Swill Radio News and Releases
Idea Fire Company - Postcards (Swill Radio 033) LP $18
2013 marks both the 25th anniversary of IFCO and the 30th anniversary of Swill Radio, so what better way to start the celebrations than with a brand new IFCO LP? Postcards is a reworking of a cassette originally released by No Basement Is Deep Enough in 2011. Re-ordered, remixed, remade, and remodeled Postcards presents a more charming atmosphere than Music From The Impossible Salon's (Kye) stark melancholy. There is still plenty of piano and sad scenarios, but there are also flights of electronic fancy. Eight imaginary impressionistic portraits of cities we have never been to. Karla Borecky and Scott Foust. Deluxe edition. 220 g vinyl. Cover painting and artwork by Karla; booklet with highly subjective text by me. Postcards from a past that never existed. IFCO march on and on.
Matt Krefting's Review of Postcards
Idea Fire Company – Days (Swill Radio/Plinkety Plonk) 7" $9
A new IFCO single. This one went through the tortures of the damned, but here it finally is. The First Days is a different and more sprightly version of Romance from Impossible Salon. The Last Days was originally going to be on The Island Of Taste. I always thought it would make a great B side to a single and now I am vindicated.. Happy and sad. Just like life. Although it doesn't say so on the sleeve, this record plays at 45 rpm. I forgot we were not having printed labels.
FOUST! - Jungle Fever (Swill Radio 030) .....CD $12
FOUST! is my first ever solo project in all these long years. Through most of these years, since The XX Committee days, a constant supporter and champion of my work has been the journalist Oskar Spee. I think his email sums up Jungle Fever quite well.
Dear Scott,
I received Jungle Fever yesterday. Many thanks. I first played it while I was cooking dinner and found it very odd and perplexing. Later, I sat down in a more relaxed set and setting and gave the recording my full attention at good volume. Astounding! Simply one of the most hallucinogenic recordings I have ever heard. All three ‘acts’ have a monotony to them, but the shifting patterns under the surface are superb. I can certainly see this as a drama involving a late 19th century British explorer contracting a tropical disease. The drama is palpable. The three acts, if I may call them that, “Train Journey/ Restless Natives”, “Delirium”, and “Demise” are perfect. Really fine work. The strange and obsessive attention to detail of Jungle Fever really reminds me of your film. Another stone in your mighty edifice.
My (our) mission continues. We should get together soon. We have much to discuss.
Here’s To Love!
Oskar
Digipak. Edition of 300.
Ian Middleton - Aural Spaces (Swill Radio 029) LP...$16
I've been in touch with Ian Middleton for over 13 years now, lured into contact by a Remora lathe-cut LP, I believe, which sounded similar in intent to IFCO material that Karla and I were working on at the time. Ian was a somewhat prolific figure of the 90's UK underground scene, both with his music and his visual art. There was an LP for Swill Radio 'in the can', which ended up on Eclipse as there wasn't any money here to release it. Ian's music has always had both organic and artificial elements combined with the vague melancholy of distant beauty. With Aural Spaces, Ian has refined and distilled his processes into a gorgeous electronic diamond. To quote my good friend Oskar Spee, "Aural Spaces is an exotic, scientific, and beautiful perfume that slows down time and allows one to live, however briefly, in a better possible world". I couldn't agree more. There is not a wasted moment. Ian has kept a low profile the last few years, preferring to concentrate on his work and make it better, an approach of which I heartily approve. The sequencing of this LP is immaculate, a skill that is becoming a lost art in this shuffle-play world. Aural Spaces is totally removed from the confines of today's backwards looking fads and instead points its bow directly towards The Future. Fighting the good fight.
Scott Foust - Here's To Love! DVD (Swill Radio 028) ... DVD $14
A Film By Scott Foust. Starring: Matt Krefting, Meara O’Reilly, Jessi Swenson. With Scott Foust, Graham Lambkin. Music by Idea Fire Company, Tart, The Pickle Factory, XX Committee. Y Front.
Here’s To Love! is reminiscent of the past glory of silent film, when the beauty of the image predominated, yet it looks firmly to the future. It is the story of a quest by three young people to find their aesthetic idol and save him from his degraded state, told through slowly unfolding scenes with striking, lingering, and sometimes aethestically challenging videography. These images are closely matched with original music by Foust and his various sound projects from throughout his career. A film to be watched with thought and a patience not usually demanded by today’s methods of hyperactive, cartoonish editing, Here’s To Love! should be viewed as a series of extended moving paintings, accompanied by truly timeless music.
