Monday, September 28, 2009

GERRITT WITTMER "Drenched Hands" c21

GERRITT WITTMER - c21 - Land of Decay #004


20 Left! (Contact for availability.)



1. Drenched Hands (Locrian remixed by Gerritt Wittmer)
2. Untitled

Edition of 50 in oversized jewelry box with block print by T. Hannum, obi band, 8.5"x14" b&w poster.
Released 09/25/09 at G. Wittmer's show in Chicago, IL at Metal Shaker.



PRICE:
$10 ppd
$12 International

Gerritt Wittmer

UPCOMING RELEASES:
UNLUCKY ATLAS - c21
T. HANNUM - Mount of All Lands 3" CDR

Thursday, September 24, 2009

To be added to our listserve

If you'd like to be added to our listserve then shoot an email to:

landofdecay@gmail.com

We won't be sending out mass emails very frequently. We'll have new about how to pick up some upcoming Land of Decay releases very soon!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

From Gapers Block Re: Gerritt's Chicago Show on Friday

THE RIGHTEOUS POWER OF PROOF




Above: Gerritt

Folks, I'm gonna lay all my cards on the table; no headline-burying for you lovely souls today. Gerritt is playing in Chicago this Friday (at Metal Shaker, 3394 N. Milwaukee, 9 p.m./$5/21+). For those with chaos-hungry ears, who can (and will) take the time to differentiate between the thousand ways to to make the great din new and exciting, no more need be said, and you've already trampled the messenger on your way to line up at Metal Shaker for tickets. If you're unsure but interested, here's the brief version.

Gerritt Wittmer first launched the Gerritt project in 1998, though the throttle really got slammed into high gear with the release of his Space Level Blaze CD in 2005 (on his own Misanthropic Agenda label, a label that has released all manner of big names in the din game: Merzbow, Bastard Noise, Boris, and Sissy Spacek). It's an old saw that every noise artist eventually gets compared (favorably or otherwise) to Merzbow, but Space Level Blaze truly matched Masami Akita's laptop-age demolitions pound for pound and then some, a stroboscopic, digi-noise heart-stopper that stands tall amongst the heavy-hitters in computer noise. 2007's Proof of Powers veered off into a terrain better suited for comparison with recent John Wiese recordings (it's no surprise that the two collaborated on a short, punch EP entitled The Disappearing Act, also in 2007), with the slower, more deliberate editing also being applied to less conventional sound sources, assorted groans and gurgles layered purely and exquisitely to create sonic abattoirs filled to the brim with thin-sliced vocal chords and fist-sized chunks of pumice.

Recently, rumors have been filtering out from Wittmer's Oakland, CA HQ that a new direction and approach has been discovered and is being developed. Friday's performance, titled 'The Message,' will work within a compositional structure of some kind, perhaps involving some sort of body-action, a la Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, sound poetry in the realms of Henri Chopin or Graham Lambkin, or brainwave-manipulation in the tradition of Eric Lunde's De Sade or Pierre Henry's Cortical Art III. It's hard to tell -- I only have photos and artifacts of the past to go on.

Joining Wittmer will be Chicago's only Lebanese Power Electronics practitioner (that I know of) Koufar, a forceful and thematically-charged project that lays loops of traditional Lebanese music over thunderous declamations of racial strife and territorial outrage, outrage gleaned first-hand by Koufar's Waddiah Chami as he helped his family evacuate during recent conflicts at the hands of Hezbollah. Opening will be Katchmare's Nick Hoffman, and throughout, DJ sets by Slow Electronics (who seem to be some sort of Power Electronics critique act -- the web site, promising an end to 'crypto-fascist Patriarchal Power Electronics,' makes cloudy concepts cloudier through murky rhetoric, so I hope that the audio will explain all) will drown out the damned infernal silence.

Bonus: $5 door donation will get the first 20 attendees a free copy of the Drenched Hands cassette, a Gerritt remix of the Locrian album Drenched Lands.

— Chris Sienko / Comments (0)

Friday, September 11, 2009

Locrian Remix Wilt Coming Soon


















Locrian Remix coming soon. Land of Decay will hopefully have some copies. More information here.


FALL 2009
WILT: Cemetery Road / Dead Electroniks
2 x CD
Ad Noiseam Records
Includes remixes/collaborations with: Luasa Raelon, Josh Lay, Mark Solotroff, Larvae, V.O.S., Theologian, Locrian, Horchata, SICKNESS, Climax Denial and Cornucopia.

