Fördämning Arkiv Vinyl, CD & Tape 10 Items

Early and mostly previously unreleased recordings from Dundedin's The Strange Girls, a band that initially consisted of Clayton Noone, Kaaterama "Motty" Morehu and Jon Arcus. The Strange Girls existed on and off from 1999 up until Motty's passing in 2019 and left behind a peculiar trail of gems scattered around on a myriad of limited lathe cuts, cassettes and CDrs. It's OK To Be Happy focuses on the trio era - Jon Arcus left the band in 2002 - and starts at the very beginning with 'Satan', the first song at the first gig they ever played. Ten tracks of atmospheric bummer folk/downer rock with that unmistakable lo-fi Root Don Lone For Cash anything-goes approach, carefully sequenced into something that feels like the album that never was rather than just a compilation. Edition of 500 copies. Insert with liner notes to each track by Clayton Noone. Fördämning Arkiv 8.

Hot on the heels of their third album Forget The Curse (Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox, 2023), Fördämning Arkiv presents a Troth anthology compiling early non-album material and other odds and ends from the Australian duo. A massive 15-track retrospective, Uncut Flowers consists of the tracks from the Our Opaque Wreath cassette (Moontown Records, 2019), The Optimist (Essential Minerals, 2019), the Garland And Gauze 7" (Altered States Tapes, 2020) as well as various compilation contributions. 74 minutes.

"In evidence throughout is Troth’s penchant for capturing and collecting sounds from their environments, transforming field recordings, organic and non-organic sonic sources into textures of a palette that they then compose and improvise with. There’s a virtuosity of sampling and sound manipulation. The recurrent sounds from Besseny and Bowman’s intrepid field and bush explorations often verge on an indistinguishability between the synthesised and the concrete-organic. Permutated hand percussion or the throbbing of a waterfall; xylophonic melody or the tape loop of a bird call. The clank and tings of unidentified objects, matter itself writhing in the veggie garden. An environment starts speaking from iron gates in a paddock anywhere, close to the damp leaf and loam of a forest floor far below unseen birds and their cacophony of song and chatter. Tracks often collapse into a grey zone stretched between composition and improvisation." - Chris Colla

Digipack in an edition of 500 copies including a 8-page booklet with liner notes, photos etc. Mastered by Joakim Karlsson. Artwork by Charlott Malmenholt. Fördämning Arkiv 10.

Plastic Carved Out In The Shape Of The Music compiles all the non-album releases of the 1990s by Dunedin free improvisation quartet-cum-trio, Sandoz Lab Technicians. One of many hermetic enclaves of creative endeavour in the nineties NZ underground, Sandoz Lab Technicians are James Kirk (also of King Loser, The Stumps, Black Boned Angel, Renderizors, etc.), Nathan Thompson (Sleep, Renderizors, Eye, Expansion Bay, etc.), Tim Cornelius (Sky Blue Lodge, Three Forks, Ray Off, etc.) and, for their first few years, Mark Curragh.

Like many of their peers, Sandoz Lab Technicians also ran their own label, Blunt Instrumentals, on which they released lathe-cuts of their own music, both with Sandoz, and in other configurations (The Cornelius Brothers, Unspecified, etc.); once word had spread, particularly thanks to the release of their debut album on Siltbreeze, their music also leaked out via an international network of small labels dedicated to underground experimental music. Plastic Carved Out In The Shape Of The Music features all their Sandoz self-released EPs, and a few extra bits and pieces, offering the listener an excellent overview of their music’s development, from their very first sessions, through to the wildly sophisticated free noise sculpting of their later material.

Sandoz Lab Technicians were always a curious proposition, even within the NZ free noise ‘scene’ (such as it was, or was not). Their early material has a particularly loose, suburban cast, not without some humour: the material sounds like it’s been recorded in scungy lounge rooms, dimly lit hallways, kitchens full of bric-à-brac, sharehouses with dusty curtains. Neighbours drop by to ask about their cats; guitars clang, drums tumble, all kinds of incidental instruments clatter and pulse, in a matter not unlike collectives like Smegma or Los Angeles Free Music Society (as mentioned in the excellent liner notes by Mike Trouchon).

