event horizon

Cassette released by Tailnia

"Noises, words, and sound of indeterminate origin traveling in time and space of seems to be an on-going concern of San Francisco audio collagist S. Glass. They jump, flicker, rebound, ooze, and disintegrate across and around the audio field like bits of overheard gossip. Pacing, texture, and point-of-view are all over the place, and yet the two 20-minute tracks, plus the second in a series of short Fluxus actions, are assembled with deliberateness. Non-Disclosure Agreement might be insane but it’s not irrational." c40

Stream or download here.

2xCD coming September 17 on Nyahh

“I like to think I’m good at petting animals, that dogs and cats alike recognize me as a master fondler. Only a few seconds in the lap of S*Glass has fully disabused me of this. I could never pet as I have just been pet, involuntarily twisting and gnurling my head trying to get each sound sunk further into my skin, my surrender is immediate. Beyond timing, past masterfully braided timbres, the six sides and hundred-twenty-eight minutes of Posterior Vitreous Detachment aren’t just gorgeous musically, they are the lost sound library of Alexandria itself, an indefatigable degustation, squirming sushi along an undulating conveyor one glutting morsel climbing onto another, the eaten eating, a rising gorge of nascent hunger so that somehow you have room for it all. Have I been seduced, educated and nourished, or is this a fattening for slaughter? My attention clawfights in panic but my fears seem to shape the music as it parries, distracting me with meek yowls turned yawns rolling me right onto my back. I’m done for.

“It must be like this for pets, the very notion of interspecies-massage a bewildering revelation, the genre of rudderless molestation to which submission is requisite. Holding boundaries is key to fondling, that’s what sets it apart from mere fucking. It’s how S*Glass sustains twenty-minute tracks without once tiring or sating or abusing your supple insides. Restraint his secret. Then admitting sampled speech, he sets your leg spasming at the phantom itch of language context. But it’s gone just as quickly, mind’s fading laugh, oh then back again! And gone. 

“Hang on one second, though, just between we housebroken our actual last shred of dignity is at stake. What is happening to us? This fucking artist pieces music together from silent scavengery. Found objects fleeing a burning field, he spots each with a falcon’s eye, neatly picked off he tucks them in their place, adorning a monstrous nest. His pupils are full of scenes we’ll never see for all the choking smoke. Search your thoughts as you listen and you’ll find you simply aren’t there. This is demonic music, a hologram in sound and sense, the parergon unseen, flushing us out. I had to trot away awhile, lick at my whiskers puzzling over track titles, sniff at what the hell Harry Crabb Tunnel might be, find my nearest internment camps, remember playing marbles in a pool of poison mercury the neighbor kid had broken out of his mom’s thermometers. Be myself for a minute. Beyond sensory immersion there are conceptual analogs to all these tracks as wide in sweep as the sound and timbres are deep in fathom. You’ll feel but never know them. “Video soundtracks volume one,” it says. I’m shivering. Which way back in?

“Are there even any instruments, or none? All you can do is climb toward lap, look into the face of this incalculable dimension, hope it returns a glance, trying your best for neoteny so it won’t snap or worse ignore you! Hope the world keeps communicating its dimension, keeps probing you through the epidermal veil, hope for a buzzing plane above, distant screams of strangers behind, unstartable motors, raving expectorations, yes, tuneless ragtime against a churchsteeple carillon, ache for a rusted car door, radio sizzle, divingboard rebound, stammering phonemes. What does it want? What is wanting?

“I know myself now to be a sensory hack, a subspecies pretender, a stoner in a World’s Best Dad hat, stupefied parasite of a terrible magnificence, humiliating myself to return to that human throne then shooed onto the floor. I’ll learn to rollover, I will. I’ll pay triple for this double album, I’ll lift my hairy paw and press play once more. If you try to join me here I’ll scratch your eyes out, back off!”

