ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

Due to some very serious personal and family-related issues that I've been confronting, Mutant Sounds will now be placed on hold for the time being. All the older texts and all links attached to the new and authorized files from the last few months' posts will remain, but Mutant in its current incarnation will cease operations. Instead, what will follow at the (to be determined) time when activities re-start will be a revival of Mutant in an entirely new format as an internet radio show.

Until then, thanks to all of you for all the years of support and patronage.

Eric

About Eric's absence...

Greetings, this is Matt from Vas Deferens Organization. I just want to let everyone know that Eric's been away from posting due to some unexpected family-related drama, but he'll be back to his posting on Mutant in about a week.

MUTANT UPDATE AND MICHAEL ALAN & VDO RELATED NEWS

So hello to you all and thanks for your patience. I'm just back from working on the next two Vas Deferens Organization projects in California, which is why there's been a lapse here on Mutant, but new posts should hopefully appear within a week or so now that I can devote myself again to Mutant related activities.

Until then and if you're in New York next week, please don't miss the chance to take in VDO collaborator Michael Alan's performance at the Brooklyn's New Museum's Untapped street festival. This takes place in Manhattan on May 4th from noon to 4 PM at Sara D. Roosevelt Park, a bacchanal that'll include music from our collaboration with him. This album (Michael Alan Alien & Vas Deferens Organization-All You Can Eat) is now set for release as an LP later in the year via Beta-Lactam Ring Records  (specifics forthcoming later). In the meantime, you can check out one final brief advance track to whet your appetite Here  The three earlier advance tracks we posted can be found on the links list on the bar to your right.

Also scheduled for release later in the year on Beta-Lactam Ring Records will be the three way collaboration between Vas Deferens Organization, Sound and French Art Brut RIO mutants La Societe Des Timides A La Parade Des Oiseaux, whose cassette EP you can download below.

CHANGE OF PLANS RE MUTANT AND THE FMA

After much discussion and debate, it became clear to both the Mutant brain trust in VDO and to WFMU that the particular requirements of the creative commons licensing used by the FMA would be too complex and slow down the process of getting material posted on Mutant too much to make sense in our unique case. Mutant and WFMU still have plans in the works for future activities together, but for now, the files that we share will remain housed on our own Dropbox accounts, and as with the first set of posts on the new Mutant, only be shared after gaining the clearance of the artist(s) involved.

LA SOCIETE DES TIMIDES A LA PARADE DES OISEAUX-UN OBJET DE PLAINE, TAPE, 1995, FRANCE

An artfully arranged fracas of pantomimes, pirouettes and prankish raspberries blown in the face of polite good taste, La Societe Des Timides A La Parade Des Oiseaux (translation: Shy Society At The Bird Parade, or La STPO for short) are longstanding arbiters of the far flung French musical fringe. Since 1984, and across many shifting line-ups, they've established a musical voice that takes the effervescence and sly asymmetries of French R.I.O. architects like Albert Marcoeur and Etron Fou Leloublan and refracts them through the lens of both eruptive Pere Ubu-like post punk and the kind of Art Brut song form deconstructions proposed by labels like Ayaa and DDAA's Illusion Productions. The resulting all-knees-and-elbows thrust and parry is then used as a springboard for the glossolalian attack of vocalist Pascal Godjikian and his repertoire of alternately blustering, simpering, hectoring, cajoling and capering histrionics.

La STPO are in fact one of the groups that I'm most happy to finally be able to bring to your willing ears, as their dislike of compressed audio has now been surmounted by my offering to share this cassette EP of theirs in .WAV format. The document at hand, Un Objet De Plaine was issued on cassette by Prikosnovenie in advance of their release of STPO's remarkable Les Explositionnistes CD and features an alternate version of its opening track, "Dada Max Stellt Loplop Vor". Full disclosure: La STPO have been involved in a recently completed three-way collaboration with both my ongoing band Vas Deferens Organization and my one-time outfit Sound that's been some 13 years in the making, so I'm hardly a neutral third party in my endorsement of their music.

Get it Here 

YETI-THE MAN WITH THE LAMP, ONE-SIDED LP, 2006 (RECORDED: 2000), USA

It's with great pleasure and some reverence that I'm finally bringing to you this extraordinary recording. With both keyboardist Doug Ferguson and bassist Tommy Atkins now having departed this earth (a sadly all too common occurrence in our musical circles), founding Yeti member and current half of Pinkish Black Jon Teague has agreed to let me share this remarkable recording with you.

