Consumption
Finding unorthodox anchors that strangle the fatuous out of abject grimness is a squid-free squid game Bren’t Lewiis mastered long ago, and Consumption certainly reaffirms that. The album’s fifty-minutes of quacking at the moon was inspired largely by mandatory wellness sequestering at a Walgreens post-inoculation, and the attendant anxiety that the pharmacist might be required to rush out of the bullet-proof cubicle because Gnarlos can’t handle the side effects of another microchip in the bicep. On any other day, a disoriented stumble up and down aisles stocked with gleaming fruits of capitalism, so desperately packaged with hot colors and zazzy lettering and borderline-lascivious hype, might earn a person a request to vacate ASAP from a polite rent-a-cop. When nano-bots in the bloodstream is part of the equation, forget it, back to the factory with you, we’re gonna have your head changed to something more aesthetic. Those surveillance cameras are not here to protect the mouthwash.
Anonymous chatter from field recordings is maddeningly constant, passages of repetitive electronic yoib hopscotch across cowering backdrops, there are more cut-ups and loops than a knife fight at a prison knitting circle, and the dynamics feel like flu symptoms. The first time The City Councilman heard the finished album, he said “I tried to listen while I was grant-writing and found it so intense that I could not do both things at the same time.” Among the album’s final straws are Lucian Tielens reading pick-up lines found in an abandoned notebook at the public library (a truncated early mix of which was included on Cough Park’s Bandcamp-only mix EZ Street Cheeze), and Steve Marquis’s psychedelic heart attack on “Tumbling Down An Embankment With A Stomach Full Of Bowling Pins.” Absent-minded mumbling, concerns about post-op complications, the appropriated voices of self-help mutants colliding in surreal patchworks of entendre all lead to the inevitable: that Hastings Of Malawi no longer have to reimagine I Think You Should Leave as an old time radio drama.
“Music for weirdos.” —Zef-Zef
Stream for free or download at Bandcamp.
To order CDRs, go to Tedium House (US) or Chocolate Monk (UK / Europe)
Toupeé Made of Weather
Eventually the spring-breakers who survive their pandemic-era bacchanals are going to discover nostalgia, and Toupée Made Of Weather hereby provides many options for the inevitable retrospective anthology Befuddled Goobers of Shartwave with which all Jersey Shore wannabes worth their anti-viral cream will soundtrack their fevered reminiscences. In addition to sentences from thrift store cassettes, near constant field recordings of indecipherable voices in the background, collages of suburban VHS psychosis, and fragments of guitar and electronic flubba dubba from Fluxus Enigma and Hazel’s ’Lectric Washhouse sessions, lots of processed loops grabbed from various coordinates within the audiosphere are present — an instructive percussive vamp from Art Blakey here, disco hits by KC & The Sunshine Band and Kool & The Gang there, a little fortune-telling from Jan & Dean’s inexhaustible supply of face-palmistry, bluesman Jimmie Revard’s alien doink, weird shit by Steely Dan, yogurt-slathered sitar from a Carnaby-era Marianne Faithfull, and glitches sourced from a Paul Bowles album uploaded to Spotify (proof that the death of quality control is the noisician’s library card). “Dead Mackerel and a Bucket of Flaming Housepaint” is a demo submitted for consideration as the band playing in the foyer at the ceremony when guitarist Brian Ruryk earns his Lifetime Achievement Award. The Ensemble’s cover of a French black metal song relies on a phonetic mistranslation of the lyrics of the original by a wiseguy YouTube user and is also loaded with enough backstory to fill an escape pod (“you get 3-D pictures of space porn!”); in the hands of Bren’t Lewiis, it now reads like a dystopian travelogue penned by an incel from the future visiting the past to impregnate baby Hitler. Other highlights include the transformation of lyrics lifted from Daffy Duck and The Groovie Ghoulies into pathos-rich nightmares, Lala Lu’s baby-doll-off-her-meds multi-track soliloquy, and the deliciously anticlimactic finale when Stanley Zappa and Glub Pasha spend some time between two ferns.
