LAFMS - Los Angeles Free Music Society
The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is a loose underground collective of experimental avant-rock artist-musicians formed in 1973, who found commercial rock too boring, slick, and predictable, and set out to reinvent improvisation and sound experiments with a DIY ethic
The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is a loose underground collective of experimental avant-rock artist-musicians formed in 1973, who found commercial rock too boring, slick, and predictable, and set out to reinvent improvisation and sound experiments with a DIY ethic
Member of: Joseph Hammer
Free rock
Dennis Duck (ds), Fredrik Nilsen (b), Tom Recchion (mock cello, strangaphone), Keiji Haino (g), Rick Potts (g). Recorded in 1982. A definite, honest-to-goodness blast from out of the deepest vaults, bringing together Haino and a trio of wildly surreal pranksters from the Los Angeles Free Music Society scene. An amazing archive find!
Suite The Hen's Teeth
*Exquisite black and silver silk screen printed cover. Limited edition** Oh man, this match-up must be a dream come true for at least a handful of freaks, somewhere, us included! The tenth release on Jozef Van Wissem's Incunabulum imprint sees the label curator jamming with LAFMS legends, Smegma at the Pink House in Portland, 2010, infusing his 13-course swan neck baroque lute into their uncontainable free improvisations in eight parts. They appear to be entirely respectful of each others space,…
Unboxed
Unboxed, a collection of dissected from the Lowest Form of Life 10CD box set (on RRR) (including tracks not available in the box set) is a splash introduction to a newcomer of the L.A.F.M.S. The Lowest Form of Music is an utterly devastating set of the works of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. This tremendously obscure collective -- a loose assemblage of artists and with shared subversive musical interests (John Cage, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, The Residents, Derek B…
Mirage
With Mirage on Important Records, Smegma again does the impossible. 38 years after reinventing the musical wheel, they have recorded a stunning masterpiece. With four of the original members working together again for the first time in many years, together with many new collaborators , they have kept alive their unique brand of old school primitive, Avant/Garage music. Running the gamut from the Musique Concrete inspired subtilely bombastic mood of the Title track to World of my Own's frenzied n…
s\\t
'On side one, a live performance of smegma and Liz Young at LAFMS Telethon Revisited 24hr performance on February 2009. On side two, studio recording of smegma + John Wiese. With member of Airway (Ace Farren Ford, Dennis Duck, Frederik Nilsen), Ju Suk Reet Meate, Nour Moborak, Oblivia, Parker Lemus, Victor Sparks, John Wiese with special guest vocalist Liz Young. With a poster, cover print on recycled paper, to open like a book... Art work by fleur D. Limited and numeroted to 500 copies.' label …
I Love You, Please Love Me Too
With "I love you please love me too", Joseph Hammer continues his journey into playful yet heavily focused idiot-savant infinite psychedelic inertia. Utilising consumer audio technology and 20th century detritus, Hammer lovingly decodes his passion for mid century sci fi and AM radio station beyond all point of recognition like a snakecharmer. Multi-dimensional audio collage techniques to a free form and completely unorthodox plunderphonic hypnosis. Baked devotionals for tape loop minds. Joseph …
I Am Not Artist (1973-1988) 6Lp Box
This astonishing 6LP/DVD Box-Set compiles most of Smegma's long out or print and impossible to find Vinyl-releases and contributions on labels such as their own legendary Pigface Records, LAFMS, TRAP, DOM and SELEKTON. The box incl. their first three 7" inches "Disco Diarrhea", "Flashcards", "Pigface Chant", their Lp's like "Pigs for Leper" or "Glamour Girl 1941" as well as a 2Lp-sided extract of the Live 73-82 Double Tape „Spontaneaous Sound, all in one place. Smegma started collectively by Ju …
Live At Lace
This version will be almost a complete replica of the Japanese version of the original album." Paste-on cover with black and white inserts of numerous performance flyers and photographs. Crucial early-noise document from the Los Angeles Free Music Society heyday. "AIRWAY is a brainchild of Joe Potts. Here are COMMANDMENTS OF AIRWAY: AIRWAY is a hole through which our conscious passes. Sound of AIRWAY is not an object. Sound of AIRWAY has no fixed location. Sound of AIRWAY has no fixed loc…
Split
Inspired split LP that pairs feral European art soundists Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer with the avant garage surrealism of LAFMS stalwarts Smegma. Numbered edition of 177 copies with colour paste-on sleeves. The Smegma side bundles an eerie track from 1975 with two pieces from 2008/2009 that use loops, electronics and waves of extended muzzy tone to confuse time lines completely. The Kommissar side is less about outlaw sound poetry and more plugged into their destructo rock style as documented…
Morass
In 1987 the Morass tape was released. One studio side. One live side. Totally killer. The studio side was recently re-released as bonus material on the Nattering naybobs CD (Harbinger). We decided to re-release the live side on vinyl. And to add 15 minutes of extra material. Astounding unreleased live recordings from 1986. Full colour artwork and labels. Black vinyl bag.
