★Feeding Tube Records
The Language Shadow
Reissue of the very limited debut LP by this Massachusetts-based musician. We first ran into Kass's Good Cry label when she put out Jordan Perry's eponymous debut, which we promptly reissued (FTR 376LP). And we are well pleased to be able to do the same for The Language Shadow -- a most excellent album by all known metrics. Kass (who works with Meg Remy's U.S. Girls) sings and plays guitar, dulcimer and small instrument-style percussion. Recorded at Montreal's Hotel2Tango, her music has the clea…
Kin
Over the years Sharron Kraus's musical career has pulled her in many directions and seen her collaborate with artists, poets, writers, and researchers, creating soundtracks, podcasts, musical accompaniments, and responses. She is an intuitive improviser, a compelling performer and a weaver of musical spells. The spine supporting this body of work is songwriting, though, and it is to this most natural combination of words and music that she always returns. If prose writing is a tool for analysis …
Verdun
Feeding Tube announces The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol LP. Verdun is the first studio LP this war-torn group have recorded in some time and boy oh boy what a magnificent freewheelin', incendiary and blissed out racket TBWNIS have conjured. Over the last 15 years there are few groups that have been more prolific or dedicated to pushing psychedelic rock and all things cosmic to its limits. With Verdun their sound has become even more expansive -- Scott Thompsons' outer zone zonk horn blowing... Ja…
The Abstract Horse
An incredible, primitive and ecstatic teenage garage rock explosion from the suburbs of 1968 Orlando, Florida. With an instrumental line-up consisting of just guitar and drums, this is a version of rock & roll as raw and naked as only a duo can manage. Think Half Japanese, the Work Dogs, the Bassholes and so on -- Two Much are cut from the same wicked cloth. I remember a cassette of some of this material circulating around sub-underground Boston back in the 1980s. Might have been around the time…
Bidet Dreaming
First LP by this rather berserk Portland Oregon duo, made up of vocalist/electronics-scrambler Noa Ver and drummer/electronics-scamperer Zach D'Agostino. Our experience with Portland music had led us to believe it often has a mellow and/or gentle edge, but Sea Moss offer none of that. Their raucous, face-to-face approach to duo dynamism is as weirdly aggressive as anything that's ever come out the dag end of Brooklyn or Providence, and that's saying something. Using homemade electronic devices t…
Live In Fishtown
"On a hot night in Philly -- Saturday August 9, 1998 -- Brooke Sietsons's backyard hosted the No More Bush tour. The line-up that evening was Zaïmph, Jack Rose, MV+EE, Tom Carter & Willie Lane, 50 Foot Women with Axolotl, and the sole known appearance of the Mike Watt/Charles Plymell duo. Plymell and Watt had met a year earlier at the Festival Ecstatique in Western Mass, and they hit it off like crazy. So, when this tour was coming together, and Charley agreed to reprise the work he did on the M…
Dark Ride
The debut album by Western Mass trio, Mozzaleum, is an unholy union of hot cheese pie, cool Italian prog, and wanton horror movie lust. One gets the feeling this's the sort of band that Roky Erickson dreams about after a few mugs of cocoa and a slasher flick watch-a-thon. The three tracks on the first side all take their names from actual films (none related to the films' music as far as I can tell), the five on the flip carry on in a more thematic manner. But the music on side two -- keys, samp…
Jaw Guzzi
Jaw Guzzi is the ninth LP Melted Men have released since 1995. This is reportedly the year they formed, but as with all Melted Things, there is little hard information to back this up. Like an earlier experimental 'rock' band from Northern California (by way of Louisiana), Melted Men have embraced something akin to Nigel Senada'sTheory of Obscurity. Facts regarding the band's details are smudgy at best, and that's the way they like it. About all I could get out my contact for the group is that t…
Sun Cycle / Elk Jam
Two mind-bending slabs of acoustic and electric guitars, wandering into corners of acid-logic only accessible to bravest explorers. Elkhorn is a duo -- Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner -- from NYC. Their earlier records (Elkhorn on Beyond Is Beyond, The Black River on Debacle) would have blown us away, even if we didn't know Jesse from his work as a film-maker (he directed the Glenn Jones/Jack Rose doc,The Things That We Used to Do) and organizer (he put together the 1,000 Incarnations of the Ros…
Pastry
2025 stock "Jonny Kosmo, the Los Angeles (via New England) registered therapist and home recordist is a card-carrying expert in the shape of your desire and the horizon of meanings your dreams catalyze. In his briefcase lives his weapons grade kaleidoscope, a 1972 Mayfair recorder, and a neatly folded pair of pants that fits seamlessly to the shape of your longing. His armchair prescriptions for the zeitgeist hover ever present on his most recent LP Pastry which hits you Like 69 cc of heady nost…
