SC Distributon

This self titled release could be considered Adrian Orange's first ?deliberate’ album. After touring the country in 2006 with a massive band in two vans (including children and horn players and official dancers) and inventing a new kind of music and living, the band re-materialized in Dub Narcotic Studio in February 2007. The studio is an amazing collection of equipment from an era when recordings were made "live", everything happening on the spot, which was perfect for this new kind of tidal wave. It’s the perfect combination of beautiful accident and deliberate symphony.

The All Girl Summer Fun Band Make a Joyful Sound! Kim, Ari, Kathy and Jen (also of our lovely Softies) have come together forming a powerful pop majesty. Dream girl mod action recorded at the Dub Narcotic studio, it’s the ultimate in groovilicious guitar wonder-chimes. There are elements of girl group, punk and Britpop; long distance boyfriends, oversized cel phones and cars that don’t start. Confectioary Grrr Grrr Grrr.

What started years ago during a heat wave to pass the time, has blossomed into a full on pop and roll extravaganza. Portland, Oregon’s All Girl Summer Fun Band are back with their second K Records release, “2". And they’ve got something new for you up their sleeves. While their first album (All Girl Summer Fun Band, February 2002) left you swooning with hearts in your eyes, and received rave reviews from pop critics and rock journalists, who compared them to The Shangri-La’s, The Shirelles, and all things sugary, AGSFB now take the “girl group” to a new level. With confidence, the girls attack classic vocal harmonies, pairing them with distorted guitars and pop-punk melodies, to produce an album so full of hits, you’ll need a corner man to patch you up between tracks. Kim Baxter (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Jen Sbragia (vocals, guitar), Kathy Foster (drums, bass, vocals), and Ari Douangpanya (bass, drums,vocals) flex their musical muscles with catchy rock numbers like “Ticking Time Bomb”, “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Troublemaker”, “Becky”, and “Tour Heart Throb”; and then pour on the sweetness with caramelized pop hits like “Video Game Heart”, “Parallel Park” and “Jason Lee”. This 30-minute dance party will leave you breathless and sweaty - hook after hook, AGSFB pull you into the closet to make out and tell you they love you. Throw it in the mix with The Breeders, The Ronettes, Tiger Trap, Sleater-Kinney and The Runaways, and it will hold its own. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll dance, you’ll sigh. And when its over, you’ll dive to hit the play button on your stereo one more time to keep that hyper-sweet feeling of nostalgia going as you giggle into the mirror at the hickey on your neck. All Girl Summer Fun Band is still here to save you from the seasonal doldrums with their fresh new look at pop music, only this time, they’re not asking, they’re telling. Uh-huh, that’s right!

Inspired by Bollywood, a trip to Morocco, and Serge Gainsbourg, Angelo Spencer’s second full-length World Garage [KLP235] brings armloads of new instruments and the flavor of exotic locations to a compilation of songs that amount to more than just an album, but an experience of wildness

“My Music is My Sweat” began with a conversation between Karl Blau and Angelo Spencer about how music is similar to body odor and, like everyone’s stench, one’s music is also unique and identifiable. Angelo’s music is as raw as sweat. Recorded in one day, on one take by Blau, this 7” is a puddle of twitchy urgency. Generally a one man band, this recording is fleshed out with frantic drum fills and fidgety keys by L’Orchidee d’Hawaii soon after they finished a tour with Spencer. “My Music is My Sweat” is the sprint and “The Great Salt Lake” is the cool-down, exasperated pause needed to sprint and sweat again; embellished with distant whistling ? like the playful intermission of a spaghetti western ? and Spencer is the wandering hero. “Music should always be like that.”

“L’Argent” [IPU131] is the second collaboration between Angelo Spencer et L’Orchidee d’Hawai resulting in a 45 rpm double-sider for the International Pop Underground series of 7” records. Although there is a Side A and B, “L’Argent” is really one song; this is a single that can’t be left idle ? tend to it like a fire. “Part I” contains the voice of Angelo Spencer, it is calm and gently awakens you from a slumber, the urging guitar providing a tingle in the hands. “Part II” follows with a procession of handclaps, stringy guitars, a totemic drum and an echoplex that unspools like the celluloid at the end of the reel. Closed eyelids filled with spinning light, “L’Argent,” is a vinyl Dream Machine.

Similar to works by such instrumental groups as The Shadows and The Ventures, Angelo Spencer et Les Hauts Sommets illustrates the potential of the guitar; how it can be played and bent to influence accompanying instruments. Angelo Spencer is self taught, but aside from his one-man band performances, he has never played guitar in a band before. On this album his guitar creates the wavering tempo for accompanying echoplex, bass clarinet, keys, bells, bass drum, handclaps, shenhai and shakers. Arrington de Dionyso (Old Time Relijun), Karl Blau and Clyde Petersen (Your Heart Breaks) were called to Olympia, Washington to contribute extra instrumentation as Les Hauts Sommets and set the scene. Because Sergio Leone has already passed it is a soundtrack to an unmade, never dreamed of movie. A village is burned. A nameless drifter has undetermined motives. A town celebrates his arrival. The unfolding drama happens within the mind of the listener. Les Hauts Sommets is an homage to that special moment when someone hears a soundtrack that is so wild and dissimilar to what’s been heard before that it helps them create their own story and hero from the music.

Some artists push the envelope, Arrington de Dionyso eats the envelope and spits out an origami of sound.Malaikat Dan Singa is a collection of throbbing, hallucinogenic, trance-inducing trans-utopian cosmic post-punk sounds from Old Time Relijun’s Arrington de Dionyso. Never one to compromise in pursuit of his twisted visions of the future of music, de Dionyso not only rattles listeners with heavy grooves but he also sings every song on this album in Indonesian, with some of the lyrics being lifted from the poems of William Blake and passages from The Zohar. Malaikat Dan Singa is an album of translated and personal mysticism that sounds like it was dug up from the Earth. Although there is a familiar (drums, bass, guitar) and foreign (bass clarinet, throat-singing, echoplex) rhythm -- with a mixture of post-punk and Gamelan tendencies, Malaikat Dan Singa is really Future World Music. And you can dance to it.

