WOTZIT - Demo - Tape - 2016

    Believe or not, sometimes I don't have a story or the reference points or the "members of" list or anything to go on. Every once in a while, I just get a tape that makes me stop what I'm doing and pay attention. This is that tape. Sometimes, I just think "What if Fred Frith played guitar in a punk band?" and this is what I think about. This is the band's second tape. They're from Tokyo.

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Find other stuff by the band here 

RAW WAR - 2 Demos - Tape - 2010

    Sometimes a band exists in your region and you just never see them. Some people work too much. Some people just don't feel like going out to every show. Some people don't go to "those" shows. In my case, my best friend had cancer and I forgot how to interact with the world.
   Because of this, I know almost nothing about RAW WAR and these tapes came into my possession years after they broke up. I can enjoy them now and you can too. "Outfit" is carried almost entirely by one riff (until close to the end), but when the drum roll leads you to the bass line, you realize how sorely you've been missing that riff in your life (if you were, in fact, out of the loop like me). "Poster" has a call-and-response style vocal chant that always gets caught up in my head like an alternate universe "Steak Knife" (ANGRY SAMOANS). Everything about this band sounds so perfectly fucked...guitars on ten on a shitty amp...pounding dilapidated drum set....multiple singers who sound like they would kill you but kinda be bored while doing it. I don't know. Like I said, I was at home and didn't know how to live.
   This download contains both of their tapes. One has an alien on the cover and one does not. I'm not sure which one came first, but they mostly have the same songs on them...just different versions and recordings. It's all great.

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COUNTY Z / IMPRACTICAL COCKPIT - Split Cassingle - 2002

  Since the previous entry was so sprawling and featured 100 songs, I decided to keep this one short and sweet. These two bands are two of my absolute favorites of the late 90's and early 00's. They played beautiful and ugly music. It was produced by purely lovable dirtbags. I feel comfortable calling them that because one of the members recently told me "We were such fucking dirtbags." The shitty punk historians of the future won't write about COUNTY Z and IMPRACTICAL COCKPIT in their $100 coffee table art cubes (books won't exist). The noisers who write the history will only make a scant mention of them. That is fine. They probably don't give a fuck. All of these people are still active in art and music, creating work that is incredible and essential.

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I think this tape was created for one of their joint tours. Two songs. Less than two minutes of music.  

S.B.S.M. - "Bitter Ends" - Tape - 2014

   There's this thing that happens when you live in town long enough where everyone just assumes that you know everyone. This isn't true. I started hearing about S.B.S.M. around town. When I asked some friends about the band, they would just say "Oh, you know them...it's (these people) and they played that show at (venue I've never heard of) with (that one band everyone cares about but somehow I've never heard of them)" Well, it turns out that I work with a member of S.B.S.M. Oops.
   When I finally tracked down S.B.S.M., they were playing in a tiny basement in West Oakland. Their loud, cacophonous mess of sound was almost overwhelming in a way I haven't felt locally in a long time. The thing that really drew me to them, besides the fact that I was into their music, is that even though it's completely obvious that the three people in this band are very serious about what they do, they don't let that stop them from laughing it off when their broken equipment shorts out mid-song. One of them will use that as an opportunity to explain the song or tell you about an upcoming protest or talk about why they're playing that particular benefit show while the other members change out cables, tear apart wires and try to figure out what the fuck went wrong. And this is all so refreshing for me because I feel like we have entered a stage of punk (and this is just my perspective) where so many bands are trying to be perfect recreations of bygone eras or they're afraid to go out on limbs or they're trying to pose just right for that Instagram photo or whatever the fuck it is that people do. Many bands don't discuss their politics anymore or don't have any politics to speak of whatsoever, but when the whole fucking world is falling apart and there are rape apologists (and rapists) in your audience and cops are killing all the brown people they can possibly get away with and you feel like you're just gonna explode because you can't fucking take it anymore...just fucking talk about it!! Or just take your place in line (or the barstool) next to all the other soulless hardcore bands.

