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BLASTITUDE a new web mag devoted to "underground music and the derangement of the census," created by some of our renegade office workers...


HIGH-KNEE MUSIC
2158 N. Mozart St. #2
Chicago, IL 60647
USA

highknee1@hotmail.com

all funds payable to "Matt Silcock"

High Knee Music & Distribution
1993-1999: cassette label presenting Eastern Nebraska free-sound
2000-present: distributing these tapes and other cd/cdr releases

 

NOW AVAILABLE FOR MAIL ORDER
all kinds of goodies from the
PUBLIC EYESORE label

   


playlists from HIGH KNEE RADIO as heard on
88.5 FM, WHPK, Chicago IL
and previously 89.3 FM, KZUM, Lincoln NE

 


 

PROTEUS FILMS-September Song
One knock-down drag-out 30-minute side in which the Films show off some new pedals and old instruments. "...mesmerising subaudible tinklefestage of the noblest rankage" said one critic who knows.

 

TYRANNY OF THE SHOULD
All of us here at High-Knee are very excited about this, our first "hardcore" release. Less than 30 minutes but packed with material, featuring not only six tracks from I'm So Lonely Studios but also the entirety of a memorable concert in the living room of High-Knee HQ.

 


 

CHEYNTARA-"^^^^^^^66666^^^^^^^"
"The title symbol is supposed to represent some sort of demonic bird that will appear on Judgement Day. That sort of Hollywood scenario in which Judgment Day consists of demons rising up to destroy the world and God is suddenly called into action to save only the most important people. Like one hundred dignitaries for every one-hundred-thousand people. It's a recasting of the Noah myth. Considered now, the Noah myth naturally leads to some sort of spaceship scenario, in which people get on spaceships and get whisked away to God, or you know, some sort of utopian domed civilization. So the music is supposed to represent demonic birds, cityscapes being destroyed, and Earth people, who may or may not be members of a suicidal UFO cult, hoping to be one of the chosen ones escaping in spaceships."

 


 

 

THE BEST OF WORDS cdr
A compilation of insane moments in public broadcasting, 1996-1998, as realized on 90.3 KRNU FM when none of the authorities were listening. (There were complaints, but the authorities, god bless 'em, didn't really care. Beer was drunk in the studio more than once, and no one ever got in trouble for that either.) Featuring the Words posse (DJ Wanna Be A Big Star, Mr. Egomix, Professor Krackpipe) and assorted guests, this landmark radio show featured taboo-breaking media crinkle noise-jamming at a peak not heard before or since in this here cowtown.

 


DAWN RICKLES--Live in Rochester
Comedy by P. Snaker, recorded in a van in Rochester, NY. "Musique concrete" by DJ Dawn Rickles, recorded at High-Knee HQ.

 


MCMS--Factory in Heaven
Still a few copies of the cassette edition of this act's debut platter--sounds "different" than the CDR reissue on Last Visible Dog.

 


NAT SHAMROCK--Night Games
cdr
Tired of waiting for his hero, Prince, to finally make another good album, Mr. Shamrock took matters into his own hands with his 4-track. The result is the best Prince album since Graffiti Bridge.

 


THE CARROT PEELERS--Jazz Tangent EP
Quasi-flamenco acoustic guitar duets, lo-fi and zoned-out. Both Peelers admit to having listened to the Robbie Basho Guitar Soli CD on the night they recorded this. Ends with a mood-changing surprise appearance by the Transmaniacon MC.

 


CHEYNTARA-Great Plains Music
. . . the plains of Saturn, that is!!! Via the (late) Owl House basement, GE dictaphone, and the amplification technology of Peavey.

 


CHEYNTARA-Live in Lincoln
one-sided C90
Improvisational smoke and late-night quiet-city dada. Mostly recorded outdoors on a summer night in1996. (The night of the Olympics bombing in Atlanta, as documented.)  A personal favorite here in the office.

mp3


 

JAY BAYLES/MATT SILCOCK-Duo
2/3 of High-Knee flagship band Think/Ozona Getaway/Skyboxed/???. 40 minutes worth of boom-box tape documenting about 45 minutes of guitar/drums freakout/flow. 9 or 10 shorter numbers that pile up to create a spacey 'burning Morricone' sound.

 

STILL BARELY AVAILABLE:

THINK-Music for Student Films
Gtr/bs/drums free punk with secret classic rock influence. Recommended only to those who are fans of both Jimi Hendrix and SST Records, not just one or the other. Recorded in 1993, issued in 1994. Something of a legend, at least to the band members.

