Clean Teeth Recordings Etcetera

Post-Summer

2011-09-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

I finally got a computer that works!

It has been a really shitty, rainy summer here in Berlin but I've tried to get out and get as much sun and air and swimming time as possible. Lots happened, like the Quear festival on Schwarzer Kanal, which I helped out at. Sound installations were placed all around the Wagenplatz for the weekend, listening spaces were created for documentaries and radio plays, there were workshops and there was a performance evening. It was super-inclusive and had a real energy to it that was incredible refreshing. Moreover, it was very successful.

Also, this summer, there were some great gigs. Viv Albertine solo on a telecaster. I saw Boris and Blonde Redhead, the final two bands on my must-see list when I left NZ 4 years ago. I guess that means I can go home now! Other amazing things happened this summer, like the Transgeniale queer parade, going to a rave at the abandoned amusement park Spreepark, working at an illegal rave on the Baltic Sea, going hiking on the Offa's Dyke, taking our inflatable boat out to Schlachtensee, boating on the canal by my house, visiting Müggelsee near my favourite Bräuerei, the one that makes Rotkehlchen and Bio Pils, napping at Wannsee, avoiding a pay beach on another eastern See (out Köpenick way), swimming at Lärz at sunset, swimming at Badeschiff on a rare sunny day, swimming at Prinzenbad on yet another gusty day, doing the waterslide, cycling through the rain to Marzahn for a hedge maze experience (and the devil orchid), picnicking, etc.

Anyway, Currer Bells got some radio play over the last few months, which is pretty cool. These were the shows:

Quiet Space

Presented by Tim's friend Paul Gough, on ABC Radio National.

Thomas Meinecke played us on Bayern Radio 2 Nachtmix. "Die Stunde für anspruchsvolle Popmusik"

So that's pretty neat. I feel like everything is going as it should with this record, it seeps slowly in.

Have started a protest band with Johnny Chang called 'Opera Non Grata'. It involves a lot of discussion of topics like crowds, collective anger, and action. We have also had a practice.

Not many people who know me through music realise that actually reading and libraries are my number one thing. This is despite the fact that two of my bands are named after authors. I read as much as I can, novels mainly, also popular science, history, anthropology. I volunteer once a week at the gay museum archive here. It is a tiny archive. It is amazing what materials survived the 1933-1945 period.

OK some actual news over the next month, as I slowly move life indoors...

Everyday Physics Callout

2011-06-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

Am ACTUALLY REALLY starting that mid-term zine project about physics in daily conversation. How often does your daily problem-solving require some dredging up of high-school science, or extend to some carefully key-worded google searching? I have been TAKING NOTE and hypothesise that it happens every day. I am starting to collect anecdotes and experiment descriptions about this very thing. If you would like to contribute to this project, then please get in touch!

The results will eventually be published in an a5 sized zine, in shitty quality black and white.

Tea Dust

2011-05-18T02:27:00.000-07:00

Hey so Ben Spiers and I made some recordings under the name Tea Dust. 2 songs 'about' our perambulations in the English countryside, I reckon. Guitars, vocals, some rhythm, a little icy crunch, a little warm clarinet.

Mark put the recordings out on A Binary Datum.

7" lathe, strictly limited quantity available. NZ$15 plus postage.

Electric Speech

2011-04-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hey my zine from last year ELECTRIC SPEECH has been photocopied again properly this time...so copies are available! 4 conversations between friends.
Beth and Rise of the City Cat Cult
Tze Ming and Kah Bee
AK and Tiitu
Emily and Niamh with Julia

It's pretty DIY and budget and black and white and has great pictures!

It was about a year ago that I decided to put this zine together, but it was so hard to actually get it sorted out with my dearth of resources, not even a flat surface to work on for weeks on end. And no free photocopying, which is was more constrictive than this fucked up but loveable little computer, which has no CD drive and had a weird linux distro forever...

The zine title references Avital Ronell. Repeated dips into her books, rather than any concerted effort with one in particular, frequently supply me with the energy and enthusiasm to keep up wordsworth pursuits.

My next zine project is called Everyday Physics. Every day I have at least one conversation about the physics of an everyday process. I have decided to start noting these down, and will be taking the time to research the physical processed involved. I will be welcoming contributions and collaborators. I assume this will take some months to put together.

