First Shrimper & Refrigerator tapes reissued

As noted in earlier posts. limited edition reissues of the first cassette on Shrimper from 1990 & the first Refrigerator cassette “Lonesome Surprize” from 1991 are out today. Available via Revolver, Grapefruit & Midheaven. The PSST Shrimper compilation cassette features a replica of what morphed into the first Shrimper catalog tucked into its coffin shell. The Refrigerator cassette includes new liner notes by Allen & Dennis Callaci.

Read earlier posts for the history of both as well as listen to a rare Prince cover from Refrigerator’s “Lonesome Surprize” cassette.

Shrimper + Pelekinesis = Bamboo Dart Press

I am thrilled to announce a new collaborative imprint between Mark Givens & myself, Bamboo Dart Press. Like Shrimper and Mark’s Pelekinesis books, we will be issuing a uniquely curated line of literary & art related releases. As Bamboo Dart Press our aim is to allow writers and artists to godspeed works into the physical world without the hoops and machinery that slow the process of finished-to-physical work in the realm of books and LPs that are the day jobs of the two parent companies. The initial offerings from Bamboo Dart Press will focus on modestly priced chapbooks that retain the spirit of the DIY spheres that comprise the origins of both Pelekinesis and Shrimper. The chapbook series launches in October 2020 with “The Loss Detector”, a novella-in-flash, by flash fiction superstar Meg Pokrass. Hot on the heels of this spectacular first release will be collections by John and Ann Brantingham, Dennis Callaci, Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Jonathan Lethem and Anna Moschovakis, Nicholas Williams, Joel Huschle, Victor Gastelum, and other notable literary luminaries. Microfiction, essays, short stories, poetry, graphic arts, biography, and independent voices will all feature prominently in these small books. Each chapbook will be available via all of the shared distributors between Shrimper & Pelekinesis, meaning that besides buying them direct from the Bamboo Dart Press website, you can couple these books to other orders you might do at Revolver, Grapefruit, Ingram, Midheaven, SPD, Amazon, and brick & mortar retailers everywhere. More to come soon, here is a sneak at the cover art for the first three books with art by Callaci & layout by Givens.

https://www.bamboodartpress.com/

Falcon Eddy “No.2 Record” out digitally

Don’t call me Man.  Don’t call me dude.  Don’t call me ma’am.  Tonight is all we have.  Word is spreading downtown and out.   There was a was a bunch of poetry tumbling out of the car window after I drove away from that building that we used to work in.  Wait, that is from the cassette of an early mix of the second album by Falcon Eddy called “No. 2 Record” that I need to bump up the volume on as that glass building burns itself back down to sand in the rearview.  Oh shit, I forgot to pull that guy I used to work with up off the floor after that fast food Fast Times at Ridgemont High bathroom wave he gave me made out of neon and gas fell as I exited.  I need to go back.  I can’t go back.  I don’t want to go back.  Pillars, all of them now as I hop on the 10, maybe those ghosts have reversed and turned into glass.  An old song in my head underneath this one by Falcon Eddy duets with “Don’t look back, you can never look back”.  The fact is that even if the rewind worked on this deck or this car or your phone or that stickered Bubble Yum laptop, I wouldn’t employ it.   I have this cassette in the sternum console, stuck and not only don’t I want to perform surgery to get it out from the pin and spinning rubber wheel that is keeping it in, but I don’t want the loop that we are in to end.  “No. 2 Record” by Falcon Eddy has twelve songs on it just like “No. 1 Record” has a dozen songs.  I have to drive with the one on and the other in my mind making comparison and contrast notes in the dust of the dash.  That post bend pop in your ear, when you can finally hear clearly after hopping on a dirty scrimfoot, warm salt water down the nape of my neck from that canal.  The two records I am on about both have that quality.  It is a note perfect flawed record from a friend that retains enough off the cuff reed and spit that you know it is legit, legit like that episode of Combat that Altman did on TV, like Cassavetes guesting in a Hollywood Bowl episode of Columbo.  Bumping the McLuhan mediums up into top drawer grade A’s. 

One more thing.

   The new Falcon Eddy is available on bandcamp right now, and there is some shit about someone or other waiving fees and all sorts of comma dash hiccups that aren’t quite of my understanding on street date, September 4th, but the point in my panting is that it is available now & for some time after that.   Steve Folta not only plays on the thing, but lovingly recorded and sweated over months of mixes.   Amy Maloof’s songwriting and lyrics offer surprise at every turn.  Why is this song already over?  How did I get from Philly to Yemen during that ninety second song in my mind?  Oh right, I followed the pixel dotted script that rounded me through the atlas of thought and time.  Maloof is hard at work on a follow up release due out next year on Shrimper in the duo version of Falcon Eddy with band mate Erica Tyron.