I See Beyond the Black Sun pushes de Dionyso's previous solo album Breath of Fire (2006) from a charcoal sketchbook into a Technicolor landscape with more clarity, shape and definition. The album is structured with two immense bookends "AION" and "Pluto in Capricorn (I See Beyond the Black Sun)." "AION" creates a rhythmic drone that specifies the rules for movements of the melodies on the album in a convergent up and down scale ? continuing to climb the color spectrum ever so slowly. The gradient shift is deceptively hidden before exploding into color on the parenthetical title track. "Pluto in Capricorn (I See Beyond the Black Sun)" ? featuring a guest appearance by Old Time Relijun drummer Germaine Baca ? is the culminating catharticconclusion, a propulsive mythical beast that combines all the previous pieces into a new separate entity where sparks begin to rise. It is the crossing over and the release.

While Arrington's work with Old Time Relijun has brought much in the way of both critical praise and notoriety for ecstatic-rock deconstructions and a frenzied performance on the edge of possession, "Breath of Fire" is a very different sort of beast. Recorded on Christmas Day in a nameless town in Southern Italy, the album uses voice, bass clarinet, and jaw harps to invoke the spirits in a mind-bending ritual of technical mastery and emotional freedom. Like field recordings from a lost continent, these short pieces conspire to present a completely mysterious sound universe, unlike anything you may have heard before. To be sure this voyage is not without its reference points- fans of Old Time Relijun's live performances have longtime been aware of Arrington's multiphonic vocal research, unearthing the missing links between Tuvan throat-singing and free improvisation. In "Breath of Fire", this research is presented in its purest form- spontaneously, without overdubs or processing of any kind; an ethnography of intergalactic avant-primitive folk music, a dream diary without words, that enwraps in resonant sound.

Ever since Arrington de Dionyso cleared his throat and growled "I ate a hole right through the mirror/ Spat out the shards, and I put it back together" on the standout track "Mirror", his music has spoken to those lonely souls who have stared at themselves in the mirror and known that something lies on the other side, beyond their comprehension. The band Old Time Relijun formed in Olympia, Wash., in 1995 with bassist Aaron Hartman and drummer Bryce Panic, to take Arrington's four-track tapes that had been circulating and spooking people around Olympia, and to translate them into live performance. Since that time, the band has gone through various mutations, including a number of drummers (Phil Elvrum, currently of the Microphones, toured and recorded with Old time Relijun for several years after the departure of Bryce Panic), but the spirit of Arrington’s musical explorations and creative expression have remained constant. Unlike most releases that attempt to summarize a band and an era, Varieties of Religious Experience is not a clear-the-vaults effort, and the multiple takes are not filler; nor is their inclusion the result of an unchecked ego, intoxicated by its own brilliance, unable to edit itself. It would be equally wrong to suggest that Arrington's four-track takes are "originals", the band's versions are "alternates", and one is necessarily better than the other. While four-track enabled Arrington to cram songs full of esoteric sounds and a sheer ear-popping lunacy that can turn two minutes into kaleidoscopic trips, Hartman and Panic helped loosen his grip on the drum sticks, change up the whack-a-mole tempos, and let a song's backbone slide. Calling the result Varieties of Religious Experience emphasizes Arrington's belief that it's all good - every song is its own spark of playful, in-the-moment creation, its own shard of experience - and the remarkable thing is that all is good on this CD.

In December of 2001 Arrington de Dionyso and Aaron Hartman of (Olympia/K Record's Old Time Relijun) found themselves stranded in Milan during one of the worst snowstorms in Italian history. They were sheltered, fed, and protected by the auspices of two of the most notable figures in the Italian independent/experimental music scene- Fabio Magistrali and Jacopo Andreini. This album is the result of 18 days of practicing, performing, recording and mixing with a quartet that had never played together before, but found an instant chemistry in their mutual fervor and ferocity for the exploration of new musical territories. Some moments on this album will seem familiar to the rabid fans of Old Time Relijun in their off-kilter gumbofication of free-jazz intensity with "rock played wrong", while other pieces bring the quartet through even less easily definable non-clichés of free improvisation and new music experimentalism. There are no "songs", and none of the pieces on this record have titles. Little discussion took place before the recording of each spontaneous composition, yet the results are as cohesive and whole as any master expressionist canvas.

You know how in the 1950s the press and parents and such talked about how rock'n'roll had some evil, sexual, tribal force that was going to possess the youth? Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Singa is really that. Trance-punk dancehall explosion gonna knock you up! 2011! Formerly of Old Time Relijun, this is Dionyso's second Malaikat Dan Singa release, the lyrics for which are entirely in (self-taught) Indonesian. Fancy!

You may have experienced Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Singa as an unexpected live force, pushing up through the earth like daffodils in late winter; or maybe you're familiar with their previous exploits in the studio, Malaikat dan Singa [KLP215] and Suara Naga [KLP226], which burn clean with fragrant traumas. Open the Crown is similarly passion-filled, with new vistas (channeled hallucinations) exploring English (previously only the Indonesian language was employed) as their stomping ground to expand parallel themes anew. Open the Crown conveys tendrils of raw energy emanating from the head ? dream visions translated directly to audio outrage. Heavy. And sexy. To be expected from Arrington de Dionyso and his molten collection of Malaikat dan Singa who manipulate the "form'd and the formless" to create from within this broken system.