Currer Bells plays in Berlin

2011-04-12T03:37:00.000-07:00

Currer Bells Plays in Berlin-Mitte

emotional quandaries & textural intrigue

+ DuChamp, The Shitty Listener, Benjamin Laurent Aman

Freitag 15. April 21.00

KuLe Theatre, Auguststraße 10, Berlin-Mitte Eintritt: Spende

Jane Austen at Limbus Europae, Neukoelln, Berlin, Saturday 6th November

2010-11-30T04:33:00.000-08:00

I played at my friend Alex's er Finnissage. Alex Martinis Roe is pretty cool. This was the event:

limbus europae presents:

episode #30

Alex Martinis Roe

Encounters:

Conversation in practice

06.11.2010 // 8pm - midnight

(exceptionally on saturday, at the same time as the "Nacht & Nebel" festival in Neukölln)

11pm: Concert

Angeline Chirnside

This project involves encounters between visitors to the project space and the artist, who simultaneously transcribes the events which occur. These transcriptions are both the document of each encounter and the instruction for the following encounter. Using various modes of notation including Hanne Darboven's "non-writing", monochrome Polaroids and geometric diagrams, these transcripts form a cumulative archive in the project space, which in turn influences and informs the choices made during each event. The reenactment of an event from the previous encounter forms the starting point for each new interaction. Each encounter is a decision making process which defines the geographic, aural and visual relation between the artist and the visitor. The need for this spatial work upon relations became apparent via an observed analogy between the psychoanalytic encounter and the art encounter: both are one-on-one. The set physical relation between the psychoanalyst and the analysand produces a particular kind of relation. Analysis of this performative operation highlighted the possibility of producing a practical spatial/temporal framework which could facilitate co-authorship of relations in contemporary art contexts, specific to each different encounter. This genealogy of different encounters, which forms the project Encounters: Conversation in Practice, explores both the encounter itself and the artist's contribution as the stenographer of events.

Alex Martinis Roe, 2010.

alexmartinisroe@gmail.com

I didn't post about the event beforehand because I am a little useless, and also, I feel like it wasn't going to reach anyone I didn't know in Berlin. I'm pretty happy to just keep this as a review blog, recounting stuff.

Anyway, I am now off to cycle in some -3C weather. It is way more miserable than it sounds. It sucks.

Currer Bells available on A-Musik

2010-11-30T03:59:00.000-08:00

"trouble is brewing under the surface. the ex-pat new zealand duo currer bells (penpals tim coster and angeline chirnside) play hide-and-seek on their first regular full-length lp. sound fragments were mailed to-and-fro between tim (auckland, melbourne) and angeline (ex-auckland, london, dublin) and then meticulously pieced together into the 7 tracks. as well as three brand new tracks, the lp includes one track previously featured on the january 2009 wire magazine subscriber-only cd dirt beneath the daydream and three tracks from a micro-edition 3"cd released on claudia in 2008. strands of recorded percussion, acoustic guitar, thumb piano, whistles, viola, field recordings and an array of other sounds coalesce into these open-weave textures, through which glimpses of drama and the gentle suggestions of songs are apparent. the vocals appear as spectres, lost in reverie on two of the seven tracks. angeline's astonishing voice is reminiscent of spooky folk vocals such as kuupuu or an even more fragile, childlike isobel sollenberger (bardo pond). more often, a handful of notes surfaces and then dissolves, simply repeating until forms a subtle melody, creating the barest skeleton of a song. at the intersection of experimental pop and abstract avant-garde, currer bells fits perfectly in the program of quetzi records. a musik

Or you can order this from ME in exchange for money or food! Email me at my janejaneausten gmail...it'll be around NZ$25 or equivalent in snacks probably. Paypal or transfer to NZ bank account.

Photos from L.A.

2010-11-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

So it would seem that I have finally got my act together to upload a few photos. I lost the thingee that connects the camera and computer, I didn't have a desk to lay out my computer, hard disk, and camera on for a long time, in fact, I nearly scrapped my beastly computer because I could not work out how to get rid of the nuisance obscure Linux OS...then I discovered FREE GEEK and they changed my life by installing ubuntu. OK so it was all these niggling problems...blogging is supposed to be easy, but I have an uneasy relationship with all electrical things. I try to understand, but things just fail me. Sorry.

