phases. And all this is recorded in the privacy of his own basement, with his brother and closest companions in tow, over the course of several years. Change Has Got To Come! is a perfect counterpoint to the recent Evolutionary Jass Band CD and gives some glimpse into the wealth of music yet to spring from this group and their community."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 013CD
|
"Christmas Decorations' second full-length Communal Rust should please fans who have been following the lineage of processed-guitar heroes and anti-heroes (Fennesz, Ambarchi, et al). But where those icons are making forays into drone and noise, Christmas Decorations are taking the other fork in the road, back towards the melancholic, crisp strum of post-punk and indie, and back towards an atomized, crumpled, improvised sound design. Communal Rust documents essential 'anti-guitar guitar music.' The songs revolve around a dichotomy between guitar-pedal-and-computer induced fragmentation, on one hand, and the intricate, melodic guitar motifs referenced to classic post-punk and forgotten lo-fi indie music. Pull away the layers of glitches, snippets, trills, and echoes and you might discover a core guitar disposition that recalls the contemplative, steely tone of early Factory, 4AD, or New Zealand music. That's not to say that the duo is boxed in by reference points; moreso, these influences are exerting the most gravitational pull on the band's temptations to commit all-out, fractional sonic disintegration. This tension between new and old, rough and smooth, or chaos versus control, puts the band squarely in the ComLib sensibility of sublimely balancing problem and accessibility in music. Following on the band's debut release, the criminally underappreciated Model 91, Communal Rust marks a key point in the band's development and is a crucial addition to any collection of experimental music."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 011CD
|
"Welcome Project Perfect to Community Library's cast of contributors! PM+ is the definitive document of this elusive duo, as well as a key release for us that draws together ComLib's threads of musical coverage, abstract electronic music, jazz, free improvisation, and noise musics. Project Perfect (Andy Brown -- synth, electric piano, drum machine, and Charlie Smyth -- guitar, radio) were the tricksters of Portland's music community during the days of their frequent and strange performances (2002-2004). Appearing live in costume or with exotic dancers on stage, the group's deadpan humor was at odds with their profoundly introspective, abstract music. Following from their membership in Fontanelle, the two longtime collaborators came into their own with a reputation for consistently dextrous live performances, a distinctively insular sonic vocabulary, and a fluid, telepathic improvisatory rapport. Project Perfect's mastery over sounds takes them jump-cutting from squiggles, squonks, and blurts of random (yet eerily on-target) radio broadcasts, to moments of austere, dry guitar and piano interplay. Hopping between tender and bombastic moods, introspection and extroversion, delicacy and jarringness, the band's sense of variety within a narrowly-defined sonic palette is unmatched. Their approach comes from some oblique musical reference points (Rune Grammofon label, Cabaret Voltaire, Conrad Schnitzler, or Cluster come to mind), but this was a group that truly did not sound like any other."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
CL 007CD
|
"Community Library is proud to present the debut release from one of Portland's most unique and wonderful bands, the Evolutionary Jass Band. Formerly the Steele Street Revolutionary Jass Band, the group has slowly but steadily made a name for themselves locally for reliably powerful live performances in a variety of traditional and untraditional venues. Bandleader Jefrey Brown and drummer Michael Henrickson were longtime key members of one of Portland's better-known musical exports, the improvisatory, rotating-membership group Jackie-O Motherfucker. The Evolutionary Jass Band coexisted for some time but truly took flight when these two left JOMF; in contrast to JOMF's multigenre escapades, the Jass Band is an entity more focused on creating a variant specifically within a jazz idiom. Relying on a delicate balance between compositional tact and way out improvisation, the band is able to refer to a jazz vocabulary while building on it with confidence. The group has grown into a sextet under Brown's direction, and has brought incredible beauty, force and rawness to Portland's often overly academic live improvisation scene. Change of Scene reflects the band's combinations of Ethiopian-influenced, modal looping riffs with elements of American band music and early jazz, as well as the underground soul-jazz of the 1970s, with a lot of influence from more recent music from the DIY, experimental rock spectrum as well."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
12"
|
|
CL 004EP
|
"Eats Tapes are the duo of Gregory Zifcak and Marijke Jorritsma, who build and modify their own synths, toys, drum machines, etc...Known for great block parties and frequent appearances at Bay Area punk shows and dance parties, they returned to their homeland of Portland for a few days to record these cuts with electro guru Solenoid (who also contributed 303 acid programming to a couple of the tracks). This is wicked, off-the-hinges techno that is not for the purists or faint-hearted-high-octane analogue dance tracks with plenty of feedback and (naturally!) cassette tape manipulations. Eats Tapes let their frankensteined gear stomp around like prehistoric monsters, but this is a joyous sound."
|
|
|
|