“Here we go again. I can’t even.” — Max Level, KFJC
Stream for free or download from Bandcamp
Mailorder CDR from Tedium House (USA) or Chocolate Monk (Europe)
Stop Yelling at Me in Neon Braille
The first Bren’t Lewiis album of the New Year arrives on Inauguration Day, on purpose, even though there are no illusions that it will have any more of an impact on the nature of the nation’s venomous collective consciousness than the event it commemorates. Still, as part send-off, part retrospective obstacle to wound management, this screeching, undulating psychocosm is dominated by four shrill, seemingly interminable portraits of noxious invisibility. Dissonant synth pulsations; loops of unpleasant contact mic scrape; atmospheres that resonate less than the aftermath of a collapsed parking garage; incessant electric guitar fractures; keeko-bleeko theremin scribbles; lost transmissions of PBS documentaries that resurfaced in a desert trailer park; unnatural congress with the inanimate populace of that rich musical wonderland, the suburban garage — screamin’ babeh jazus, what building blocks!
Accompanied by production values that are both supportive and antagonistic, Lucian Tielens reads an account of a husband and wife forced to slaughter a sea turtle as published in their autobiographical 117 Days Adrift. The group’s minister of psychological effrontery and textician scrambler-in-chief Tom Chimpson navigates a cactus labyrinth of construction site field recordings, mad radio, turntable aliens, and Jon the Baptist’s murble-possessed guitar. His matter-of-fact message — about insurance, maritime infestations, messianic origin stories, and fragments that seem to say “no idea, you tell me” — arrives more garbled than perjured testimony in a kangaroo court where Masons are getting persecuted. One of two very brief tracks, Lala Lu’s confessional / plea / accusation / state of the union opens the album. And then, functioning as an oasis at the midpoint, a short mashup where Kristin Anderson’s boat slip sonata field recording rests on top of the gleeful self-pleasuring of Nixon, the rhino-hound sculptor owned and operated by Glub Pasha and Stanley Zappa.
Stop Yelling At Me In Neon Braille could be a rare MRI that ends up providing no useful diagnostic assistance; fortunately, an hour-plus of your time that drops an extra smidge of stress, discomfort, and claustrophobic panic into the skull is your idea of a prized resource. That’s what it says in your file, anyway.
Cover art by Steve Marquis.
Stream or download via Bandcamp, Mailorder via Tedium House, and Chocolate Monk
Keystone Cyclops
Kinda-sorta but not really a concept album, noise opera or what-have-you, the final 2020 release by Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble is named after a one-eyed turkey from one of the many unreasonably vivid and detailed dreams that tiger-lily their way out of the subconscious of Gnarlos and make a grab for life on the material plane. While the album is free of all reference to Les Nessman, it instead jumps across time and space, logic and proportion, and intersects with scenes of obliquely rendered insurrection led by the titular character who, in addition to being that most ill-tempered of the class of land fowl known as “delicious,” also happens to be a superhero. What his accomplishments in that role are undetermined, as are whether they have any effect, and if they do, whether it’s good or bad. No, it doesn’t make sense, just leave such hopes in a paper bag somewhere and move on.
The group keeps things moving at a zippy pace, layering objects-only jam sessions, field recordings, guitar treatments, tape manipulation, and primitive electronic garnk that drops through the ceiling like a fat man stepping off the beams on the attic floor. You might actually omg aloud once immersed in this loop-saturated, collage-heavy snart-nado of dystopian pop culture and sci-fi, where Wanda Jackson, Lenny Bruce, Mr. French, and an ugly bag of mostly old hotdog water masquerading as a talk radio host enhance the spectrum. Not surprisingly, audio boosted from homemade internet videos, persistent voicemail scams, silverscreen classics, cornball commercials of yesteryear, old sound effects libraries, and thrift store cassettes abounds, while on the other hand, no one foresaw cover versions of Destroy All Monsters’ classic nihilist anthem, Edward Alderson’s delirious visions of revolt, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s gavotte-slash-inexplicably-affecting-lullabye-dirge (voiced with maximum creep factor by newest Ensemble inductee Commodore Slaiman and Jon The Baptist). Overall, it’s a screwball empire toppling as heard through a cellphone infected by nano-parasites that are eating the transmission.