So these are the highlights of the first couple of weeks of the American trip that I did this summer. This is mainly in L.A., where we all hung out for a couple of weeks, stinking up Helga and Andrew's wee house and getting ready for the tour. I don't really know what we all did. Ate lots of Mexican fruit - do you know those bags of fruit, with the melon, pineapple, mango; lime juice squeezed all over it and chili. We hadn't been together in the same place for ages. How could we have ever all so casually hung out at the Wine Cellar together if we had known how far apart we would spread?! Anyway, it was a great couple of weeks...I already posted, at the time, the poster for the Ecstatic Knot festival, which we all played at...some photos....

This is me on Sunset Boulevard, about to go find out if I have what it takes to be a model in L.A.

This is me stalking celebrities at the Chateau Marmont

Watts Towers. These were built over the 1920s-1950s for people to hang out in, but he was harassed about them a lot and they are fenced off in the middle of Compton now, no one hangs out there. You can pay to tour I think.

The mosaics are mostly made from bits of glass and crockery and things like that

Add caption

A cute little house in Compton, in the spirit of the towers across the road. Fenced off...barred windows.

Los Angeles Public Library. I am a pencil-owning member of this library

Mark Sadgrove

Mark and Tim

City People's Farmer's Music. This captures the ambiance. I brought them their chips for the chips song, and then stayed to sing, which made me nervous. These guys played in the back room of the Echo Curio in almost total darkness, eyes often closed, in the only performance I will ever refer to as synergistic.

We gathered flowers for putting on to the tables at the wedding. Here is Tim with two bags of the succulents, other bits of tree branch and bougainvillea.

We took these flowers from roadside gardens and Elysian park, near to Andrew and Helga's place in Echo Park. The area is pretty hilly and exposed, dry, hot. There's no grass.

Sam

Lovely blooms

Andrew and Helga totally getting married by Alice Coltrane.

I took a million photos of these three and this is the funniest because everyone is pursing their lips. Sam, Christine, Mark.

I LOVED the late afternoon L.A. light.

Some bright old light though.

Me and Tim cracking up

Me and Tim laughing it up some more

Luke and Sarah, some funny angle

First dance (to Sonny Sharrock)

Me stupefied by the sun at Griffith observatory

L.A. on a lean from Griffith Observatory

Telescope, Griffith Observatory


Sam and a Tesla Coil. I notice that they aren't even using said coil to power up that sign in front of it at the moment. When I was in Serbia, I went to the Tesla Museum. They cranked a Tesla Coil right there on the museum floor. Everyone was totally allowed to just stand there, within a metre of a bolt of electricity. Here, the thing is hidden behind safety glass. Diverse safety standards around the world, blowing my mind

Christine and the Muons

So the Muon chamber was amazing because every time it sparked, it gave you a clue about a cosmic ray in the vicinity. Constant cosmic rays.

Stock photo of sunset. Nah, just kidding. Love the view from that observatory.

Mark at the taco truck

A la plage, San Diego: my bare feet give away my real enthusiasm for the environment, and also that I had been swimming and had been cut by the barb of a stingray lying in the sand and was still waiting for my foot to stop bleeding so that I could put my shoe on.

OK so that is the first two week or so of the American trip.

La Verne Vance

2010-11-16T03:44:00.000-08:00

La Verne Vance is the name of my band with Daniel Cooke. We existed for a week and a half in Vancouver in October 2010. I wanted to put up a video of us playing trumpet and cornet but I really can't tell what happens when I go to upload it. Weird.

There is also an audiotape of this event which will be available for swaps eventually.

As you all know, I have not been at all on my swaps recently, but life has been chaos. I used to say that feeling like I was making excuses, because really I'm privileged to have the life I do. Anyway, but getting normal things done has been pretty tough. Where is the post office? Where is anything? I have no key to my own house, even though I have an own house now, well, until December 7th, which is when things really settle down.

