Friday, November 16, 2012

Mannlicher Carcano: Trouble & Thensome Ltd Ed Mini CDR!


To celebrate Mannlicher Carcano’s 25th continuous year as an improvisational audio collage group, and the discovery of an unopened stack of recordable 3” mini CDs in a dumpster in Glendale, CA, redacted records is pleased to announce the release of a numbered limited edition of 50 mp3 mini CDs containing over 3 ½ hours of Mannlicher Carcano recordings spanning 1987 to 2012, including many of Mannlicher’s most beloved recordings, various out-of-print rarities, and several previously unissued gems.

Trouble & Thensome (or T ‘n’ T) is an expansion of MC’s definitively unfinished career anthology Trouble Comes in Threes, which compiled recordings from their beginnings as a noise-leaning musique concrete performance group through the early years of their weekly multi-stream radio program, to their 2001 studio collage Hunt Down & Punish -- recorded and released within a week of the 9/11 controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, in an effort to rally the populace and forestall the military incursion into the middle east which nevertheless ensued.

Trouble & Thensome substitutes the long-unavailable full 17-minute version of Hunt Down & Punish for the more familiar single version, and sets several other tracks from the original Trouble aside in order to make room for a selection of subsequent single releases, including the hypnotic Cash Out, recorded and debuted the week of Johnny Cash’s death; Indian Ned’s Song from the soundtrack to Lee Lynch’s 2012 revisionist Western film The Death of Hi Good; and (It’s) Time to Smash Things Up (for Mike Kelley), excerpted from the Jan 31, 2012 radio broadcast -- the exact time the LA-based artist and noise musician was taking his own life.

Other material added to the expanded Trouble includes the first released audio fragment from their 2004 multimedia installation/performance Mannlicher Carcano vs Nanook of the North, the ensemble’s deconstructive multimedia mashup of the first feature-length cinematic documentary from 1921; individual tracks from their first CD release in 2001 Half Duplex Receive Only [roden quote] and their 2009 long player Crawl to Safety (with Mannlicher Carcano), as well as the previously unreleased Another Finite Monkey, a live mix of some of the 90 10-second loopable micro-compositions assembled as their groundbreaking 2002 work Infinite Monkeys, originally released on the CD accompanying the band’s cover story in the prestigious new music magazine Musicworks.

Several other tracks originate from the 11 self-released cassettes issued by MC between 1987 and 1999, from which much of the original Trouble derives. As participants in the first cassette culture underground, MC released such landmark collections as Level Best, Next Best, and Honorable Mentions, but their 1994 concept cassette War Measures Act is widely regarded as their finest cassette moment.

Other excerpts on T ‘n’ T represent such experimental releases as the 1988 cassette Walpurgisnacht, each of which had a different dumpster-scavenged photograph featuring a bust of Hitler, a chunk of hash, and other objects in various arrangements as the j-card cover, and a different combination of recordings from a 6-hour live performance on April 30/May 1 that same year; and Fogwit, a 60-minute document of two specially designed turntables simultaneously playing identical funk 45s that had been meticulously distressed by the band members.

The members of Mannlicher Carcano are Porter Hall, Gogo Godot, and Really Happening -- plus more than 200 beloved adjunct band members -- including Kenneth Friendliness, The Missing Hyperlink, Christ, Pilot K9, Peas Porigiott, Lucky Breaks, Dr. Pityface, Darth Pitapants, Brudda Debuddah, Woodpity Pitywood, Mr. Supreme Neurotic, and so on to infinity -- many of whom play on this record!