CITIZEN FISH

I will freely admit that I joined the CITIZEN FISH camp pretty late in the game. The early '90s were, by most accounts, the heyday of both the band's output and their popularity, but I didn't even see them play live until 1997 (and even then, it was only because Karoline was on tour with them, I am not sure I had ever even heard their music). But it didn't take much to see why people and punks from virtually every subsection of every scene were into the band, and I've been an unabashed fan ever since that first show. I'll still hold Life Size as my favorite record, but please don't ask me to pick a favorite show because there have been to many to choose from...and they are never bad. It just doesn't happen. The Psychological Background Reports are collections of outtakes, field recordings and remixes, things that few bands could pull off in an even remotely interesting fashion, but when CITIZEN FISH digs into the archives, the result is nothing short of fantastic.  This is the first installment, circa 1993....a full hour of dub, reggae, remixes, techno (lest you thought Phil was a latecomer to the electronic music game!), alternates and interviews, all carefully manipulated for your listening pleasure. Sometimes I rip tapes and leave them in the background while I get on with life, but this one held me mesmerized....the manipulation is every bit as effective today as it was then. And, for the record, no matter how many crucial shows (or years?) I missed out on by jumping on the bandwagon late, I wouldn't change a thing about my relationship to the band or their music because it's been nothing short of perfect from that show in San Luis Obispo until today...

FIRST PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND REPORT

UNKNOWN

This comes up from time to time, and is perhaps only of interest to the more adventurous of you, but your curiosity will be justly rewarded. Five different tapes that made it into my life with little or no identifying marks. And to all the nerds (which is hopefully most of you), you see the challenge before you, the only question is whether or not you are up to it. So....are you?

1. Twelve tracks of chaotic industrial noise. Greatness is approached, embraced, and then cast aside over the course of one half hour. Cassette marked only as "ETC......."
HERE

2. Ten minutes of crucial grind/powerviolence. The completely unmarked tape was in a box full of master tapes and live recordings from '90s Bay Area bands, so I'm inclined to think this is from the same time/scene...but I cannot identify it. The recording is absolutely ruthless.
HERE

3. I feel like I may have shared this one before, and simply unearthed a double? Dual vocal fastcore/thrash that I think is from South America. The recording varies quite a bit from track to track, but the vocals are pretty consistent so I think this is all the same band...but I might be incorrect.
HERE

4. From the flipside of the DEAD FISH tape I posted a while back. The collection of Brasilian demos I picked up from Allan had many tapes with records dubbed onto the blank B side (like the WIDE AWAKE demo on the back of the DIASPORA tape). Someone with a better mental encyclopedia than me can surely pick this one out.
HERE

5. Live (at least mostly?) outsider shit-fi punk. Four tracks, all essentially inept, possibly from England, and endearing (if only for a few minutes).
HERE

Get to work, kids....

