Minor Musics: Finland features a rare live Kemialliset Ystävät performance with New York collaborators. Kemialliset Ystävät is an ever-changing group of free-form pilots who have been sending murky audio clouds from their basement in Tampere, Finland, to the people of the world since 1995. They work in short, spooling instrumentals, building layers of simple repetitive riffs into laminal mudcakes and weaving ghosts of noise songs into huge tunnels of drone. They utilize a wide spectrum of moldy acoustic instruments and almost broken electronics to create their joyful blasts but the recording studio itself might be their single most important instrument. Kemialliset Ystävät discography includes CDs, vinyl records, cassettes and lathe cuts on Fonal, Fusetron, Beta-Lactam Ring, Lal Lal Lal, Jewelled Antler, Celebrate Psi Phenomenom and other revolutionary labels around the world. Members of Kemialliset Ystävät are involved with other projects such as The Anaksimandros, Avarus, Islaja, Kiila, Es and Päivänsäde.
Raphael Lyon (aka Mudboy) is an established sound designer, musician and installation artist working around the world. His work focuses on the conceptual frameworks of living systems design and fractal organization with an interest in creating a sense of wonder and magic as a primary practice.
Samara Lubelski has split her time between Germany, where she works with the psychedelic group Metabolismus, and her Lower East Side home base, playing and recording with a who’s who of the art-punk and freely-improvised folk scenes for she has been brewing a rich cup of aesthetic ingredients.
Marcia Bassett predominately uses guitar and vocals to create sounds that shimmer in a dark metallic buzz of sonic noise and drone, before a swift shift into blissed out ragas or crippling, brutal, white-hot noise.
Michael Bernstein performing primarily on modular synthesizer was founding member of Brooklyn group Religious Knives formed after the demise of drone legends Double Leopards.
Taylor Richardson (Infinity Window, Purple Haze, Human Teenager) channels the more damaged moves associated with lost psychedelic and industrial private press records released throughout the 70’s and 80’s. The sounds emitted reveal a communion with the outsider spirit by re-contextualizing their meaning through various processes utilizing analog systems, so as to disrupt connotations or expand awareness of secret vocabularies.
Tom Carter augments rudimentary guitar skills with unreliable instruments, cranky analog electronics, and disintegrating practice amps. He has managed to forge his evolving ideas of complete tonal immersion (and the quest for the perfect fuzz tone) into a layered sonic toolkit of rough beauty and unrefined proficiency. Best known for his work with acclaimed psych-drone iconoclasts Charalambides, which he co-founded with Christina Carter in 1991, he has branched out into other collaborations since 2001, playing and recording with long-term projects Zaika (with Marcia Bassett) and Badgerlore (with Rob Fisk, Ben Chasny, Liz Harris, and Peter Swanson), as well as in frequent collaborations with Bay Area sound artist Robert Horton.
Dave Nuss has been an active part of the NYC musical community for nearly twenty years. Nuss is founding member of the No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK), the longest-running American musical group dedicated exclusively to improvisation, and has toured the band more than a dozen times around Europe, Canada, and America. Throughout 2007-2009 he toured as a member of the Japanese group The Boredoms, leading performances of 77 and 88 drummers. Currently he is working on promotional projects with Feral House Press (Seattle) and Process Media (LA, CA) on music related to new American religious movements. After completing an extensive audio-archiving project on the the Source Family and Yahowha 13 (based in Hawaii), he created the band Sabbath Assembly to perform the hymns of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a UK-based 70s cult.
As a founding member of The Magik Markers, prolific solo artist and collaborator, Pete Nolan's work exists in its own space and time. Untethered to any scene or movement, Pete’s sound has its roots in the classic psych/folk/noise underground without betraying the originality that separates a true artist from flash-in-the-blog hype spew.
