condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Hand-painted sleeve.

The first Mauve Sideshow LP, and the formal start of the husband-and-wife partnership Dusty Lee and Treva Dea had been incubating through their last Kangaroo Kourt records. Released on Refraction Sound in 1990 in original hand-painted and "mouth-kissed" (with lipstick) hand-stamped sleeves, Dark Flowers is the opening panel of what has been described as a love story told across five albums.

Lee plays keyboards, Mellotron, and builds the sound-collage bed; Dea contributes wordless vocals, whispered threats, and occasional nursery-rhyme delivery. Half an hour of atonal-yet-ethereal soundscapes, closer relations to Nurse With Wound, Twin Infinitives-era Royal Trux, and the quieter Faust moments than to anything in the ambient or goth-industrial canon proper. There are no songs in the conventional sense: Dea's voice hops between ghost-cry melisma and muttered speech, Lee's keyboards detune and warble through Mellotron-characteristic wow-and-flutter. Mauve Sideshow belongs to what the couple have since called a linked series of American "darkwave" outfits, including Mistress of Strands, Torn Curtain, Angel Provocateur, Minus Infinity, and Thistle, most of which use the Mellotron at some point. Dark Flowers is the keystone. The object itself (hand-painted, lipstick-kissed, impossible to find two identical copies of) is part of what the record is about.