Newly minted label What Delicate Recordings to issue releases by Eldridge Skell’s The Rude Staircase and The Condor Moments.

“The Rude Staircase - the best combination of Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel and The Banana Splits I've ever heard.” –Kristian Hoffman, solo artist and member of 70's cult New Wave band The Mumps.

The story of Eldridge Skell's The Rude Staircase begins with a hearty appetite for transpollinated thought patterns, a dead-end job doing thankless invigilation at the Mardi Gras Indian Museum in New Orleans, LA and a natural inclination towards the transcendentalism of misty hilltops. The group's founder and leader L. Skell honed his sonic hypnotism by woodshedding in the backroom of Misty Cleavage's Mississippi Moon Dancerie. But this night train would not flag the sundown lighter any longer. He soon moved his outboard vision quest to the cultural hotspot of Washington D.C. where he began a long distance disembodied stalking of Dagmar Krause.

It was around this time, while sleeping and rehearsing in a tiny scummy flooded basement, that he met his musical soulmates LoveLace-On-Tape and Vaclav Havel. This initial trio of Guitar, Mandoraphone and Electric Tuba sounded like a bangled stripper humping John Trubee's The Ugly Janitors of America after beating the cathartic raindrops out of both Wingtip Sloat and Tragic Mulatto. They continued crafting songs and playing gigs while hatching their masterplan for making a record of all out feathercloud mindfuckery and torrential lift-off! This was destined to be the best band to come out of DC since Beefeater and The Make Up.

This glorious recording process would begin in late 2003 mainly to capture Lovelace-On-Tape before he vanished into premature Hollywood Babylonian disappearance condition. The purposefully haphazard basic tracking of Theremin, Trombone and Cello was made at the Spinto University Tech Studio in Arlington VA. All subsequent ensemble material was recorded in a home studio using the latest TrUthQuEst technology. Eventually a psychic signal emanating from the underside of a magic suitcase facilitated The Rude Staircase's contact with the cult savory snack aficionado and genius engineer/producer Bob Drake. The studio mastery proved so successful that the group instantly ceased to exist upon its completion! The Ancient Ones were pleased….

The final product Sookie Jump is an elegant pile of songs reminiscent of the architectural innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and Paolo Soleri's massive utopian concrete village Arcosanti. It builds tension and grabs attention by really cramming darkness into the spaces between sounds in an uneven interstitial bumpy car ride soundtrack on dusty dirt road donkey trail of desire. It suggests the single-minded mania of Pretties For You-era Alice Cooper but the sound is more full than the gregarious headdress of Samla Mammas Manna and playful like the precise hooliganism of Willem Breuker Kollektiv. By the end of this experience we will all feel like we've listened to the entire career output of The Cardiacs in one sitting with a warm belly full of crazy jalfrezi.

“Condor Moments summed up in a phrase? Camp S&M cabaret, and definitely not suitable for a PG audience. No matter what the truth may be, from hearing the demo I can only ever conjure up an image of a stage full of middle-aged men wearing PVC Speedos and singing a plethora of piano-accompanied expletives in the most operatic way possible, with completely straight faces.” – High Voltage

Spawned somewhere between the colored crystal rock caves of Preston and the elegant seaside hostility of Blackpool, The Condor Moments has seamlessly reinvented a music of ritual suicide and crack-party dengue fever. The group was formed in 1985 by keyboardist/singer Richy Midnight and drummer The Real David Grey from the still warm embers of the anarcho-pop theorists Cheap Kojak. Using tiki torches and water balloons the duo started writing some of the most challenging campfire songs to hit the dirt since Casey and The Sunshine Acid Blues Crawlers. Later joined by the miraculous bass player Gregory Pex they were now a true power trio fully prepared to press on and conquer with tender provocation while always ready for cooking a big roast. The sparkle donkey hides its young before it shines its rainbow…. Eventually the trio was joined by unhinged guitar legend Brucie Millions between his stints in regional penitentiaries of northern New Jersey, USA and nothing would ever be the same...

After years of kicking it about playing romantic waltzes in the moonlight of The Lake District or earth shattering dirges inside a fishing net atop a billiards table in one of the burliest leather bars in NYC, they finally perfected their most convincingly delusional and effervescent sound reminiscent of Charles Ives, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Raymond Wallbank, Ludwig Van Beethoven and The Homosexuals among others. They have become an impossible ideal ready to take both The United States and the United Arab Emirates by storm!