Cover photo by Toni Smith.
Stream for free or download here.
Discs are available via Tedium House and Chocolate Monk
Complete Implant Solution
During innumerable hours isolated from each other and the world at large, and having undertaken a variety of new hobbies (such as breathing, binge-watching Locked Up, and scraping skin off their shoulders), Bren’t Lewiis dives into this new go-crazy with their customary zeal and willful wrong-headedness. Each individual member of the group exploits assistance from consciousness-depriving substances in order to achieve isolation from him- or herself, an endeavor both effortless and far more difficult than it seems. If nothing else, the practice affords opportunity to consider that Tiffany’s version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” is actually about getting buried alive. Likewise, the despondent wail of Lee Moses in his 1971 cover version of “California Dreamin’ ” reminds us that mere gray skies and brown leaves are nothing to worry about compared to dodging pestilent spittle huffed by joggers as they prance maskless through the opaque silver morning air of West Coast fire season. Probably imminent are dead-frog hailstorms and a slurry of pig blood and bone marrow bubbling up from storm drains. Indeed, our current era may well be remembered by those who survive it as one that not only enshrined bad, vanity-based decisions but immortalized them — from face tattoos and psychedelic dentistry to any online comments section relating to public policy. Such a dark expectation is hinted at by Karen Constance’s cover art depicting a rogue Moai apparently constructed in a DIY enthusiast’s garage using raw chicken, reclaimed wood, and a kilogram’r two of hijiki congealed in rubber cement. Under an arch of red roses, suffocating within a ballgown of purple roses, the monstrous head either spews celebratory streamers from its sourdough lips and tin pupils or else passively accepts the invasive penetration of its body by aggressively parasitic space eels.
Excerpts from numerous improvised sessions where life itself was squeezed into and out of guitar, synth, turntables, tape players, theremin, radio, thrift store cassettes, and laundry baskets filled with toys and objects have been sutured together tidier than the aftermath of a shopping mall massacre. Several tracks contain grafts courtesy of back-alley amputation of the more psychotic blobs from an old-timey promotional cassette starring Ronald McDonald, while others attempt blood transfusions served in shot glasses by Stumpo (a duet for passing train and Black Sabbath, and a duet for seagulls and the spacy part of “Whole Lotta Love”). Smart discount shoppers will spot good deals on helium mice, Waylon Jennings versus carpentry, throat crackles, the now-ubiquitous low-bit ambience of Zoom meetings, low drollery by early ’50s wise-gal Anna Russell, corrupted fife-and-drum loops strong-armed away from slack-jawed Civil War re-enactors, screeching bigots, operatic warbles, and Inger Nilsson croaking the theme to Pippi Långstrump at 16rpm.
So here it is, another pestilence-inspired, plague-mandated black hole in which the density of withholding surpasses the atomic structure of the source impulses of the refuseniks-in-chief.
Cover by Karen Constance
Toxic Beard
As with any improbable object that can’t help but be era-specific, especially during a time when the relentless strobe of an unpleasant glare makes the grime and pestilence smeared every place all the more opaque, when Civil War 2.0 often seems more imminent than not, when you have to wonder if you’ll get in trouble because your browser history shows that you were looking into getting a permit for a bow-and-arrow, Toxic Beard stews in disgust-suffused withdrawal. Many of the recordings feel remote, bordering on apathetic, a series of tosses-and-turns across the bow in the softness wars.
A corny advertisement prattling fake bonhomie jive launches the album, and Lucian Tielens immediately annihilates it with “Blood Clot,” a solo turn on cornetto (as seen on episode number two of the Colour Out Of Space series Plague Time Television). For just over three minutes, he studiously avoids producing a single note in any key, opting instead for a tonal palette more common to slapping a disembodied lung left unattended on a stainless steel gurney in the hall.
