[Moshe]

 

Thanks for everyone's support at our SXSW Showcase. We had a blast. Here is proof.
(BTW: The beautiful Tyfus letterpress posters are still available on the website. )

Other News:
Awesome Color is going to be recording in April and then joining a very exciting recently announced tour in May.

Thurston Moore begins recording his solo record for Ecstatic Peace this month with John Agnello at J Mascis' studio in Amherst, MA.

Be Your Own Pet have written 11 new songs and are getting ready to record with Steve McDonald. Catch them out on tour with the Arctic Monkeys in May.

Wooden Wand's new album "James & The Quiet" produced by Lee Ranaldo is tentatively slated for June 12. A masterful piece of music. Love it, buy it!

Sunburned Hand of the Man's latest intoxication entitled "Z" will hit the streets April 24 along with "Throats" from the avant bagpiper David Watson. Get 'em while they're hot.

 

Pitchfork loves the Tall Firs..."its haunted solitude sounds great at night any time of year..."

Byron and Thurston's column Bull Tongue is alive and kickin on the Ecstatic peace website. Read issue number 26 here. Plans to post the entire back archive are in effect.

Look for a record early this summer from an amazing band called Turbo Fruits with Jonas and John from BYOP as well as Maxwell from Deluxxin.

In other BYOP news, Cheap Time, Jemina's band along with bo Jeffrey and a rotating bass staff have plans to release a full length on the garage rock powerhouse IN THE RED label. Hot shit. Not to mention a hot slab of self released noise wax by Nathan's Deluxinn called "Black and White". Ask him and he *might* sell you one.



Vinyl!! Less than 50 copies left of each of our latest vinyl offerings from Lambsbread, X.O.4, The New Blockaders, and Emil Beaulieau so pick them up while you can.

New Vinyl!!! A strong dose of noise from venus en route from the most amazing Leslie Keffer as well as a superb split offering from 16 Bitch Pile Up and Mike Shiflet. Both of these will shrivel and destroy and be available in limited quanitities. Pre orders will be available.

[SynthethicalY]

Thanks, I am expecting Thurston Moore's Album, and Be Your Own Pet.

[Everyneurotic]

cool, new byop! good to see they are blowing the artic assholes off the stage.

also excited for sunburned and 16 wench, thurston's album too.

[Bollocks_to_Pop]

Awesome. Looking forward to Thurston, Sunburned and Wooden Wand. 2007 doesn't seem to bad!

[greenlight]

nice pictures from sxsw showcase by the way.
Czech stop! when?

[val-holla-ing]

awesome!

[jon boy]

hooray and etc.

[Moshe]

http://noiseweek.blogspot.com/

Sunday, April 15, 2007

EMIL BEAULIEAU



In the fog of my time away, I accumulated many great recs that have sat in sad piles, begging to be cracked open and played. Last week I finally heeded the cries of

 

some Ecstatic Peace vinyl - mammoth sides from X.o.4, New Blockaders / Moore / O'Rourke, and Lambsbread - and they're all stunners, but the winner isEmil Beaulieau's Moonlight in Vermont. It's been so long since I checked in on Mr. B or anything RRR-related that I inexplicably thought his identity as RRR prez Ron Lessard was still a secret (was it ever?), but since about 200 sites mentioning it pop up via Google in seconds, I guess not. So, Emil=Ron, and also Emil=a noise lifer who's done enough amazing work on record and in his live, pink-shirt-and-tie guise to earn his own self-appointed mantle of "America's Greatest Noise." His sheer longevity would be enough to enshrine him, but the work has always been top shelf too.



Such is the case with Moonlight In Vermont, which I'd love to say ranks among his best stuff if
I could legitimately claim to have a decent handle on his catalogue. But KFW sez so, and I don't think you want to argue with that. Apparently this album has floated around as a CD-R since 2004, and was slated to get a Hanson matrix number at some point, but instead it's Emil's Ecstatic Peace debut, complete with one-of-a-kind Emil-made covers - you can see 272 of them here. Mine (see image above) is an excellent magik-markered defacing of an album of John F. Kennedy speeches (see orignal to the right). Individual covers are always a great idea, but even cooler w/this rec because Emil certainly put as much care and craft into Moonlight in Vermont's array of sounds and sequences as he did into each of the 300 covers.