Most recently The Condor Moments have recorded a titan's breakfast report of songs in the remote foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France with the mad hermit engineer/producer/musician cult hero Bob Drake. This masterwork, ...And Though We're Told We've Got It All, The All We've Got Is Freezing Cold..., combines the band's shifting rhythmic ellipses, keyboard weirdness and tongue twisting vocal perversity with the unlimited epic revisionism of visionary flamboyant industrialists. For added tree hugging empowerment these cocksure wizards have added the meat rubbingly elegant vocals of Madge Daddy and Lady Dah of Blackpool's Twilight Golden Calf as well as the underworldy deepthroat vomitsounds of humansacrifice from the noise/actionist cover band Peeinmyfacewithsurgery.

This CD is the most amazingly complex and purehearted collection of cinematic songclusters to be recorded since The Sun City Girls' 300,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, Ash Ra Tempel's 7 Up! and Fela Kuti's Coffins for Heads of State combined! It is capable of simultaneously promoting healthy nudist living while welcoming all listeners to their unremembered collective past lives and psychic marshes. This music is more than simply food, as it exists in the spirit of science fiction and the mode of sheer mindless bootyshakin' joy!

Both records were mixed by Bob Drake, a cult recording artist for Recommended Records and member of Thinking Plague, Hail, and The Science Group; a recording engineer who has remastered projects by Faust, The Homosexuals, Henry Cow, and The Art Bears; and engineered projects by Ice Cube, Englebert Humperdink, Tina Turner, Quincy Jones, Fred Frith, Hamster Theater, and Peter Sellers, among others. Sookie Jump was engineered in part by Nick Krill of The Spinto Band (Bar/None and Virgin Records) and in part by Chad Clark of Beauty Pill (Dischord Records) and T.J. Lipple of Aloha (Polyvinyl Records) at Inner Ear/Silver Sonya Studios.

Sookie Jump Track Listing:
Release Date: September 11, 2007
01. Variations On A Theme By Michael Jackson
02. A Gaggle Of Swans
03. In The Silo
04. Houses Are Burning (MP3)
05. Cranes (Detail)
06. Cranes
07. Here Come The Red Teeth
08. We Had Our Work Cut Out For Us, Francis
09. Telephone, Telephone
10. March Of The D9 Caterpillar
11. Shut Up!

…And Though We’re Told We’ve Got It All,
The All We’ve Got Is Freezing Cold… Track Listing:
Release Date: October 2, 2007
01. Butlins’ Rash
02. Palace Of Earthly Delights
03. Lord Protector, Milk Collector
04. Made For Love
05. (La Borde Basse)
06. Liquorice Fish Dish
07. Counterpoint Study
08. ‘Snot What They Want, But What’s Good For Them
09. (I Hope) Raymond (Is Still Alive) (MP3)

On The Web:
www.therudestaircase.com
www.myspace.com/therudestaircase
www.condormoments.co.uk
www.myspace.com/condormoments
www.whatdelicate.com
www.myspace.com/whatdelicate

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Legendary culture jam-band Negativland announces upcoming release of Our Favorite Things DVD.

“Declared heroic by their peers for refashioning culture into what the group considers to be more honest statements, Negativland suggests that refusing to be original, in the traditional sense, is the only way to make art that has any depth within commodity capitalism...” – The New York Times

“Twisted genius...compelling...parody and satire as a grass roots weapon of consumer resistance.” – Rolling Stone

“Negativland isn't just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling.” – The Onion

Negativland’s greatest hits become all new moving pictures in the amazing and long awaited DVD release of Our Favorite Things, to be issued via the Other Cinema (Sonic Outlaws, So Wrong They’re Right) imprint on October 23rd. Years in the making, this package is an epic career-capping project from Negativland. Sure to please the group’s old fans, this very accessible DVD is also an incredible introduction to Negativland's work for new ones.

Created with a crew of 18 other experimental filmmakers from all over the USA, Our Favorite Things is a collaborative project that takes a striking visual leap into the same legally gray area that Negativland has been exploring with sound for the last 27 years. A dark and charming film collection of unforgettable collage and classic cut-up entertainment for all ages, it also comes with over 90 minutes of bonus material, as well as a truly silly and bizarre 50-minute bonus CD of 100% acapella versions of Negativland's work by The 180 Gs, a five-person black acapella group from Detroit, that has endeavored to “cover” Negativland’s cut up collage work in R 'n B, Doo-Wop, and Gospel styles. The resulting album 180 D’Gs To The Future! is extremely fun, funny, and very weird.