   The other reason I like them is that when they play the last part of ":Godzilla" live, it sounds like 30 bombs going off in a haunted castle nestled in a nightmare world.

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They're recording a new tape soon. 

VARIOUS ARTISTS - "Field Recordings From The Edge Of Existence. Vol 2" - Tape - 2013

   When I'm at my job, I rarely let down my guard to reveal details of my personal life to my co-workers because I feel like there's too many facets of it that are confusing or difficult to explain (I want to say that I also work with a lot of wonderful people who "get" me 100%. I have a lot of co-workers). For example, a nurse told me that she routinely spots me all over the city, riding my bike at all hours of the day. She explained, "I feel like I've seen you over 50 times in every corner of San Francisco, but you've never noticed that I'm in the vicinity." As I was coming to the end of a 12 hour overnight shift, I barely looked up from my paperwork and casually said, "I have to put on psychic blinders in this world to block out the constant barrage of bullshit so that I can continue to fool myself into believing that this city can be a beautiful and magical place." As those last words fell from my lips, I started to catch myself and glanced up to see the nurse looking both horrified and confused. I stammered "I'm...I'm sorry I didn't see you. Sometimes my best friends have to grab me to get my attention as I pass them on the sidewalk." It was too late. I revealed a little too much and that nurse gave me a look that simply said "Let's just not talk while I'm here, okay?"
   Sometimes, the blinders are on too much and I even miss the things that I should be looking out for. My friend Vanessa gave me a copy of her zine Asswipe (issue 5), which consisted mostly of interviews with Oakland bands that I had never heard of, even though I go to punk shows in Oakland regularly. I read through the interviews and felt all kinds of emotions. I was intrigued, annoyed, confused, enthralled and enlightened. Never bored. For the first time since living in the Bay Area, I felt completely and utterly out of touch with what was going on in a facet of the Bay Area punk scene. It was awesome. I think some people would take that as a sign to drop out or move on, but I found it to be exciting...like, there's still interesting and productive scenes thriving on the fringes. When I feel like I should take the blinders off, I think that maybe I should keep them on and venture further underground.
   I was handed this tape by Yacob in the backyard of an Oakland punk house and it showcases some of the bands talked about in Asswipe (p.s., one of the better Bay Area zines), as well as some non-local heavy-hitters. Almost everything on the tape was recorded live on a handheld tape recorder by Yacob in the Bay Area, so the sound quality is lo-fi (as hell) but still engaging in a totally fucked way. PATH OF RUIN start off the tape with a wild, noisy, violent stab of no wave and their recording trainwrecks into a live set by the BILL ORCUTT and JACOB HEALE DUO. Orcutt should be no stranger to any fan of noise and outsider sounds. The tape continues on with more harsh, (possibly) challenging recordings by KAREN, EXIT BAG, ETTRICK and more.
   Side 2 begins with a live recording of last year's phenomenal SF performance of SUN RA'S ARKESTRA led by Marshall Allen (I feel embarrassed now that I didn't include this on my year end top ten because it was one of the best, most transcendent musical performances I saw last year, by far) at the Victoria Theater in the Mission District. It's followed up by a free jazz performance by SF SOUND GROUP, who also played the ARKESTRA show. I liked the recording of them on this tape, but, honestly, I was unimpressed by their live presentation and spent their set drinking cheap beer on the corner of 16th and Mission while people-watching. I wish that this tape included the opening performance by HANS GRUSEL'S KRANKENKABINET, but this world is not perfect. The tape closes with the no-wavey improv (?) blanket of BAT MAGICK. Overall, this tape is challenging, interesting and does a phenomenal job of documenting the underside of the Bay Area's noise scene. Blinders on. Head down.

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Tape is not split into tracks...just side A and B, since everything runs together.

File is large. 203 mb.

I think this tape was released in an edition of 25, so it's probably gone. 

If you want to hear more from people involved in these projects, check out Albacore Records