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LAFMS Los Angeles Free Music Society

LAFMS, formed in 1974, was a collective of like-minded artists inspired by the likes of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Some of those in the collective included Smegma, Airway, Le Forte Four and Doo-Dooettes and some other groups interested in noise and improvisation.

Japanese Cassette
** Much-Needed Repress, Red Vinyl ** Tom Recchion is a legendary character. He is a world-famous art director, a founding member of the L.A.F.M.S., and was even the drummer for Sonic Youth for a brief period. Since the '70s, Tom has been creating screwed-up music in a dizzying array of formats, from large fully-clothed ensembles to buck naked solo explorations. The Japanese Cassette album falls into the latter category, and it is a head spinning doozy. The music here was originally created in 19…
Infringements / 35 S. Raymond Avenue
This bundle includes the following:Smegma "Infringements" (LP) **Edition of 230** This is alga marghen’s third installment of Smegma’s original “Suburban Primitive Avant-folk music” Period (1973-1975) based in Pasadena, featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the deep vault of their home recordings. In the beginning, the Band Smegma had only one rule. No Musicians. Starting from scratch, they took the Road much less traveled. They were inspired by outsider musical artists of the time s…
35 S. Raymond Avenue
**New edition of 100 numbered copies presented in a hand-coloured sleeve** One afternoon in 1975, friend and fellow music traveler, Harold Schroeder, showed up at Poo-Bah Record Shop where Tom Recchion worked selling records and experimental music to people, forcing them to buy albums that he swore would change their lives. Harold asked if Tom wanted to share in a studio space close to the shop. After seeing it Tom immediately said "YES!". They moved in and divided the space in half. On Tom's ha…
Infringements
Tip! **Edition of 230** This is alga marghen’s third installment of Smegma’s original “Suburban Primitive Avant-folk music” Period (1973-1975) based in Pasadena, featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the deep vault of their home recordings. In the beginning, the Band Smegma had only one rule. No Musicians. Starting from scratch, they took the Road much less traveled. They were inspired by outsider musical artists of the time such as John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fish…
Couscous Bizarre
* In process of stocking * Absolute collage hell from the bowels of several known earths. We have worked with the horrible Orchid Spangiafora (aka Rod Carew) before. Back in 2013 we were tricked into doing an expanded 2LP reissue of Rod's 1979 Twin/Tone album, Flee Past's Ape Elf. A mistake we swore we'd never make again. Glands are a different story, being a two-headed beast comprised of Allie Caulfied (of Just Bananas magazine) and Bobbi Manring (former leader of both Poop World and The Giant …
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History Of The Butte County Free Music Society (Book)
Hidden but not forgotten, hinted at through piecemeal reference after the fact, the creative efforts of the members of this West-Coast-centric cadre of art mutants first took shape in the early 1980s in Chico, California, home to a state university infamous for its alcohol-embracing student body. Twenty-five years later, in 2009 to be exact, Induced Music Spasticity, the 4xLP boxest of unheard home-made four-track recordings of tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, p…
États-Unis Bundle III
Includes five albums:    etat16 - Various - I.D. Art #2 (LP)    etat17 - Le Forte Four / Doo-Dooettes - Live at the Brand (2xLP)    etat18 - Various - Blorp Esette Volume One (LP)    etat19 - Smegma - Glamour Girl 1941 (LP)    etat20 - Various - Sound (LP)
Sound
Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building and Acoustically Tuned Spaces opened at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in the summer of 1979 (and was also on view later that year at PS1 in New York). Curated by Bob Wilhite and Robert Smith, the exhibition surveyed the field of sound art. The forty-four participants were painters pivoted toward performance, conceptual artists attracted to time-based mediums, self-styled creators of environments, and musicians (formally…
Glamour Girl 1941
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
Blorp Esette Volume One
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
Live at the Brand
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
I.D. Art #2
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
Mutant Stomps
These American legends of outsider avant-garde need little introduction. Since becoming core members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society five decades ago, they have retained their focus, determination and unmatched originality, influencing generations and never seizing to advance further avenues of progress. Mutant Stomps is a result of Smegma’s living room recording sessions at their pink house in Portland. All tracks were produced 2012–2013, with one dating back to 1975 for good measure. The…
Live At Zebulon
Airway began as a solo project of Los Angeles Free Music Society member Joe Potts. The first release was the Airway 7-inch, which featured subliminal messages to coincide with an art exhibition in Tokyo. Since their August 1978 live debut at the LACE Gallery, the group has performed many concerts with different large lineups, always with Joe Potts’ subliminal message experiments as a central feature. Airway’s “Live At LACE” LP, first released in 1978, and introduced to Japan by Takuya Sakaguchi,…
Los Angeles Free Music Society -1974~1983+
Building on the back of a pretty stunning series of releases over the last year and beyond, Vinyl on Demand returns with one of their most ambitious outings yet, Los Angeles Free Music Society's "-1974~1983+", a stunning, deluxe 13LP box set - issued in a limited edition of 500 copies - of early material that has never before been issued on vinyl, from one of the most important outfits in underground, experimental music from the American west.
The Pre-Tenses
** 50 copies. The cassette comes with two laserprinted and xeroxed inserts** Recorded 1995 & 1996 at home in Portland Oregon USA. Surrealistic sounds by Smegma veterans Ju Suk Reet Meate and Oblivia. Recorded in 1995 and edited by Ju Suk in 2021. A collage of otherworldly music. 'I'm not sure how we got some of the sounds going'
no record
* 2021 Stock * "In 1965, eight guys from London, Ontario, decided to start a free-improv group — 'free' to the point of building their own instruments, which they decided couldn't be set up to produce specific pitches... Their vocalist, schoolteacher Bill Exley, banged on a cooking pot and bellowed hilariously about stupidity and destruction and Canada. They didn't treat what they were doing as an advanced, visionary form of experimental music, but as a big, stupid, fun, ecstatic noise. By the '…
Lock 2, 4, 6
Working since the late 1970s among the downtown New York music and art overlaps, video artist Tony Oursler (born 1957) is famed internationally for his immersive installations. In the summer of 2001, Oursler staged a spectacular installation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Titled Flucht, it involved projections onto the building's glass façade and an audio component with actors speaking in a range of dialects. LOCK 2,4,6 was developed over a number of years in conjunction with Eckhardt Schneider and t…
Smegma
**Original edition of 100. About 20 copies left from the original pressing** The only Russian release for legendary Smegma!
Sonic Fermentations
**200 copies** "The moon is out and it's time for experiments in the Pacific Northwest. Enter the abode of Smegma Laboratories, dwelling of Ju Suk Reet Meate & Oblivia (The Tenses) whom are active in Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) notable collaborators with Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, John Wiese and infamous rock critic Richard Meltzer. It's late in the evening and they have invited fellow Smegmateer David Morgan along with synthesized sculptors Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper of MSHR, and psyche…
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