In the works:
THE FREE BIRDS--"Double LP" C90
DJ DRUNK--Rocks CS
JUICE NEWTON--The Arguments CS
TV CITY--S/T CS
NAT SHAMROCK--Songs:Nebrasko CDR
THINK--Skyboxed 3CDR
THE JAZZ HESSIAN--Session CS


On other labels:

MCMS-Festum Asinorum CS outofprint (CELEBRATE PSI PHENOMENON)
CHEYNTARA
CDR  pending (FREEDOM FROM)
MCMS/YERMO: The Womb That Gives Birth To Itself CDR (CELEBRATE PSI...)
MCMS: Angels CS (UNREAD RECORDS)

ALSO IN STOCK:

LAST VISIBLE DOG (CD-Rs)


#1 MCMS: Factory in Heaven
Wild debut features guitars, un-Godz-ly percussion rattle, sub-Doyle reed grindage, home-fried electro-tinker, etc.


 #4 YERMO: S/T
"Fucking amazing."--Bon Mots, prop., Freedom From Media. A real heavy composition; I think of it as Xenakis meets Black Sabbath meets Bernhard Gunter, but I tend to overuse those "x meets y" descriptions because I used to read Rolling Stone when I was a kid.


 #5 MCMS: MCMS3
Live-in-a-basement technicolor jams; a lot of guitar, some rock, a lot of meltdown drift music, nicely underpinned by the always-impeccable 'musical radio' of Steve Rolfsmeier.

#8 OHM: Live at the Crown
NZ 'supergroup' featuring Campbell Kneale, a Sandoz Lab Technician, and more. One long track that evolves into a spacious "krautrock" jam. I liked this the first time I heard it, and then with each successive listen it got better and better, and on the 40th listen it REALLY kicked in.

  #10 THINK: The Drift
"The past has found Lincoln, Nebraska's free-est rock band all over the map, going from sloppy Ornette Coleman tributes to noisy King Crimson destructions. Now, with The Drift, Think get focused. Side One is 30 minutes of wind-swept all-instrumental trance-jamming, like a lickless Carlos Santana recording a trio date for ESP-Disk. Side Two is Think's skewed idea of a pop album, featuring their legendary live staple, the 12-minute 'Fucked Up By The Sun'; the eerie 'Lucie'; a folk-stumble; a found-sound collage; a nude Morricone tribute; and an inexplicable gust of Borbetomagian squall."--George Harrison, The Lincoln Reader.


 #17
MERTHIOLATE
45 straight minutes of ecstatic trance music from 1995 by a creative writing professor, a co-op grocery store manager, a pizza delivery guy, and some other goofball.
Reissue of a High Knee cassette.

 #20 MCMS: Always Cop To Love [aka "self-titled" aka "untitled" aka "4th" aka "The Love Album"]
"Although spanning over an incredibly large musical map this record holds together amazingly well. If you ever looked for the lost link between Ghost, Don Cherry and Pelt you may very well have found it." -- Mats Gustafsson, The Broken Face. Kris "Furisubi" Lapke joins the ranks and adds an ethereal musicianship that points towards extended psychedelic quarters....

#21 ENTRANCE: Information/Reference
Entrance are a transportational electric guitar quartet from Minneapolis. The first time they played together, they recorded two 20-minute-plus tracks that now comprise Information/Reference, a heavy-ass CDR guaranteed to fill your world with deep drunken waves of hum and buzz (the first track) and crash and crunch (the second track). (At least it makes me feel drunk.) Entrance is: "Jesse Petersen (ex-Nature). Solo percussive/free guitar player, utilizing more feedback than say Derek Bailey. Jesse has been around since the early 90's playing in different circles around MPLS. Matt St-Germain (Late, New Port, White American, etc). Abstract off-kilter free guitar/organic drone using no fx pedals. Ever. Got his start ruining Cock E.S.P. performances in 1997. Erik Wivinus (Skyeklad, Salamander, Gentle Tasaday, etc). Member of various heralded heavy psych/drone/rock groups featured most vividly on Camera Obscura records of Australia. Also has played around MPLS for quite some time. Josh Wodarz (ex-The Teeth). Abstract pop/drone guitarist known only for personal duets with late and solo works. The 'Maverick' of the group."

  #22 BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL: Vespertine
One 40+ minute track that does the same near-antarctic thing for its entire duration without even a hint of disruption. "Ghosty" was how Campbell himself described it, which says it pretty well. Besides, any piece that credits "vacuums" as one of the instruments is a keeper in our books....

