Tag: experimental music

ni-hao! – No Respect – 28th March 2016

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Cat #: 182TZM

RED ARIKO (drumR, sampler)
BLUE YUKARI (drumL)
SILVER JAZMIN (guitar)
GOLD JENNIFER (bass)

Omochi Records OMC-012

All songs made by ni-hao! except tracks 1 & 12 by Soakubeats (guest vocal Onnen on track 12)
track 8 by wanna “NERVS” (guest vocal, too!)
Produced by Jun Taniguchi and ni-hao!
Recorded and Mixed by Kenichi Matsumoto
Mastering by Kenji Abe (AIM MASTERING)
Art designed by Takahisa Sano
Spuervised by Shinnosuke Mochizuki and Hakuto Asami

Special Thanks:
Ohara, Shinji Ouchi, Anthony, Yasunori Monden, Nagatomo family, Soori, Hirofumi Horikawa, Aoi Swimming, Ito, Wac, Miko and Tomonari

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes – A Million Farewells – 13th November 2015

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Cat #: 177TZM

When Xiao Zhong and Sharon Cee-Q found themselves in a room together for the very first time, they agreed on a guiding philosophy: “Let’s not make anything that’s going to last. If we’re together for just two shows, then that’s what it is.” Thus was born Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes. Since then, they’ve most certainly deviated some, but not much, really.

Over the course of a year and a half, the Shanghai-based musos who’d been involved (non collectively) in such lauded mainland acts as Pairs and Hua Jia Hu Wei, released their debut 7” here on Genjing, added journeyman bassist Sam Walsh and drummer Daniel Nagles to their lineup and have proceeded to lay down one of contemporary indie rock’s most exhilarating jam sessions gone right – a concise full-length chock-full of woolly, dreamy, delicate, white-knuckled shoegaze imbued modern hymns.

This autumn marks the official arrival of A Million Farewells, the band’s first long-player for Genjing Records. It is a miraculously dissonant, wonderfully immediate display of Tom & Kate at their mightiest; alive with the same wild chemistry and sense of possibility that made their first recordings so vital. With more time together than they’d ever had before (which wasn’t much), the band had found themselves confronted with ideal, yet quasi-foreign conditions. And they wouldn’t have had it any other way. Two-minute freakouts like “My Life is Over” share airspace with the meditative squall of “Sam’s Knife” and the guitar-born majesty of the title track. One can’t but notice the band’s intentionally one-off brand of being exactly who they are in a pop context; everything presumably captured in (something like) three takes or less in a bleak, quasi-nondescript studio someplace deep within the damp, scabulous scrawl of modern Shanghai.

“It’s a simple thing,” Xiao Zhang says of their approach. “Simple takes the worry out of it. But we’ve grown up and been through some shit in China. To get to this point you have to bust through a few walls. It’s easy to be new, and I think, in the end, this is what it is.”

When you put the aforementioned foursome in a room, it’s Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes.

And A Million Farewells truly is what it is – quite something: a classic quasi-Sinophilic full length if there ever was one. 

Primitive Calculators/Torturing Nurse – 16th March 2015

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Cat #: 175TZM

Roland Barthes once said: “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not – or is not merely – its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else,” but who gives a shit? Torturing Nurse would sooner cough on you than speak to you, and they are most definitely not concerned with “music”, just the “some- thing else”. The “grain” here is the granular phlegm at the bottom of “vocalist” Junky’s throat, a choking, faltering reference to the body before the machine takes full control. For this music, you don’t need ears. You don’t even need a body, really. What would Barthes say about the grating grain of all voices at once? Music that’s been fed through the effect-chain meat grinder so many times it ceases to be readable as “music” and actually starts to sound like meat? Just GRIND, fine-ground, the last tiny pieces of humanity ebbing through the proverbial hourglass, grain by grain by grain. There’s no one left: just “Midnight, The Stars & You,” and the horrible, howling wind whipping rust particles through your pores until you’re more corroded metal than man.