Also in the works is the long awaited re-issue of Negativland's legendary 1983 difficult listening conceptual suburban epic A Big 10-8 Place. Over three years in the making, and with ten-thousand-million-billion analog tape splices, this insanely cut-up and uniquely weird release remains the hands down favorite of many fans of Negativland's work. This re-issue, due out on September 25th, comes with a 60-minute bonus DVD of Negativland's No Other Possibility video, created in the mid-1980’s.

As if all of this Negativland activity weren’t enough to cause a government reaction, the band recently brought a new version of its weekly radio broadcast (“Over The Edge” – on the air since 1981) to the live stage, mixing music, found sounds, found dialog, scripts, personalities, and sound effects within a “radio” theater-of-the-mind.

Time Out New York featured the band in anticipation of its first New York City performance since a sold-out show at Irving Plaza in 2000 (LINK). “It's All In Your Head FM” is a two-hour-long, action-packed look at monotheism, the supernatural God concept, and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. Dr. Oslo Norway is your “radio” host, and Christianity and Islam are the featured religions, as Negativland asks you to contemplate some complex, serious, silly, and challenging ideas about human belief in this audio cut-up mix best described as a “documentary collage”. “It's All In Your Head FM” is a compelling and uniquely fun presentation of sticky theological concepts, which has actually been known to provoke arguments for days after the show is over.

Opening the NYC performance were two other significant contributors to the history of re-appropriation of found sounds – Steinski and Double Dee. In 1983, Tommy Boy Records held a promotional contest, in which entrants were asked to remix the single “Play That Beat, Mr. D.J.” by G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid (members of Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force). The entry submitted by Steinski and Double Dee, Lesson 1 — The Payoff Mix was packed with sampled appropriations from other records -- not only from early Hip-Hop records and from Funk and Disco records that were popular with Hip-Hop DJs, but with short snippets of older songs by Little Richard and The Supremes, along with vocal samples from sources as diverse as instructional tap-dancing records and Humphrey Bogart films.

Double Dee and Steinski followed up this success with Lesson 2 — The James Brown Mix in 1984, which began with a sample from “The War of The Worlds” before quickly running through a montage of memorable breaks from classic James Brown records, with sampled appearances by Dirty Harry and Bugs Bunny. In 1985 came Lesson 3 — The History of Hip-Hop Mix which attempted a survey of the great breakdancing favorites, along with snippets from Johnny Carson and Hernando's Hideaway. The Illegal Art label, home to notorious musical collage artist Girl Talk will issue a definitive compilation of this long unavailable material in 2008.

Our Favorite Things DVD Chapter Listing:
Release Date: October 23rd, 2007
01. Learning To Communicate
02. No Business (VIDEO)
03. Gimme The Mermaid (VIDEO)
04. U2
05. Time Zones
06. Freedom’s Waiting
07. The Bottom Line
08. Yellow, Black and Rectangular
09. Guns
10. Over The Hiccups
11. The Mashin’ of The Christ
12. KPIX News
13. Truth In Advertising
14. One World Advertising
15. Why Is This Commercial?
16. The Greatest Taste Around
17. Taste In Mind
18. Humanitarian Effort
19. Drink It Up
20. Aluminum or Glass (VIDEO)
21. My Favorite Things (VIDEO)

180 d’Gs To The Future! Bonus CD Track Listing:
01. Intro (Everything’s Going Fine)
02. Christianity Is Stupid (MP3)
03. Helter Stupid (Excerpt)
04. Greatest Taste Around
05. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
06. Car Bomb
07. A Nice Place To Live
08. Seat Bee Sate
09. Roy Storey’s Sports Line
10. I Am God
11. Playboy Channel
12. Oven Noises
13. Theme From A Big 10-8 Place (Live)

A Big 10-8 Place Track Listing:
Release Date: September 25th, 2007
01. Theme from a Big Place
02. A Big 10-8 Place, Pt. One (MP3)
03. Clowns and Ballerinas
04. Introduction
05. Four Fingers
06. 180-G, A Big 10-8 Place, Pt. Two

More About The 180 Gs:
The 180-Gs began in 2001 when David Minnick and his four or five brothers got together to sing and perform in their family's two-car garage in Rochester, Michigan. Soon the whole neighborhood knew of the “Singing Minnicks” and the crazy ruckus that David, Chris and the triplets set up on those hot summer nights. It wasn't long before their pastor, Reverend Al “Sugar” Sweet heard them and decided to take the youngsters under his wing. It was in Reverend Al's venerable Airstream Trailer home that David Minnick found, under a dusty anorak, the album which was to transform the sound of the group: Negativland's Points.

