Here’s the second volley of Bandcamp links to reissues of obscure electronic/experimental/whatever music.
Kultur Operating Penis is an ultra-obscure Japanese one-man-band who released a fair amount of tapes starting from the late 1980s. Despite their productivity, KOP have escaped the notice of all but the most diehard noise collectors. Some of the music is straight-ahead noise but there’s also a streak of rhythmic industrial machine music in the vein of Esplendor Geometrico, Vivenza or early SPK. In 2022, Tribe Tapes compiled a terrific “best of” (ha!) album with tracks drawn from most of the KOP‘s history. Since you probably won’t ever find the originals, this album is an ideal entry into their hermetic world.
Marc Benner initially started the Oxidation label in order to revive old noise CDRs that would otherwise have… um, oxidized. He’s since expanded his publishing empire to include new music and has amassed one heck of a catalog. Those initial reissues are still worth exploring! “The Logic Bomb” was a 1999 CDr by an artist from Ohio called R4 (aka Barry Scheffel). See, this exemplifies one of the things I like so much about Bandcamp. I’ve been obsessively combing mail order noise catalogs since 1989 and I’ve never even heard of R4! Maybe he was better known locally? Thanks to Bandcamp, Oxidation can take what was once a small run, barely distributed CDR and release it to the world via Bandcamp. Some of you might be old enough to remember having to root through dusty boxes of noise CDRs at record shops in order to discover gems like this. Check out the rest of the label’s catalog while you’re listening to this, there’s so much great stuff there… titles by Expose Your Eyes, Azoikum, Kadef, Compest, Mutant Ape, Mlehst, Straight Panic, The Flayed Choirmaster…
Meanwhile in Neumunster, some weirdo called Harry the Hirsch spent 1981 recording his own sideways interpretation of punk and electronic music. He published a bunch of poorly-recorded cassettes under band (?) names like Ui-26, I.C.H. der Bundesminister, Gassenhauer and more that I won’t bother listing because you’ve never heard of any of it. As far as I can tell, the only time this guy’s music appeared in public is when he put it out himself on a tape in 1981. I happen to love audience-ambivalent home taper post-punk private-release nonsense like this and Harry has generously uploaded most (maybe all?) of his tapes to Bandcamp. Thanks Harry! You’re a real mensch.
From 1995 to around 2000, Nanjo Asahito (bassist and singer for everything-in-the-red-always psych band High Rise) ran a quasi-bootleg label called La Musica Records. The story is that very few of the releases on La Musica were actually sanctioned by the artists… but Nanjo still amassed an impressive catalog of PSF-adjacent psychedelic rock and improvised noise (featuring himself and also Keiji Haino, Tori Kudo, Yamatsuka Eye) that was maybe never intended for publication. I recall hearing of people who were surprised to find tapes of themselves in other people’s collections, apparently rehearsal recordings that Nanjo put out without running it by the performers. Since Makoto Kawabata (of Acid Mothers Temple, duh) started his own Bandcamp page, he’s reclaimed several of the La Musica titles that he appeared on. Now you can get these albums knowing that you’re actually giving money to the people who made the music.
Meanwhile in Australia, the late 1970s & early 1980s post-punk scene was vibrant with art school weirdos and other adventurous types who formed loads of bands, many of which didn’t last very long but left a lasting influence on the bands that followed them. There’s a good article about some of them here. The Melbourne label Chapter Music produced a couple of absolutely essential compilations called Can’t Stop It Vol 1 & Can’t Stop It Vol 2 which you really ought to go grab before you’re done reading this sentence. The same label gave the world required-listening artifacts by confrontational synth punks Primitive Calculators, Essendon Airport and miraculously unearthed & previously unreleased disco/punk by Use No Hooks. The Australian post-punk reissues that I’m going to direct your attention to today are some privately (barely) distributed cassettes of spiky, messy songs performed live by Voigt/465, who existed from 1975 to 1979 before members left to join Pel Mel, Crime & the City Solution, Wild West and Tactics. Their studio recordings were released as a CD some time ago and are worth your time if this era is something you’re excited about (I sure am). But the band has recently digitized and made available a few cassettes of concerts that show them at their roughest and rawest, working things out in front of variously enthusiastic and vociferously antagonistic pub audiences. The thrilling sound of imperfect young energy is clear, even when the drums and bass guitar aren’t. I find this sort of stuff endlessly inspiring. If you do too, check it out:
Last one for today… American ex-pats Doc Wör Mirran (which by the way, guess who just now learned how to type an umlaut on an American PC?) have been a prolific and ever-changing group of weirdos since living in San Francisco in the early 1980s, then shifting to Nürnberg in the middle of the decade. They’ve made messy punk rock, psychedelic ambience, jazz-adjacent instrumental jams, visual art and more, all linked by main instigator Joseph Raimond’s sense of humor and short attention span. He’s in the process of posting lots of titles from the vast DWM archive at his Bandcamp, but I’d recommend a couple of starting places: the early 7″s and the collaborative albums he made with Tesendalo. DWM is ideally suited to the 7″ single: several ideas slammed together, moving along rapidly and ending quickly. The work with Tesendalo is the opposite of that: longform placid drones that stay softly burbling in one place.
Noisy Bandcamp 