Roland Barthes also said: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which…  more

PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS are
Frank Lovece – Vocals
Stuart Grant – Guitar / Vocals
Denise Hilton – Keyboards / Vocals
David Light – Bass
Andrea Blake – Rhythms / Vocals
additional vocals by Pocket Calculators featuring Grace, Velvet Sand (Siege-a & O-g-o), Fu and Stella Electrika

TORTURING NURSE is Junky – Noise

After Argument – This Is Not Your Game – 4th January 2015

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Cat #: 165TZM

Following in the footsteps of their critically acclaimed 2013 debut LP Furs of Time [Share the Obstacles], After Argument continue further down an even more refined sonic path, combining avant-garde experimentalism and post punk sensibilities that hint at the gut-level thrust, heft and swing of Television as much as the restless, hook laden fury of early Fugazi, Slint and Mexican psych band Los Dug Dug’s. The band, comprised of legendary P.K.14 vocalist/poet Yang Haisong and Beijing musical luminary Zaza [Eyes Behind] have quickly established themselves as one of China’s foremost punk rooted explorers, filling venues of all shapes and sizes throughout the PRC with a sound, arguably unrivaled and most certainly celebrated by their peers behind the Bamboo Curtain and beyond.

This Is Not Your Game, After Argument’s debut full length for Genjing Records, finds the duo capturing the explosive rush and emotional power of their live shows, where they range from mathy arpeggious interludes through headlong, thunderous charges. Recorded and produced by Yang Haisong at Psychic Kong Studios deep in the heart of the Chinese capital, This Is Not Your Game is an immediate, visceral record. On it, After Argument use riff, repetition, incremental layerings of distortion, bursts of noise and sudden changes in pace and volume – all shot through with a strong sense of poetic melody to provide new ways of seeing and feeling guitar-based rock.

But, more importantly than all that, After Argument manage to infuse emotionally complicated music with a sense of fun. What they offer and the source of their appeal is more a full-bore sensory thrill-ride than anything else. After Argument want to take you to faraway places and show you exciting things through musical algorithms both foreign and familiar to the listener. And This Is Not Your Game is just the key you’ll need to get started on that adventure. So, buckle up, strap on some headphones and enjoy the ride – it’s a one of a kind. 

All songs written by After Argument
Recorded at Psychic Kong, Beijing
Mastered by Garrett Haines at Treelady Studio, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

After Argument are:
Zaza and Yang Haisong

Visit them at www.afterargument.com, and also at storecords.bandcamp.com

Cover photo taken by Tanara Stuermer in Tavares Bastos, Rio, Brazil
www.tanarastuermer.com

Artwork by NOHOHONO

汤姆克鲁斯和凯蒂霍尔姆斯 Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes – 你不爱我 – 7th August 2014

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Cat #: 160TZM

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. What happened with those two? Why name your band after them? Are they a totem of the 21st-century relationship? The infuriating alienation and slow-burning pain of failed love? Nah. Maybe. “You Don’t Love Me (你不爱我)” rails against the inevitable for about four minutes before yielding to the feral chaos underlying human nature, love, celebrity, the sounds of the words themselves. After the heart’s fires burn out there’s just swirling ash, granules too small to be individually seen but jagged enough to sting your eyes long after the light and warmth are gone.

The flip side is an extended remix of another Tom & Katie tearjerker,
“After Leaving (离开后),” by Huashun Unit. H.U. is one of many aliases for one-man Shanghai doom drone crusader Nahash, née Laura Ingalls (not his real name), and his partner in crime, Clement Pony. In this studio trip, he basically takes one open guitar chord and a few disembodied vocal fragments from Tom and Kate respectively and transmutes them into a lush gestalt that sounds like it was written and performed by Enya’s evil twin for some kind of nefarious ritual. If you’ve never been to Shanghai, let me tell you: this track sounds exactly like how it feels to walk into a bomb shelter dance club choked with cut-rate cigarette smoke and the stink of unmoored pheromones at 5 in the morning. Love blinds.

Recorded and mixed by The Horses at Studio Poney, Shanghai China.
Mastered by Garrett Haines at Treelady Studios

汤姆克鲁斯和凯蒂霍尔姆斯 are:
Cee Q – vocals, keyboards
小中 – guitar, keyboards
tomlovedkatie@gmail.com
tcakh.bandcamp.com
huashanrecords.bandcamp.com

Licensed from Genjing Records for release in Australia.

The All Seeing Hand – Mechatronics – 1st October 2013

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Cat #: 146TZM

Mechatronics is the second album by The All Seeing Hand. It will be available on vinyl and CD from October 1st through Muzai in New Zealand and Tenzenmen in Australia. While the bands’ first album documented the band’s original incarnation as a turntable and drum duo Mechatronics presents the band in its new, three headed form!