Formed on the heels of Doug's departure from the temporarily dis-banded Vas Deferens Organization circa 1998, Yeti was the ultimate vehicle for realizing Doug's grandiose avant prog visions. While Ohm had served as his conduit for his cosmic improvisations and Vas Deferens Organization a means for him to express his most outlandish visions, it was with Yeti that Doug truly came into his own as a composer. To the accompaniment of a bulldozing rhythm section  rendered acres wide with fuzz and distortion and the surprisingly shaded interventions of guitarist Eric Harris, Doug would let rip with barrages of minor key organ and string synth menace laced with synthetic hailstorms from his Wakeman-worthy banks of keys. All of this was the result of Doug having internalized the deepest dimensions of avant prog in general and Zeuhl in particular; specifically that most anguished dimension of it articulated by the Magma of De Futura and even more specifically Shub Niggurath, who'd take this genre it to its most harrowing and soured extremes. With the assist of his Fort Worth pals, who'd been steeping in this stuff with him, though approaching it from a background more based in in hardcore, Yeti's dystopian vision was brought to life.

They would emerge fully formed with their debut outing "Things To Come" and after Doug's tragic death in 2002, Jon, Eric and Tommy would carry on as a power trio on 2004's "Volume, Obliteration, Transcendance", but the Doug era was considered to be a closed book until the emergence of this 18 minute epic, issued on a one-sided LP in 2006. The source recording for The Man With The Lamp was offered to my bandmate Matt Castille from Vas Deferens Organization by Doug to see if the rehearsal room recording from which it stems could in any way be salvaged by Matt's magic.  The Man With The Lamp was a career high for them as a composition but it was also, having only been recorded as a private rehearsal jam, a pretty rough and murky document and required a substantial sonic overhaul from Matt to bring it up to releasable level, if not perfect clarity. What results is one of their most monolithic and crushing recordings, leavened with some of their most delicate shadings and ensconced in a VDO production patina.

This recording also exposes a hidden dimension of VDO's productions, in that this was but one of three dark avant prog recordings from the era that we produced. Expect to discover more from this universe once our productions for PrimitivEcho and Coprolingus eventually see the light of day.

Get it Here 

DECIMUS-TEMPLUM, PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED, 2012, USA

No-Neck Blues Band member Pat Murano just offered up something very special as a follow-up to my post of NNCK's Furamingo Josei album. On his own, Pat's been  issuing a prolific stream of levitation and/or disintegration-inducing electronic work under the Decimus handle, with some nine LP's, 3 tapes and 2 CDR's to show for it so far. I enthused about this work in a piece I penned for Ad Hoc last year and so it's a particular pleasure to be able to offer not just an exclusive new Decimus recording but one that I think of as being among his best. Pat's musical activities have threaded though several different mystery schools over the years, from his longstanding parallel work in K Salvatore to current activity alongside Sightings' Mark Morgan in Key Of Shame and Digitalis head honcho Brad Rose in Safiyya, but Decimus is his primary conduit to convey his preternatural electronic vision. Across Templum's six sections, fragments of recondite rituals escape like opiated gas through tar pit bubbles and telekinetic surges of astral energies become ensnared in perilous gravitational pools. 

Get it Here

THE ASTRONAUTS-IN DEFENSE OF COMPASSION, LP, 1989, UK

This long-standing UK cult band whom much was shared by in our previous incarnation offered a unique vision of free festival freak rock. In their distinctive iteration, it was tempered by instincts that place them as close to the sort of shambolic DIY post punk of Instant Automatons as it did to anything beloved by caravanning crusties. Like the Instant Automatons, The Astronauts also orbited the axis of and participated in the free gigs put on by Fuck Off Records, the squirrely DIY imprint run by key UK free festival operative and Here And Now member Kif Kif Le Bateur. This particular trajectory of crusty hippie to crusty punk would underpin a lot of key UK fringe praxis over time from The Cardiacs to Crass and The Astronauts vision of this impulse is a central one.

Looking like Hawkwind roadies and playing like punks during their gigs, their scrappy DIY veneer is beautifully frayed at the seams, revealing the hippie ethos underpinning it.  This tension was particularly evident as their studio efforts, which, since their debut EP in 1979 have matured step by step to reveal ever more deftly deployed folk and pop arrangements. In Defense Of Compassion was their fifth outing and it perfectly captures this lot at the peak of their peculiar powers and in an unusually production-rich setting for them. On In Defense Of Compassion, they nimbly shift from fizzing synths over garage rock motifs to drugged surf music and from reverb drenched world music mutations to mordant folk dirges, climaxing with a career besting 9 minute folk psych epic. Thanks to both Joe Davin of The Astronauts and Acid Stings Records for making this share possible.

