LAZY MAGNET/SOCIAL JUNK "Split" c60 [Arbor]

I picked this up earlier in the year at a record swap of all places, along with a sick ass Occasional Detroit 7inch. My only experience with Lazy Magnet was 7 years ago when I was 15 and it was one dude with a guitar playing 40 second songs to a big old proto-drum machine/rhythm generator (the only song I remember started with "Fornicating on my neighbor's front law-awn"). Anyhow, their side on this tape sounds completely different from that. The single half hour track, which is dedicated to Work/Death, "Yet From the Highest Crown, No Blossom Fell" sounds a lot like what the cover looks like. Two people are credited with synth playing and that's what it sounds like dammit. It's a pretty sweet little suite though. Sometimes totally in a new agey, pure moods vein, other times it's more disruptive but mostly it sounds like a bunch of great early 80s synth scores that never were (the fact that this was recorded in "The Futuristic District" of Providence is spurring my imagination too.) I'm guessing this is improvised as it just drifts from part to part but it sounds pretty seamless with no lulls so they get an A+ in the not-wasting-(my)-time department. Good side.
So everyone knows how badass Social Junk is right? They don't care apparently, as they keep pumping out the jams like they got something to prove. The SJ side is split into 4 tracks "Fallout," "Terminal," "Lockdown," and "Days That Follow" so you know they got zombies or something on the brain. Swaggering forth with the John Carpenter of the new millennium vibe of the short first track, "Fallout" edges further towards the apocalypse. It's an excellent jam, simple, tense with a fantastic synth/vocal melody. I love cinematic music and this is completely satisfying my need right now. It's incredibly evocative and would work beautifully scoring any sort of slow-motion tragedy you could think of. Things are burning, people are fleeing and there's little hope in sight. That's my take on it anyhow. "Lockdown" is much more raw with a marching drum kit, echoing vocals and blasts of distortion. What happened during lockdown? Apparently, the two survivors, Noah Anthony and Heather Young, started band. Who knew this was an origin story? "Days That Follow" is steeped in static and synthetic crickets, a lone guitar slices up the barren landscape and Social Junk realizes it was actually a lot less depressing in lockdown. Killer music as usual from these guys.
An edition of 125 is sold-out, but this release seems inexplicably available at record swaps around the country, try there I guess? Good bang for the buck.
Lazy Magnet
Social Junk
Arbor

BUDWEISER SPRITE "Muculent Passage" C60 (OMS-B)FORM A LOG "Air Circus" C30 (I Just Live Here)

A C60 of straight noise does not always make me jump for joy, but what we have here is actually quite good. Budweiser Sprite is the one man band of Dan Rizer and he creates a massive sound. Not too massive, however, to take time for dynamic shifts and moments of (relative) peace. This tape is rather epic and has a real nice arc to it. There is some really great mixer greasing going on here, along with a sizable amount of four track crunching, a dash of knob twiddling and a heavy dose of psychedelic doom. It's been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture and this tape makes me dance about a dungeon ... a really fun dungeon that you will want to listen to again and again.


Form A Log is a Philadelphia super group (related projects: God Willing, Social Junk, New Flesh) and "Air Circus" is their third tape. The first one found them thrashing amiably and amateurishly on guitar/bass/drums. This is an entirely different beast. Each of the three members operates a four track tape player and little else, an instrumentation that seems so obvious in this day and age, but when I saw these guys a fortnight ago at the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange in Turners Falls MA, it was the first time I'd ever seen a band with that particular make up. The live set and the tape are remarkably similar so my impressions of the two blend together. Perhaps even more so than the Budweiser Sprite outing, this tape is very dynamic and displays a variety of forms of sonic trickery. The four track's ability to be used as a mixer or playback device, along with it's variable speed control give the musicians almost limitless freedom. Thing about it: three dudes = twelve tracks of insanity. Like all of I Just Live Here's releases, this looks very nice: a great screen print and a black and white insert with a poem by Alex Hampshire. The label's website (operated by Ren - God Willing) says there are only five copies left, so scoop this up soon!

oms-b.org
ijustlivehere.org

SOCIAL JUNK "untitled" (JK Tapes)

Ashland, KY's pride/joy are gearing up for a MASSIVE US tour and a relocation to KALI-FORNIA, so now is the time to recognize and give praise to Heather & Noah's years-running electronics miscellany mission under the Social Junk flag, and I recently dug out this old-ish C60 on JK Tapes and it's flooring me all over again. Such a broad planet of moods, instruments, tempos, intensities, layers, levels, etc. A genuinely perplexing band to pinhole or even explain, the breadth of terrain they cover is stunning. Subtle low-end loops rumble on concrete, distant sax blasts explode in the corners, hypnotic voices chant, ritual drumming marches into the foreground with a parade of emotive distortion, vibes transition from miserable to majestic in an instant, you get lost in the current of their ideas and tidal pulls and then look up and it's an hour later, the tape's over. This is another gem in the gold vault of SJ's ever-deepening discography. Pay attention soon.

SOCIAL JUNK / KRAKEN FURY (Husk Records)

Rough-and-tumble C40 by these two Southern death cult units that free-ranges from robotic lurch passages to banshee shriek electronics to cold computer numbness. Like a lot of Southern noise crews/projects of late, SJ and KF are both way too rambling and vibe-gambling to get pegged to any particular genre, and that’s obviously for the best. Social Junk’s side, in particular, is a totally puke-soaked rubik’s cube of outsider modes, morphing and brawling through radically different labyrinths of overdriven impulses, abused machines, and weird feelings. Aggressively unique with an intensity that’s either painful or the exact reason why they rule. Flip a coin. Kraken Fury I’ve never heard before, but their untitled piece of this puzzle is a pleasant enough practice space meditation with slow-walking bass lines, stutter drumming, guitar noodling, and some backwards-looping mist in the corners. Doesn’t seem too hell-bent on accomplishing anything, but that’s no crime. Kinda jazzy with a relaxed, “killing time” chill-out mood. Definitely no fury here, whether Kraken-esque or otherwise.

HEAD MOLT / SOCIAL JUNK (Teenage Whore Tapes)

Another whorish outing from the prolific haters at TWT. This one has a fat skeleton holding a cross on the cover and the Head Molt stuff is some of the grossest and least socially acceptable shit I’ve heard from them yet (which is saying something). Lots of repulsive noises and sputtering crap and then negative space zones littered with trash and echoes before the inevitable return to wretched white-faced screaming about hookers and the South Sandwich Islands. Social Junk, here, chase a slightly less aggro dragon. Their jam, “The New West,” is a fried, oddball junkyard of woozy feedback, jittery strings, and bizarre ESP percussion. There’s lots of stops, starts, and quiet parts, all steeped in tension and subliminal dread. Eventually they clatter things up into something like a climax, but it’s not nearly as straightforward-sounding as that. More great stuff from the Junk.

SOCIAL JUNK “Mirror Landscape” (Snakefork)

This metallic gold C12 by warped Kentucky electricians Social Junk is as great, nameless, and unique as anything else I’ve heard by ‘em. The A track is a hypnotic windswept steppe of blips, bloops, and purring electronics that ends far too soon, and the B is pretty similar, although some of the high plains drifting peaks at screechier frequencies, plus there’s some lonesome sax bleat and the echoing croak of what sounds like a pack of gargling frogs somewhere under a dock. Unclassifiable and visionary and a solid display of Social Junk’s impressive depth. Bonus/bummer: you gotta bust out a knife to play this CS, as it comes rope-tied to a chunk of oversize cardboard. Deal with it.