—pHarmar Histamine

CD coming in November on OCOMM

“The five track titles here could pass for the lineup of a midnight shorts screening at the Fresno Film Festival. They are words of haunting — as are the source materials this San Francisco-based sound collagist excavates. The hopeful living, recorded in the 1970s and long since discarded, trapped inside media, on tapes no one can even play anymore. Their anger is justified: the promises made to them were smokescreens, lies. Glass releases these voices back into the air. Some are still legible. Others have nothing left to give but the sounds of the body, and a final exhale.” —Petra Zélie

CDR released by l'Esprit de l'Escalier

Perched like a weathered gargoyle ruminating behind a hideous, undiagnosed nutjob glare, this batch of grating, surrealism-ravaged sound collages and bent audio blurt arrives on the 130th anniversary of the birth of F. Bushnell Tanks, director of silent films A Girl Called Minusha and The Lady In The Filing Cabinet, whose star Irene Gordon-Pheldt is depicted on the front cover. Contains two live recordings (from Wednesday Night Live on KZSU in Stanford, another from Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland), plus two homemade beauty massacres from the Day Three of Dead Bats on The Porch sessions (for frappéd electronics and boomer delirium, respectively), and the third in a series of paper towel dispenser Fluxus actions. 

“Master class, rapier sharp sound collage works out’ve his bamboo shed behind the grove of Paw Paw trees”— SimonGarfunkle 

Download or stream at Bandcamp, order discs from Tedium House or Chocolate Monk

LP reissue by Minimum Table Stacks.

Originally released in 2012 to coincide with Glands of External Secretion’s third-ever live appearance (at Trapdoor Fucking Exit, a performance series connected to Helga Fassonaki’s Touching Them Touching You - A Love Song for the Dead C), Unexplained Bite Marks took place on May 20, 1994, at legendary subterranean niteclub The Purple Onion, in the Chinatown / North Beach district of San Francisco, where a loveable maniac by the name of Tom Guido held court whenever and with whomever he wanted. Michael Morley (of The Dead C and Gate) happened to be in town, and Margaret Murray of U.S. Saucer (and Manning’s Truth Walks In Sleepy Shadows album) never refuses a challenge, so this utterly impromptu occasion also marked the first and only time Glands of External Secretion was a quartet. The raw and monolithic result is loud, distorted, saturated and more obscured by murk than The Loch Ness monster on a menopausal rampage. Mastered by Weasel Walter. Wrap-around poster-style cover in generic MTS jacket, hand stamped labels, postcard. Edition of 200

Cassette released by Un Poco Fría

“Big Mother in Tunisia” b/w “Block Captain.” Objects, violin, Optigan, loops, location recordings, electronics, fails videos, thrift store cassettes. Includes booklet. c40

“Acceptable.” —Haadjins

Stream for free or download here. Order tapes from Big Cartel or Tedium House.

CDR released by l'Esprit de l'Escalier

Nauseating shards epoxied into three 20-minute sound collages — one mixed live on the air at KZSU in Stanford, plus two studio monstrosities, scarred by sharp-edged distortion, crushed by abstract oppressionism, riddled with harsh sentencing. Also includes "Senior Prom #1 - Oberlin," the first in a series of paper towel dispenser Fluxus actions for Leo Dilloway

Download or stream at Bandcamp, order discs from Tedium House or Chocolate Monk

CDR released by l'Esprit de l'Escalier

Dull scrape is valorized on the opening track “Pelvic Bowl of the Common Hippo,” recorded live on the air at KZSU, Stanford, where amplified cabbage strafes a listless murk that overflows with pulverized calcium. “Please Vote Lexi Carter Thump Queen” milks the subconscious panic and despair from rural beauty contests and replaces them with psyops yoga. “All String, No Pearls” is a new soundtrack for student performance art duo Maria Callous’s recently unearthed script, the writing of which was triggered 45 years ago by psylocybin and the paddle-ball barker in the 1953 horror film House of Wax, while “Original Soundtrack Recording to PJ Cramer’s Meet Me At Agnew’s Grave,” despite a title that references a non-existent movie, is an anthem for all territories that cannot be colonized or annexed. Closing out the ordeal is a kind of secular exorcism, or what dry drunks call “a Burmese meltdown” — judgmental, shrill, loaded with blurry resentment. Wicked fine.

Download or stream at Bandcamp, order discs from Tedium House or Chocolate Monk