  “One more thing; I noticed your corsage fell off before you hit the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe just after the sound check.  We found an exact match at the scene of the crime, your fibers on it.”  Cassavetes slumming, we do that too, but at night we moonlight with the second job that we have.  That job rules.  “No. 2 Record”.  Falcon Eddy.  I burn every building I drive by with the spark of each song exhaling.  I am doing sixty in a twenty five, unnoticing.

When I die, I will purchase it at Diablo’s Discs and Guns in Jupiter, Florida, maybe Departed Platters in Tempe or the Secondary Sister Store of Mercy in hell as though the earthly version of those bricks and morticians are gone, in the afterlife, they live on. Here in this purgatory non physical world, buy it here:

https://falconeddy.bandcamp.com/album/2-record

Refrigerator reissue first cassette only release on September 8th

The earliest Refrigerator recordings surfaced in 1991 on the Shrimper cassette “Lonesome Surprize”. Lovingly remastered from the original sequenced tape by Steve Folta, this limited edition cassette reissue features brand new liner notes by Allen & Dennis Callaci recalling the origin of these songs. The hand painted covers offer an upgrade to the first edition, with the shell containing its sharpied “X” that also figured on the orignal issue.

The cassette features the brothers along with Joel Connel ex of Pillsbury Hardcore and then a budding member of Man Is The Bastard. The majority of the cassette was recorded live on the air at KSPC, with a few live to one track acoustic stomps rounding out the recordings. You might be most familiar with the title track as a duet that The Mountain Goats covered on their “Nine Black Poppies” release with Allen on the other side of the world delivering his vocals, or maybe their cover of the Prince song “Annie Christian”, retitled here with a hardcore lean that you can check out below. The following year, childhood friend Chris Jones would return from college and take over drumming duties, which he still does to this day. The cassette is out September 8th, available via Grapefruit, Revolver, Midheaven & finer independent record stores like Pickles, Piss and Broth in Madison, I Get So Emo Philips in Bensonhurst or Steve Bannon’s Yacht in Long Island Sound.

Refrigerator “Annie Xtian (Remastered)”

New Falcon Eddy en route

Numerology, it is one of the lesser arts in these Wiccan times as even when algebra or calculus is dressed up with a hardcore edge, it is still a hard sell. Falcon Eddy is out to change that with “Minute Ten”, the fantastic new song of theirs that doubles with a video for the days of yore that stretch and stretch hubba bubba style into months. 96 seconds, that is the length of singles in this flash fiction swipers paradise, and that is what we have here. Drummer/band member Erica Tyron has directed the video which enhances the action of this late bloomer song of the summer. Amy Maloof sings of a perfect night, and Benjamin Orr ditches the suits at the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame mausoleum to put in a hilarious cameo. Numerology? “#2 Record” is due out shortly and though the ladies are drinking & causing havoc on a Wednesday night in the video, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have time to check the face of their watches, do a quick survey of the land in preparation for turning the equations and axis of the thing inside out, mathematically, piece by piece. Don’t park in their spot unless you want your engine disassembled and sent back to yer folks in tiny black bags. Check the video here, then visit the bands site below to hear more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmgKQTbQhfk&feature=youtu.be

https://falconeddy.bandcamp.com/

First Shrimper Cassette celebrates 30th anniversary

The first Shrimper cassette was not on Shrimper, it was on a label called PSST. Right, Psst, as in quietly trying to get your attention or as in PISSED, Two things at the forefront of mind being a twenty year old in 1990. The name of the only proper release on PSST was a compilation entitled Shrimper. PSST also had a third rail in regard to its origin as a label name; it was also a piss take on the most beloved west coast flag flying record label of the time whose MO and roster influenced Shrimper, that being SST records. Keep yer Chad & Jeremy summer of love, I’ll stack my high school years of 1983-1987 with those releases on SST as one of the wealthiest catalog runs of any label, let alone the dreaded flog of the late 60’s. 1983-1987. Pettibon art, punk, free jazz, fried country acid, spoken word and what the fuck on top, The label and those bands moved so many, including me, changed the lives of so many folks that were around during that time, hell, The Minutemen are still changing lives. Ah, we could have all been accountants in windowless offices crunching numbers were it not for The October Faction…

