A five-part descent into absurdist tape collage and haunted electronics from Northern California’s most confounding musical collective. Originally recorded years ago and quietly sealed away, Rammed Earth emerges now with eerie prescience, a perfect soundtrack for the chaos and contradictions of the present moment. Operating under the long-standing banner of the Butte County Free Music Society, the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble has for decades embodied a form of lo-fi dadaism that resists coherence and invites confusion. Their latest dispatch—released in just 200 copies by Nashazphone - offers titles like “Resting Mengele Face” and “The Glistening Variously Hued Sausages Do Not Progress, For Advancement Is An Illusion,” revealing a world where humor, horror, and sonic detritus coalesce.

With contributions from Lucian Tielens, The City Councilman, Gnarlos, and Tom Chimpson, the group wrangle disjointed tape loops, degraded electronics, and broken narrative fragments into a grotesque and exhilarating whole. The result is a work that embodies what Dr. Bruce Russell once called “the most aberrant exemplars” of sound culture—a reference point for anyone tracing the lineage from 1980s cassette culture to today’s noise underground. Recorded at Fluxus Enigma in Fair Oaks, mixed and edited in San Francisco, and mastered by Jean-Marc Foussat, Rammed Earth sounds like an unearthed transmission from a parallel dimension—one that’s funnier, darker, and far more unstable than our own.

“I realized [that the significance of work put together specifically to annoy listeners lies in its capacity to illuminate some of the key problems in sound culture today] in an epiphanic flash while reading a quote cited by Walter Benjamin: ‘Truth lies in the extreme.’ He meant that no genre of art can be defined by its lowest common denominators, only by its most aberrant exemplars — thus at a stroke explaining the value to criticism of Rudoph Grey, The Stooges, Charlie Feathers, and Elder Otis Jones. To understand why this kind of lo-fi noise, willful absurdism, deliberate chaos and the rejection of meaning have become such ubiquitous touchstones of contemporary culture, we have to examine the Petri dishes of this tendency — the underground cassette culture of the early 1980s — and for this, BUFMS … is locus classicus.” — Dr. Bruce Russell