Tom Chimpson dissects institutional text from the world of religious scolding via flat caroling on “Scuttlebutt Within Our Bubble.” Later in the album, on “Hoopo Koomkl Inheritance: Discuss,” he locates encrypted data worthy of espionage, as only a master textician and minister of psy-ops can, in toddler brainwashing narratives. It’s like The Conet Project produced by Up With People.
New voices making themselves heard for the first time here will attract a decent audience on the steps of the gackolopolis, plentiful though the group’s stock-in-trade vocalizations barely more coherent than slurred vowels delivered supine on the floor may be. With Count Darkula as his missionary wingman, Vishnu Richelieu makes his first public appearance since The Date Fork Seeps The River (Nauscopy 2003) on “The Hardy Boys Meet Reverend Werewolf,” where he reads, in the style of a pro wrestling announcer, an apocalyptic email written by none other than Maurizio Bianchi himself. Lala Lu, the second of four new ensemble members making their debut on Toxic Beard, gets her diaphanous poet laureate on during the front end of “Reptile In Name Only” (with words penned by that president, our diarrhea nutsack sculpture), while Joan Of Art and Asskicker Bob jank the back end’s zarnt-scape with lyrics by noted pro-rape deer-piss salesman The Nuge.
For the three-part suite by The Experimental Artists — an obscure Hayward-based trio of suburban creeps who directly catalyzed the formation of the group in the 1980s — they recruited Lacie Pound of Birmingham, England, to ensure the track pulsates underneath the gray matte non-sheen it deserves.
The monolithic “Lateral Incisor At The Bottom Of A Swimming Pool” is more rickety and cartilage-deprived than a near-eight-minute track requires in order to survive, but Lily McBilly and our final noob Amferz commit to the plastic hysteria and zealous dealth-cult patriotism as if pitching an Annie Graham theme to Ari Aster. The thing shimmers hard with Hereditary-adjacent menace and otherworldly apparitia of pyromaniacal squirrels trying to set your feet on fire while you sleep. Consider yourself trigger-warned.
Regular listeners do not need to be reminded of Bren’t Lewiis’s views regarding the interchangeability of features and defects. From the warble of kitchenware to the chatter of inane neighbors and ascended-master pretenders ostentatiously gasping for air, urban field recordings, elusive turntablist chirps and ping-ponging decontextualized voices, defective electronic fragments, faraway and backward everything, mumbles, clacks, grunts, loops, and cut-ups, this album rolls in the short’n’curlies on the floorboards of a schizophrenic harmhouse.
"The perfect plague-time salve." — Chocolate Monk
Moose
Pointedly undignified improv is Bren’t Lewiis’s consistent tripping off point, the elements of which swap bacteria indiscriminately and form mutant heaps of questionable awareness. Fragments butchered from recording sessions — electronics, guitars, objects from kitchens and garages and toolsheds, turntables, loops, nonverbal vocalizations, and a variety of accidental and/or unintentional activities — spiced with nuggets plucked from the public domain (because any recipe with mayonnaise is not complete without raisins) are reconstituted with compositional prowess easiest described as unkempt; many of the tracks on Moose don’t fade out so much as wander at a leisurely pace toward silence. Highlights from the department of field recordings include the idiot neighbors playing their idiot drinking game, arguably gongable street musicians, and a time-lapse document of Warvette’s bullfight against the GPS in his pick-up truck. Gnarlos delivers the vocals on a cover of Peter Hammill’s “A Ritual Mask” with a level of passion rarely heard beyond a police scanner dispatch operator, while the reincarnation of Stentor himself, Lindy Lettuce, bellows and gurgles through a mash-up of words to the Christina Aguilera hit “Beautiful” and “The Light, The Sound, The Rhythm, The Noise” from Flipper’s second album. Lucian Tielens grins and bears it on a reading of execrable lyrics to an antique show-tune written to enhance the rich fantasy life of Coca-Cola salesmen. Thus, the end result is an album that’s one part stoned teenagers sloshing around the back of a station wagon taken off-road without permission, one part long-winded recollection of an erotic Tardigrade cosplay party, and one part endless loop of Linda McCartney’s synth solo on “Jet.”
