E G G , E G G S
“Off Yellow Soft Pillow”
KSE #264 (CDR album)
limited edition of 123 awkwardly hand-cut, hand-numbered copies
$8 US / $11 outside US postpaid payment via paypal to django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com
The cover features an original painting, “Small Business,” by Connecticut artist Elisa Vegliante. You can view more of her work at mondoexpressionism.com
Short version: a generously programmed selection of “sound happenings” from EGG, EGGS, the pioneering Western Massachusetts low-fi free-improv ensemble, with strings, toy instruments, electronics, percussion, and the sonic glue of the sound-poetry of vocalist David Russell, weaving inside and around the pieces. After dozens of cassettes and various LP’s and lathe-cut micro-editions, OFF YELLOW SOFT PILLOW is their first CDR release. They are totally what KSE is about, and we are honored to have their sublime plink, plonk, and scratch on our label. Core members Ted Lee, David Russell, Brett Robinson, and Jennifer Gelineau are joined by five other initiates from the Temple of the Off Yellow Soft Pillow. ORDER YOUR COPY NOW!
Longer version: With so many “underground” bands today doing calculatedly “transgressive” projects that they are probably also submitting as their MFA portfolio, all the while trying to get on the cover of THE WIRE, it’s nice that a few remember the true anarchic, f*ck it all DIY spirit that animated SMEGMA, YA HO WA 13, Gertrude Stein, the Nihilist Spasm Band, and “Last Movie”-era Dennis Hopper. Noise is old hat now–as stylized as hardcore, bluegrass, or shoegaze. It’s so eight years ago! The older I get, the more jaded I become, the more I believe that anyone who’s doing anything worthwhile in the arts has to be rejected as a charlatan (especially by those who were once part of the so-called “underground” but have become careerists) AND to produce a massive amount of work as a kind of existential barbaric yawp, sprayed over the world like a shaken-up soda bottle providing an aesthetic Coca Cola Douche. To produce work that has some constantly moving entry points but exists in its own inimitable world and takes the listener/audience into that world for a roller coaster ride without any seat belts, while at the same time having a kind of outsider folksy quality with roots, but roots in the flotsam and jetsam of a disposable culture, roots in the curly fries and elderly burlesque queens and grumpy winos and vinyl handbags and stuttering mechanically-separated piles of almost-meat ready to serve at gradeschool cafeterias. Truly, by that standard, EGG, EGGS is the only band that matters, as some group of limeys (whose name I forget) once had claimed for them by their label.
FINALLY, someone has taken the tribal-psych communal racket-making aesthetic, mixed it with the most playful and subversive aspects of European free-improv (back when it was still uncharted territory and free of cliche), folded in some post-Crocus Behemoth, post-Zoogz Rift, post-Babs Gonzales sound poetry delivered with a witty but acerbic musicality the way a Steve Lacy or a Trevor Watts might be working in an Alan Silva large ensemble on BYG or in a European Echoes-style orgasmic free-jazz orchestra…or maybe Blood Harvest-era Tiny Tim jamming with The Music Improvisation Company.
And there is a wonderful sense of PLAY…with toy instruments and nursery rhymes...it’s a JOYOUS PLINK, PLONK, and SCRATCH.
Each track on this generously programmed album captures a kind of SOUND HAPPENING, frozen naked at the end of the fork, and presented for you on CDR by Kendra Steiner Editions, a Texas label sending an exploratory mission to the wilds of Western Massachusetts and taking back an audio core sample, OFF YELLOW SOFT PILLOW. What’s in the water there in Northampton? We don’t know, but you can drink from those same streams with the FIRST-EVER CDR ALBUM from Egg, Eggs. After dozens of cassettes and also vinyl and lathe-cut editions, they’ve allowed us to capture the EGG, EGGS experience on glorious home-burned CDR.
You need to grab this album before all 123 copies are gone….the rotgut-sillyputty white-cat-heat sound of a band that never stops to look back…..ladies and gentlemen, EGG, EGGS… GET YOUR COPY NOW…and see the band LIVE if you live in the Northeast. This album really captures the in-your-face immediacy of an EGG, EGGS performance. You can almost smell the curly fries and taste the Mad Dog 20/20…your speakers have never before handled such a nakedly intimate and raw and beautiful recorded experience…that’s our story and we’re sticking to it…
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Late 2013 CDR releases still available from Kendra Steiner Editions:
KSE #240 (CDR) SPRILLS OF ORE (Eva Kelly), “Time Mirrors”
KSE #260 (CDR) TOM CREAN, “Wired Love” (solo guitar and banjo explorations)
KSE #255 (CDR), ERNESTO DIAZ-INFANTE/LISA CAMERON/LEE DOCKERY, “Live At the KSE 6th ANNIVERSARY CONCERT”
KSE #257 (CDR), ALFRED 23 HARTH, “Micro-Saxo-Phone, Edition IV.”
KSE #254 (cdr), DJIN AQUARIAN/SIR PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE & THE EVERAFTER, Live in San Francisco 10/2011
$8 each postpaid in US/ $11 each postpaid elsewhere…payment via paypal (see instructions above)…please include a note w/ your order giving yr name/mailing address and which items you are ordering…many thanks…
and thank you for your support of independent, non-aligned DIY arts organizations EVERYWHERE…
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COMING IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2014 from KSE (not available yet):
MARCH…KSE #271 (CDR), FOSSILS/BILL SHUTE, “Diesel Fallout Dixie Stampede”
APRIL…KSE #268 (CDR), CATHAL RODGERS (Wereju), “Instrumental Conditioning”…meditations on the work of Samuel Beckett, from a contemporary Irish master
MAY…KSE #274 (CDR), MASSIMO MAGEE/TIM GREEN/MAX FOWLER-ROY, “Relentless Communion”…scalding hot free-jazz from the exciting Brisbane, Australia scene
JUNE…KSE #275 (CDR), ALFRED 23 HARTH, “China Collection,” to be released June 2014…live recordings from Shanghai/Hong Kong/Macao and related studio works like a new Peking Opera remix… all from the years 2011 – 2013
and let’s not forget the poetry chapbook coming out in March:
KSE #272 (poetry chapbook) POLYMORPHOUS URBAN: POEMS FOR LOU REED, featuring new Reed-inspired poetry from LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, JIM D. DEUCHARS, MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH, A. J. KAUFMANN, and MATT KREFTING. Art by David Payne.
They’re here, they’re gear, they are E G G , E G G S !!!!!!!!
the amazing Feeding Tube album from EGG, EGGS, “The Cleansing Power of Fruit”…their best-distributed release so far….if it’s still available, buy one AFTER you buy OFF YELLOW SOFT PILLOW…
nothing goes better with yr heaping platter of EGG, EGGS than some FROSTY SHAKES…
Kendra Steiner Editions (Bill Shute) 