About Scott Foust
Visionary theorist, musician, composer, filmmaker, performance artist- Scott Foust is a true outsider artist. Unlike most outsider artists, who tend to be mystical crackpots or mental defectives (usually both), Foust has a clear world view grounded in reality. For three decades Foust, now 50, has pounded away at The Spectacle, employing a wide array of aesthetic approaches with no public or financial support. Foust’s hermeneutics lie at the strange crossroads between Guy Debord and Oscar Wilde. If Foust’s ideas seem idealistic and impractical at first, it is only because being against power and for beauty is always idealistic and impractical. His Swill Radio record label, founded in 1983, has released not only his own work, but LPs by The Shadow Ring, Asmus Tietchens, and Ralf Wehowsky among others. His longest running musical project, Idea Fire Company (founded with long time associate Karla Borecky in 1988) - while not having the bloated catalog of many contemporary bands - produced three of the finest, if still unknown LPs of the last decade: Anti-Natural, Stranded, and The Island Of Taste. In 1997 Foust along with Borecky and Dr. Timothy Shortell founded the Anti-Naturals, an art and theory group which has few but dedicated members worldwide.
Asmus Tietchens - Teils, Teils (Swill Radio 027)..... LP $15
I’ve been a fan of Asmus Tietchens’ music since Formen Letzter Hausmusik came out in 1984. That LP fascinated me and I soon began acquiring anything I could by this strange musical force. I’ve learned a lot from his music over the years and we became acquainted via the post in the late 90s. As it turns out, we both have an extreme fondness for cigarette smoking and an interest in Max Nordau’s Degeneration, so what better place for his first LP release in years than Swill Radio? The side-long Teilmenge 20 starts off the LP with an odd manic ticking that never lets up. Other sounds ebb and flow throughout and the whole piece has the rare quality of sounding totally artificial and yet organic at the same time. The second side slows things down with three tracks of dripping industrial ambience. The whole LP brings to my mind an atmosphere of waiting. To quote my good friend Matt Krefting, “No one’s music sounds both as cold and as emotional in quite the same way as the music of Asmus Tietchens.” I couldn’t agree more. Excellent stuff!
Idea Fire Company - The Island Of Taste (Swill Radio 026).... LP $16
IFCO follows up our conspicuously ignored Stranded LP with an equally, if not more so, strong statement. Core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust are joined by an all star cast: Meara O’Reilly and Jessi Leigh Swenson from Stranded, as well as Frans de Waard, Graham Lambkin, and Dr. Timothy Shortell. The Island Of Taste depicts a manoeuvre in which the beauty becomes more beautiful as the desperation becomes more desperate. A stark and romantic mission to the rocks. Lavish package featuring an excellent Karla cover painting as well as a booklet presented as a set of 5 x 7 art cards with another Karla painting, band photos, and an essay of mine. Perhaps The Island Of Taste is the first LP to make explicit a certain nostalgia for itself. Along with The Shadow Ring’s Swill Radio trilogy (Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs), I’d put IFCO’s trilogy (Anti-Natural, Stranded, The Island Of Taste) up against anyone’s three LP run. We’ll see…
Idea Fire Company - Vital: Live In Europe CD (Swill Radio 025) ... $11
In March 2006, IFCO made their first appearances in Europe. Core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust linked up with Frans de Waard and hit selected hot spots in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Adding de Waard (Beequeen, Shifts, Kapotte Muziek, Freiband, etc) was a brave gamble that paid off handsomely. Armed with only a tiny digital keyboard (Borecky), a radio/cassette boombox and small echo unit (Foust), and a sawed off MS 20 (de Waard), the trio captivated audiences large and small. On these selected recordings, IFCO exhibit a virile murkiness, an almost desperate muscularity. Warnings from a dwindling outpost. Five tracks, 52 minutes. Includes two versions of the haunting 'Pleasure Cruise'. Digipak edition of 300.
Idea Fire Company - Stranded LP (Swill Radio 024)...$20 Last box!
Since 2002, Idea Fire Company has performed and recorded as a quartet with core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust (me!), joined by Meara O'Reilly and Jessi Swenson. (Meara and Jessi, along with Matt Krefting, start in my finally completed feature-length film Here's To Love!)
