(A RANDOM SAMPLING OF) MY BANDCAMP COLLECTION Part Two (Shuffle-All Reinstatement Edition)
Grey Windowpane, Time Designers, XV, Peach of Immortality, Octagrape, Mammal, Mythical Creatures, Scott Scholz, Kern Haug, Sophie Cooper, Michael Morley, Mope Grooves, Dura, P'derrigerreo, more
Here it is folks, the promised sequel to the “(RANDOM SAMPLING OF) MY BANDCAMP COLLECTION” BlastiLetter that ran here on the BlastStack back on March 16th. You might remember (probably not!) how I ended that column complaining that Bandcamp had removed the “shuffle collection” option on their app, only to notice that it’d been restored about an hour before publication time, which meant I could start working on part two. Well, here it is now, four months later. Even more of a true blindfold test than the last one, you’ll see I’m often unsure who I’m listening to.
“A Memory Bedroom (Pickpocket Mix)” by Grey Windowpane from "Dir'y Mixes For Dir'y Money" ("Two Bricks For Every Bag" EP Remixes) (2022, FOTS Editions/Conglomerate of GWPEOPLESFRONT WORLDWIDE) It’s appropriate to start off with a track by Grey Windowpane, because that might be the artist I’ve listened to the most from my Bandcamp collection, the placeholder/pandemic/electronic palate-cleanser project of Ma Turner, aka Mazozma, taking on the alias “Brown” and orchestrating, by my count, eight albums of endlessly unfolding . . . I still don’t know what. Electronic collage? Broken beatscape? Deconstructed everything? GW released five Bandcamp-only albums and three physical releases, and I believe that might be it for now (especially as Mazozma has returned in 2025 with a great new trance-folk album called Bathing in the Stone). I love it all, but especially those five initial Bandcamp-only albums and the Ice the World 2CS (2023, Strange Mono). On the other two releases — the Barnie Bewail CS on Half a Million and the Abracujo CDR on Chocolate Monk — GW sound like they’re already morphing and molting, shedding creative skin as elements of Mazozma re-emerge with actual songs (?) and guitars (?).
“Time Design Side A” by Wolf Eyes v/a (aka Time Designers) from Difficult Messages Two The Clock Box (2021, No Label) Just wonderful, my single favorite of all the Wolf Eyes v/a bands, ladies and gentlemen: the Time Designers. Perfect endless broken-beat stare-down, implacable, puttering, continuing, and yet you can almost dance to it the whole time, or at least nod and/or bang your head.
“AAAO” by Grey Windowpane from “Two Bricks for Every Bag” EP (2022, FOTS Editions/Conglomerate of GWPEOPLESFRONT WORLDWIDE) OK thanks Bandcamp for bringing the shuffle back, but now you’re just taking me right back to Grey Windowpane? Who ya gonna play next, Wolf Eyes v/a? It’s OK though, because this song, like most Grey Windowpane songs, absolutely shreds, tearing in from the jump with a monster guitar riff. By the last half of the song it’s already drifted out of the picture and we’ve morphed into what sounds like straight-up progressive house music to me, if completely psychedelic, totally slamming.
“Lullaby” by XV from Basement Tapes (2020, No Label) OK not sure what this is, crude 90s-style indie-rock strum and chime, very lo-fi, home-recorded. That goes on for awhile while someone talks about someone they know who has kids and “now she’s a nurse.” The whole track is less than two minutes long, but ends with a crossfade into a different recording, that may be of the same piece or a different improvisation. Oh duh, this is XV from Detroit. Been a while since I’ve listened, but how could I forget?
Didn’t write down the artist/song but I’m pretty sure it was Peach of Immortality, more on them and the album I have below. An opera record is being blasted on some subterranean stereo where a group of noise musicians has gathered to play with and over the recording, rattling percussion and strange hissing sounds giving the opera singing an otherworldly shaken sheen. After a minute or two the opera is revealed to be on tape, not vinyl, by violent varispeed manipulations into freakish high-frequency blast-outs.
“Syntoptikon” by Octagrape from Major Mayor Maxion Marble (2014, Sounds Familyre). Speaking of blast-outs, this starts with harsh noise wailing in both ears then quickly lurching into a monster Blue Cheer/Black Sabbath ensemble riff. I’m not sure who this might be. This is like Japan-level blasting Blue Cheer worship, but I think there’s something just funky enough about ‘em that they’re probably American. Really good riffage, no vocals to distract us, even as it devolves into wild guitar noise clouds. Who is it? Well, we’re 4 minutes into a 12-minute song by Octagrape, a Major Stars cover from an album of four epic covers called Major Mayor Maxion Marble. (Each word in the title refers to one of the bands covered.) Octagrape shred, and the guitarist and vocalist is Glen Galloway who was a founding member of Trumans Water.
