Locust Music

LOCUST MUSIC MID AUTUMN UPDATES
Greetings and welcome to the mid-autumn locust update. We have another fine run of locust releases to bring you as we jostle between subtropical climes and the usual crisp fall air. To purchase any of the latest batch of locust records & cds now, you can click the links below and order straight from paypal.com or you can log on to the locust music site & go to our catalog page to place an order.
Single CD $13 (USA) / $14.50 (Canada) / $16.50 (World)
180 gram Single LP* $15/ $17 / $25.00
180 gram Double LP $22 / $30 / $35
T-Shirts $15 / $17/$20
All prices include shipping
Mambo for Metal
Angelblood
Mambo Mange
locust95
180 gram LP
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Listen to "Aztec Flag"
First up is the slightly delayed release by the short lived and really great NY art metal group Angelblood called Mambo Mange. This final posthumous release represents the band's fullest incarnation after a handful of releases on the Captain Trip label and NYC's Printed Matter.

Layered & entangled twin vox duels between Lizzi Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance) & visual artist Rita Ackermann carry on a lineage of free femme glossolalia attacks that stretch far and wide from Bas Sheva, Yma Sumac, Cathy Berberian to Yoko Ono and beyond, only here, the cosmic dual rides above a full on punk metal machine that quickly got me longing for the days of hoofing it over to CBGB's Sunday harcore matinees. It's a damn shame that they aren't around to blow away today's open ears.
Ackermann's Ono inspired freak-outs, feline growls & orgasmic yodels and Bougatsos's breathy wordless space panting over Matt "the Count" Heyner's (NNCK) seriously beefy power chords, Anders Nilsson's (Aorta) sinewy solos, Brian DeGraw's (Gang Gang Dance) bass thump & Dave Nuss's (NNCK) propulsive drumming made for the most thoroughly realized vision of Angelblood's art + metal sound. Outside of lobbying for a reunion show, Mambo Mange is your best bet for trip on their surreal adrenaline soaked ride. Available on 180 gram vinyl with a killer cover design that pays homage to another stellar fringe album of decades past. First to figure that one out gets a free pony ride or at least a copy of this here record.

HENRY FLYNT & NOVA'BILLY GET DOWN AT THE INTERNATIONAL PARTY
Henry Flynt & Nova'Billy
Nova'Billy
locust101
CD / 2 x 180 Gram Vinyl
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Buy Double LP (USA) / Buy Double LP (Canada) / Buy Double LP (World)
Buy Nova'Billy T Shirt (USA) / Buy Nova'Billy T Shirt (Canada) / Buy Nova'Billy T Shirt (World)

Last year, some of you folks had a chance to check out the small run nova'billy 45 "i was a creep" / "left ear". That 45 quickly slithered out of our hands and, in its stead, reports came in from people who cared to seek it out in the first place. "A pretty nutty collision of sputtered Mose Allison vocals, tasty guitar licks, funky rhythms & hingeless horns, bass & percussion" said the Wire; "The real Rolling Thunder that year didn't belong to Dylan's revue but instead to an anonymous bunch called Nova'Billy whose solid backbeats & higher key interactions of fiddle's 'n gits reduces the white frocked, turban wearing, mime-faced Renaldo & Clara folly to the outhouse of hokum" said Siltblog; a sophisto’s "real people" disc said Z Gun. It was a small dose of what was to come with this release of Nova'Billy - the first new archival Flynt release since 2005s Purified by the Fire . "I was a Creep" finds its way back on wax, as does an alternate cowpoke hillbilly stomp spin on "Left Ear" along with 11 other Nova'billy monsters.
Story has it that when Henry Flynt first assembled Nova'Billy , he was desperate to get out of the art venues and found his way over to CBGBs. Taking the name at face value - COUNTRY BLUEGRASS BLUES, Henry approached the folks there and told them he had a new band called Nova'Billy that was a perfect fit. It was, after all, all of those things CBs ostensibly stood for and more. Flynt was promptly told to get lost and, so it goes, that Nova'Billy never did happen to find opportunity to play outside of the odd loft gig, The Kitchen or at Anthology Film Archives.

What the band did manage, however, was to record an enormous amount of A grade material in just a few recording sessions. Nova'Billy stands as one of the fullest, most beauteous document of Flynt's tenure with a full working rock band to date. For less than one calendar year between 1974 and 1975, Henry Flynt's hard driving, heavy jamming agit country rock band, Nova'Billy embraced bareknuckled deep fried groove attacks, bearded hippie jam band workouts & a monstrous melange of blues, boogie and free jazz squeal into a musical soufflé that could only have come together with Flynt cooking up what was proven to be, time and again, an impossible vision within the confines of the SOHO art orbit of the 70s. After a couple performances at Anthology Film Archives and studio sessions in Richmond, Virginia and Manhattan, the band postered SOHO in a last ditch effort to get some traction with the hipsters that read, "Party on down to the Kitchen. Stoned country music for rock country". The gig, like all the others before it, was poorly attended. Nova'Billy played what would be their last live gig at the Kitchen on June 27, 1975.

Nova’Billy covers a damned fine and important moment in Henry Flynt's musical career. If the Insurrections laid the foundation for his anti war primitive garage rock sound, the emergence, nearly a decade later of Nova'billy is the realization of Henry's own vision of obtuse personal politics ( "I was a creep"), provocative leftwing posturing (check their version of the world communist anthem "the international!") and a gleefully recombinant spin on southern rock music. 13 cuts and 60 minutes of old glory on gatefold double 180 gram vinyl & CD & boasting the band's logo designed by George Maciunas.