  #25 SHUJI INABA: Yoenzange
After one mysterious release on PSF, this contemporary folk performer from rural Japan reappears with a solo acoustic concert. Heavy, intense, and elemental. Includes a lyric sheet with both the original Japanese and an English translation by Alan Cummings, who also contributes original liner notes. "At $10, the cheapest way anyone's gonna hear current Japanese folk music." -- Chris Moon


  #31 NATURALISTE: "plays LVD 31"
First release by this Omaha, Nebraska quartet after shows for die-hard audiences of 10-20 and maybe a secretive cassette or two. Violin, guitar that is barely there, bass that is barely there, or has that been it the whole time? Very subtle synthesizer playing.....recorder flute....bells? Either way, a pretty sweet haze. 65 minutes. On the two shorter tracks they get this pace going like the Vibracathedral Orchestra on downs, or a REALLY laid-back Godspeed You Black Emperor. On the two long tracks, both live performances at Omaha's Shock, they sit there in a way that's as calm and hushed as cotton. C'mon and order it, it's the Naturaliste thing to do..................


PUBLIC EYESORE (Decorah, Iowa)

VARIOUS ARTISTS: Analagous Indirect LP
Pretty stellar collection of post-noise experimental music. Artists: Ando Kunihiro, Monotract, New Port, Solmania, Flying Luttenbachers, Fukktron, Thurston Moore, Jonas Lindgren, Billy?, Laced Blue, Kazumoto Endo/Yoko Sato, Cornucopia, John Wiese, Sickness, Automobile. As good as a Bananafish comp, and it even comes on a big hearty slab of real live vinyl. $10 ppd.

 JORGE CASTRO / CARLOS GIFFONI: Guitarras del Olvido y Pensamientos Dimensionales cd-r
Jorge Castro is from San Juan, Puerto Rico and the band Cornucopia. Carlos Giffoni is from Miami, lives in New York, and plays in Monotract. He's a pretty wild player in that band, but for this 30-minute instrumental it seems Castro (known for "guitar ambient improvisations") reined him in to create a soft evolving mysterious piece. Or was it the other way around? $6 ppd.

FUKKTRON & HAIR AND NAILS cd-r
Brad Sonder liked this disc so much he wrote a cut-up poem about it: "funky scrambled-beat chant hip-hop kinda female vocals emerge over the noise-funk from a background haze no-wavey lurch-huzz and extended garbage rumble sped up beyond gender over a warping guitar jam like The Melvins playing under a pillow lots of garbled garbage-burrowing sound experiments manic minutes of hazy super-abstract burrowing crunching microcircuitry jamming." Not Sonder's best work, but it does describe these two bands very well. Fukktron is "Vanessa & Dino" and Hair and Nails is "Walenska & Dino." I think they're all from Miami, but don't quote me on that. The difference between the two isn't huge, though Fukktron is more vocal-oriented, very adequately giving off that "P.J. Harvey and Renee Scroggins overdubbed onto Twin Infinitives" vibe... $6 ppd.

 KANGAROO NOTE: Soundness cd-r
From remote Sapporo, Japan comes a post-jazz improv trio featuring Aso Takashi on electronics, Ando Kunihiro on contrabass, and Kimura Masaya on tenor saxophone and "breath controlled synthesizer." 12 shorter tracks that mix rather traditionally "smoky" jazz sounds with alien rumblings and frightening wailings. Another interesting release from the global underground on Bryan Day's always-expanding label.
$6 ppd.

SHLOMO ARTZI ORCHESTRA: Pizza Little Party cd-r
"Even for a PE release this is bizarre shit. I know absolutely nothing about this band and the cryptic packaging does not reveal much else, but the band is coming from a lot of different directions using tape loops, samples, and heavily mutated orchestration to create something... something... um, different...Lots of groaning tapes in the background and what sound like devolved and processed wind-chimes turning in the wind in the foreground, with plenty of other peculiar bits drifting about in the space between." -- Dead Angel. $6 ppd.

HAIR AND NAILS: III cd-r
Another satisfying/dizzying release from this great junk/noise/pop duo.
$6 ppd.

360 SOUND: Scratching the Surface cd-r
The Des Moines, IA-based duo of Brian Noring and Shawn Kerby make up a strange free-form rock/improv/quasikraut/newwave act. How about.....a collaboration between Cluster and the L.A.F.M.S., recording for Ralph Records???

UNREAD RECORDS (Omaha, NE)

  MCMS: Angels
"The key word is calm here. Matt Silcock puts forth 30 minutes of (very) minimal drone/skree noise safeguard. Very diffrent from previous MCMS impromtu. add guitar solos."


