THANKS TO ALL OF MUTANT SOUNDS' FANS OUT THERE FOR MAKING 2011 OUR BEST YEAR EVER. BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS AWAIT IN 2012 . HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

THE OBSCENES-IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, LP, 1993, ITALY

Ear canal befouling nonsense-mongering from a highly obscure Italian combo with exactly nada in the way of currently extant info available on 'em. The deliberately cheap and nasty sonics alongside the absurdist attitude here could easily persuade you that this was some sorta lost Neue Deutsche Welle cassette, what with all the willful ineptitude and inanity on display here, alongside the dictaphone recording quality, manipulated vinyl abuse, and cheap drum machines battling it out against cheaper guitars.

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HELGOLAND AND BAND-99, CD, 1999, GERMANY

With a roster that reads a bit like a supergroup from the 90's German experimental electronica scene (Groenland Orchester/Nova Huta mastermind Gunter Reznicek and serial Felix Kubin collaborator Pia Burnette appear here alongside Helgoland founder Rudi Burr, whose CD EP together with Reznicek "The German Face" I shared a while back), Helgoland on this debut outing of theirs actually exist at a distinct remove from any anticipations those associations might suggest, including expectations based on the Helgoland music that would follow via their brilliant and distinctly zany avant electropop confections on Kubin's Psychoscifipoppia compilation LP and their 2001 Media Music EP on Storage. Instead, the 99 dadaist blasts that emerge from your speakers like a never ending string of anal beads are purely the after-effect of a diet over-rich in Ruins, Naked City, Boredoms and Melt Banana. Surely not what you'd anticipate, but a cheerful eruption of inspired gibberish to while away the hours with regardless.

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TONI ESPOSITO-PROCESSIONE SUL MARE, LP, 1976, ITALY

Continuing on from my shares of his first and third albums, this second outing from this wildly gifted and wide ranging Italian prog/fusion drummer (a one time member of both St. Just and Alan Sorrenti's band as well as Luciano Cilio's collaborator on Dell'Universo Assente) catches Esposito at a real creative peak. As with the other albums of his that I've shared, the arrangements, stereo imaging and the endless peppering of pinprick percussive detailing make it plain that this is a drummers album, though Processione Sul Mare is an absolute master class in dynamic sense from all parties involved and overflows with that tell tale quality of airy, fluid and life giving expansiveness that you find in so much of the best Italian fusion of that time from Area to Perigeo to Napoli Centrale.

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V/A-CD VOOR DE INSTABIELE MEDIA-CD FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA, CD, 1992, VARIOUS

As if to deliberately thwart an easy reading in concord with the spirit of this compendium's remit, the compilers of this CD have seen fit to maddeningly format the whole shebang into one continuous 68 minute sound block, but with a roster of period sonic agitators that takes in everything from Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock's dadaist disembowelments and Gregory Whitehead's surreal speech dissections to pioneering Dutch electronic composer Dick Raaijmakers experiments (circa 197 1) with his Ideophone sound sculptures, it's a stream that's well worth your time wading into.

Track listing:

Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock-Zur Autodestruktion
Gregory Whitehead/THU20-I Prefer To Talk To The Dead
Voice Crack-Ballistics Of The Wild Turkey
Radi Subcom-Intransit (Excerpt)
The Haters-Final
Dick Raaijmakers-Ideophone I 1971
DFM Radio-Untitled (Excerpt)
Entre Vifs-Slavium Fornikant
Ad Van Buuren-The Clock
The Hafler Trio-Untitled
Chris Mann/Warren Burt-Anyway You Can Always Put Language Down To Experience
Merzbow-V2 Live (Excerpt)
Strafe Fur Rebellion-Die Zahl Pi

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S. IDA & BGG-…EAT SHOW, TAPE, 1985, JAPAN

Issued on a once hugely prolific and now entirely forgotten Japanese experimental tape label of the early-mid 80's called D.D. Records, evidence of whose existence has all but disappeared (not a peep on either Discogs or Rate Your Music about them) despite their having issued 100+ cassettes and a handful of vinyl flexis during their lifespan (the Eurock book consolidating all the old issues of their zine has the only extant info on 'em that I'm aware of), this 1985 oddity by S. Ida & BGG, which landed in my hands a while back sans any imagery, accompanying info or even song titles, gives a strong sense of the quizzical and high quality experiments being unleashed by them. As evidenced by the sounds at hand, S. Ida & BGG exist to confound, or at least to cheerfully work through their fascinations with all manner of outwardly bound sounds of that era, however chalk-and-cheese it might be to dish their particular array out in one interwoven bundle. Starting with a fit of squalling and blubbering guitar excess emerging from a mire of melted shortwave radio signals and lumbering bass, the remaining contents take in everything from primitive and spasming sampled vocal malarky to terse string improv and from Neubauten-like metal bash strategies repurposed to infantilist ends and faux gamelan accomplished via tin whistle and kitchen debris to long expanses of location recordings of birds flocks with factories in the distance.