There's nothing world-changingly new about what Emil's doing here, but that's kinda what makes it great - it's just pure, workman-like noise, way less concerned with being different than being thick, detailed, textured, interesting, and basically unbeatable. Each of the eight tracks pulls a subset of sounds from Emil's array of searing strikes, depth-charge bombings, sandpaper tears, high-end screeches, and more, then lines them up into shapes and patterns that sometimes attack, sometimes drift, sometimes bounce, sometimes even swell. If you wanna get classical about it, there's both a Non tint to Emil's rhythmic cutting, and a Merzbow smell to the burning tone of the noise, but I also hear some of what Carlos Giffoni's been doing lately, at least in terms of arrangement and sequencing. It's the way both CG and EB structure their noises into vaguely song-like skeletons without getting montonous or predictable, and still hang onto the essential abrasion and urgency of their noises. Those are pretty standard comparisons, but hopefully that's less about my lack of imagination than it is about Emil's ability to make great shit out of pretty familiar sounds.

The track below is a good, succinct example: traces of feedback and distortion spin around each other in smoky rings, until a surreal sub-beat emerges through the natural waves of Emil's brain-shaking discharges. I especially dig how this track (and others on the rec) can start to sound like a locked groove, an infinite loop of the same simple noise, yet just pay a little more attention and you can hear Emil's subtle variances and organic modifications adding density and color without calling attention to themselves, like an image photocopied over and over until its repetitive shapes slowly blur into abstraction.

[Moshe]

Sunburned News
Out today 4/11/07 Sunburned - The Pegadrift - Fuck It Tapes
The Pegadrift is a 30 minute burn zapped to cassette. theres only 80 of these so act fast. check with fuck it tapes because we don't have any for sale.

Sunburned & Circle recorded a collaboration in Finland last september and Conspiracy Records will be releasing this on both vinyl and cd sometime close to the european tour. more details later...

Z on Ecstatic Peace! is here at the HQ and can be yours, paypal $10 to sunburnedhand@gmail.com for postpaid shipping to the USA, outside the US paypal $16 dollars for postpaid International Airmail Delivery to anywhere in the world.

Job Alert: John Moloney will be taking over the Corsano / Gown Spot at Byron Coley's Ecstatic Yod which has been dormant for about a year. The store will be back online as soon as the new website is up, could be soon, could be later. . .

European Tour
We're coming back in september - scandanavia, benelux, germany, france, UK and maybe other places. Plan is for Sunburned - Hush Arbors to share some bills on the continent. more news as things develop.

Gown
Sunburned people will be playing as members of Gown opening for Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice April 25 - PA's Lounge - Somerville, MA & April 27 - Eagle's Nest - Northampton MA. Gown will be Gown - guitar, vocals. Taylor Richardson - drums. MJK - electronics. John Moloney - guitar.

[Moshe]

 

[RdTv]

thurston,sunburned,wooden wand....all sounding good

[PAULYBEE2656]

wooden wand new one real good...
sunburneds z real real good.....

new byop. yeah, kinda lookin forward to it, new hurston record, fuck yeah!

[Iain]

I haven't really got into the new Sunburned to be honest. I'm more looking forward to the thing with Kieran Hebden even though I don't really like Fourtet that much.

[val-holla-ing]

what thing with kieran hebden are you talking about?

[whorefrost]

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3559

Dusted Reviews


Artist: X.O.4
Album: Cataracts
Label: Ecstatic Peace!
Review date: May. 9, 2007

 

 

X.O.4 is Bill Nace, John Truscinski and Jake Meginsky, three chaps out in western Massachusetts who seem prepared to roll up curbside with pawnshop six-strings, a Fender Twin, and a few cymbals in the backseat ready to jam. Cataracts may not be their debut (who knows what sort of limited misshape preceded this), but as the first widely available side it’s a stunner presenting the trio as weathered auteurs of sound suspension. For those still bemoaning the passing of Paul Toohey’s Surface of Earth a decade back (or Thela for that matter), it’s finally time to move on.
X.O.4’s craft is rural strident drone; explicitly akin to a hand-crafted, workmanship aesthetic than an embossed style as elegantly plotted by Growing or Stars of the Lid. While both of the latter groups emit slow-churned organic swell, X.O.4 arrive at natural progression via a totally different path. Like Robert Rutman’s towering steel sheets he conducted his U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble to bow and forcibly bend, X.O.4 liberate cross stains of glissandi, microtonal splinters and pulsating electricity from an apparent unfussy, simplistic set up.
Guitarist Nace is probably best known as Chris Corsano’s foil in Vampire Belt, though his solo work and recent LP as Ceylon Mange (with the Chocolate Monks au pair Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Lollypop) are as deserving, if not more, for wider attention. Meginsky and Truscinski have been teaming up as Slaughterhouse Percussion for the past few years and their abstract discordant art is Cataracts’ foundation.
The side-long opener could easily be mistaken as rain forest field recording. Beginning subtlety with metallic tones that shift into whooping and oscillating call and response, various side streams of wire resonance continue lentissimo across the 20-or-so minutes. It is a literal topographic sound field with each pot mark and crest morphing into its own miniature theme. Not until the end does the volume and pace quicken to massive string hammering.
After X.O.4 demonstrates their ability to nail the long-form, the flip-side is divided between four short pieces. The first takes place in the benthic zone. Navigating though a murky atmosphere of submerged buzzing and chimes, a fractured melody surfaces at the end, as if played on a mutant thumb piano. From there, Harry Bertoia’s presence can be felt as if egging on the trio for the reaming tracks. Alternating between atmospheric exploration, harmonic scrapes and vibrating bowls, the album spins out into a deeply engaging and dream-like ambiance, which in a blind-taste test would most certainly be fingered as kiwi. While named after a blurring of vision, Cataracts is the most crystalline effort at metallic intonation and instant serial technique in recent memory.