As the group’s playing develops, the music becomes more expansive, patient, laminar. The audio verité recording techniques gift the music an unerringly right sense of space, place, and drama; the interaction between the musicians is always spot-on, growing in sensitivity and nuance over the course of these two discs, able to flip on a dime from all-in group-mind levitation to inhabiting parallel, coincident universes. It’s a bravura collection of music that tells us much about free and improvised sound from the South Island, while still holding its cards close to its chest. - Jon Dale

37 tracks presented on 2 CDs, the first one compiling tracks recorded between 1993 and 1996 and the second one 1996 to 1999. 6-panel digipack with a 12-page booklet. Edition of 500 copies.

"By the mid-1990s, there was a quietly thriving underground in Wellington, New Zealand, made up of a number of loosely aligned operatives - Surface of The Earth and their World Resources imprint; Fever Hospital and 8 Dec, and the music made by the members of The Garbage & the Flowers after that group temporarily dissolved in 1992..." One of those rather short-lived groups was Dress, who on record consisted of Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone from The Garbage & the Flowers and Kristen Wineera from Entlang. Their sole release was a lathe cut 10" released in 1995 on their own label Hell On in a total run of 120 copies. Fördämning Arkiv here presents those wonderfully puzzling tracks to a wider audience, now pressed as a 45rpm 12" with the original recordings remastered for vinyl by Ben Wright Smith. While the ambience is kind of similar to what was going on in the early The Garbage & the Flowers stuff, the music that was made by Dress was very different: improvised and non-song-based but kept in place by repetition and odd melodies. Hypnotic and perplexing music that existed in its own parallel universe for a brief moment in time. The 12" is packaged in a sleeve with slightly reworked artwork though staying very close to the original 10" cover and comes with a 16-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes by Jon Dale, lots of photos and a reprint of the interview with Helen Johnstone and Yuri Frusin published in Opprobrium #1 in 1995. Edition of 500 copies. Fördämning Arkiv 7, October 2022.

A long time in the works vinyl edition of one of our favorite New Zealand albums. Rachel Shearers astonishing debut as Lovely Midget was originally released as a CD on Corpus Hermeticum in 2000. Mastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed in an edition of 500 copies, comes with insert.

This self-titled disc was the first full-length Lovely Midget offering, which I released on Corpus Hermeticum as a CD only in May of 2000. It followed a 10” on Ecstatic Peace a couple of years earlier. Rachel Shearer (who is the Lovely Midget) had, however, been busy since the late 80’s in the rock groups Angelhead (a cassette on Xpressway), and Queen Meanie Puss (singles on Siltbreeze and Flying Nun). She spent the latter part of the 1990s perfecting her engineering skills and developing the modus operandi that made Lovely Midget possible. The music of Lovely Midget is all about texture, there’s not just an LM ‘sound’, there’s an LM ‘feel’ as well. This is achieved by careful and extensive digital modification of recorded sounds. Their origin might be instrumental (as she claims for much of this album) but they sound ultimately anything but. This is a painstaking, almost lapidary approach, which produces highly polished fragments of sound, constructed like a mosaic into more-than-lifesize pictures in sound. Sounds are sanded away, then reconstructed from piles of dust-like granules; they are polished into unnatural brilliance, then dirtied up again into new shapes mimicking nature, but with subtle yet undeniable differences. At its most extreme this can produce an other-worldly ‘underwater’ sound, where every sonic event is heard through a curtain of intangible but unavoidable substance. Even the ‘songs’, where these exist as frameworks for the pieces, have been stripped back to their musical chassis and reassembled in the same order but to a different end. The effect is like listening to the ghosts of a yet unborn generation, paradoxical and uncanny. Lovely Midget was thus totally contemporary in the production sense at the fin de siecle, using state-of-the-art tools, but the music was and remains uncategorisable, achingly cool NZ soundwork for the 21st Century. While some might ‘chill out’ to this kind of thing, the truly discerning will quite simply find it too damn exciting. Pour yourself a glass of top-shelf vodka straight from the freezer and listen up as these beautiful dreamy drones and hovering inverted sound sculptures softly clash like floating icebergs of sound in a frozen fjord. Immaculate purity of aural vision realised. - Bruce Russell