The cassette, “Shrimper” was, for the most part, an amalgamation of various bands related to The Bux (the pre-Refrigerator band of Allen & Dennis Callaci) & KSPC DJ’s. The Jim Bishop Guitar Army, Punk Rock, The Sunday Supper Club & Welfare all featured DJ’s from KSPC; Girlhole, Pigsnuff, Mark, Asshole Mouth & The Satnam Puppets were offshoots of The Bux. Also featured on the tape is a live cut by The Deli Creeps (Featuring gtr maven Buckethead and the unique voicings of Barnum in their bizarro horror/comedy begins), Oskar Meyer (A bridge from the nascent LA punk scene of the late 70’s to the Inland Empire. He was in circles that featured Geza X and others in his orbit & is still recording today. I just heard an incredible batch of new songs he has recorded as M Otis Beard this past year) and rounding out the tape is as a cut by The Idiot Savants. Who? Yeah, I dunno, they were the first band to send a cassette for submission that I didn’t know hide nor hair about, don’t know now. There would be dozens of others on Shrimper that had releases without either party ever meeting, seeing one another or even talking to each other on the phone, here is the first.

With a Deemed too cute and too heavy a nod to said label, Shrimper became the namesake for the record label and its first round of cassettes in late 1990. This release has all of the hallmarks of what the label would grow to become in the years ahead. The noise, free jazz, left of center pop, metal riffs and folk stoicism stutter as they make their way into one another on a densely edited canvas.
Worth mentioning in the history of the label, that Bill Chen (another one of those pesky DJ’s at KSPC) and Robert Vodicka (He would head up New Alliance records when it became an umbrella label under SST) had championed The Bux, featuring them on a 7″ single that also featured future Shrimper artists The Primordial Undermind, Nothing Painted Blue and Shoeface that after delay, saw release in 1991. The calendar year after the release of the PSST Shrimper tape, Nothing Painted Blue, Buzzsaw, The Mountain Goats, WCKR SPGT, Goosewind and Bob Durkee (whose Fartblossom label and the band he played in, PHC) would intersect with Shrimper as well as SST artist Lou Barlow making that early circle complete. These artists would become regular walk on guests and put an end to the nom de plume, wished for/prayed for scene that this cassette’s nascent seed would soon help to birth.

Shrimper will be reissuing the cassette called Shrimper and will be putting Shrimper back out of print after a limited time by burning the negatives and salting the polaroids. The cassette will be available via Revolver and Grapefruit in the late summer. The baby no longer shits and pisses itself, but do be careful when holding the thing, for it’s a fucking mess.

John Davis Pure Night Plus Kicks of series of reissues & vault titles out this fall

John Davis’ earliest recordings on Shrimper are being reissued on September 21st on Shrimper in conjunction with John’s Inundation label (which issued his incredible instrumental record “Gnawing On The Bone” last year). The double CD will include his Shrimper cassette, “Stars & Songs”, his debut 7″ and LP on Shrimper as well as other 7″ single releases from that era and previously unreleased songs. New extensive liner notes by John Davis and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches explore John’s beginnings in The Palace Brothers and the bridge that would lead him to The Folk Implosion.

Keep your eyes moist, I would hope unpeeled, for an announcement in the next month of other reissues and previously unreleased recordings from the Shrimper vault.

Jeff Fuccillo & Allen Callaci are calling you from home

Jeff Fuccillo, a seasoned Shrimper vet who played in the band Irivng Klaw Trio before going solo and running his Union Pole label has been collaborating with Refrigerator’s Allen Callaci on a series of songs written in the eighties by neither of them. What would Allen Callaci, who has collaborated with Adam Lipman and Buckethead among others, be doing recording a Bryan Adams song with the guitar player Fuccillo whose most well known collaborative recordings are those he did with John Fahey? Well, you’ll have to ask one of them. Luckily for you, they are both wearing masks, so should you run into either of them on the street, keep your cool and push your greasy Dorito fingers back up the spine of your own CVS mask as you pose the question of the moment to either one of them. Highlights thus far are a reread of a Tina Turner power ballad and a Pavement cover stripped of its irony.  Check out the latest entry where they cover not only a song, but the video as well.

Shrimper catalog available via Grapefruit Distribution

Shrimper continues to be distributed by Revolver USA where you can download titles as well as pick up physical copies of in print Shrimper CD’s, LP’s and cassettes. Grapefruit distribution is now carrying a wide swath of Shrimper LP’s, Cassettes, 7″ singles and CD’s, including some rare & out of print excess runs on titles like Dump’s “Thatskinnymotherfuckerwiththehighvoice” CD and cassette, tapes by Ah Club, Linda Smith and others that have been out of circulation for years. Click on the icons for Grapefruit or Revolver at the top of the page to go to either store to shop Shrimper releases.