LAFMS Los Angeles Free Music Society
LAFMS, formed in 1974, was a collective of like-minded artists inspired by the likes of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Some of those in the collective included Smegma, Airway, Le Forte Four and Doo-Dooettes and some other groups interested in noise and improvisation.
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…
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…
Northwest Passage: The Birth of Portland\'s D.I.Y. Culture
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Pacific Northwest witnessed a surge of idiosyncratic creativity that, for a time, banished the slack-jawed banality of mainstream music and art to the shabby bargain basement of the cultural wasteland. Countless young men and women turned their backs on the hollow blather generated in corporate boardrooms, producing their own music and art with a rebellious, energetic glee. Northwest Passage: The Birth of Portland's D.I.Y. Culture is an independent film…
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 …
I Know A Chord Buried Into The Ground And A Tongue On A Cloud
Self-released Japan-only album from the higher-mind duo of Shizuo Uchida and Hirotomo Hasegawa aka Hasegawa-Shiuzo. Previous releases on PSF and Tiliqua have orbited the O-mind with alla the force of an octopus in zero gravity, with strings and ethnic drone instruments floating in waves of macro/micro bliss. This latest release ups the ante even more, with a more aggressively nuanced attack on post Taj Mahal Travellers group mind aesthetics and it makes for one of the best contemporary communal …
Smegma Plays Merzbow
An awesome CD resulting from mail collaboration between experimental two noise legends. A dynamic mix of whirr, crystalline drones, and staticky noise abstractions.1-26: Electro Smegmacousic Music Merzbow used Smegma tapes. All composed by Masami Akita using MA-tape, audio generatior, teleband tranceiver & mixer. 27-50: Smegma Plays Merzbow Composed 1996 at Smegma Studios using Merzbow tape, tape loops, record players, wood flute, vocals, optigan, mussette & frequency analyzer. Recorded & mi…
The Beast
"Smegma man, fucking Smegma. They started the whole damn thing. Sure there was Lee Rocky & some soundeffects 78s that set the crew in motion but screw it.. you wouldn't be blasting The Beast or any Weird Handdrawn LP with rotten ears if it wasn't for this truly motley crew. In high school my sweet momma would give me ten bones a week for lunch, come Monday by noon that shit was blown at the local rec shop. When I only had a couple of raggedy bux left from gripping Zorlac stickers, the only optio…
Dennis Suck Goes Disco
Essential reissue of this LAFMS cassette-only release from 1977 -- the first in a series of archival LAFMS release from the label based in the store that was ground zero for the orginal movement to begin with -- Poo-Bah Records! Great booklet with new liner notes by Dennis, design by Tom Recchion. "Dennis Duck Goes Disco was originally released as a hand-made cassette in 1977. Only 20 were made, numbered and given to friends. The album was made entirely with a phonograph and records, utilizing s…
Live At Lace
This album was originally recorded and released as an LP in 1978; Airway was a group featuring Joe Potts, Chip Chapman, Rick Potts, Dennis Duck, Juan Gomez and Tom Recchion. Live At Lacewas later included in the Cortical Foundation/RRR 10CD LAFMS box from 1995, but this version has been remastered, using the original tapes for the LP. It is considered to exhibit a "pretty different feeling of sound" and features unique artwork that was only used on Japanese-export copies of the LP when it was fi…
Beyond The Pink Live
Airway started in 1977 as a plot by Joe Potts to subliminally program audiences behind the cover of a chaotic wall of sound. To create the wash of ear-splitting noise, all of the instruments, Vetza's vocals, and the subliminal implants are mixed together and processed through a daisy-chain of flangers, phase-shifters, delays and distortions. Then the super-charged signal is blasted through guitar amps carefully placed to maximize the ricochet of sound from wall to wall. Airway kicks the notion o…
Sweetly doing nothing
with a 30 year practice in sonic explorations – including, record manipulation, live tape loops, free improvisation, found and invented instruments - tom recchion is one of the world’s most established and finest experimental artist and musician. based in los angeles, tom recchion has co-founded the legendary music entity lafms (los angeles free music society), collaborated with david toop, christian marclay, oren ambarchi, keiji haino, max eastley, rova, john duncan, smegma (just to name a few)…
Nattering naybobs of negativity
The second in the series of Harbinger Sound's efforts to present the Smegma back catalog. This album originally came out in the UK only back in 1987 and is backed by the studio side from the 1988 cassette release, Morass. Twenty-one tracks in total. Dedicated to Tom (Pig Champion) Roberts. Limited to #1000 copies. CD features an eight-page booklet with photos and a pre-1988 Smegma discography