A small chunk of early 80's Swedish DIY underground history from the legendary but rarely heard Fysisk Fostran. Based in the small town of Stenungsund north of Gothenburg and roughly active between 1980 and 1984, the group released a few cassettes as well as a fabled 7" that due to mysterious complications only exist as a testpressing in 4 copies. Fysisk Fostran were inspired by the early UK industrial sound as well as post-punk and synth music, this combined with the young age of the bandmembers and general small town boredom resulted in a rather unhinged and wild sound. While comparisons at times could be made with other early Swedish industrial/cassette culture freaks like Enhänta Bödlar, Engürdetz or En Halvkokt I Folie, one could argue that Fysisk Fostran stood out thanks to their obstinate will to rock out in the midst of all the rudimentary, electronic experimentations. The crude fidelity of their recordings only adds to the utterly bizarre atmosphere.

The LP compiles the tracks from the 7" as well as choice cuts from the cassette releases, stuff so scarce that it barely existed even back then. Original sources transfered and mastered for vinyl by Linus at Elementstudion during 2023. The LP comes with an insert featuring liner notes by Marko Gillingsmark of Levande Begravd. Cover jackets stamped with the same stamp used for the 7" sleeve back in 1984. Edition of 500 copies.

Utmarken was a combined venue, record shop and recording space in Gothenburg that existed between 2008 and 2011. A short-lived under the radar hub for outsider art and fringe music, the place quickly became an oasis for an wide variety of local misfits and a hotbed for interesting sounds. The creative, multifaceted atmosphere spawned acts like Ättestupa, Lust For Youth, Street Drinkers and Arv & Miljö but also became a temporarily home for then already established names like Sewer Election and Poppets.

Fantasy Sex consisted of Dan Johansson (Sewer Election) and David Eng (Ättestupa) and existed on and off during those three years and the few recordings the duo left behind them captures the true spirit of the time and place better than most. It's still hard to try define exactly what Fantasy Sex really was all about. They almost became a house band, albeit one that necessarily didn't perform in front of an audience. The two major recordings sounds very different to each other and they almost did as many sound installations as they did proper live shows. Very fittingly, the duo pretty much stopped their activities at the same time as Utmarken closed in 2011.

In late 2022, David and Dan revisited the old recordings and came out with a brilliant 34 minute long LP edit. The A-side consists of a new mix of the massive recording that became known as the 'Blue lagoon', originally released in a tiny edition on the short-lived imprint Inkasso Kassetter in 2009. Sort of inspired by the then exploding new age-y movement of spraypainted DIY cassette culture, the track is a suggestive blend of tropical loops and brittle, hazy electronics with an almost Yeast Culturian approach to continuous longform composition. 'Desperate Attempts' on the flipside was originally released on Joy De Vivre in 2011 as a split cassette with Elisha Morningstar. You're never better than your record collection and the track shows a very different side of the project. Initially chaotic and almost FMP-like free jazz skronk mixed up with severe slices of what was once upon a time refered to as "Swedish tape noise", the track suddenly slows down to something that predates a sound that Neutral perfected and cemented a couple of years later. The LP closes with 'Waves Of Skin' which was their contribution to the Ett Annat Göteborg compilation cassette, a track that used source material from the Blue lagoon session.

Two-sided insert with liner notes by Matthias Andersson. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Edition of 500 copies.