Under Reverend Al's tutelage the Minnick boys redirected their energies into the delightful and stunning arrangements found on the recordings. Christened “The 180-Gs”, their performances went from basements and garages in Bloomfield Hills to crowded church halls and Elk's Lodges in the entire Detroit Metro area. Their soulful styling of such Negativland classics of “Car Bomb” and “I Am God” were particularly uplifting in the tough times that followed 9/11, and their popularity came to the attention of local DJ and impresario D'Andre Xavier Jones, who produced their first singles. Jones sold these out of the trunk of his car – often moving as many as three crates in a weekend – first to folks in the neighborhood, but later to people all over who had heard bootleg cassette recordings of the Gs at block parties and dance clubs throughout the city. What started as a local phenomenon had broken out into the world, and The 180 Gs were going to ride it to the top.

“The mission of the 180-Gs is to bring music with a positive message to the youth of today. Their music is the complete opposite of the gangsta rap and techno devil music and all the stuff kids think they're supposed to like. They're 180 degrees away from that. In fact, the sound of their voices is an insult to the entire gangsta rap community. Coming up in the streets, the Gs learned the hard way that you've got to use your head to get ahead. There's just no other possibility.” – Reverend Al “Sugar” Sweet

More About Negativland:

“Negativland, longtime advocates of fair use allowances for pop media collage, are perhaps America's most skilled plunderers from the detritus of 20th century commercial culture. Negativland are media addicts who see society suffering under a constant barrage of TV, canned imagery, advertising and corporate culture...the band's latest project is razor sharp, microscopically focused, terribly fun and a bit psychotic.” – Wired

“Brutally hilarious...a compelling argument for the anti-copyright movement.” – Village Voice

“Fearless artistes or foolhardy risk-takers.... by constantly haranguing the audience with authentic advertising spiel and highlighting its transparency, they kill the messenger, kill the message and produce highly entertaining art simultaneously.” – L.A. Weekly

Since 1980, the four or five Floptops known as Negativland have been creating records, fine art, video, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture, Negativland re-arranges these bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural opposition and “culture jamming” (a term coined by Negativland in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.

Okay, but what, you still ask, is Negativland exactly? That's hard to answer. Negativland definitely isn't a “band,” though they may look like one when you see their CDs for sale in your local shopping mall. They're more like some sort of goofy yet serious European-style artist/activist collective - an unhealthy mix of John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Pink Floyd, Bruce Connor, Firesign Theatre, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Rauschenberg, 1970's German electronic music, old school punk rock attitude, surrealist performance art, your high school science teacher…and lot's more.

Over the years Negativland's “illegal” collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, artistic and humorous critiques of mass media and culture, and, of course, so-called “culture jamming” (a term now thoroughly and somewhat distastefully commodified by Adbusters Magazine.)

While they have been, since getting sued, aggressively and publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation's copyright laws, and are often perceived as creative and funny shit-stirring anti-corporate activists, Negativland are artists first and activists second, not the other way around. Their art and media interventions have (often naively) posed questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda and perception, with the results of these questions and explorations being what they release to the public. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about in over 30 books (including No Logo by Naomi Klein, Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff, and various biographies of the band U2), cited in legal journals, and they often lecture about their work here and in Europe.

In 1995 Negativland released a 270 page book with 72 minute CD entitled Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. This book documented their infamous four-year long legal battle over their 1991 release of an audio piece entitled U2. They were the subjects of Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature documentary Sonic Outlaws. Negativland also created the soundtrack and sound design for Harold Boihem's 1997 documentary film The Ad and The Ego, an excellent in-depth look into the hidden agendas of the corporate ad world that goes very deep into the gross and subtle ways that we are adversely affected by advertising.

Negativland is interested in unusual noises and images (especially ones that are found close at hand), unusual ways to restructure such things and combine them with their own music and art, and mass media transmissions which have become sources, and subjects, of much of their work. Negativland covets insightful wackiness from anywhere, low-tech approaches whenever possible, telling humor, and vital social targets of any kind. Without ideological preaching, Negativland often becomes a subliminal culture sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren't supposed to notice.

A complete discography of Negativland's work is available at the band’s website (LINK).

On The Web:
www.negativland.com
www.myspace.com/officialnegativland
www.myspace.com/180gs

Photo Archive:
www.fanaticpromotion.com/photos/negativland

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Beat the summer heat by cranking up the cool with Fanatic’s trio of summer tunes.