Anyway, now that I have all this stuff on a desk, hopefully things are going to come together. Watch this space. Maybe there'll be a video in it.

A few Currer Bells photos

2010-10-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles, San Diego, Tempe, Albuquerque, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Madison...these were the cities that Currer Bells played in between late July and August 12th for our tour of the states with the newlyweds in Metal Rouge and celebrant Sam Hamilton. What a wedding party. What a honeymoon for Helga and Andrew.

More details to follow eventually...since the tour I've been adventuring a lot. I spent 6 weeks living in Vancouver and now I have moved to Berlin and also I am trying to manage closing off the life I had in the UK....all these things take time.

Madison, WI

Tempe, AZ

San Diego, CA

Echo Park, L.A.
No time to retake the photo! No time!

good thing I wasn't wearing my earplugs

2010-08-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Review of the Boston show here

Was just looking for reviews and photos online because I haven't put anything up and I can't find that cable that goes from the computer to the camera. It's somewhere in the van, I think.

In Denver, zonked. Tour end.

2010-07-29T20:48:00.000-07:00

TEETH07 - Jane Austen "Companion" CD-R
A hastily thrown together tour CDR. As hissy and abrupt as anything you've come to expect from Clean Teeth. Not since Wyntr Ravn "Daylight Raving" have you been actually able to play a release from Clean Teeth on your actual COMPUTER. Maybe you want to get into it - it is simply a collection of one-off weird jams at my friends' houses over the course of the last few years. Sometimes it is songy, sometimes a riff we settled into, sometimes it was people all fucking around not paying attention to what anyone else was playing. Sometimes I cut a bit from the jam where it is actually just me, I realised later, because the other person had lost interest and was making tea by then. It is your garden variety jam CD, brutally edited to half an hour of material. Recorded with pals in Dublin, London, Auckland, Tokyo, Berlin....all the sleeves are totally eco, too, I used pages from DDR-era German children's books. Which of course means that the covers are all UNIQUE...50 copies

US$6 equivalent

TEETH 08 - Jane Austen "Tusk Two" 3inchCDR
This was originally on gest in 2007 or whatever but I don't know what that was all about because I only gave out like 15 copies in Wellington once and then never bothered to do anything else about it. It is 3 tracks, all sort of quiet nothings, BUT I have made cool origami covers and attached safety pins so you can wear it as an awesome badge...11 copies

US$4 equivalent

L.A.

2010-07-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

Hey so I am in L.A. and there are all these great shows this week! This is a sort of a festival for Andrew and Helga's wedding time...they booked out the Echo Curio for all their visiting friends to play shows all week.
My one is tonight, and Currer Bells plays tomorrow.
I should be doing tarot readings all week as well.

Avanti Maria, Duckling Monster

2010-07-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

OK so that's the end of it for Avanti Maria, several shambolic shows and an amazing cassette tape later, and we are both off our separate ways now...

Duckling MonsterAvanti Maria, visuals by Emily Aoibheann

The Sugar Club was amazing. A variety show Sunday night. I'll miss Avanti Maria a whole lot.

Music Frenzy

2010-07-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

Dublin tonight!

Probably the last every Avanti Maria show, as I am moving continents, after all.

Also playing a show at Ecstatic Knot in L.A. next Monday...

http://echocurio.com/blog/upcoming-events-calendr/

And then, of course, there is the subsequent tour. All the dates are up on Metal Rouge's page.

http://www.myspace.com/metalrouge

The Jane Austen CD should be ready for next Monday. It is called Jane Austen Companion (Teeth 07), and it is a collection of little jammy things that I've done with my friends.
The covers are all unique, cut out illustrations from DDR-era children's books...tryna recycle and be a bit more eco here.

Avanti UP

2010-05-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

It was lovely to have Emily visit, we reunited our band at the Mill Hill East Studio and Welding Complex in deepest darkest North West London

Newtown came too and utilised the time well, writing an awesome new pop punk song about America

Then we went to Ladyfest Oxford and had a fun weekend. We played Friday, then there were author talks on Saturday (Deborah Cameron and Hester Tingey), a coincidental queer burlesque and disco on Saturday (I DJed Sound Laydee, Coco Solid, Fake Purr, Cat Cat Cat, just quietly) and on Sunday a film screening - I only saw Times Square which I've already seen but it was great to see it again. There was another gig on Sunday and a crafternoon tea which I totally missd. We spent a lot of time hanging around a haunted graveyard.