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MUTANT SOUNDS GETS PROFILED IN BOING BOING AND VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION REVEAL THEIR HIDDEN HIP HOP HISTORY

Watch out! Whole swaths of aboveground straight society have just been hepped to our doings via Boing Boing's omnidirectional reach, as the kind folks at that site unexpectedly profiled Mutant Sounds a short time ago. You can read that here

This also seemed like it might be an amusing moment to reveal the real reason for Vas Deferens Organization's disappearance off of our fans radar screens for a span of time during the last decade. It was because we'd effectively gone undercover. Some time in early 2005, I got an insane phone call from my bandmate Matt who was living in New Orleans at the time, in which he told me that he'd effectively conned one of the top hip hop club owners there into believing that we were heavy duty rap producers and the guy was interested in seriously hooking us up if we could hand him some tracks. Once the realization hit what a monumental prank on reality this could be if we really managed to pull of this hat trick (and really, how hard could it be for innovative electronic producers to unpack the logic of making this stuff?), we set about doing just that and our contact in turn set about introducing us to a series of industry fat cats, with the end result that I moved to New Orleans to open a hip hop studio on the periphery of The French Quarter with Matt in early 2005. Before Katrina struck, we had handlers and reps for Juvenile coming around and scoping us out and affiliations made with A&R men from B.G.'s Chopper City Records and after Katrina wiped us out and sent us fleeing New Orleans, we ended up following the A&R rep for Chopper City all the way to Atlanta and effectively becoming his right hand for a year until a series of insane and unforeseen circumstances exploded this dream right as it was about to take flight. You can still find a stray remnant of this era lurking on this random and generic hip hop compilation CD here

The best way to understand our specifically subversive intentions in trying to make an intervention into the hip hop world is to note the alias that we'd rechristened ourselves as: The Water Brothers. Legendary pop sci-fi author Robert Heinlein had used aliens going by this name in order to secretly spread Aleister Crowley's Thelemic teachings to the masses in his celebrated book Stranger In A Strange Land and we in turn would use the Trojan Horse of hip hop in order to seed the VDO audio virus as far and as wide as we could before anyone put 2 and 2 together and realized exactly what kind of avant garde acidhead subversives that they'd unexpectedly and unintentionally released into pop culture.

Since the Italian magazine Blow Up unveiled this hidden part of our history in the biggest possible way by headlining the article that they ran about VDO a few issues back with this info (a .pdf scan of the article with some personal annotations via the Italian friend of ours that initially scanned this for us can be had here ) we're now making available four 30 second samples of our work as Dirty South gangsta rap producers during this time (we'd offer whole tracks, but we're contractually bound from doing that), though it seems worth putting these out there now just to see how much amusement, confusion and shattered illusions we can generate with one gesture! You can check out what VDO hip hop sounds like here

And since we have, for no good reason, shared our recently created video for the first track from Vas Deferens Organization's Eye Peels & Brain Picks ("Defenestration At The Gravity Pit") everywhere else but here, it seemed time to plant this here as well for the edification of those who didn't happen across it via Altered Zones, Youtube or elsewhere

JUST A SMALL SHOUT OUT TO OUR FRIENDS AT ALTERED ZONES AS THEY TRANSFORM THEMSELVES INTO AD HOC

And a pointer in this direction to make note of their future home early next year. Expect to see some very interesting developments emerging from these quarters after they reconstitute themselves.

