New Release: Shit Creek - The Land Of The Remember (CVC016) Limited Edition of 50 CD-Rs & Digital Download

Shit Creek

The Land Of The Remember

(CVC016)

Limited Edition of 50 CD-Rs & digital download

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

Crow Versus Crow is delighted to present for public absorption a new body of supra-spectral, barely-contained-by-the-medium-of-sound works from Shit Creek, titled, The Land Of The Remember.

It can be difficult to make music about anything other than clinical depression when you're clinically depressed. Similarly, it can be difficult to imagine a reality beyond our own when the one we find ourselves in is so thoroughly depressing. Recorded between October and December 2019, in the midst of the General Election and the dismal sham masquerading as political discourse, The Land of the Remember could be seen as an attempt to forge an alternative - free from the restrictions of stifling oppression and dehumanising, debilitating structures of the contemporary UK.

Jamming the emotive tranquillity of the raga against a glittering technicolour that glitch-flips between atomising anxiety and absolute joy, The Land Of The Remember is an attempt to create the sound of a world beyond, or perhaps reconfigured from, the current socio-political context.

With no beat to anchor, the layers of granular fizz, squelching tropicalia glimmers and discordant plucked whatevers form shifting, expansive plains of multifarious sound, in a psychedelic bricolage of transcendental reconstitutions of the everyday.

The Land Of The Remember is released as a limited edition of 50 hand-numbered CD-Rs and digital download via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp on Friday 27th March 2020. The physical version is presented as a full-colour thermal printed CD-R, housed in a folded recycled card sleeve, with full colour artwork by Crow Versus Crow

CD-R £6
Digital Download £4

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

New Release: Carnivorous Plants - Mammon (CVC015) Limited Edition of 50 CD-Rs & Digital Download

Carnivorous Plants

Mammon

(CVC015)

Limited Edition of 50 CD-Rs & Digital Download

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

Crow Versus Crow is pleased to announce a new release in, Mammon, the latest work from Carnivorous Plants AKA Owen Chambers, a key member of Bristol’s Liquid Library, and fervent contributor to the No-Audience Underground scene.

Having previously self-released works via his own Carnivorous Plants Bandcamp, through the Liquid Library, the Wormhole World label, and Robert Ridley-Shackleton’s Cardboard Club label, it is an honour to be able to help spread the good word of Carnivorous Plants through Crow Versus Crow.

This release is developed from a bespoke cassette made as part of The Carnivorous Plants Automated Album Delivery Service, in which Owen recorded a pair of unique recordings for 10 people, based on a theme of the individual’s request. I requested a pair of recordings based upon Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series, which, after an email or two of gushing thank-filled praise, became the foundation for the recordings which were expanded upon to become what is now Mammon.

Spanning thirty-three minutes, Mammon is formed of three tracks of heavily textured, delicately layered, glacial-shift guitar drone and feather-light ferric hiss-coated field recordings and lulling piano. Subverting an oft-assumed machismo within the Noise/Drone field, Mammon eschews such negative confrontationality to explore themes of light and colour, producing complex works that reflect a heady mix of existential weight, joyful serenity and a personal transcendence felt during the process of their creation.

If it weren’t a crass, reductionist approach, for ease of reference one could say these recordings sat somewhere between Earth and Eno. *Yeurgh!*

Mammon is released as a limited edition of 50 hand-numbered CD-Rs and digital download via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp on Friday 29th November 2019. The physical version is presented as a white-faced, hand-stamped CD-R mounted onto an A5 postcard, featuring artwork by Crow Versus Crow, housed in a recycled plastic sleeve.

CD-R £5
Digital Download £4

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

New Release: Posset / Stuart Chalmers / BBBlood - 'Live at Fuse Art Space' Limited Edition CDR & Digital Download

Posset / Stuart Chalmers /  BBBlood

Live at Fuse Art Space, Bradford

Limited edition of 50 hand-numbered CDRs & digital download

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

£5 CDR / £4 digital download

This record does exactly what it says on the tin: presents unedited performances from three of the No-Audience Underground's finest purveyors of sonic exploration, Posset, Stuart Chalmers and BBBlood, recorded live at Fuse Art Space, in Bradford on Saturday 17th June 2017.