TV CITY PRODUCTIONS

 TV CITY: Funk Shui
The duo of Shane Aspegren and Matt Silcock, in both their basement warehouse practice space and a Pro Tools studio, concoct strange, feel-good/feel-sad, airy, 98% instrumental electro-rock. As this is essentially a no label 'demo CD' (-R), you can get it for $5 ppd.

  TV CITY: The Leaky Roof Remixes
"Tracks incorporating the untreated sound of the roof of a rental house leaking in at least seven different places onto a loudly resonating tarp during the quiet part of a very dark and rainy spring day." For live shows, TV City mixed these same tapes into the set via a 4-track running through the P.A. or a guitar amp. All sorts of remixing went into each live performance of these tapes, mostly by live-only member Joe Krings. It was what we in the biz like to call 'set glue,' the bizarre, quite danceable groove of that leaking roof a reoccuring presence in between songs, and for "Leaky Roof Blues" from Funk Shui, serving as the rhythm track for part of it.
cd-r.
$5 ppd.

COCKEY HIGHSCHOOL (CD-Rs)

 001: THE GLAVLIT AGENCEY
Thad Aerts of Tyranny of the Should is CEO of the Glavlit Agencey. He enlisted some of his favorite (of the nine) improv musicians in Lincoln to put together this exciting murmur of Nebraska free-music. Guitars, saxophone, drum machines, electronics, in different combinations track to track, all with a great plugged-direct-into-the-board twinkle-sound to it. Edition of only 20, so act fast.

002: OVEAROU
Thad Aerts: guitars, effects, Mark Elsener: keyboards. This represents Elsener's only recorded appearance that I know of. Pretty primitive. The most 'No Wave' of the Cockey Highschool releases? Maybe, but track two, "So Sad and Spiritual With a Knife," sounds like freakin'
Hollywood soundtrack music thanks to Elsener's keyboard approach. Confounding.

 003: ORIGAMI
For this one Aerts brought his portastudio over for a visit to semi-reticent Lincoln guitar genius Eric Bemberger (Rural Route 134, Blandine Cosima, Gabardine, Bright Eyes, and for one show about five years ago, Truman's Water). Excellent recording of post-hardcore Incus-label atmospherics. As on all Cockey Highschool releases, nice use of little graphics and construction paper to raise the jewel box standard.

  004: THE WORK ETHIC THESIS
Purportedly the last Cockey Highschool release for awhile, The Work Ethic Thesis is quite sweetly dedicated by Aerts to his parents. "Though they are not big fans of this type of music, it's all I got." The disc is Aerts solo and in duet with primitive sax improviser Amy Metschke (who also appeared on CH 001), and frankly doesn't seem like the most appropriate dedication to his parents -- it's pretty foreboding stuff.

 005: SPITTING IN THE FACE OF COMMUNICATION
Installment number five opens with the now-familiar blast of Aerts-ian improv-scatter, but before a minute has gone by he's onto some next shit, as the track gives way to a slow Melvins-ish drum-machine-and-guitar-riff grind, which after a few of its 9 minutes becomes strangely calm and trancey. So trancey that I forgot tracks 2 and 3, though I remember 4, a 17-minute 'plunderphonics' collage utilizing some pre-existing recordings which I probably shouldn't refer to by name here.

MORE LABELS:

 CLEAN PLATE CLUB CD (MO-TEL)
Debut CD by this Lincoln-based one-man collision between Negativland, Yello, and Crash Worship. I'm not usually one for 'industrial' music, but this baby positively bubbles; easily the most danceable release in this catalog. Comes with nice graphics and incredible sound for a home recording.

 PLATYPUS-Top 40 Singles CD (ERGOT)
Released in 1996 (if I remember right), a wobbling window onto thee frolicking of Lincoln's toadstool-licking underground. A freaky pop-hippie sound with a hard electronic edge unlike anything emerging from the Star City before or since. $5.

 ALL-TIME PRESENT CD (BOTTOM FEEDER)
A Brooklyn, NY guitar trio with Chris Forsyth, Ethan Sklar, and Rich Gross. Gtr noise at its most soothing. You could take a warm bath to this.


all cassettes are $3
all CDs and CDRs are $10
EXCEPT doubles, which are $12
all orders are postage paid in the United States
add a dollar per cassette or two per CD for overseas action
Or e-mail me with a 'package deal' you might have in mind and I'll quote you a nice price. Make funds payable to Matt Silcock.

NOTE NEW PERMANENT ADDRESS:

HIGH-KNEE
2158 N. Mozart St. #2
Chicago, IL 60647
USA

 

 

           

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