The organisers, particularly Sally (who let us all pile into her house to stay one of the nights), were an amazing bunch of people. THANKS!!!

We played Bristol a couple of days later, but I don't have any photos. FAG Club had us all playing. THANKS!!!! Newtown had people dancing cheerfully, Beth KILLED as Duckling Monster playing a slowed down Futurians song while I stood behind her playing a bass drum, bewildered and at times ecstatic. Avanti Maria clattered and fuzzed through our repertoire, Emily getting audience members up to play our encore for us....Debi treated us to a quick set on the Newtown Holiday Guitar before all of this started up, extending to a rousing rendition of Hounds of Love which got the whole room dancing like Kate Bush, undulation from a to b.

Avanti Maria 'Catholic Glitch' TEETH06
Cassette, 5 mins per side
4 pounds sterling equivalent

No success!!!!

2010-05-15T00:17:00.001-07:00

Oh no where's the lead to connect the camera...will post photos soon...

Hey look Jane Austen had a play on KFJC San Francisco two days ago, total playlist here, I dunno about you guys but I find that pretty exciting. Maybe lots o' noisy types expect their tiny small scale releases to achieve some notoriety but I hadn't realised it was possible with Jane Austen.

Avanti Maria sold a tape last night, for cash, to an anonymous stranger. Oh yeah, the tape is called Catholic Glitch (Teeth06), and we have 50 copies. More on that soon! But yes, they're available NOW.

In other news, the blog title is of course the title of an ATR song. I went to their 'reunion' show this week. Nic and Alec and new friend only - I guess they've still got the pip with Hanin. The gig was actually spectacular.

LADYFEST OXFORD 14th-16th May

2010-05-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hey, look Avanti Maria is playing at Ladyfest Oxford! There are going to be bands, DJs, talks, films - the usual. The programme looks really good. Like all Ladyfests, this is a non-profit event, and proceeds go to the Oxford Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre. We feel really strongly about showing our support for such a vital community resource. We are super happy to get the opportunity to perform in a Ladyfest, and fly our feminist queer weirdo flag with pride.

I am also DJing at the dance party on the Saturday:
Our tape release should be ready by then, it is being dubbed at the moment!!!

There is another Avanti Maria gig in Bristol on May 18th. More details on that soon!

Soul Breakdown

2010-04-22T04:25:00.000-07:00

I am surprised to discover that I have material and energy to make another Jane Austen tape. I'm back in London working like a dog so this might happen soon.

Tea Dust is finished, and has been sent to A Binary Datum...it's gonna be a lathe so don't know when that will be ready.

Avanti Maria - have got the quotes from the duplicators and just need to organise burning a CD (this is not straightforward as I have no CD drive) to send to them. Half of the artwork is done (Emily's half, obviously!) and we should have copies in time for our show at Ladyfest Oxford on May 14th. It will be a super limited run...

Readying the Currer Bells stuff with Tim but this is a slower process...as is the soundtracking for Caterina's animations...more on those things later.

Last week in Tokyo

2010-04-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

For the archives...
Maybe more documentation later?

2010-03-25T23:53:00.000-07:00

I finished my zine troubles finally, will run off copies for swaps.

I will get my shit together with some documentation of the show I played the other night. All the other performers were amazing and I had my fortune told afterwards.

What happened last weekend

2010-03-12T16:10:00.000-08:00

Showz

2010-03-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

Details of the Japan show!

March 23 (Tue)

Koenji Enban

19:00 Open/ 19:30 Start

1500 Yen (Drink included)

-------

* Seiji Morimoto (Berlin)

* Jane Austen (New Zealand and elsewhere)

* DX-OPQ (Shibata + OPQ)

* Yoshihisa Suzuki + Mark Sadgrove Duo

So excited!