Where Were You On Christmas?
A brand new Christmas single from long-running Los Angeles avant-garde pioneer TOM RECCHION. Includes the Yuletide faves "Where Were You On Christmas?" and "A Christmas Filled With Tears." Limited edition pressing, imported from The Netherlands.
Endless Coast
Nordic microsound operatives-turned-noise metallers Jazkamer (or Jazzkammer as they are also known) team up with legendary American underground pioneers Smegma and No Fun head boy Carlos Giffoni (who for this disc is listed as a member of Jazkamer) and make one unholy racket. Far from the overblown formless din this could have been, all parties do a magnificent job of keeping their more explicitly destructive tendencies to a minimum for much of the record, instead resting much of their attention…
Merzbow Plays Smegma Plays Merzbow
Chances are that most of Smegma's fans are already familiar with Merzbow's music. This collaboration, occasionally referred to as Smegma Plays Merzbow Plays Smegma or even Plays, features two 20-minute tracks. In "Electro Smegmacoustic Music," Masami Akita plays Smegma tapes, an audio generator, a teleband tranceiver, and a mixer. In "Smegma Plays Merzbow," Smegma use Merzbow tapes, tape loops, record players, and a few acoustic instruments. The result is surprisingly homogeneous -- enough to ma…
The Mad Excitement, The Barbaric Pulsations, The Incomparable Rh
Smegma has been around, in one form or another, since 1973, issuing an average of a record a year out of odd tape-loops and jarring-yet-ambient original instrumentation long before electronic sampling was even a glimmer in Mr. and Mrs. Casio's eyes. They achieved a small degree of noteriety in the '80s as one of that proud elite of North American new-music acts hiply obscure enough to have European-only record deals. They're also known among the anti-pop sound exchangers of the international cas…
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black was an installation at LA Municipal Art Gallery as part of the COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship exhibition from 2004. The installation consisted of 2000 posters: 1000 Gold and 1000 Black. Two separate rooms were covered with these posters that were covered solid in their color with the name of the color printed rather large in dead center. At the bottom of each poster was listed the instrumentation for each particular soundtrack to the color. The GO…
Xoxo
Extended Organ is a 'supergroup' of experimental sound artists whose members are culled from the ranks of that seminal West Coast 'slacker' noise cult the Los Angeles Free Music Society. The four members of Extended Organ have been improvising with sound for over two decades and although they have played together in various configurations in the past, this is the first time the quartet has ever played together as a total entity. The foursome each have active and well established careers on their…
I Love My Organ
The bulk of the material on Tom Recchion's second album for Birdman was recorded just after the completion of Chaotica in the mid-'80s, and sounds like a natural continuation of that record (despite the absence of any Esquivel). Recchion is assisted on some tracks by noted musician, composer, author, journalist for The Wire, and music curator David Toop (himself a collaborator with Eno, Jon Hassell, John Zorn, Talvin Singh, Adrian Sherwood, and Scanner). Recchion labored on I Love My Organ for y…
Glamour Girl 1941 + Pigface Chant
This CD collects the first Smegma long-player, Glamour Girl 1941, originally released on the LAFMS label in 1979, the Pigface Chant 7" released that same year and recorded five years earlier, and even adds in four bonus recordings from that same era. These early recordings of this long-running group of noise anarchists show an extremely primitive but non-conformist take on the musical world, even more so than, say, the Krautrock band Faust, as Smegma adds a messier element of chaos to its sound.…
s/t
Studio collaboration recorded and mixed by DR. ID. himself at Smegma's Portland studio during Metalux - Giffoni summer tour. Total weirdness full on psychedelic improvisation in the classic smegma style, amplified by giffoni's arsenal of unmatched apocalyptic precission machinery and Metalux's own arsenal of strangeness electronic sound and vocals from the next dimension. Already a total American classic before it even existed. Enjoy the Present. The Eternal Sound is now and forever. Coreleased …
Tiromancy
New recordings and a couple of their unreleased tracks. Another Japanese CD from 1997 by this oblique improv collective. In some ways, just as traditional as a bunch of Sun Ra acolytes, in others more bent than actual acid casualties, Tiromancy splashes down swaddled in rainbow dots, early Playboy chic, laughing gas electronics, conflicting vapors, surround-seep ooze-adelia, and highly agile mental capabilities. Japanese import.
Smegma is an American experimental noise group formed in Pasadena, …