Thrilling document of the more radically deconstructive side of the Butte County Free Music Society (whose Induced Musical Spasticity box set is a mandatory purchase), with a bunch of sound actions drawn from 1984-1986. Brent Lewis Ensemble come across like a darker, more occult Glands Of External Secretion, combining the goof-off Scientific American appeal of the early LAFMS broadcasts with outer space shortwave and electro-acoustic group actions that would conjure the ghosts of Taj Mahal Travellers and The Skaters. Another fantastic trawl through an alternate 1980s: “As part of the 25th anniversary of the Butte County Free Music Society, "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" follows "Induced Musical Spasticity" 4xLP (BUFMS, 2009) and roughly coincides with "The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s At the North Pole, Easter Day, 1982" (upcoming on What The...?) and, if the master tapes rescue succeeds, the soundtrack to "Esther’s Brother Is Missing by Maria Estevez". Recording and performing primarily in the mid- to late 1980s, with sporadic efforts in the early 1990s, this barely organized enclave based in rural Northern California ingests and disgorges outsider free music à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema. Members of the Brent Lewis Ensemble later migrated to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Each side of "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" is dominated by tracks whose lengths meander into double digits. On Side A, “Take It Out and Kill It” is a murky glance at mortification via caninicide, with its ancillary fleas, cockroaches, and especially worms. This is the only large group recording on the album, and as such whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner that one backwater critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” A completely different version of this track was previously released on the Maggie Is a Dot cassette in 1984. On Side B, “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks at hand, the recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice, and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are shorter tracks (average length: two minutes); these four excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience guerilla action were recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. All were previously released on the "Mary Jane" cassette in 1983. '[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird, befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow' — Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

One of the most exciting cultural excavations of the past few years has been the unearthing of the convoluted history of the Buttecounty Free Music Society aka BUFMS, a wild collective of artists, non-musicians, rockers and goofballs who came together in comparative obscurity in the early/mid-80s and who, as their world-defining box set Induced Musical Spasticity makes clear, were as attuned to garage rock, psychedelia and free jazz as much as noise, avant garde and surrealist traditions. The BUFMS aesthetic paralleled the earlier experiments in spontaneous musical theatre of LAFMS associates like Le Forte-Four, Airway et al, but with a post-punk/pre-Bananafish style that was less west coast freak and more industrial strength in its urge-to-usurp. Brent Lewis Ensemble remain one of the society’s central groups and the main carrier of their particular brand of liberated excess and though a few major documents have made it through the net- the Three Christs LP on Siltbreeze, the North Pole LP on What The...? – Out Patience presents the fullest documentation of their wild style. Sections of Out Patience were excerpted on the Siltbreeze LP and the Mary Jane cassette but this is the first time this legendary performance has been presented in its complete form. And it’s a revelation. Recorded by the trio of ‘Lucien Tielens’, ‘Tim Smyth’ and ‘Gnarlos’ at Bell Memorial Union, Chico, CA on April 28^th 1984, the performance combines tape work, doomy percussion, long sections of freak vocalese, savage percussion, ancient horn drones and sudden Ferraro-style found sound interventions in the context of free improvisation that comes out of the East Bionic Symphonia/Group Ongaku approach, with a heavy cultic energy that balances droning passages of head-spinning Om with the kind of bloodied interactions of the Urabe/Mukai duets and the monks in space feel of Taj Mahal Travellers. But there’s something else here, a classic basement/hobbyist vibe that feels like the transmission point between the LAFMS’s ground-breaking vision of a new underground rock and the contemporary experiments in DIY avant of the whole Chocolate Monk scene. If the sound of Japanese avant gardists praying in caves in order to hold off the end of the world appeals to you as much as laughing your ass off to back issues of Bananafish then this recording may well be your dream summit. Throw in echoes of Charlotte Moorman, Lee Rockey, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Opera “From The Works Of Tadanori Yokoo” as well as The A Band and NNCK and you have a peerless side of pure outsider invention. Edition of only 50 copies: “Bren't Lewiis's afterhours guerilla action, performed inside the darkened, cavernous, now-defunct Bell Memorial Union on the campus of CSU Chico on the evening of April 28, 1984, was facilitated by Alison Gude, at the time an elected official of the Associated Students. Yes, this is how she betrayed their trust. The area where Lucian Tielens, Tim Smyth and Gnarlos performed was three stories high and just under a block long. The trio was in constant motion, re-positioning themselves throughout the building, possessed by plastic flamingo, goink visions, and the compulsion to insert their heads into buckets and howl. The complete, unedited session, recorded with a single microphone, filled one side of a c90. Eight minutes were released on the Mary Jane cassette (DooDoo Product 1984) and on Three Christs of Ypsilanti LP (Siltbreeze 2010). This is the first-ever availability of the wildly spatial recording in its entirety, mastered in early 2011 from the original cassette it was recorded on. Silence occurs at around the sixteen-minute mark when a fork, scuttling at high speed across the tile floor, slams into the tape recorder and dislodges the mic. The duration of the audio interruption, a legitimate element of the recording, lasts as long as it took to plug the mic back in. As stated in Siltbreeze's Three Christs press release, "hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects [were used]." Additional brentstrumentation includes The Nube Tube (a corrugated hose from a hair dryer swung like a bullroarer), harmonica, dozens of metal remnants of antique armaments, toy guitars, toy pianos, toy drums, glassware, marbles, the staircase, empty cans, pie tins, metal coils, jewellry, moans, gurns, chants, sneezes, whistles and insectoid heralds. Heard as a single 47-minute track, the nonstop performance splits its time between a spastic corruption of the thirteenth text from Aus den Sieben Tagen and a barn where damaged minotaurs are stabled.
Packaged with hand-painted screen and found photo or abstract print.” – BUFMS. Highly recommended!

Edition of 75 ‘tour’ CD-R, released to coincide with the Ensemble’s appearance at the 2011 Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton, England. This is a fantastic big-band performance recorded in 1987 that feels less elusive and more coherently structured than some of the group’s work. While there is plenty of surreal tape loopage and infomercial chatter it’s bracketed by some fantastically ‘out’ jams that have a lucid, Venusian quality. Some of the guitar work sounds like drunken loops of Loren Connors while at their most ‘explosive’ the group succeed in mainlining Faust’s classic “Krautrock” via what sounds like a warehouse full of devotees and almost Stare Case-style bass jams. A killer side from Brent Lewis, cutting their communal improvisatory style with inspired tape-work and a classic/mysterious, low-level avant rock edge. Comes in the usual classy packaging with art inserts etc.