Three songs from three different albums by three different artists. The first is California pop straight out of California, the second is California pop straight out of the UK, and the third is California pop straight out of the UK via a California-based record label - all perfect for cranking up at the beach, or at least reminding us that the waves aren't so far away.

“[Frankel is] gently orchestrated pop that recalls a Harry Nilsson (a contemporary kindred spirit may be Richard Swift) yet harbors the subtle atmospherics you might find on a Grandaddy album..” – LA Times

We’ll spare you any Nelly references about how it’s getting hot (upper-90's in NYC today!) and instead suggest using Frankel’s “Thermostat” (MP3) to take it down a notch. The first track on Lullaby For The Passersby has Frankel’s Michael Orendy asking, “Tell me, do you want to come inside? / Because I'm dying to get outside where the sky is blue / And if it's pouring, I mean, it's really coming down / Let's put our clothes on inside out and we'll walk around.”

Frankel’s Michael Orendy is a Los Angeles native who grew up steeped in the music of Southern California, from The Byrds to Beachwood Sparks, and you can almost hear the deserts, canyons and the chaparral in his songs. In fact, after listening to “Thermostat,” we’d find it hard to believe it if you don’t finding yourself daydreaming about road-tripping it to California while the album plays the whole way through.

“Lullaby For The Passerby is going to remind you of a lot of great bands but never borrows a single lick. Frankel’s songwriting holds its ground because there are so many quirky bits stapled to the melodies without ruining the feel” – Little Radio

“It's the kind of music that seeps slowly into your consciousness, and like the warmth following a shot of brandy, it gets a little deeper with each repetition. Despite their humble beginnings, The Lodger is doubtlessly top-shelf material.” – URB

The Lodger’s “Kicking Sand” (MP3) from its glorious debut Grown-Ups, is straightforward Brit-pop gold that deservingly earns the band comparisons to UK greats like The Wedding Present and The Smiths. “We’re not superstars, we’re just kicking sand,” lead Lodger Ben Siddell sings. If that’s the case, we want to be kicking sand right there with you, Ben!

Coming from North England, specifically Leeds, The Lodger is in the company of successful British guitar bands like The Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs but stand out as one of the region’s most promising new acts. Grown-Ups is intelligent and catchy without being arrogant or gratuitously complex. Full of singles, the record has a timeless and classic appeal and the irresistible hooks will have you listening on repeat.

“…It’s clear that The Lodger’s prime mover, singer/songwriter Ben Siddell garners comparisons to [David] Gedge and [Amelia] Fletcher mostly because Grown-Ups suggests that he just might be nearly as good as them.” – Billboard

“[The Loose Salute is] a hazily mellow tribute to vintage Laurel Canyon folk-rock” – The Onion

The video for The Loose Salute’s twangy tune “Turn the Radio Up” from its debut album Tuned To Love is the epitome of summer fun. It features footage of the band surfing, swimming, and tandem biking their way across the world in a super-8 home movie style that would make Kevin Arnold, Winnie Cooper and Paul Pfeiffer of “The Wonder Years” beam with pride. Watch it HERE.

Tuned To Love is a record full of summer and nostalgia and songs that make you want to go out, find some friends and dance the night away. The songs are about all the facets of life: falling in and out of love, break-ups, partying, wanderlust, home-cookin’, surfing, travel, fields, beaches, stars and bars…

“The general weight of the world,” explains Ian McCutcheon, Mojave3 / Slowdive drummer and founder of The Loose Salute.

“Clean acoustic guitar arpeggios, the tingle of tambourine, and a modest string arrangement suggest some California dreamin’.” – Pitchfork

Combined, Lullaby For The Passersby, Tuned To Love and Grown-Ups make for the perfect summer mix tape. All three albums are out now. See below for more information and for best results, listen while wading in your baby pool, driving with the windows down, napping in a hammock, or cracking open a cold one while grilling out.

On The Web:
Frankel
www.frankelmusic.com
www.myspace.com/frankel
www.redrocketsglare.com
www.fanaticpromotion.com/current/frankel_lullaby.html

The Lodger (Stream The Album HERE)
www.thelodger.net
www.myspace.com/thelodgerleeds
www.slumberlandrecords.com
www.myspace.com/slumberlandrecords
www.fanaticpromotion.com/current/lodger_grown.html

The Loose Salute (Stream The Album HERE)
www.theloosesalute.com
www.myspace.com/therealloosesalute
www.graveface.com
www.fanaticpromotion.com/current/loose_tuned.html

Subscribe to Fanatic:
Web: www.fanaticpromotion.com
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