V/A-ITALIC ENVIRONMENTS-PROJECT BY NICOLA FRANGIONE, LP, 1985, ITALY

Conceived and curated by the Italian multi-media artist, activist and organizer Nicola Frangione, Italic Environments involves Frangione supplying a host of fascinating fellow Italian avant gardists of the era with suggestive location recordings of specifically Italian environments for them to integrate into their work. Former Futuro Antico member Ricardo Sinigaglia's contribution (in concord with one Mario De Lio) begins the proceedings here in high fashion (REALLY high fashion) with a very subtle but intense foray into resonant drone and emotionally intoned vocalizing that's very much an after effect of Franco Battiato's influence, though Battiato was never accompanied by a lake full of quacking ducks. Piermario Ciani is up next blathering away through what sounds like one of those electronic larynx's provided to throat cancer patients to the accompaniment of spare and fragmented free jazz nudges from sax and drums before building up to a sudden and unexpected head of steam and barreling through a hectic Etron Fou Leloublan-like passage of infolding avant rock tumble.
Arpa Celtica Vincenzo Zitello rounds out the A side with some very proto new age-y harp, hand drum and rainstorm sonics. Naif Orchestra begin side B by latching onto a pass of buried crowd noise and building a slight synth pop track on top of it rather arbitrarily before Franco Ballabeni wheels into frame with a contribution that's consistently lapped by Frangione's recording of splashing water, into which he situates some very ZNR-like passages of pensive piano and wheedling synth, while Giovanni Fontana seems to be running several recordings of bebop jazz ensembles simultaneously with little detectable accompaniment from Frangoine's recordings and little individual gravity to speak of, though it makes for a head scratching album closer to be certain.

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MINOY-PASSAGE OF THE MIGRATORY BIRD, CDR, 200? (RECORDED: 1987), USA

Swimming in an ocean of his signature cheap Radio Shack reverb and queasily modulating ham radio emissions, this is another lost monument of subterranean 80's tape culture electronic investigations from one of its most reliably excellent and significantly overlooked practitioners and a follow up to my post of his Pretty Young Negro Man tape some time ago. This Torrence California based marginal was a somewhat ubiquitous presence at one time on the sub-underground cassette network during the 80's and early 90's, often working in collaboration with a array of other networkers of that era, though there has always been an elegance and grasp of the macro/micro to Minoy's own work that makes it readily stand apart from others probing around in this soupy post industrial arena; Minoy's recordings having an intuitive grasp of manipulating the minutiae of shortwave-based (and shortwave bathed) sonics in a way that surpasses John Duncan's investigations into this realm of ghosted sound manipulations to these set of ears.

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TRUBROT-LIFUN, LP, 1971, ICELAND

Massive and totally drugged psych/prog brilliance from the early 70's Icelandic underground (yes, they had one too) with an almost absurdly wide remit and a capacity to spin on a dime and confound expectations. This blasts out of the gate on a thundering roar of acid wah-d psychotropic thuggery ala Yeti-era Amon Duul 2 before the clouds part and the voice of a hippy god resonantly intones pearls of cosmic inanity over a bed of meditational flutes and loudly throbbing hearts to significantly brain frying (and Don Robertson-like) effect. If this doesn't grip you by the short hairs, you're dead from the neck up or hate hippies, 'cause this shit is kissing the great cosmic beyond with some real throbbing intensity. Theirs is an often elaborately orchestrated sound redolent of everything from the symphonically bathed UK proto prog of Spring and Czar and the starry-eyed and Crosby, Stills and Nash-indebted early era of Yes to segments of maximal dancing fluti-ness and sharply chiming keys that exhibit an almost Italian library music-like angle ala something like Braens Machine while other passages of dead sharp pop prog tactics summon comparisons with Vangelis' old prog band Aphrodite's Child's and their seminal double album 666.

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INSTANT MUSIC-S/T, 10", 1980, GERMANY

Delicately percolating Neue Deutsche Welle loveliness with a distinctly bare bones and naif touch that dovetails insistent bass themes with cheap rhythm box bonk and sweet female blather toward ends that exhibits both a hangover from The Young Marble Giants and a direct line of investigation to tactics later pursued by France's X-Ray Pop.

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KLANGWART-INKIEK, 3" CD, 1997, GERMANY

The duo of Timo Reuber (whose solo debut "Anna" remains one of the high water marks of turn of the century German electronica) and Staubgold label boss Markus Detmer, this debut 3" CD EP of theirs shimmers, tingles and statically hovers with an aerated spectrality and prickly grace. Comprised of two 10 minute tracks, the eponymous opening number immerses the listener in a bath of the above mentioned, as evanescent tendrils are sent out to glisten in the dew of the dawns light, while Utkiek rolls in on a tide of frequency rich narcotic lather before subterranean caverns of pressure and post industrial signifiers begin to creep to the fore.

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