** Edition of 300 copies in a silk-screened sleeve. ** With Leisure & The Elderly, Armpit delivers an album that is as confounding as it is compelling. Recorded in Dunedin in the mid-1990s, he record is a dense collage of tape loops, feedback, and found sounds, stitched together with a sense of humor that is both surreal and biting. Armpit’s approach is unapologetically lo-fi, embracing the imperfections and accidents that come with home recording.
The music is unpredictable, veering from moments of abrasive noise to passages of unexpected beauty. Armpit uses the studio as a playground, layering sounds in ways that defy conventional logic but make perfect sense within the album’s own internal world. The result is a listening experience that is immersive, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.
Leisure & The Elderly is a cult classic for a reason—it captures the spirit of a scene that values experimentation over polish, and creativity over convention. For fans of outsider music and experimental sound, this LP is an essential addition to any collection.
As reported by Stefan Neville: "Clayton 'CJA' Noone and Jon 'Sugar Jon' Arcus are some of my oldest and dearest friends. "I've been listening to their band Armpit pouring out infinite sweat and toe jams for 20+ years and I still can't work out what Armpit even is. They are the wrongest band I've ever heard. We were all part of the same gang in early 1990s Hamilton, New Zealand. Armpit would always happen in rooms next door. They would keep me awake with the eternal strumming of bad guitars through bad equipment, bottles falling over, people falling over, things catching fire and always lots of giggling. I saw them play at a party once where they were too wasted to plug in their guitar pedals. They wrestled with them giggling for about ten minutes and then gave up. They didn't make a sound but it's one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen.Their recordings are always confusing. They display their deepest awful humanity and their sweet, sweet hearts, all in the same mouthful. Scorched hateful noise, incompetent absurdity, smoochy crooning folk songs with poignant words and brutal sausage fingered editing to highlight the horror and hilarity.Jon was doing a nursing foundation course and learned to simulate giving a skinhead a sponge bath. A classmate gave him some of her tortured poetry so Armpit blended it with a nursing textbook and disappeared into the room next door to record the album in one go, ping-ponging recordings with two tape decks." It was originally released on cassette in an edition of just three copies. "
