Noisey (Germany) was kind enough to premiere Broken Machine Films’ new video for Halasan Bazar this morning. Take a peak above or click through here to read or crudely translate their original post.
Another release a longtime in the making, we’re psyched to finally revisit our mixtape series with a new free-to-download collection, Return to Dope Mountain. Our biggest mix to date, the whole thing should give some impression of the admixture we’re building this year while still looking back on our history and partnerships to date; unhappybirthday, Halasan Bazar, and Cosmic Sound make appearances, alongside b-sides from Aria Rostami and other of our new projects this year, with the lion’s share representing new work by friends. We’d love if you clicked through to our bandcamp and grabbed a download, but thanks either way for all your support this year and since our starting Crash Symbols.
Another tape that’s been a long time in development, our cassette edition of How Many Padmes Hum?, previously released in New Zealand on CD by Muzai Records and digitally worldwide by Stroll on Records. The debut of 18 year old Christchurch musician Sam Perry, the album was mastered by Kody Neilson (Opossum, Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and was conceived of as a synthesis of Perry’s sense of punk and classic psychedelia. Stream “Change” below and purchase a copy of the tape from our bandcamp.
Thanks to everyone for sharing such a positive response with us as we’ve been shipping out copies of our new Cream Dream cassette, we hope that everyone enjoys it as much over the summer as we have while getting it to press. We still have copies available at our Bandcamp.
In the meantime, our pal Glenn Jackson at XLR8R gave album opener “Paradiso” an exclusive premiere and published the track to their SoundCloud. Hope you enjoyed it as much as last week’s track, which you can still stream over at the Crash Symbols SoundCloud.
We’re preparing a release with San Francisco producer Aria Rostami, Decades/Peter, a sort of double-album that pairs his older album Peter with a roughly equivalent new movement, Decades. This video from Caitlin Denny should give a pretty solid impression of where we’ll be coming from with this tape (weird/awesome places, God knows).
Cream Dream is Teddy Ouwerkerk, a Long Island based designer and producer with a flair for combining disco, soul, and funk circa 1970 with house and contemporary beat-making. Cream Dream: Collected gathers his first three self-released EPs, issued prior to the release of his free-to-download debut album Love Letter; the Paradiso and Total Babe EPs, as well as his mixtape Spliffy Beats vol. 1 and two muggy bonus tracks from the same period. It’s the first such compilation of his prior work, but it turned out too well and the tape’s way too good looking for it to be our last.
Pick up a copy from our bandcamp page.
Perhaps our most notoriously overdue cassette, the ill-fated PBUH037, which we pressed last year but had to sit on until… well, just about now. Featuring reworks of artists that run the gamut from the Cyclist to Barry White, these are some of the best remixes we’ve ever had the opportunity to put to tape (if you know our proclivities, you’ll know we’ve pressed more than most). Thanks to Beau himself for the incredible packaging design on this one.
“Beau Sorenson was born and grew up in remote northwestern Wisconsin, where it doesn’t necessarily take a village to raise a garage band; at least when you can count on the intervention of drum machines and a four track recorder. Sorenson’s interest shifted to synths as the 80s were losing their flavor, amassing ‘a small pile’ of them alongside as many other homemade pieces of equipment. Now a studio engineer with diverse credits, running the gamut from Sparklehorse and Death Cab For Cutie to Czarbles and Testa Rosa, Sorenson’s intimate knowledge of the equipment he uses gives him ample range for experimentation, a quality particularly palpable in his remixes. A small but growing appendage to his more technical work, Sorenson’s moniker Beaunoise reveals the fullness of his kaleidoscopic aural impulses – remapping the work of others through the refractive prisms of pop culture and contemporary technology. More so than his own more abstract compositions, remixing serves as a technical and personal laboratory for Sorenson to explore new production techniques, though also to test perception; to enjoy and admire a song enough to deconstruct and rebuild it with respect for a range of potential outcomes. This is the first release to collect his remixes. With several other projects slowly simmering on the backburner, Remixes serves as a strong counterpoint to his previous ambient work.”
Stream it below or click through here to order the tape.
Here’s video of our buddy the Cyclist playing a short live set at the Boiler Room! Check out his new album from Leaving Records/Stones Throw - do yourself a favor and get the cassette version, it’s one of Leaving’s finest.
Happy Release Day! We’ve been shipping copies of Space Junk since last Friday, but today’s the album’s official release date. Activity at the USPS will be particularly vigorous today, robust even, as we stand dutifully in line to ship a tote-bag full of cardboard squares we’ve filled with music-loaded vinyl rounds, though eventually we’ll come home to wait for the reviews. I must be getting old, because this mediocre review from the 405 just seems funny - seems like the album wasn’t psychedelic enough for him, but he also intimates not liking psych music on principle, so go figure.
Order a copy of Space Junk on vinyl from our bandcamp.
In the meantime, check out the latest single from the album, “You & I” - premiered last week over on Pitchfork.
“Proposed by lo-fi recorder and pop auteur Emily Reo, the Clubhouse Split collects songs from four similarly active female musicians, enlisting Johanne Swanson, aka Yohuna; Rebecca Doerfer, aka Brown Bread; and Malee Bringardner, aka MoonLasso. Though each is animated by their own unique projects, the impetus for the Clubhouse Split came from a mostly independent discovery and appreciation of each other’s music, the final gaps in familiarity being filled as each musician accepted in succession Reo’s invitation to collaborate on a split cassette. Their music is elegant, elaborately realized, and fully apprehended - each has been towing their own line for years at the heart of an expanding “post-colonial” music economy (no stuffed-shirt labels for these ladies).
Though the whole of human history is difficult to perceive for ‘most’ humans, because female voices are so thoroughly undocumented prior to recent centuries, tension in the form of radically opposite self-conceptualizations leaves thinkers of different genders designing their ideal self according to rules that sometimes don’t translate. That isn’t to say that women don’t have role models, just that we live in the throes of a protracted realignment. Progress as a species is the pace of our collective re-investment in the integrity of transcendent principles - in the face of an undesired state, we conceive of an ideal and (ideally) progress toward it. These four women have made it their work to model positivity and strength in the pursuit of a ‘public’ creativity, brooking no compromise and allowing their sincerity to play out across their respective bodies of work.
In the spirit of good will and basic arithmetic, the Clubhouse split offers eight songs and four genuine exemplars for anyone cognizant. If you include the packaging designers, that total raises to six; much thanks to artist Kaley Dickinson and designer Liz Pavlovic for their contributions.”
Order the Clubhouse split here.
