Hot diggity damn, the last few weeks have been a fuckin chaos. I'm currently in Atlanta on my annual Thanksgiving vacation, babysitting my friends' baby and finally having some time to do things like update the webstore, compose some mass e-mails, write people back, etc.
First, some housekeeping.
I'm currently in Atlanta. All orders start shipping on Nov 29, when I return.
My annual return to Baltimore is also coming up:
There will be no updates to the website and no orders mailed from Dec 10 to Jan 13. I'll be living my best life on my home turf and avoiding the brutal cold of my other home turf haha.
Any orders placed between Dec 10 and Jan 13 will start shipping on Jan 14.
Expect an enormous update to the website around Jan 16ish.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
As basically everyone in my life knows because I cannot stop talking about it, I've been having full trench warfare with mice in my apartment.
The mice are an intermittent occurrence every year. I kinda see them and kinda hear them, but I never find any poop and they never get into anything so I generally don't care. I figure it comes with the territory of wintertime in a janky old apartment building full of messy tenants.
But this year, the mice escalated their behavior, started pooping in public places, got into a bag of packing peanuts and started eating styrofoam wtf!!!! I feel like, they threw the first punch, and I'm gonna throw the last one!
So I went to the store and bought 2 packs of anything/everything that is anti-mice, Danny and I moved like 30% of the records out of my apartment, my apartment is torn the fuck up as all space and floor is freed so that Ian and I could lay down an intricate labyrinth of traps, poisons, repellants, steel wool, sprays, I mean it is fuckin WAR. Every raised surface is covered with records, I'm sleeping on the couch cause my bed is covered with books, shit sucks and my whole life feels incorrect.
And for all this effort....
I only downed 2 mice in almost 2 weeks.
Yo wtf????? I thought I'd be drowning in bodies as the mice send wave after wave to break my defenses and I hold the line to keep my space free of these bastards but....there don't really seem to be any mice.
Did I overreact? Are mice smarter than I thought? Are they dying in private? Is the problem actually not that bad and I had 1 incident with the mice and flipped out because I have weirdly strong commitment so when I commit to myself to deal with the mice, I went berserk unnecessarily?
Well, I left for Atlanta with a whole new array of traps with new attractants spread throughout the apartment. If I come home and there's no mice and no poop, this is probably ideal, I will take my victory and get my apartment back in working order. I will feel a bit foolish but better to be foolish and clean, I think.
Send me your positive mice-free vibes and cross your fingers for me, thanks.
-Dan
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NOVEMBER NEW ARRIVALS
First and most exciting for me, my little label SPHC Records got 3 new releases out now! As everybody knows, pressing records at the current time basically sucks worse than ever before, so it's a huge relief that these are done and I now have an extra 1300 12"s sitting in my living room....LOL.
If you track the label at all, you already know Kuroishi new LP, this is the third album I've done for them here in the USA and they are only getting more brutal and relentless as time goes on. One of the best bands in punk today by my count. Look to see their name more and more come 2023. =)
Skarnio LP is a dream come true for me. We've been back and forth about what to work on together and to put the new album on vinyl is the perfect outcome. People fawn over Armagedom and Ratos de Porao, as they should, but these same people should fawn over Skarnio too. One of the true hidden gems of Brazil, playing the traditional style that I can't get enough of.
And finally, I headed up a big cooperative release of Choke Cocoi LP, one of the most important punk bands of the Philippines, now easily available for worldwide consumption. The island already knows, where the fuck are you?? Look out for Choke Cocoi Euro tour 2023, see you there!
Speaking of SPHC, here's some more activity from our network of friends. We blew everything on a ton of Fun People LP reissues, and they have basically evaporated instantly lol, but at the time of writing we still have a few copies of these titles left.
This is some of the most important music ever for me. If I were going to list off my top 5 favorite bands, it'd be: Paintbox (Japan), Leatherface (UK), Fun People/Boom Boom Kid (Argentina), Exit Hippies (Japan), and Gauze (Japan). I know you could get this lesson from any number of bands, but for me, it was Exit Hippies and Fun People/Boom Boom Kid that taught me that punk should be an expression of the self, it doesn't need to be limited to rigid and defined genre expectations, but should be without limits as an honest articulation of the self. That's an attitude I always carry with me, and I hope that in some of my bands, that worldview is evident.
Sure Fun People is a magnificent pop-punk band but for me, there's an emotion and worldview that resonates with me in the deepest levels.
If you're like me and you already got all the OGs, we also have copies of the brand new Boom Boom Kid/Hello Bastards split 7", which sees the Kid cover a lot of ground for being one side of a split 7", from the beautiful "Cucu" to the explosive and aggressive "En La Escalinata" to his more modern penchant for weirdness with these funky Hello Bastards covers.
Along those artsy lines, I'm super super hyped on this The Apostles demos collection 2xLP, seeing anarcho-punk's arguably most intriguing band in their formative stages, at their most weird, primitive, and ramshackle. A great and informative retrospective of a band I have a lot of appreciation for.
I'm equally keen on this Tilt LP, featuring hyper-obscure recordings of this minor classic of early Polish punk, which as I've mentioned many times in these newsletters, is a time and place I have a most enthusiastic interest in.
I can picture which of my friends are going to be more excited for the immaculately danceable coldwave synth of Nouveaux LP, or the mature adult feelings of the Apologize LP, which sounds straight out of the Revolution Summer scene.
How much art can you take?
If you're like me and you're mostly interested in raging hard, it's a good month to be into hardcore 7"s. Stray Bullet first EP made an impression on me and Stray Bullet new EP continues their frantic Clevo-inspired rocking thrash attack. Mutated Void EP lives up to the hype, with its thrashing USHC filtered through piss raw (black metal?) sensibilities. I cannot get enough of Ohjus/Raamattu split 7", Finland still the best in the game these days and this record is all I need to make my case, total blasting hardcore attack.
But the most interesting to me is Balta EP. Don't think there's been a proper shit-fi hardcore record like this since the Thieving Bastards EP?? This is punk perfection, total noise-not-music talentless ramshackle hardcore attack in all the right ways, pure unadulterated attitude and absolutely no fuckin musicians here.
And finally, if you live that crust as fuck existence, you probably already know veteran bands like War//Plague new LP and Reality Crisis newer EP, but do you know Innocent LP? Terrific noise-not-music relentless d-beat with the sort of high fidelity that really lets the noise glisten and shimmer like I always want it to, and Samantha's vocals sit in a cool and stylish place against the music, never sounded better. Good band.
For more commentary on this stuff and more, please scope our Instagram page, where we review choice new arrivals as they come. If it sounds cool when we talk about it, it'll sound even cooler when you hear it streaming on the online store, and even cooler still when you buy the record and slap it on your turntable.
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on the way for January:
GRIND // GRIND // GRIND
so much Alchemy Records reissue action, we put a separate section on the webstore for it
....and other wacky Japanese shit
possibly another SPHC release?
more More MORE
Thanks and talk more later.
-Dan