Artwork by Steve Marquis
"I guess I might be more at home in a freak show." — WFMU listener Chresti
Stream it for free or download here.
Live At Pompeii
Anyone whose mind was sawed in half by The Stallion’s liberties-hogging interpretation of The Wall released by In The Red stands a chance of not hating what The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble does to the soundtrack to Pink Floyd’s legendary concert film (plus a couple tertiary Floyd-related pieces), finally joining us all in the noxious haze of daylight after a fitful four-year gestation. The hairless apes don’t come at it sideways so much as burrow through the dirt underneath and pop their heads out in various places like moles trying to ambush a housecat. Hands with no arms. Torso like a leftover chile relleno. Vulcan autoharp. Alpacas recovering from the effects of tainted codeine. A cameo by Darksmith of California. You know how it is. Edition of 50, the first 25 of which include a tardigrade air freshener, because prog rock.
“A lotta more doctrinaire Pink Floyd fans might not dig it, but if (like me) your favorite bit of Floyd is the last minute and a half of ‘Bike’, it’s gonna go down plenty easy!”
—Talkin’ Jive, The Official Newsletter Of Golden Feelings
Noncanonical Gospels From The Cult Of The Immortal Tapir
You’re half dead in a marsh with no recollection of how you got there, next to a redolent wad of expectorated whale grease the size of your skull, but you’re not sure if you’re actually waking up in the middle of a rainforest underneath a boa constrictor skin made into a blanket. Then again, this is exactly the same cognitive maze your mind traveled when you came to in a Daly City motel parking lot with nothing on but a sheet of aluminum foil and a Pepto Bismol mustache. The sound of persistent quacking fills your ears, which turns out to be a shaman (or a custodian named Sherman) trying to cure what ails ya by prescribing some hair of the giant rat of Sumatra that bit you.
The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble plays the part of Sherman the shaman and today they’ll be tipping you, and to make sure you can’t possibly misinterpret the allegory, parable, Alka Seltzer coma, or whatever this is, the deluxe edition of their BUFMS reissue of Noncanonical Gospels From The Cult Of The Immortal Tapir is packaged in a bloody-tapir-fur-covered jewelbox. Both editions — regular and deluxe — include one serving of Flehman’s Nightmare-Eating Tea, made with dried blood of the wild Malayan tapir (certified organic, retsina-free, zeon-ready, and purity approved for use in the second sacrament).
Additionally, the group has purchased all-new artwork from LAFMS brother Ace Farren Ford for use as cover art. The album contains three bonus tracks previously released on Bren’t Lewiis’s seven-inch Refreshing Hemorrhage.
"The problem with those Harry Hosono tropical island records is that they never imagine people like Matthew McConaughey’s character from The Beach Bum meet people like Smegma on vacation. This rectifies that a little." — John Whitson, Holy Mountain Schallplatten GmbH
For more information about the album, scroll down to see the notes about the original release. Available in the US from Tedium House. Euros are encouraged to order from Coherent States (Greece) or Chocolate Monk (UK). The fur-covered version is a numbered edition of 35, so if that’s your thing, reservations are recommended no matter where you order from.