I feel this LP is as strong as any I've been involved in, and I feel pretty strongly about my body of work. Stranded is the perfect companion to Anti-Natural. Excellent Karla Borecky cover. 180 gram luxury object.
Tart - Bring in the Admiral (Swill Radio 022)….LP $14
Tart (Graham Lambkin, Karla Borecky, Scott Foust) present the world with their second LP, Bring in the Admiral. Since the release of their first LP, Radio Orange, Tart has been plying their trade at various shows in the northeast U.S. Using the same minimal instrumentation as the live shows (two small Casios, guitar, and shotwave/cassette boombox, plus a few odds and ends and the Anti-Naturals trademark tight editing), Tart produces a dazzling array of scenarios, a testament to senseless deranged beauty. Beautiful color cover. Who doesn't need a little Tart in their life?
eaRLy W - Volume 2: Nur Die Tiere Blieben Ubrig (Swill Radio 020).....LP $14
Volume two in a Swill Radio series of LP's documenting the early work of Ralf Wehowsky (aka RLW). As with volume one, a slightly different version of this LP was originally released on cassette by Wahrnehmungen (later renamed Selektion) in the early 80's. This is a much more band-oriented release than volume 1. A number of tracks were recorded live and the mood is aggressive throughout. This is a fantastic Neue Deutsche Welle document. If it had been released on LP, it would be legendary. It still is.
Tart - Radio Orange (Swill Radio 019).....LP $14
The debut LP from the trio of: Karla Borecky, Graham Lambkin, and Scott Foust, recorded and assembled over 8 months between 1999 and 2000. Tart is an exquisite combination of three distinct minds, much like the skillful structure of diverse, yet subtle, ingredients in a piquant and nostalgic recipe: The Past as well as The Future. Tart blends together these strange elements in an organic yet totally disciplined style that renders many of their contemporaries as either flabby or boring.
Radio Orange presents 7 original pieces of expertly edited new music-form. From the opening tape-collage miniatures, The Rabbits of Mangtarau (pts 1 & 2), through to the indeterminacy and excitement of the closing title-track, Radio Orange carves its identity through great use of diversified expression. The analog drone / vox duet: Astride Such Delicate Pins; the bizarre environmental action, Woman In Her Womb; the fragile tone composite, The Mums; and the grinding electronic surge of (the almost 20 minute) Chopin in a Shell all help complete the program in classic style. The overall sound is both hypnotic and explosive, with each side being carefully sequenced to maximize the fact.
Radio Orange comes complete with a beautiful full-color sleeve, designed by Karla, and contrasting monotone labels by Graham. The super-modernist avant garde continues to raise its aesthetic head under the romantic banner of the Anti-Naturals. Tart is fabulous.
The Idea Fire Company - Anti-Natural (Swill Radio 018).....LP $14
Idealized field recordings that capture the hallucinatory isolation of an abandoned arctic base. Anti-Natural combines organic mechanistic processes into an aesthetic whole. Both severe and opulent, naïve and self-confident, Anti-Natural offers an escape route from the false dichotomies of man/nature and man/machine and attempts the transcendence of the impossible. Electronic recreations of the world around us, both real and imagined, foment immutable revolutions in sound.
The Pickle Factory - Our Pledge CD (Swill Radio 013).....CD $8
The Pickle Factory is Karla Borecky and Scott Foust from IFCO plus long-time collaborator Mike Popovich. The sound is somewhat similar to the Idea Fire Company, although within at least sort of a song structure. Many think this is our finest work yet. The CD package is a manila envelope with stickers on the front and back, and a printed card insert. Some (in the U.S.) have suggested that the package is crap, although people overseas don't seem to think so. The truth is the I just hate jewel boxes.
The Pickle Factory - Our Pledge LP (Swill Radio 012).....LP $12
The Pickle Factory is Karla Borecky and Scott Foust from IFCO plus long-time collaborator Mike Popovich. The sound is somewhat similar to the Idea Fire Company, although within at least sort of a song structure. Many think this is our finest work yet
Idea Fire Company - Explosion in a Shingle Factory (Swill Radio 010).....2LP $20
Our debut. Karla and I developed the IFCO style of using collaged improvisations. In this sense, our music is both improvised and composed. Lots of synths, field recordings, and whatnot. Now comes with one of a series of four color drawings by Karla. No more hand marbled prints.