Dreams

2010-02-11T11:07:00.002-08:00

I released 5 things basically at once last year, and at the moment I have a backlog of about another 5 things so I am getting it together with those at the moment. Here is an idea what to expect:

- More Currer Bells
- A unique Tea Dust release (me and Ben Spiers)
- Avanti Maria!
- More collaboration between me and Emily of Avanti Maria (A/V)\
- A/V collaborations with Kah Bee and Caterina

I'm hoping to release a few bits and pieces by other ladies too. HOWEVER, I am currently travelling and this year looks like it is going to be especially restless, so I'm kind of living mean right now...I always sort SOMETHING out, eventually.

TOUR DATES!!!

Wellington - February with Beth at Fred's next Sunday!
Christchurch - March 6 I finally get to meet L.A. Lakers!
Tokyo - March 23 apparently! At Enban, apparently!

I felt a bit weird asking everyone for shows which is why I put it off til about 2 weeks ago to finally start sniffing it out and i have no idea what I will play. I only have my drum machine and distortion pedal with me, yikes. Also my saviour netbook.

Zine News:
Now that I have access to my archives I might make that 'best of 5 things you can do to improve our friendship' celebrating the 5 issues spanning 7 years BUT maybe I'll just focus on getting TROUBLES out. I'll have this coffee and we'll see what happens eh.

That's all the dreams for now. Scary!

Currer Bells

2010-02-11T11:07:00.001-08:00

I'd recommend www.halftheory.com/claudia for the several compilations that I am on there. It's a great label, anyway. This label of course released 'currer bells' as a 3".

Currer Bells played in Berlin last year in October, at Staalplaat Record shop in Neukoelln.

Our show was pretty cool, considering that we had never played together before....

www.myspace.com/currerbells

It's actually a pretty useless myspace, I guess we aren't down with the kids.

Here is a review:

A hauntological reading of this sort of thing will always leave you at sea, usually somewhere in the middle of some Bermuda Triangle, stranded in a nauseous soliloquy while the sun sets on critical distance, but the gently gyrating passages and timbered timbres of Currer Bells genuinely advance in a maritime manner, and, as the artists Tim Coster and Jane Austen remark on their collaborative methodology, move at an ‘agreeably leisurely pace, by seapost’, invoking a sort of desultory below-decks chamber music for an ancestral kind of post-digital migration.

Setting out with a bit-crushed phantom shuffle of softly syncopated transistor static, ‘Vivid Words’ soon becomes an intricate palimpsest of sonorous tremolo whirr and warmly mechanical agitation, lithe polyrhythmic patterns slipping over themselves in a sinuous lattice of sloow but protean motion, stirring against a backdrop of buoyant and undulating hum. Hull-like ligneous beats are soon unsettled by wraithlike ricocheted laughter and the dispatching of an enveloping, flute-like symphonic theme, its arciform drift buoyed upon a pulsing glissando that rumbles into life like the tremulous loops of Zoviet France’s “The Decriminalization of Country Music”, however seasicker.

Vitreous clinks and faltering recorder-puffs mingle amidst the drifting top-deck mirth, clipping and dubbing momentum, embossing its ghost ship vibes and casting a pre-emptive spell against prescriptive repose through a kind of compressed and squashed aquatic turbulence. Percussive double-time flickers emerge and withdraw into the background as the ingénue twitters and laughter of the sampled recorder lesson swell the dis-ease of the musical berth and connect up with a resurfaced static fizz, curling over into ‘Six Feelings’ with its truncated toy-ride cymbal twinkles and muffled poltergeist tumbles invoking the warmer spirits of This Heat’s “Deceit”. Gated toy-bird flutes circle around a hypodermic ostinato and a peripheral wash of traffic, rare sights out in these waters. Tentative two-note guitar patterns float through the vacuous depression on a time-stretched raft, ending up on an arid plateau against a background of footfall crinkles, cicada-like car alarms and general domestic hiss. This textural grounding occurs almost subliminally, demonstrating Coster and Chirnside’s utter rhythmic élan and microscopic attention to felicitous detail. You could almost read Chirnside’s vocal appearance as siren-like but it’s too comically Zen and desiccate, navigating instead a pastoral terrain of ‘grey sky and bright snow’ with ‘rainbows in the puddles’, delivered with a deadpan beauty that is sparkling in its tuneless intimacy. The ballad is stark in its departure from the winding splendour of the opening track and even the double-tracked doppelganger voice and oscillating sci-fi glissandi that quietly erupt towards the conclusion retain the eerie setting.