The first album was absolute sonic freedom and although improvisation allowed them to reach aural destinations impossible to reach conventionally it meant that often the turntables and drums existed in totally different universes. Fortuitously, there were parts where the band would fall into perfect synchronization and these moments gave glimpses of a way forward.

On Mechatronics the drums and turntables are in-sync, interlocking, moving, and sounding, like huge cogs in a mechanical production line. Where once any human voice would be scratched samples from ethnic folk records, there is now a real living throat; singing! Rather than just contributing a looped texture the voice now tells an entire story and its rich-tone, gritty screams and percussive yelps drag the drum and turntable rhythm section up to the heavens.

Although all the pieces on Mechatronics stem from this tight palette of overtone singing, turntables and drums the subject matter and images projected into the mind are diverse. From sprawling mechanised assembly lines (Mechatronics), robotic nano-surgery (Surgery) and riot control (Grab & Smash) to shamanistic séances (Cadentia) and hectic theme-music for extraterrestrial road tripping (Maximum Capacity). 

The album was recorded at Scumbag College, a beaten up but much loved DIY studio, lurking under Wellington Airport. The album features contributions from Deane Hunter on guitar and previous live collaborators St Cosmos and Samin Son on vocals.

The album artwork is a fantastically detailed masterpiece from the twisted mind of Wellington prodigy Daily Secretion (a.k.a Hannah Salmon). In perfect visual analogy to the music, it combines the mechanical, the biological and the cosmic into a work of terrifying beauty.

Golden Blonde – Gwen – 2nd September 2013

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Cat #: 135TZM

‘Gwen’ is GOLDEN BLONDE’s debut full-length album – recorded and mixed with local engineer Tim Carr.

The recording sessions saw the members adopting a cut-and-paste aesthetic inspired by hip-hop producers such as Doom and Madlib.

Electronic and percussive elements come to the fore creating an acoustic and electronic mix of choral melodies, brutal sub frequencies, loops and field recordings.

GOLDEN BLONDE is
Adam Guzowski – Vocals, Guitars, Clarinet & Tenor Recorder
Austin Buckett – Rhodes, Hammond B-3, Synths, Piano, Fujitone & Percussion
Hugh Deacon – Drums & Percussion
Joshua Becker – Bass Guitar

Additional vocals by Amy Wilson on tracks 4, 5, 8 & 11.
Recorded and mixed by Tim Carr at Studio 301, Sydney, Australia.
Mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at Peerless Mastering, Newton, USA.
Composed by GOLDEN BLONDE.
Post-production and field recordings by Austin Buckett at various locations.
Co-directed by Austin Buckett & Adam Guzowski.

Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing – Eeling – 12th March 2013

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Cat #: 138TZM

Try as you might to sum up Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing accurately, the sheer range in dynamics makes the group difficult to pigeonhole; at times post-punk, at other times experimental, even moments of folk. Eeling in every sense evokes the sentiments that this is something unique – not just in regards to its chosen physical release format.

“… an album of new discoveries upon each wonderfully harrowing listen” – Cheese On Toast

Recorded by S. Huf and J. Hobbs
Mixed by S. Huf
Mastered S.Huf

12th Mar 2023 – GPOGP always tickled that weird music itch I enjoyed. I just like music that doesn’t appear to make sense at first.

Fat City/Lu Xin Pei – Super Split – 20th November 2012

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Cat #: 117TZM

Fat City and LuXinPei are noise and alternative rock bands. Because two bands share each other’s player or idea and been a longtime friends, they make this SUPER SPLIT together. This split is a collection of the bands’ early songs and soundtrack. Though you can find many music genres here the two bands still keep their love to experiment with various sounds and structures in their songs.
CD version is factory made CD-r.
Imported under license in Australia from Zhu Wenbo by tenzenmen.
And thanks to Nisky to provide the cover picture.

All Songs’ Instruments and Vocal by Fat City and Lu Xin Pei
Record & Mix & Mastering by G.B.J.D. Records
Studio : Kill the Poor, Beijing , China
Date: Apr.-Jun. 2011
Album Cover Picture by Nisky, Shanghai, China