KTB
2015 release ** Edition of 150. KTB are Shawnie from Bugs & Rats, and Arian from Guerilla Toss playing an aggressive, stripped down game of noise rock Shenanigans® while lazy young people fall down all around them, scrunching up their faces and mewling. There is something very non-Bostonian about the duo’s sound. This doesn’t mean it sounds Belgian or anything (although I suppose there are Belgian precedents in terms of guitar/thump/voice blending), more that its muscularity is diffused in a way…
Next
LP version. "While they have collaborated a good many times, Next is the first recorded evidence of Danish guitarist (or more properly Bastardist) Jørgen Teller playing with American ex-pat multi-instrumentalist Mark Cunningham. The pair both have long histories on the fringes of known sounds. I first heard Teller as a member of the dizzily freakoid Tzarina Q Cut and Cunningham's decades of musical adventurism with Mars, Don King, Bestia Ferida, Blood Quartet, etc. have been well documented, not…
The Portrait You Painted Of Me
2025 stock Orange vinyl (US exclusive). Here we have the third solo LP by London's Alison Cotton, following on previous successes, All Quiet at the Ancient Theatre (FTR 424LP, 2019) and Only Darkness Now (FTR 564LP, 2020). And as with each of Cotton's projects it is a stylistic advance as well as another example of her dark signature sound. Alison's work with bands is well documented by recordings with Saloon, 18th Day of May, Trimdon Grange Explosion, and her current, ecstatic folk/psych duo, T…
Low Effort Social Events
2025 stock Creative Healing is a new Massachusetts combo mixing the folks from Hollow Deck (Andy Allen and Mia Friedman) with three old pals who also passed through the Ran Blake Paddle Tunnel at NE Conservatory (Katie McShane, Jesse Heasly and Nick Neuberg). The results are, as the old men say, a real gas. Although it's not a constant, there are moments throughout this album where the swonky collision of sax, guitar and drums puts me in mind of several classic versions of Beefheart's Magic Band…
Mystery Meet
2025 stock Vinylization of an insane and legendary CDR that Nashville's Cherry Blossoms collective issued when they did a 2007 tour of Upper and Lower Rangoon with Josephine Foster as a special guest member. The Cherry Blossoms are a musical entity not easily described, but I feel as though their essential whatsis was grasped by Michael Hurley. We were talking a few weeks ago and when the Blossoms were mentioned, Mike said, 'Oh Yeah. I remember the last time I played a gig with those guys. Their…
Wake In Fright
2025 stock "Finely thuggish debut LP by a trio led by guitarist Micah Blue Smaldone, a well-known figure in the same South Portland Maine scene that gave us Big Blood and other treats. Indeed, Micah's fourth solo album was a split with Big Blood, but the fingerpicking sound of his solo recordings is a far cry from Wake in Fright. WIF are a trio. Micah plays guitar, Greg Bazinet plays bass, Jonas Eule plays drums, and all of them add vocals. It was Greg who sort of got things going when he convin…
Hydromancy
Here is the third of our LPs documenting the new work of Vienna-based expatriate guitarist, Eric Arn. The first was the solo Orphic Resonance (FTR 281LP), the second, Paranza Corta (FTR 384LP), documenting duo work with Austrian guitarist Margaret Unknown. And now the third features duet recordings with English avant garde cellist Jasmine Pender, who also performs more noisily using the soubriquet, Rotten Bliss. Pender and Arn first met at a 2018 festival in Krems, Austria. They played a duo sho…
Cosine
2025 stock Shimmering dream pop readymades are the heart of Cosine, the debut release by Ancient Pools (originally a cassette, and now an LP). Ancient Pools are a duo (Anna Jeter and Kevin Christopher), recently relocated from Olympia to Portland, where Kevin was offered a good set-up at a new studio. Anna is from Pensacola, FL, where she was in a folk-tinged pop band called 100 Watt Horse. Kevin remains the bassist for a more rockist Northwest quartet called Oh, Rose. But Ancient Pools, with it…
Bloodroot Spitball
Vinylization of a CD-R released by Josh Burkett's Mystra Records by this great cassette manipulator, who was long a central part of the Boston Whitehaus scene. Bloodroot Spitball is a bit different from Arkm Foam's other Feeding Tube releases, since it incorporates a bunch of 'real' instruments into the mix. This hearkens back to Mr. Foam's first solo LP, The Foam Doesn't Fall Far From The Shore (2013), on Hot Releases. As on that one, there's another player heard here, when Andy Allen (who was …
No New Summers
Nice to hear the first solo LP in a good while by this most excellent guitarist who also runs the superb Scissor Tail label. Dylan writes, 'I made the title track a couple years ago at the beginning of summer. I was thinking about how as you get older you have fewer new experiences. That feeling of excitement for summer fades, after it used to be such a big deal as a kid. Those experiences can only be new and vibrant once. The rest of your life can be spent in nostalgia for them. It's a sad thou…