CONTINENTAL DRIFTING

The Family Elan
Stare of Dawn
locust102
CD / 180 gram LP
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Buy vinyl (USA) / Buy vinyl (Canada) / Buy vinyl (World)
Listen to "the wide eyed fox"
There's no telling what happens when you leave a guy alone in a room with a turntable, the entire Ocora & Ethnic Folkways back catalog, pepper it with classic 60s british acid folk sides & leave him to his own devices with an odd instrument or two. our guess is that Glasgow's Chris Hladowski's solo project The Family Elan comes pretty close to one possible result. Hladowski may be known to some for his involvement with 3 great UK acts Nalle, Scatter, The One Ensemble of Daniel Padden. On Stare of Dawn, Hladowski goes it mostly alone and the result is a special little record built around Chris's gently liliting vocal offerings and really awe inspiring modal bouzouki drones . This is wide eyed, globally influenced hypnotic stuff that brings to mind everything from Anne Briggs bouzouki inventions & the Incredible String Band to near eastern innovators like Azerbaijani saz master Edalat Nasibov & Kurdish sufi mystic Ostad Elahi or the sounds of the Greek rebetes of the 1920s & somehow combines it into a cohesive whole.

Available on 180 gram vinyl and cd, Stare of Dawn features lovely illustrations by visual artist & Nalle musical partner Hanna Tuulikki. Elan will be doing a load of shows around this release in the UK and in the Spring of 2008, folks in the U.S. can expect a double bill tour featuring Nalle & The Family Elan to coincide with the release of Nalle's sophomore album & locust debut.

Nov 4 2007 @ The Egypt Cottage in Newcastle
Nov 5 2007 @ The Hare and Hounds in Mannchester
Nov 6 2007 @ The Scotchman and his Pack in Bristol
Nov 7 2007 @ London ICA in London
Nov 8 2007 @ The Packhorse in Leeds
Nov 9 2007 @ The Arts Organisation in Nottingham
Nov 10 2007 @ Eggstock 2007, Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester
Nov 11 2007 @ The Tin Angel in Coventry
Nov 12 2007 @ Exeter Hall in Oxford

"Sometimes you have to lose yourself 'fore you can find anything." Ed (Burt Reynolds), Deliverance

Minnesota's Paul Metzger is an unsung hero of the unaccompanied steel string instrument and a master musician of an instrument of his own invention. On Deliverance - a real time performance on his overhauled 21 string banjo - you'll be treated to some of the most deeply satisfying & impulsive outer cosmos ragadelia you're ever likely to hear. Clocking in at nearly 60 colossal minutes, Deliverance is 3 tracks of unfiltered aural transcendence; a hypnotic raga epic that's by turns a slow burning meditation & an urgent mind / body duel. Put simply, on Deliverance, Paul has pretty much reverse engineered his way into an astonishing south asian tradition and it's simply jaw dropping both live & on record.

Paul's playing may summon up the spirits of Sandy Bull's searching inventiveness, Billy Faier's out Tacoma sides, J.P. Pickens' tweaked Americana, Henry Flynt's searing harmonic drones or Big Jim Sullivan's psychedelic exotica, but at the end of the day, Metzger is no idolater and we're all a little luckier to have him around to occupy his own singular post in this post- Fahey world.

This is Paul's locust debut - the first of several to come - and follows a handful of other fine offerings including a split w/ Ben Chasny (six organs) & Chris Corsano duo on Roaratorio, three improvisations which found its way out on Low's Chairkickers Music years ago and later in a gorgeous hand made double vinyl edition & a fine limited vinyl release on the Mutable music label. Deliverance is available on CD and limited 180 gram virgin vinyl housed in a stunning gatefold jacket. It's hard to believe it but we managed to get the last of the three extended tracks - the 31 minute title track - onto one side and the results are purely high fidelity! Eat your heart out Deutsche Grammofon.

In support of the release of Deliverance, Paul is embarking on a two week tour from the midwest to the upper reaches of the North East with friend and fellow twin cities musician Tim Kaiser. His tour opens on November 4th witha gig at Danny's pub here in Chicago where we'll be doing a locust dj set or two & serving up some favorite obscurities. It's a free gig so we encourage anyone in the area to come on out, drink up & be merrily transported.

All dates except * w/ Tim Kaiser
11/4- Chicago, IL: Danny's
11/5- Detroit, MI: Bohemian National Home
11/6- Cleveland, OH: visible voice books
11/7- State College, PA, Schlow Centre Library
11/8- Philadelphia, PA: Big Jar Books
11/9- Brooklyn, NY: Marquise Dance Hall
11/10- Medford, MA,: OXFAM CAFE
11/11- New Haven, CT,: BAR
11/12- Portland, ME: One Longfellow
11/13- Florence, MA: Ecstatic Yod
11/14- Providence, RI: AS220 W/ Geoff Mullen
11/15- Brooklyn, NY: Monkeytown W/ Geoff Mullen
11/16- Philadelphia, PA: Vaccum w/Kahoutek & Bardo Pond
11/17 - TBD
11/18 - Chicago, IL: Elastic Arts

Hunt! Gather!
dawson prater
locust music
p.o. box 220426
chicago, il. 60622