With works descending from, but distinctly separate to, the trio's previous Crow Versus Crow-released split CDR, 'Delirium Cutlet Impaste', Posset spins golden, skittering yarns with his looping, dicta-wonked abstract poetry; Stuart Chalmers constructs throbbing chromatic walls from shimmering, morphing loops; whilst BBBlood conjures spectral landscapes of cut-up place, with pummelling swathes of fizz, hum, scrape and tone.

In an affectionate killing of a sacred cow, and with tongue firmly in cheek, the sleeves of '...Live at Fuse...' allude to the reclamation of territory from what is generally considered a cultural archetype. It has probably been said by somebody somewhere before that it is paramount we document the work of the artists within the No-Audience Underground for cultural posterity, for when they who sleep awake and pay attention, and this record is just that: a document of three open artists and their innovations at the intersection of their respective paths, produced with a firm belief of the cultural significance of the work of these three artists within an Experimental Music™ context.

Would it be hyperbolic to say that this is the immortalising of one of the greatest artistic happenings within recorded history? Possibly. Well, it was 'a good night for the sausages'.

Available now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

OUT NOW: BBBlood / Posset / Stuart Chalmers 'delirium cutlet impaste' limited edition CD-R & download

delirium cutlet impaste, the collaborative work of pioneering tape music innovators, bastions of the No-Audience Underground, BBBlood, Posset and Stuart Chalmers, is now available to order via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp.

Copies are super limited and are already flying out so please do not hesitate on ordering a copy.

NEW RELEASE: BBBlood, Posset & Stuart Chalmers - 'delirium cutlet impaste' (Crow Versus Crow Editions)

BBBlood, Posset & Stuart Chalmers
delirium cutlet impaste
Limited edition of 50 CD-Rs and download
Available from the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp Friday 14th April 2017

Whether wielding Dictaphone, mobile phone or zither, Posset, BBBlood and Stuart Chalmers, three pillars of the No-Audience Underground, have honed their respective craft over a number of years and an even larger number of innovative and pioneering recordings, released through such esteemed DIY labels as Chocolate Monk, Strange Rules, Singing Knives, Beartown Records, KIKS/Girlfriend, Invisible City, Was Ist Das?... The list goes on!

So, it is an absolute pleasure for Crow Versus Crow to be able to present, Delirium Cutlet Impaste; a three-track three-way split, with BBBlood, Posset and Stuart Chalmers each offering their own slab of rich, evocative, alchemical tape music.

Delirium Cutlet Impaste is a record made from within the socio-political mindfuck that is the UK in 2017.

…The prevalence of so-called ‘alt-right’ (read: fascist) politics; deepening social divisions; an increasingly retrospective, nostalgia-yearning for an England that couldn’t, shouldn’t and, almost certainly, never did exist; a building of cultural walls to the exclusion of various/any cultural others…

This is the climate within which this record has been made.

Yet, this record isn’t a reactionary, condensable to a soundbite, statement piece. It is an open, complex maelstrom of layers of sounds and ideas

…domesticity; poetics in the minutiae of the mundane; field recordings of European excursion; the sounds of various non-Western musics, processed and subsumed; the body as instrument, as conduit…

This record reflects an open-armed engagement with a shifting, tumultuous, uncertain contemporary world. It is a raw, joyful expression of the creative process in, and in spite of, the environment from which it is born.

Delirium Cutlet Impaste will be available from Friday 14th April 2017 as a limited edition of 50 CD-Rs, housed in a full-colour 300gsm ‘greeting card’ sleeve, featuring a collaborative collage produced by BBBlood, Posset, Stuart Chalmers and Crow Versus Crow, in a hand-stamped, numbered and sticker-sealed envelope, and download from the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp.

New Release: 'States' - Photographs and Field Recordings by Crow Versus Crow

I'm very pleased to be able to present you with a new release of the Crow Versus Crow Editions imprint: States - a collection of photographs and field recordings taken by Crow Versus Crow whilst travelling through some of the southern states of North America during August 2016.

This is presented as a 48 page A5 landscape zine featuring 22 full colour photographs printed on 130gsm silk stock, with a 300gsm recycled card cover, which houses a 3" CDr featuring a single 17 minute composition of raw field recordings.
There are 25 copies available at the cost price of £5 per copy from the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp.

A digital version, comprised of the States audio and a .pdf version of the zine, for those who prefer their wares ephemeral, is also available priced at £3.

Further contextual material for States can be found below the images.