Stream for free or download the album proper plus Coherent States' bonus tracks at Bandcamp
"As long as this dadaist jam of surreal spoken word, reel-to-reel awkwardness, scratchy samples of wtfuckness, found sounds, readymade infomercials and homemade electroacoustic non-sense exists, I don't." —Corrupted Delights
Soiled Gas Mask
“Sugar brings nice sweetness to the sauce” says an accented voice a few minutes into the group’s third album of 2019, one heavy on the fevered claustrophobia. Disturbing froth and gothic Mommie Dearest shame dissolve in a dark woont piece named after Alan Wagner’s legendary milk-bath poster (a Freakdom meme-of-the-year finalist). Joan Of Art — in surgery recovery mode, deluded and paranoid from the opioid painkillers — wanders out into traffic muttering the words to The Fall’s tale of sinister government agencies. Turntables and contact mics scrape layers of hardened parrot mucus for nearly twelve minutes in an epic examination of the difference between phlegm and sputum. There are two field recordings from The Dome in Scappoose, Oregon, made at the end of BLE’s August 2018 tour (one piece came about when The City Councilman’s phone was accidentally recording while stuffed into his pocket, and the other documents Gnarlos throwing balls of goat dung at a poster hung above the dumpster by the garage depicting President Shiklgruber cradling a baby dinosaur rescued from the twin towers on 9/11). Lucian Tielens dodges golfball-sized blobs of toxins and revelations that flicker across the bottom of an apocalyptic bucket, propelled only by grunting and orally expressed distress. A freeway execution narrated by a helicopter-bound ghoul. A jaunty celebration of urushiol. Cthulhu crèpe. Hemotoma. “The Funky Chicken” as fetishist’s instruction manual. So much dirty. So much unclean.
Order discs at Tedium House or Chocolate Monk
Listen or download at Bandcamp
Loose Meat
Over an hour of viscera untethered! A cephalic card-counting snuffler memorizing the dress-code for visitors published by the Commonwealth Of Virginia’s department of corrections. Cranksters rutting through the neighbors’ storage shed and trying to power a homemade UFO with an aquarium air filter. Miscegenation of texts by John Steinbeck and Led Zeppelin. Foul seepage and damaged percolations. Toys-and-turntable spasticity recorded live on KXLU. Heat massage grimness. Gelatinous conflagrations. Brittle geekiopathy. A spontaneous gurnathon recorded at the fire pit behind The Dome in Scappoose. Lily McBilly’s WTF mash-up of the go-go-boot morality ditty “Teenie Weenie Boppie” by France Gall and Play It Again Sam’s failed-pick-up-at-the-museum scene. The 21-minute “Boiling The Grackle That Killed Suzanne Pleshette,” a live recording from The Handbag Factory in Los Angeles that delivers twice the juddering oomph of sleep-deprived space cats overdosing on bovine tranques dreaming of a laser battle with a hot water heater.
"What’s happening? Is it supposed to sound like this?" — Mike Wolf, WFMU listener
Unable To Suppress The Twitching
Exploring the intersectionality of spooky chamber music and the failures of profane janitors, unnecessary announcements from the futuristic lair of a James Bond villain, and bones of the southern skull. Guests include Dylan Nyoukis and Warvette. Studio material and live recordings from Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland and KXLU in Los Angeles.
"I love anything about Robert Mitchum." — Carmichael, WFMU listener
Order it at Tedium House
Stream it or download it at Bandcamp
Being Happy All The Time Would Be Extremely Depressing
Understated and skeletal arrangements, but still chock full of unsettling mixing and weirdos voicing peculiar narratives, sort of like a bizarre misreading of ASMR.
I was just playin this whilst gibbeting a smoked goose. You wouldn’t believe the fragrance; the sweet succulence of the fat combining with the smokey caramelization of the skin. It’s like when Victory & Honor meat. HA! I meant, MEET! See? It’s got me all minced. Listenin to theys festerin fazoozle also reminded me of this poem, drawed once very long ago, w/a foot, as a line in the sand. Not by Dick Allen, but definitely was someone what knowed him. It’s also the lyrics from a song by the band, Long Ago. The singer’s name? Alan Dick. I know what you’re thinkin & I’m sayin “yeah, well, even if I could make this shit up, why would I bother?” Steve Tupper has the tapes. Ask him.
Helen Twelvetrees
You licked the fur of kittens
From Tucson to Tucumcari
How much Feline AIDS
You reckon you spread
On them lonesome backroads
from Tehachapi to Tonapah?
Gobblin weed, whites & wine
You old, rotten fucker.
Repeat this about 30 times in a row & you are cookin with gas. Remember —NO SMOKING!