ANCIENT CHINESE PENIS

I hadn't listened to these recordings in at least a decade, but for some reason "Bureaucratic Itch" has been stuck in my head intermittently for the last few months so I thought it was time to open up the closet. ANCIENT CHINESE PENIS started in summer 1991 - initially it was just Dave and me in his apartment living room, but by the time the fall semester got rolling we were jamming with Dan on drums and Matt playing guitar in a tiny room connected to my place in Norman. We hit the road shortly after we recorded the Fistful O Penis demo in '92 (I think we spent something insane like $700 on that session), playing a whopping six shows over two weeks (two of those we jumped on at Raji's in LA), met NAKED AGGRESSION in Albuquerque, got kicked out of DeDe Troit's apartment, and played what I remember being a brilliantly fun show at a teen center in Eureka. When we came back home, it was like we had legitimized ourselves simply by touring, and our shows were actually pretty good. Maybe it was the frequent nudity and lazily executed amateur antics (play your local college bar and shower the crowd with marshmallows...trust me, it's fun), or maybe it was....nah, I think people just came to laugh at us. We recorded ANCIENT CHINESE PENIS: Envy the following year and got the itch to tour again...this time we booked shows in towns where we didn't know anyone (which was most of the towns) by posting up at the college library, pulling out microfiche (remember that, kids?) for phone books from the towns we wanted to play. We would find the record store listings, call the stores and ask where punk bands played, then cold call clubs and see if they wanted to host some mutants from Oklahoma called ANCIENT CHINESE PENIS. And if that's not weird enough, some of them said yes. We sold shirts in grocery store parking lots on our days off to get gas money, we saw BORN AGAINST and AVAIL in Cudahay, Wisconsin (a show that's been written about at length in previous TE posts), we broke an axle outside of Bloomfield, Indiana and spent a weird weekend partying with local teenage dropouts waiting for the only garage in town to open up Monday morning, we got wooed by a bizarre promoter/pervert in the hills outside of Asheville who promised us main support on a festival with BUTTHOLE SURFERS and didn't we want to get in his sports car and check out his hot tub? We booted Dave shortly after that tour and enlisted Dan Riffe (oft mentioned on these pages, he was a then-recent Tulsa transplant and frontman for ILLEGITIMATE SONS OF JACKIE O) and cranked out our last demo, Al Fresca, but we were not long for the world. Matt had recruited me for MULTIPLE CHOICE, a band that seemed much more "legitimate" and that band relocated to California in early 1994, morphing into FUCKFACE the following  year. I'm pretty sure that Al Fresca is the most listenable of the three demos, but I don't have a copy...hell, I don't even have artwork for the first two (though I can assure you that the imagery is every bit as dated as the sound). Included in the download are the first two demos in their entirety, plus an alternate version of "Bible Belt Blues" from the first session, and never before released TWISTED SISTER and MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT covers from the second. Inexplicably, we did release the 5+ minute "Down Wit' A.C.P." on Envy...just one of many questions that will remain unanswered.

ANCIENT CHINESE PENIS

Terminal Escape turns six years old today. 2,000 posts and counting, and more than two million visits to the blog...hopefully some of you have found some killer tunes in the process.

SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE

Ran into Chris from OXYGEN DESTROYER at our show in Fukuyama in April, he's living on some tiny ass island with 200 elderly citizens, teaching English to anyone who will listen. In addition to his pleasant demeanor, he brought this new demo on the two hour ferry ride into town...and it seems that his return to Japan has energized his already fervent passion for weird noisy hardcore. Chaotic, raw and blatantly nerdy, this project is less Kyushu worship and more pure outsider hardcore, like a bedroom project come to like. Since Chris's island is pretty far removed from anything,  I don't know how frequently we will be hearing more installments from SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE...so I would suggest making these eleven minutes last.

SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE

BEAST AS GOD

A complete steamroller from the UK, BEAST AS GOD make their intent to destroy perfectly clear from the intro, and proceed to make good over the tracks that follow. Fist in the air metalcrust driven by The Riff and propelled by a massive machine gun drum attack with tiny hints of melody that make brief appearances (though in tracks like "I Know Who You Are" there simply isn't enough time). The guitar lead in "Against A Dark Background," the devastating intro to "Eulogie," the transition from overpowering doom in the middle of "Eschatological Vision" to the thunderous Scandicrust that closes the track...these kids know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it right.

BEAST AS GOD

EYE OF NIX

Sometimes it's best to not describe things, but to just be blown away by them. Seattle's EYE OF NIX are a truly unique combination, a swarm of gloom and sound fronted by pure power. So heavy...and so weird.

EYE OF NIX

ONCE AGAIN

In case you haven't picked up on my feelings about '90s DIY punk from previous posts: '90s DIY punk was awesome. No rules, no pre-determined subgenres, no internet, no deciding exactly which obscure cult band you're going to sound like before you have your first practice...shit was honest. Even when it wasn't good, it was fukkn honest. It's hard to move my mind past BLATHERSKITE and ICE NINE when I think of '90s Indianapolis, but this ONCE AGAIN demo gives me more than enough reasons to revisit the hardcore legacy of The Crossroads Of America. Listen to the youth in the vocals that start "Day One," an innocence immediately countered by the chaotic pummeling that makes up most of the song...this is (almost) the shit that naysayers past and present dismissed as emotional hardcore (people would say the same about ONE EYED GOD PROPHECY, and we all know how stupid that dismissal would be, right?), but brutal determination cannot be faked, and twenty years later these kids sound hugely important. Even if they never warranted more than a ripple when they made their initial drop into the pool....

ONCE AGAIN