Inspired by Actual Events, released by Chocolate Monk

A modest treasure box of audio oddities and WTF constructions.

The 3-inch CDR Lobster Dildos contains four new blithers that could easily pass for the soundtrack to scary parts of a TV show about the paranormal. You know, with the distressed breathing and the uncanny metallic grinding, unnerving assurances, 1930s melodrama, unnatural chittering, left-handed shredding and distortion ejaculate, bio-mechanical threat blurts, and clusters of passion-damaged voices competing to get their bizarre assertions heard.

A second 3-inch CDR extracts the audio from footage of a Bren’t Lewiis live show in 1984 in support of the so-called Mad Bombers. Viewers of Tusk TV during the golden era of Covid lockdown might recall seeing resurrected VHF footage of this clatter-rich caterwaul. Minus the visuals and left with little more than the sound of ramshackle simian-grade percussion and an audience that is clearly more interested in their own conversations than the off-center thwacking of scruffy would-be surrealists, one can pinpoint the moment that obsolescence of grandeur became a manifesto.

And then a third, “value-addled” 3-inch CDR uses the Mad Bombers audio as a foundation for wild additions, brute subtractions, and EQ shenanigans.

Fresh into their trial separation from Usurper, Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson team up with Lucian Tielens and Gnarlos for the collaborative cassette Lewsurpiia. Eight tracks, 38 minutes, electroacoustic AF, the Wizard of Oz staged in an antique mall, tape cut-ups and plentiful narrative delirium. 

Also included is a 28pp comic book Many Hands Make Light Work, which re-purposes an old Jack Chick morality tract with all new BuFMS-centric text. It’s a bona fide Easter egg hunt where a wrathful puritan storms through a methy suburb in search of coherence, buttressed at either end by a transcript of  Tielens’s early ’80s doctrine chat with an unsuspecting evangelist knob. A real page-turner.

To aid in keeping the Chocolate Monk customer’s consumption conspicuous, the box also includes a small enamel lapel pin. Follow-up selfies are the buyer’s responsibility. There’s also a postcard adorned with eccentric art of a sort all returning champions would expect, plus miscellaneous scraps sourced from the lost-and-found box at a California public library.

Outer box is hand-stamped. Numbered edition of 75.   

Available in the U.S. from Tedium House and in the U.K. from Chcolate Monk

The debut release on the Ireland-based label Krim Kram is the first Mark-Knopfler-approved “real” CD by Bren't Lewiis. Eleven disorienting tracks: heavily edited sound collage; Orchid-Spangiafora-style word play; malfunctioning, sputtering machines; instruments and objects that are blown, shaken, scraped, and generally sabotaged in various ways. You won’t know whether it’s intestines, brains, or macaroni salad. If the CIA had access to this kind of arsenal during MKUltra, who knows what kind of damage they could have inflicted.

“Listening to Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble is like running through a field full of prairie dog tunnels; yr gonna get tripped up. Hand Signals is that + darkness. If you call out ‘Ya hear me?’ & the response is ‘I hear ya!’ then you’ve found the hill to die on.” —Tom Lax, Siltbreeze

“This bananas collagescape from the inimitable Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble … opens with ‘Westminster Dog Show On Acid,’ and in some ways, that says it all. Twisted drones sputter around like half-melted machines with fried electronics and sliced / diced voice samples clattering around an empty room. Cryptic signals send out scratchy cries for help, intimating that these sonic malfunctions are rotting the fabric holding everything together. Radio waves disintegrate into blenderized carcasses, chased across the burning ground by barking dogs with toy glockenspiels in their mouths. It’s all a bit mental and entirely fucking great.” —Foxy Digitalis

“Scuzzy but ostensibly ‘song’-oriented.” —Aiden Hanratty, Bandcloud

“What most would deem a kitchen sink-inclusive approach to avant garde sound making is laughingly derided as unambitiously minimal by the lumbering beast named Bren’t Lewis Ensemble. In the most densely packed of Krim Kram’s inaugural offerings, a host of pseudonym addled collaborators — limited only to the rule of thumb of ‘audibility’ when producing their contributions — pour American Standard Bathtub sized loads of audial dribs and dreck into one of the most heady, hallucinogenic and at times weirdly beautiful fluid bodies I’ve encountered since Jan 01 2022. Can you imagine a sound? Well, it’s probably in here somewhere. In fact, so crammed full of ideas is this CD that failure in attempting a round up of components is a certainty. But shall we try nonetheless? Grizzly, fizzy, warped electronics, plundered gems of misappropriated spoken word, inept, jazzless free improvised tooting and blowing, guitar strings tuned looser than a mouthful of fondue and bleating popular-rock 45s I’d guess were obtained strictly on the basis of their southward placement in the ‘Condition (M)-(P)’ scale. This dazzling piece of hyperbole might charitably be said to describe roughly four minutes of what goes on in Hand Signals, with the rest best enjoyed lacking prior context. For all its inherent busyness, the mistake here would be to think that such a creaking edifice has been slapped together in an artless clutter with no regard to ebb, flow and placement. Often such is the case with these things. But what sets Hand Signals apart is the deft hand with which those composite hunks of chum have been whittled and seasoned into narrative-rich tartare. The build and contours of these 11 tracks evidence a sculptural mastery evoking shades of GRM or IRCAM sophistry in equal measure to LA+BUFMS inclined free-Quixotica. Fuck you if you think that’s a stretch - go ahead and listen to it and try to tell me it’s anything but a vastly unpretentious, gorgeously vibrant listen which gives and gives. Whatever you do, just don’t tell the funding bodies of Western Europe that their pricy efforts are being so casually undermined by the affordable alchemy stemming from San Franciscan box rooms.” —Adhuman

“I used to hear stuff like this in my head constantly when I was younger, before I stopped doing hard drugs and started taking psych meds. I can’t say I enjoy this, but the sense of familiarity is almost nostalgic. I can’t decide whether this would have helped me or made things worse had I discovered it as a teenager. This is strongly preferable though, as far as ill- or drugged-mind atmospheres, to most of the sad, bleak, dreary same-old you usually hear (in your head).” —@granitecityrain

“I am mystified” —Vital Weekly

"Wonky and psychedelic tape bleeps that sometimes flirt with noise. Soundtrack to your sleep paralysis." —Akti #2