Chow Mwng - Mollip & Reptile tape

The theme of Chow Mwng in this tape is Seasonal Affective Disorder, accompanied by a bleak written pieces. And the sounds are slightly bleaker as well, in relation to the more playful aspects of most of his releases. The sound is more lo-fi, decidedly darker, there are of course lots of moments with prepared guitar and found objects, and there's also more screeching, tape manipulation and ringing keyboard depression. And as with all Chow Mwng releases, it's a great one. 2018 tape released on the New Zealand-based Independent Woman Records.

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Daniel Gregory - Kebab Shop Will Sell Ice Cream / Gardbuk - Fantasy of Dying Lights

In my town there's a kebab restaurant run by political refugees of the important Turkish undeground communist party DHKP-C, who have been waging an urban guerilla struggle against the oppressive Turkish state for decades. These people have come to the country where I live to escape certain death and they run this amazing kebab shop as a family. Every time I go there it's a feast with beydi kebab dishes, ezme salad for starters, and sometimes we also order their homemade deserts. I definitely would find it a great idea if they also offered some ice cream post-feast to calm down the spice, and the immense amounts of fat received via the doner meat-red tomato sauce-yoghurt-pita bread-melt butter-all-over of the poem that is iskender.

This ain't relevant though with the music hereby, which is none close to Turkish music. Daniel Gregory does guitar improvisations mainly on prepared acoustic guitar, with his sounds trying to stay as away as possible from actual music, which makes it quite similar to the also great Chow Mwng. What I like in musique concrete, and it is also present here, is the urgency; it's very live and very active. The last track is an unstructured atonal blues dedicated to Neil Campbell, and it's a nice melancholy ending to a short trip to essential no-audience underground music. 2018 tape on Structured Disasters

The tape can be bought in a bundle with the incredibly lo-fi mid-tempo black metal epic tape Fantasy of Dying Lights by Gardbuk, which is ideal for letting your waist-long hair hanging while you also keep your head down and move it slowly in a circle while walking in the local park while snowing. Xasthur fans will definitely dig this.

Chow Mwng - Beca cd

Chow Mwng, the alias of Ash Cooke, returns with a brilliant piece of experimental ingenuity; inspired by a Welsh artist group called Beca (who I know nothing about), he has created 5 tracks of Gwrth - gitâr (anti-guitar): this is improvised anti-music played on a stringless and prepared acoustic guitar and with accompanying senseless growls. This is a fine piece of musique concrète that deserves to be heard and disseminated, as it pushes the boundaries of what free music is and develops new ways of doing things with instruments. Great job done. You can listen to it and offer some cash to the Wormhole World bandcamp, which does an excellent job at making forward-thinking musicians heard.