By Eric Weddle

[Moshe]

Date:May 30, 2007 7:43 PM SubjectLeslie Keffer "Feels Like Frenching" LPBody:Leslie Keffer
Feels Like Frenching LP
Cat: E#105B
$11.00 available here: http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_music_info&cPath=1&pro ducts_id=174

When Leslie Keffer lived in Athens, OHIO she was asked about the noise scene there. “You’re looking at it”, she responded. Indeed. Leslie is one of the more fascinating proponents of homegrown Middle America noise music. A single girl drawn to the more ravaged and magical aspects of noise as source music, art and lifestyle. She has since moved to Nashville where she has been developing and progressing her personal take on what is basically a highly marginal genre of music. Her inputs are radio transmission wave-noise, the living aura of Lindsay Lohan, punk, pop, Madonna, her amazing girlfriends and defiltering the terror of male-centric Power Electronic depravity and goon-ism. Her last two No Fun festival performances, in duo with Thurston Moore in 2006, and the Noise into dance beat into ‘Where’s The Party’ slumber party freak out where all the noise girls fem-exorcised an already somewhat de-clawed noise misogynist is already legendary. Leslie’s sound has been heard on various cassette labels (Rampart, Gameboy, I Just Live Here, Epicene, Cherried-out Merch) and most recently her own imprint Action Claw. She has issued a number of hand-made CDRs with her own touch of knitted fabric pouches. She has two tracks on the 2XCD Tarantula Hill Benefit (Ecstatic Peace E#107), one with Baltimore’s Nautical Almanac who have been championing Leslie’s work for years now. We are only too happy to release this premier full-length LP of Leslie’s demonstrating where she’s been and where she’s going. More releases are coming: an Ecstatic Peace cassette limited edition with Leslie performing live one side with Thurston Moore in Columbus, Ohio and the other with Kim Gordon in Easthampton, Massachusetts. And then the 12” dance noise jammer. That’s when the party fucking hits! Beware.

Cover painting by Adriane Schram. Comes with double-sided laser printout insert.

500 copies. Available here: http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_music_info&cPath=1&pro ducts_id=174 __________________________________________________ ______________


Coming Soon: Wooden Wand "James & The Quiet" CD/LP US release date: June 12 " "James And The Quiet", is the best yet....songs like "Delia" and the title track have a sort of woody, timeless quality. It's a brilliant, subtle rethink of the folk/country-rock songwriting tradition, with just a residual hint of psychedelia. Lee Ranaldo produced it, and I can't recommend it enough." -John Mulvey, UNCUT
Turbo Fruits CD US release date: July 18 Jonas and John from Be Your Own Pet shred t rex garage punk stylee ""We’ve not seen anything quite like it in some time, maybe ever. Pretty damn phenomenal." - Nashville Scene

__________________________________________________ _______________

Also this summer: 16 bitch pile up/Mike shiflet Split LP, Okyung Lee CD, Islaja CD, Poor School LP, Little Claw LP, and then a Fall filled with turbo slayers too heavy to mention!

[atsonicpark]

cool, can't wait to release an album throguh ecstatic peace.

[lowlife]

another one soon from ecstatic peace::::: EMERALDS / TUSCO TERROR split lp. northern ohio guys.. This record is the bomb.

The Emil Beauliau lp is the shit too.. will have to check out that KEFFER lp asap