Thank you for all of your continued support with Crow Versus Crow. It is very much appreciated.

Order a copy now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

States is not intended as an objective environmental document, rather it is a depiction of an experience of travelling through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia during August 2016, as a tourist, an outsider.

Culturally conditioned experience, a pre-conceived notion of 'America', versus the aesthetic experience of being there in the moment. Simultaneously exotic and familiar. the two overlap uncannily.

Travelling through this part of the country was, very literally, an awesome experience. Expansive, sublime landscapes ripped from the pages of a John Steinbeck novel, the romanticism sharply punctured by anti-abortion billboards and ‘Vote Trump’ bumper stickers, hinting at the incredibly complex layers of history and contemporary socio-political flux beyond, or rather within, the beatific plains.

Overwhelmed by the vastness of the land, following the traces of old Bluesmen and -women through poverty ravaged states. Industry built on exploitation erased, leaving oppressed, isolated inhabitants in it’s wake.

Metronomic broken lines stretch into ephemeral, wavering pools. An eagles soars. ‘Think God’. Static hiss. Cellulose Nitrate film clicks, scratched, bubbled in heat.

'..and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself
and which cannot be spoken but only praised.'

Order a copy now via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

'Listening Fictions' by Sindre Bjerga

Listening Fictions by Sindre Bjerga

Now available in a single limited edition of 50 copies via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

I'm incredibly pleased to be able to announce the release of another addition to the on-going series of Crow Versus Crow limited editions, Listening Fictions by Sindre Bjerga.

Here's a little information on the release:

Listening Fictions presents two live sets taken from Sindre Bjerga's 2014 tour of South Korea, recorded at So Zac's Cafe and Sound Mind on the 3rd and 9th July, respectively.

Presented side by side, and detached from the intrinsic visual aspect of the performances, these two recordings sit in dialogue, cyclical and repetitive; flowing ghosts of each other. Simultaneously familiar yet distant, sounds swell from within the dense collage of 'kitchen sink' psychedelic drones, magnetic tape hiss and scree, and culled found sounds.

Sindre Bjerga is a Norwegian artist who has previously released records on labels including Blackest Rainbow, Chocolate Monk, Matching Head and Gold Soundz. He also records and releases works collaboratively as part of Star Turbine, A Vibrant Struggle and the Bjerga / Iverson duo, amongst other collectives.

Listening Fictions is presented as a full colour printed CDR mounted inside a 15 x 30 cm 300gsm folded gloss card, featuring full colour printed art work by Crow Versus Crow. The card is then housed within a hand-stamped, sticker sealed, individually numbered envelope. This is a single Limited Edition of 50 copies and won't be re-pressed. A digital version is also available

Order a copy of Listening Fictions from the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

'Excommunicado' Orders / Thank You!

Thank you to everyone who ordered a copy of 'Excommunicado'. All orders placed have now shipped and should be reaching you anytimmmme....now.

The first edition sold out within a 27 hours, which is a staggering, overwhelming response that neither Fraser/Caught In The Wake Forever nor I expected at all. Such a positive response makes all the effort that went in to the production of this work. THANK YOU.

Due to demand we will be issuing a second edition of 25 copies in mid-March, allowing a breather between the two runs in respect of those who rushed to pre-order the first edition. They will again be available via the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp. You can either check on this blog for updates around the time, or alternatively sign up to the Crow Versus Crow Newsletter for a more direct update in advance of the release.

'Excommunicado' Now Available to Pre-Order

Excommunicado is now available to purchase from the Crow Versus Crow Bandcamp

I'm incredibly pleased to be able to announce that pre-orders are now available for 'Excommunicado', a work produced in collaboration with Paisley-based artist, Caught In The Wake Forever  (Audio Gourmet/Hibernate/Mini50).
There's a dry description of the contents of the package below, so I won't go in to that here, instead I'll briefly reflect on the production of Excommunicado from my own perspective. In the interests of retaining some room for personal interpretation of the work, I'll keep it brief/vague.

 For me, Excommunicado is a work that deals with loss. Or, more specifically, it deals with the process of coming to terms with loss. I'm sure most people reading this will have got to a point in your life, post-trauma, where you're confronted with the question, 'What now?'. Sadness, bitterness, alienation, isolation, loss, nostalgia, hope, glimmers of happiness... all of these come together in a non-linear mess, as you attempt to 'pull yourself together', 'get yourself back on track' etc etc.