Thrumming ambient beats (is that still paradox?) and the pumping of a bus’s take-off eloquently bring the tripartite piece to its terminus. An abrupt fade-out is just as suddenly remedied before the slow receding of its entire ecology at the 18-minute mark. It’s an infuriatingly short trip, and threatens to be a mere promising sample of what Currer Bells could achieve on a longer format, yet this very brevity, its cyclical lineament and deft-as-eff execution will have the listener re-embarking posthaste. 8/10 -- E.R. Chatterton on Foxy Digitalis

P.U.S.H.

2010-02-11T11:03:00.001-08:00

P.U.S.H.

There is a P.U.S.H tape out as well, TEETH04 in strictly limited quantities! Not cos I'm stink, just cos I could only afford to duplicate and store so many.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jane Austen - arguably the main event

2010-02-11T11:01:00.002-08:00

some photos of jane austen playing around the world:

At Echo Curio, Los Angeles, June 21 2009

Echo Curio

Curio

The Fleapit, London, August 18 2009

I have tapes called 'wish wash' TEETH03 by jane austen available

www.myspace.com/janejaneausten

here is a really nice review, it gets a few things wrong, like this isn't my debut, it's my third solo release. But I don't blame people for not knowing that considering how mumblingly I promote things:

‘Wish Wash’’s vexating will-'o-the-wisp tenure and vignette etiquette has you flipping the tape over and over so insatiably with each side’s windup, that you wonder if the dulcet jams are spiked with MSG. There’s nothing additive about Angeline Chirnside’s debut solo release as Jane Austen, however, and the audio-verite candor of its delicate and hissed simplicity is as calmly sober as it is laconically addictive.

The tintinnabular opening rites of ‘Vilnius Bells’ sound like the intermission of a plen-air Skaters recording, its players adjourning their own ritual to let said bells do their holy thing. The result is a chiming angelic grot of eavesdropped micro-cassette minimalism, with its tolling crystal splash trapped in a crushed soar of distorted overtone flutter and flipped-out harmonic dispersion. The hypnotically interiorized civic ambience abruptly becomes the ceramic intimacy of what has to be the bathroom pictured on the cassette’s j-card, but it’s a telekinetic transition, shifting in a manner akin to the paranoid-critical cadences evident in The Skaters or even Sunroof, where disparate textures are spliced together as transportive musical portals from plateau to plateau. ‘Say What’ is animated by the echo-adorned strains of a puffed harmonica, slowly layered to infinity as Chirnside’s puerile vocal melody loops elliptically with lyrical illegibility and cute neurosis as though glazed in front of the bathroom mirror, absently brushing her teeth.

The b-side introduces a microtonal rataplan on the guts of a piano, its gamelan utterances taking place in an adjacent room. The cheeky haunt’s muffled faux pas recalls the fuzzy horror of John Cage’s ‘Ryoanji’, playing itself out as bumpy fixture elsewhere, like a warped version of the neighborly, claustrophobic piano sighs heard in Polanski’s trinity of psychothrillers, ‘Repulsion’, Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Tenant’. The jangling nano-zone of ‘Migration’ is a hands-on elegiac counterpart to the celestial drones of ‘Vilinius Bells’. ‘Bye 612’ comes and goes like the slacker eclipse of a Kraus groove, its dubbed-out bass shaped upon the shrapnel snare of what’s described as a ‘giant sheet of metal’ in the credit notes. Its valedictory title sounds like an ode to an abode left behind, and the recording is suitably truncated, as though a sonic trace left in Chirnside’s own troubadour memory. It’s hard to believe such a departure would be due to any kind of eviction for serial noisemaking, but on the other hand, you can read an edited sense of punk and abandonment between the lines of all this tantalizing reticence. It’s that very absent frisson which imbues the recording with its latent intensity and raw, phantom energy. And it’s back to the a-side for more. 8/10 -- E.R. Chatterton (20 August, 2009)

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Eggcorn

2010-02-11T11:01:00.001-08:00

3"CDR called Ship to Shore by Eggcorn (me and Zoe Drayton) is happening at the moment too. TEETH02. These are almost sold out so email for details.