Final Track Listing

Disc 1:
1. Red Bird, Black Sky
2. The Weight of Headstones
3. A Small Release
4. Escape
5. A Deaf Cry
6. The Realm of Shattered Prisms
7. The Grim
8. Symptom of the End
9. Serpent Dream
10. The Remainder
11. To an End

Disc 2:
1. Constellation
2. A Case of Castration Anxiety {Climax Denial}
3. Megalith {Cornucopia}
4. A Room with Neither Entrance, Nor Exit {Theologian}
5. Entombed in Velvet {Luasa Raelon}
6. Beyond the Valley of the Dead {Veil of Secrecy}
7. Signe Correct Correspondant {Mark Solotroff}
8. In the Shadow of Dead Angels {Josh Lay}
9. Void {Locrian}
10. The Blood Runs Thinner with Each Breath {Sickness}
11. Broken Diodes {Horchata}
12. The Many Armed Beast {Larvae}
13. Dusk

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

"Rain of Ashes" At Troubleman Unlimited and Crucial Blast

Although, we've sold out of all of our copies of the "Rain of Ashes" cassette, Troubleman Unlimited and Crucial Blast still have some.

Description from Troubleman:

LOCRIAN

Rain Of Ashes cassette (Fan Death)

Listen up all "tape" labels, this is how it is supposed to be done. Pro printed, shrinkwrapped cassettes- and sold at a reasonable price! Plus it's one of the best bands around. You may know Locrian from their LP on Bloodlust...Heavy drone death! "Rain of Ashes" is a journey, not of complex feelings, but of realizing the decay and collapse you have just witnessed is real and will never go away. Instead of completely pummeling the listener, the piece slowly rips the listener apart until there is nothing left. Though after Locrian's first full length "Drenched Lands", you might have to ask yourself, "is there anything left to begin with in the first place?" "Rain of Ashes" reassures you that nothing is left. 200 copies on audio cassette. While you're at it, we have 2 copies left of their LP on BLoodlust (scroll down a bit). Order both! The best price ever!

Description from Crucial Blast:

Finally got to see these guys back in July when they toured through Baltimore...Locrian treated a small but enthusiastic audience at the Talking Head to a half hour set of stunning kosmiche drone and blackened post-rock abstraction, with one of the loudest, most fog-filled performances I've ever seen at that joint. The two members of Locrian positioned themselves on the small stage, the guitarist hunkered down in front of his amp, his armada of effect pedals at arm's length, the keyboardist looming over a stack of analogue synths, reel-to-reel tape machines (!), and various other effects devices and sound generators, and they proceeded to knock us all flat with a thunderous wave of deep-space psychdrone flecked with strange Slinty guitar figures and surpremely tasty vintage synth tones. They sounded like a blackened kosmiche krautrock band blasting at nuclear-strength volume when they reached the apex of their set, but it took a long time to get there as they slowly piled on more and more layers of drone and circular guitar and immense bottom-end heaviness. Before going to the show, I had just heard a smattering of their recorded output but was largely new to what Locrian were doing, but by the end of their set I was totally sold.

Just before the show, Locrian had performed live on a radio show at Universaity Of Maryland, and this half-hour performance has been captured as Rain Of Ashes, a limited edition cassette released by the very cool Fan Death Records that just started up recently. It's limited to 200 copies, and comes in full color package. The a-side features the full "Rain Of Ashes", while the b-side has the same track, but in reverse.

"Rain Of Ashes" feels like it's mostly improvised, starting off with soft smears of delayed guitar and warbling drones, building slowly into a swirling mass of black sound, deep kosmiche keyboards and deep gusts of subterannean hiss and tracers of dissonant guitar flowing together, and then gradually a simple four note melody appears, played on a very 70's sounding synth, dark and descending and quite pretty, and this melody begins to loop over and over and over, turning into a cluster of melodic notes as additional keyboards enter and play the same melody, reminsicent of Shulze and the synthscores of Carpenter/Howarth, and this stretches out for quite a while. Eventually, the melodic keys fade off, and we move into a darker expanse of buzzing, blackened guitar rumble, throbbing piano notes, shrieking wordless black metal-esque vocalizations, eerie guitar melodies suspended over an increasingly fearsome soundscape that builds into a hellish cacophony of shrieking vocals and grinding blacknoize that gets really Abruptum-like at the end. It's the sound of soaring through celestial starfields, then falling endlessly into a horrific black abyss.

Hearing the same music in reverse on the b-side, it's even more unearthly and woozy, a black blur of melted feedback and gorgeously warped melodies and dubbed-out ambience that stretches out forever, and I'm thinking that these guys need to make all of their stuff available like this...

Absolutely breathtaking black-kosmiche dronebliss, you can bet that I'll be getting more Locrian stuff in stock here as soon as possible. Highly recommended

Saturday, September 5, 2009

SNEAK PEAK: Gerritt Wittmer - c21



GERRITT WITTMER - c21 - LOD 004

1. Drenched Hands (Locrian remixed by Gerritt Wittmer)
2. Untitled

Will be released 09/25/09 at G. Wittmer's show in Chicago, IL at Metal Shaker.

Edition of 50 in oversized jewelry box with block print by T. Hannum, obi band, 8.5"x14" b&w poster.

Gerritt Wittmer
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