“Honey Cat Rents A Room” by Grey Windowpane from “The Parrot” (2022, FOTS Editions/Conglomerate of GWPEOPLESFRONT WORLDWIDE) Weird electronic broken-beat exploration that makes me think the shuffle is indeed favoring Grey Windowpane, which is again fine with me and sounding really good, over 10 minutes of warped but always-grooving extrapolative lounge exotica psychedelia. Even better, this little flurry of GW music has got me re-grappling with their discography for the first time really since 2023. That said, I will exclude them from this article when they inevitably come up again soon.
“Split Don’t Split” by XV from Basement Tapes (2020, No Label). OK, now I think the shuffle is favoring XV. Here’s “Split Don’t Split,” another one from Basement Tapes. This is a really good song, a dark and thick aura, still rock’n’roll to me, and great vocals that live inside the guitar riffs and fill them up like a color tool. (Photoshop/Paint reference, what’s up?)
“Aurora” by Mammal from Deserted (2024, Impermanence) And this is clearly Mammal from his 2024 devastator Deserted. The song is “Aurora” which is short and sweet (actually more short and sour) at under two minutes, and might be a love song to an actual celestial star or some other cosmic entity, as in the Aurora Borealis herself. Sure sounds like it to me, although he does sing that the titular Aurora is a “succubus from another world” [sic] towards the end.
Another song from Wolf Eyes v/a and the Difficult Messages umbrella that I didn’t notate, but described as having a “lurching electronic yog-sothoth of a drumbeat,” which is a phrase I didn’t want to lose even if it’s the fourth (!) time that Wolf Eyes v/a have appeared in this supposedly random sampling. Also wanted to note for posterity that the Bandcamp page for Difficult Messages Two: The Clock Box contains a nested uncredited full-length Time Designers release, the Design Demos CDR that came with the highly limited physical release of the Clock Box (compare the Bandcamp page linked above to the original Discogs page for details).
“Bamf!” by Mythical Creatures from Bamf! (2023, Old Gold) Fender Rhodes piano and a cheap electronic drumbeat in a bedroom, a bedsit, a coldwater flat, etc., with a lo-fi recording device bringing us the sounds. Also a buzzing noise drone in there too. The piano playing is soulful and exploratory while the drumbeat brings an appreciated sense of groove. It’s also very rough and truly lo-fi. No idea who this might be, actually, and the blindfold removed reveals it’s Mythical Creatures from Atlanta, Georgia. Of a piece with the Grey Windowpane material discussed above, though perhaps more ‘jammy’ somehow, and regardless I think it’s pure parallel (pandemic) development and the two groups weren’t clocking each other. The album is Bamf!, released as a cassette and on Bandcamp in 2023.
“IV. Chi vole lo mondo despreccare (13th C. lauda)” by Scott Scholz from Whip Sigils (2023, No Part of It). Gonna guess this is Derek Monypeny jamming solo oud with an electronic backing. The only question is . . . which album? Because of that electronic backing, I’m going to guess Born (Free), which after all is Derek’s attempt to “make a Popol Vuh album for Siltbreeze.” But lol, it’s not Derek at all, it’s Scott Scholz from Nebraska who is jamming solo oud with electronic backing, from his great 2023 album Whip Sigils (2023, No Part Of It). I don’t feel bad about this case of mistaken identity because, as in the previous Mythical Creatures-to-Grey Windowpane comparison, these are two parallel-developed peers who quite possibly weren’t aware of the other’s existence.
“to Mass” by Kern Haug from Zum Audio Vol. 4 (2021, Zum Audio). Lo-fi and dungeon-synthy, yet uplifting and grand in tone. This is someone I’ve never otherwise heard of named Kern Haug and it’s from a typically great Zum Audio comp, this one Vol. 4. Check ‘em all out for a crash course in (mostly West Coast?) weirdness you’ve barely/never heard of before.
“Palembang” by Sophie Cooper from Our Aquarius (2014, Wild Silence) This track is just incredible, a menacing noise loop over which placid folk music is played until, after a couple minutes, angelic overdubbed and echoed femme vox glide in. From the great Our Aquarius album by Sophie Cooper, a serious 21st Century gem, now over ten years old. Original CDR release came in a lovely gatefold wallet type thing, if I remember right. I could go grab it off the shelf and see.
“3xstriptrcks40” by Michael Morley (2021, Radical Documents) Gotta be Mike Morley solo massed electric guitar, and [blindfold off] indeed it is, from that top-notch Electric Guitar cassette that was on Radical Documents a while back (Plague Year 2021 to be a little more exact).