I Have No Idea What You're Talking About
Percussive noises are a constant menace on I Have No Idea What You’re Talking About, familiar in style and purpose to crank-addled crutzers with guinea worms freaking out about dive-bombing bats that aren’t really there. Off-kilter loops and crossfades seem derived from a Waza Ensembles competition held during a calamity on a construction barge. There are more roadblocks in this twitching, raw-fi mess than would be present if Scrantonicity covered Joeboy In Rotterdam, it was filtered through Ichiyanagi’s Extended Voices and then re-imagined by Edith Hillman Boxill as an instructional music therapy album. Includes inserts.
Purchase the CDR at Tedium House
Stream or download at Bandcamp
Oh! Carrageenan!
Our tour-only CD, with cover art by Karen Constance. Lyrics re-written and mashed-up, electronic ice cream cones splattered into the third eye of neck-tied announcers, fried film synopses, field recordings from thrift stores, toys on prescriptions, duet for miniature schnauzer and eighteen televangelist croaks, weird tantrums. Prepare to be touched.
"When you can comfortably bask in the radiance’ve Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, it’s like bein' in a real-life terrarium; a sort’ve Biosphere 2 if you will, minus the philanthropy of Ed Bass. The crew works so intricately together, it’s hard to tell the Mark Nelson parts from the Tabner MacCallum ones. Sometimes if I close my eyes, I can almost hear the wind whistle across the thornscrub, the bleating of them African pygmy goats, or the oinks’ve the Ossabaw dwarf pigs. Yessir, Bren’t Lewiis can paint a picture!" —The Blog Of Roland
The Inevitable Typo On Sheila Ostrich’s Tombstone
Harmonic disarray and sour electro-splat seep upward and outward like a disturbing organ meat experiment going horribly awry.
In Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s latest reportage from the front row of a nightmarish debacle no one would want to stage, Thanksgiving is a revolting feast of Pynchon-inspired cuisine on the front edge of an exploding dirigible, yoga mats double as coffin liners, heavenly choirs are replaced by glitchy, private-press inbreds howling themselves sick in vortices of serrated cubism, and people who don’t know they no longer exist are the only ones who cry “Mortality as home entertainment? This can’t be the future. Can it? Can it?”
Dense electronic processes mingle with field recordings of machines defective and dying of old age. Alarm klaxons and calls to arms do not overpower the soundscape so much as wanly ooze from some anemic sky sphincter worthy of an Arch Oboler thriller.
The forty-minute “The Flesh Is Already Engulfing The Guns” crawls into view like a family of zombie executives exiting a fallout shelter. Nauseated screeches dry-heave at strings of metal scraping marrow-less bones into bite-sized chunks. Swarms of clinking locusts disperse above fields of plastic thrift-store detritus getting overrun from all angles by locomotives locked in emergency deceleration mode. Flightless birds elongate their synchronized death squawks and amplify their internal doom. Molecules of electronic corruption wheeze complaints to no one. Violins groan with the vigor of an old rocking chair where a corpse has been dumped. Unattended radios transmit useless advice. Drones and pulsations slowly fall apart and atomize, a mirror image of decay and putrid nothingness enveloping untethered astronauts. A portrait of the void, disembodied space globules and all.
The ensemble's version of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Assassination Raga” embalms all the stripes of the rainbow that is America’s creep-show optimism with congealed blood. That the album is released on the poet’s 99th birthday is not a coincidence.
Worst Utopia Ever
On their fifth full-length album this year, the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble charges into a blood-snake melee like public-access heroes the Ill-Advised Mutants Of Wrestling. Psychedelic euphoria and dread-poisoned torpor grapple all over landscapes smeared with swirling scrape bubbles and the post-hypnotic wobble that cleanses residua from an overdose of personality suppressants. “Very smooth,” as one disembodied and uncertain and completely inaccurate voice describes hopefully, “And somewhat spooky.” Punctuated by phlegmy coughs and metallic chirps, phasing in and out of common-area ambiance, this slow-moving travelogue through between-station grinds, animalist crunch vistas, and long-form dissection of beige respiratory gack rises and falls inside an onslaught of sinister machine drones that flay and smother everything with placid steadiness. There are multiple screech havens embedded throughout Worst Utopia Ever, where ghosted rescue attempts suffocate under the hairy mud of cross-eyed tape manipulation, mushy expressway pile-ups, and out-of-control clang orgies.