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Lost Roman Legions

2010-02-11T10:57:00.000-08:00

Red Tape by Lost Roman Legions out as TEETH01 now.

This group released a CD-R in 2005, and for this second recording I joined them. We are Gavin Prior, Dave Vincent, Stefan Neville. Nice folk, singy plingy, soft drones type stuff recorded live in sunny Raheny, Dublin, Sp[ring 2008. Good times.

Wyntr Ravn

2010-02-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

CD called 'Daylight Raving' by Wyntr Ravn out now!

(DV35/TEETH 00)

www.myspace.com/wyntrravnmusic

Here are some reviews and descriptions:

A duo featuring Jane Austen (Currer Bells) and Gavin Prior (United Bible Studies / Toymonger). Doomy teutonic electronics: beats booming somewhere at the end of an underground tunnel, John Carpenter-esque synth chills, blasts of feedback, clicks and cuts all hand-assembled collage-style. (BOA MELODY BAR)

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Now for some proper weird bastard music. Wyntr Ravn (Whaaaaat?) have chucked out a CD on Deserted Village called Daylight Raving that initially sounds like the fucking Orb made by ADD suffering feral kids off their heads on mushies & spesh. Then it goes into monged, trippy overdrive a few minutes in. Seemingly backwards masked beats, all manner of crazy whirrings & tinkles. It sounds like a musical clothes horse caught in a Wizard of Oz pinball machine, proper freaky with tape manipulation reaching the point where spool meltdown may occur & your head just falls off in a fit of ecstatic confusion. Then we're onto the lo-fi guitar plucking recorded from the next room but one with Half Man Half Biscuit's retarded wasp keyboard revived from the dead. Then it's digital paintball time whilst dad mows the lawn with a custard dishwasher and the dog eats your Wolf Eyes records. Yes, this is bloody off it's shitter is this CD. And there's more insane clangings, guttural keyboard splutterings and rudimenatary percussion to come. But I'm not going to tell you about that.....Excellent, in the most delightfully messy DIY fashion. Ideas all over the shop, literally, making for some truly original, wonky spellbinding genius. (NORMAN RECORDS)

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Jane Austen (Angeline Chirnside) and Gavin Prior have dropped what has to be one of the most all over the place discs I’ve heard so far this year. It starts off with slow electronic mutterings and whirring synth, getting progressively more mangled before the RAVE makes it presence known on the third track “r*v* like u mean it”. Wyntr Ravn avoid sitting on one idea for more than, say, two minutes, seemingly at any cost. At one stage the disc veers into an American noise sound, all tumult and slashes of feedback – like Wolf Eyes or Dead Machines with the rhythm just a little more insistent. At other times they have more of a Throbbing Gristle thing going on, with mutated beats coming apart amidst a typewriter and the shuffling of feet.

“Daylight Raving” taps into a near-perfect synthesis of weird DIY bricollage, scary rave music, and ear-rattling noise. This schizophrenic bricollage aesthetic comes as something of a surprise relative to what I’ve heard from Jane Austen previously; her solo work has tended toward subdued, immersive washes of sound. In contrast this disc assaults the listener with its oppressive busyness – space and time to let ideas play out simply isn’t in its vocabulary. The sinister squiggling of electronics on “2 scared 2 wakeup” can only last for so long before it is obliterated by the nightmarishly layered “gräber grab”. Throughout, field recordings are pressed together with squawking synths, noodling keyboards, guttural vocals and collapsing rhythms, all filtered through the unmistakable sound of broken electronics.

It is precisely this busyness that makes “Daylight Raving” such a success. Overflowing with ideas, the disc’s multifaceted rendition of nightmarish claustrophobia is something to behold. 9/10 -- Tim Gentles (1 April, 2009) (FOXY DIGITALIS)

Another decade, another blog

2010-01-31T03:50:00.000-08:00

New online presence. This is ostensibly to replace the hard-to-remember googlepage for my fairweather friend recordings label clean teeth. I guess there'll be stuff about zines I do and things like that. I like the idea of this personal digital archive here. I'll be updating as best I can over the next few weeks.