Get it Here  

WELCOME TO THE NEW MUTANT

And so we're off with this first batch of goodies for the faithful. As noted in the texts, these have gone up on my own dropbox in advance of officially putting pen to paper with the FMA, as they were promised this week. Off to your right you will now see both the new Mutant Sounds/VDO twitter feed and links to visit and download all the VDO and VDO-related posts, which are the only remaining older posts of ours to feature active links.

BRAD LANER-MICRO-AWAKENINGS, PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED, RECORDED: 2004-2009, USA

Though never realized in its originally proposed incarnation as a double LP set earmarked for our old label Free Dope And Fucking In The Streets (the precursor to our current Puer Gravy imprint) for reasons to complicated to entail, this remarkable outing from trans-generational underground music icon and Mutant fixture Brad Laner (Medicine, Steaming Coils, Savage Republic, Electric Company and about 100 more since 1982) has now been green-lit to share with you in an awesome gesture of Mutant solidarity from Mr. Laner. 

Originally laid out in suite formation, these pieces have now been re-imagined as 61 inter-linked but free standing musical mosaic tiles, with Micro-Awakenings fragmented approach to the art of composition extending back to the de-centered and jarring acidhead disjunction of The Faust Tapes, one of Brad's key childhood influences. Fast forwarding through several decades that have taken him from the furthest flung fringes of L.A. Free Music Society freak culture marginalia to the epicenter of indie scene reverence via his legendary noise pop unit Medicine before venturing off into the hinterlands of left-field electronica, Micro-Awakenings utilizes this cellular song format to create something part kaleidoscopic tapestry and part Rube Goldberg contraption. A million thanks to Brad for offering up this treasure chest to share with you!

note: In order to get my initial posts up by the end of the week as promised, I've decided to hoist these first three files on my own dropbox account and then migrate them over to the FMA later, once the i's are dotted and the t's crossed in setting everything up with them.

Get it Here

PHILIP SANDERSON & VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION-"UPSTAIRS BACKWARDS", ADVANCE TRACK

One of the first fruits from the new and as-yet-untitled collaboration between Storm Bugs/Snatch Tapes mastermind Philip Sanderson and Vas Deferens Organization, the band in which I work, "Upstairs Backwards", subtitled "Drums in the Sanctuary (Abandoning The Office - She Descends Into The Underworld)" is VDO assisted by "The Lundon Physician" as he lovingly vivisects our work and teases the results into a series of wide-angle tracking shots.

note: In order to get my initial posts up by the end of the week as promised, I've decided to hoist these first three files on my own dropbox account and then migrate them over to the FMA later, once the i's are dotted and the t's crossed in setting everything up with them.

Get it Here  

NO-NECK BLUES BAND-FURAMINGO JOSEI, PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED, USA, 200(?)

Since their first recorded output wafted up through the cracks in 1995, NYC's No-Neck Blues Band have been acting as a collective diving rod; tapping an arcane and wizened old vein of outsider musical research and group-mind action that extends in an erratic line out from the sort of heavy-lidded shambolic summonings of Krautrock-associated improvisors like Limbus 3/Limbus 4 and more acid rock-based but too-stoned-to-hold-it-together exploits of Siloah, threads its way forward to the collapsing psych improvs of 80's German marginals Heavy Kremls & The White House Devils and Blumen Des Exotischen Eises and eventually winds up as a template for the more hirsute and mind-altered breeds of contemporary free music action. Their tangible aura of otherness would eventually lead them to collaborations with the Krautrock visionaries in Embryo and productions helmed by Jerry Yester for John Fahey's Revenant label. Heard here in their natural habitat on this exclusive archival post for Mutant (likely recorded sometime in the mid 2000's around the time they made Qvaris, according to NNCK's Pat Murano), their assembled id is spilling out of them like frankincense-soaked silly string sprung from their collectively trepanned third eyes, as erratically respirating freeform freakouts and lumbering ragas disintegrate and spontaneously re-assemble amidst dense thickets of percussive clatter.

Note: In order to get my initial posts up by the end of the week as promised, I've decided to hoist these first three files on my own dropbox account and then migrate them over to the FMA later, once the i's are dotted and the t's crossed in setting everything up with them. 

Get it Here