"These guys are so good at making French prog that I had to look up to make sure Butte County wasn’t ever an overseas department of France." —John Whitson, Holy Mountain
“The weirdness prevails unabated. Twittering, jittery samples. Shimmers, disassembled spoken audio. Coughing amidst an ambient room mic. Layers of spacey synths, tinny fuzz guitar…. Crashing percussion in upheaval. Irreverent, unstructured experimentalism abounds.” —KFJC
External Organs
Simian incantations made of over-saturated squelch clangs and reptile-friendly textures that are smooth as a cheese grater to the back of the head. Hiding under asynchronous grinds and competitive echo sharpness, the five long tracks here seem to recede unnaturally, like reverse footage of a smoldering grease fire, or a predatory ballet choreographed for It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado. The ensemble feels cooked alive on External Organs, maintaining a rhythm throughout comparable to extras from Night Of The Living Dead bonking into a wall over and over again as if trying to memorize the bloodstains on the sheetrock.
Thank You, L.A., It's Been A Great Test
Absolutely live recordings of "Waiting For The Dumpster," "Elevators — How The Hell Do They Work?" "You Shoot Heroin, I'll Wait Here In The Dark," and "110-Degree Vulgar Tambourine Phantom." Not as legendary as Springsteen defacing a billboard, but in the same intoxicating spirit.
Thank You, L.A., It's Been A Great Test pumps the sump like no other album in Bren't Lewiis Ensemble's catalog, resembling a no-audience Fluxus document based on impossible actions never to be completed, crossed with an omelette made with eggs long after their sell-by date, stuffed with microscopic plankton and unpalatable, Pynchon-esque candy known as completist’s nightmare. Their lower-than-lowercase electroencephalography digs into a realm one might call post-reactionary, where meaning itself is a cosmic ugh, wasteful of time and space, sight and sound. Whenever one observes others gazing into an unmemorable void, it is never immediately clear if they’re dispassionate or dumbfounded, but given that they’re dissolving, and the resultant grit is melting, and the subsequent blobs are evaporating, and the atmosphere is an ur-destructive vacuum withholding all possibility of transcendence, it doesn’t matter. What madness it would be were this any different.
"Something I never heard of." — Vital Weekly
Noncanonical Gospels From The Cult Of The Immortal Tapir
Available now from the European label Coherent States. Available as c50 audio cassette and as a limited edition box set with bonus three-inch CDR and assorted acheiropoieta .
Bren’t Lewiis’s after-hours guerilla performance at a Sacramento playhouse was the site of their latest maculate conception: desert-blind tales and sun-scorched allegories expunged from The Ongoing Dialogue during the greasy, soothing Council Of Nivea. Imagine an old-time radio broadcast of a pagan tent revival interrupted by shortwave transmissions from an isolated and weather-beaten theater where Swell Maps are stage-managing an all-nonmusical-interstitials variety show. The bizarre compendium of revelations include a beastiary by an unreliable ornamental horticulturist, a sampler inventory of treats-centered Eucharist self-abasement, a postcard texticle, ersatz Beat poetry, idealized warrior vows, shattered testimonials from addled pitchmen, and faith-based texts about: limbless lizard infestation; inter-dimensional chonch worship; the personal toll of crimes against humanity; the banality of insane self-pity; pepper abuse; autobiographical cannibalism; hemoglobin-and-fur-based cocktails; false Elvis resurrection and messianic flim-flam orchestrated by the pastel mafia; compulsions of infectious diseases camp prisoners; the psychic struggles of a pilgrim getting telekinetically bombarded by epistles from spiteful, sentient mass transportation; interspecies organ transplant; and heavenly expectorant. The ramshackle performances and sound design display a pattern consistent with questionable Sudarium stains. Created using toys, tools, objects, instruments, and found voices, some details about audio events bleed through time and space while others fade into dust and ash.
Buy it here: http://coherentstates.bigcartel.com