The drawings that make up Excommunicado were made in the midst of such a period of my life. I hadn't 'drawn' anything in the conventional sense for a long time and set about making these works without any plan or preconceived idea of what they could or would become. After sitting on them for a few months, I approached Fraser to see if he would like to be involved in a collaborative project combining work in our respective media, made in response to the visual subject, and what on reflection was so apparently the intellectual subject matter, of the drawings. Ideas back and forthed, chopped and changed over a number of months until we had what we're presenting to you here.

Peace, love, entropy,

Crow Versus Crow

Excommunicado is a collaborative project from Caught In The Wake Forever and Crow Versus Crow that brings together work in the respective medium of both artists revolving around each artist's interpretation of a single conceptual theme. The works within were produced as a continuous dialogue over a number of months, with various stages of development and articulation being sent back and forth between the artists, until both felt that their contribution was complete.

Excommunicado comprises a 10.5 x 10.5 cm 16 page mini art book, containing black and white inkjet prints of Crow Versus Crow's minimal ink and pencil drawings printed on matte off-white paper within a 170gsm recycled card cover; four instrumental tracks from Caught In The Wake Forever, on a white-faced 3" CDr housed within an 8.5 x 8.5 cm 100 gsm recycled paper envelope; an insert sheet containing recording and production information; a 35 mm photographic negative; and a dried rose petal, all housed within a 12.5 x 12.5 cm 100 gsm recycled paper envelope, sealed with a full colour Excommunicado sticker. 

This is presented as a limited edition of 50 copies.

The first 15 pre-orders will receive a limited edition 'Excommunicado' pin badge.

+

Dub Variations

Crow Versus Crow and Posset present... 'Seaweed of Silk'

Crow Versus Crow and Posset present...

'Seaweed of Silk'

A 20pp A5 black & white zine/ 3" CDr release, featuring seven of Crow Versus Crow's multi-layered photocollages, three of Posset's finest dictaphone humps and a collaborative text, housed in a recycled card 'Flack Blag' cover.

Printed in a single edition of 50 by Footprinters Workers Co-Op of Leeds.

£4.

To order a copy please email crow_versus_crow(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk.

PS. Here's a video of Posset doing his thing...

Crow Versus Crow and Posset present... 'SEAWEED OF SILK'

I am incredibly pleased to be able to announce the completion of a collaborative project with Newcastle's finest, Posset, in the form of a 20pp A5 black and white zine/3" CDR release. My contribution is a set of photocollages produced in response to Posset's organic, layered Dictaphone 'humps', made up of various field recordings and basic instrumentation produced with aesthetic consideration of earlier Crow Versus Crow visual work.

You can purchase a copy, for the cost price of £4, by emailing crow_versus_crow(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk.

Here's a video of Posset in action...

I'll also be peddling copies of the zine/3" CDR, and the very last few copies of the previous Crow Versus Crow zine/3"CDR split, at the upcoming Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention on Saturday 19th May at Victoria Baths, Manchester - appropriately themed 'Mass Participation and Collaboration'. More information on that here.

Crow Versus Crow presents... A-Sun Amissa | Ten | Trouble With Books Zine/CDR split

Crow Versus Crow presents... A-Sun Amissa | Ten | Trouble with Books

16pp A5 black & white riso print zine with 3" CDr.

Produced to coincide with a gig of the same name, this zine features a cover illustration by Trouble With Books' Sean Wars (http://www.wwrrssddrrwwss.co.uk/), photocollages by Crow Versus Crow and a 3" CDR featuring exclusive remixes and a live track by the performing artists.

Printed in a single edition of 30 by Footprints Workers Co-Op of Leeds. £4.

There are limited quantities remaining. Please email crow_versus_crow@hotmail.co.uk if you would like to purchase a copy

Lubricated with Tea, The Production Line Rolls On...

Crow Versus Crow presents... A-Sun Amissa | Ten | Trouble With Books

Friday 23rd March 2012

Bar Up, Halifax

Doors 8.00pm

£4/£3 conc/adv

A single edition of 30 zine/3" CDR splits will be available at this gig, featuring Crow Versus Crow and Sean Wars artwork, A-Sun Amissa remixing a Ten track, Ten remixing an A-Sun Amissa track and a live Trouble With Books track.