“603 Untitled II (Final Hardart Gallery Session, Washington, DC, 2 June 85)” by Peach of Immortality from Surrealismus: Paris Prag Rockville (2017, Karl Schmidt Verlag/Adult Contemporary Recordings) Peach of Immortality made it into my last random sampling of Bandcamp, and they deserve to make it back in this one. The more you listen, the more their various esoteric and initially inscrutable inputs come into focus, and what better way to dig in than a 9xCDR box set retrospective (?) release from 2017. (Yep, that’s nine CDRs, not a typo.) There’s the dub reggae via Cabaret Voltaire influence, the industrial percussion influence (there was a time when Tom Smith was a Neubauten-styled auxiliary percussionist in Pussy Galore), the transgressive porno-samples influence, and the most wild-card and oft-forgotten-or-unrecognizable element in the ensemble, the cello of Rogelio Maxwell. Considering this was recorded in 1985, it’s hard not to think of him as a more highly abstracted manifestation of Arthur Russell’s contemporaneous worldly/echoey work on the same instrument.
“Turn to Glass” by Mope Grooves from Desire (2019, See My Friends Records). The first track on the first Mope Grooves LP I ever heard, and it was love at first sound. A quirky but burly trapkit drum groove, augmented by digital handclaps, toy keyboard vibes, and shy trans-femme vocals. RIP Stevie Pohlman.
“Blue Cube” by Marshall Trammell & Paul Costuros Duo from Zum Audio Vol. 5 (2023, Zum Audio). We can go ahead and call this free jazz, even with all that disorienting reverb. We still have a trap-set drummer going off in free-form rhythmic way, and honestly even just a little New Orleans in his bounce. There’s also some bells/clanking going on, which may or may not be by said drummer in real time; there was also a single sax-squawk at the beginning but since then no sax, unless the creeping and mostly subtle electronic washes I’m hearing are sax-squawk-generated. [Blindfold off] Why, it’s the Paul Trammell & Paul Costuros Duo from another Zum Audio comp, this one Vol. 5! Which means those electronics are indeed sax-generated (the sax does re-enter in its naturally squawking state around the 4-minute mark of this 8-minute jam). I do remember Costuros from the band Total Shutdown, part of the early/mid 2000s Bay Area Now Wave explosion (aka “the Spockmorgue scene”).
“What Am I Saying” by P’derrigerreo from Live in (a)Basement (2022, SpleenCoffin). Whoah, dreamy folk chord changes and then a baleful male and female voice duet-singing “I’m in a hell.” Dare I say U.S. Saucer-esque, which I don’t say often, unless I’m listening to late-period Souled American. Which didn’t prepare me for a literal funky trip-hop beat to kick in after one minute, as the chords and baleful singing continue. Who is this, anyway? Why, it’s P’derrigerreo [sic], another band I’ve already written a review of. (I actually knew it was them but had no idea how to say or remember and therefore write their name. If a tree falls in the forest but you have absolutely no clue how to call it by name, did the tree actually fall in the forest?)
“Where is the Foot of the Bed” by Emily Robb from How to Moonwalk (2021, Petty Bunco). And here we have thick and crude distorto-clods of electric guitar sustaining over quirky electronic bass that sounds like Raymond Scott drunk at 2 a.m. dinking around with some unsoothing sounds. In the time it took me to write not even half of that, the 1:51 track is over.
“Modern Nostalgia (Alternate )” by Aux Meadows from Zum Audio Vol. 5 (2023, Zum Audio). This is an odd charming trio for electronic keys, folky/rocky guitar strumming, and slide guitar. Folky rustic Americana but with a subtle clear improv weirdness intention, mostly coming from the high/chirpy electronic keys (which are nonetheless completely diatonic, tonal, and tuneful). I like it! Who is it? Someone called Aux Meadows from Zum Audio Vol. 5, that’s who!
“Prez” by Spanyurd from Split Ends (2024, Already Dead). Crazy noise-prog! I’m narrowing this down to one of two specific things I know are in my Bandcamp collection; this is either a track from the Spanyurd/Zumigalooje split CS, or (more likely) someone on the Zum Audio Vol. 5 comp, since my Bandcamp shuffle has clearly been favoring that, and this particular type of distortotronic skilled-but-super-noisy throwdown is very Spockmorgue/00s Bay Area. Lol, this actually is Spanyurd, my first guess was right. They are indeed a crazy band (from 2010s Chicago), you should check that tape/Bandcamp out.
“Seaworthy” by Jonathan Snipes from Zum Audio Vol. 5 (2023, Zum Audio). Kinda just straight-up trip-hop. Quite generic but somehow still quite good. Maybe I’m saying that because it’s already in my Bandcamp collection, but I think it’s in my Bandcamp collection because I already said that. (It’s just another Zum Audio Vol. 5 track. Why would I get so excited about a “shuffle all” feature when it just favors the same one or two albums every time?)