Tender Wreckage

Vinyl! Just like grandpa used to talk about: a nice big slab o' vinyl with over 300 square inches of full color artwork on the jackets. And yes, that artwork is a (somewhat enhanced) photo of a jelly roll pan filled with water and pork fat drippings. Album art and design by Jeff Wrench.

This is a collaborative/split LP with one side Brutum Fulmen, one side Norway's Lasse Marhaug. The only concept is that we would each create a piece using source sounds provided by the other person.

Lasse Marhaug side

1. Nine Thousand Things

   Lasse takes a hatchet to the entire Brutum Fulmen catalog.

   A cut-up piece with lots of abruptly changing quick edits.

2. Unmanned European Probe

   Remix of Brutum Fulmen track "Unmanned Probe" from the Moon Boots 7" record

   A calmer approach this time, rearranging longer chunks of the original mostly ambient material, plus a surprising burst of something either completely transformed or from another source.

3. Five Minute Walk

   Old tapes, Brutum Fulmen excerpts, Otomo's "Sampling Virus"

4. Music Has No Place in History

   Not sure of the source of the sounds in this low-frequency woofer-damage piece, but I really like the title.

Brutum Fulmen side

1. Lament of the Termite Queen

   Large wooden power cable spool dragged on pavement. Feedback. Sticks. Metal shelf scraped on a metal cabinet.

   One of my favorite Brutum Fulmen pieces is this calm, sad, and spooky song. Eventually made into a video.

2. It Was 1951 when I First Contacted the Moon

   Violin. Sounds from "Five Minute Walk".

   This is my Lasse remix. I used mainly a track from the other side of this record, plus a small amount of a violin recording Lasse sent me. One or two of the sounds from "Five Minute Walk" were actually from old Brutum Fulmen pieces, so there are several generations of recycling here.

   I had a fairly elaborate concept behind this piece/title: it was inspired by a kid I knew in the 80's who's family was stuck in the 50's. The dad was an electrical engineer with a whole room taken up by HAM radio equipment and a cobbled together Heathkit computer. Anyway, the idea is that back in the 50's the narrator has been reading too much sci-fi and starts interpreting the weird short wave and HAM radio transmissions he's getting as extra-terrestrial. Was he going crazy... or might he be right?!

3. Dawn

   Loose cassette tape rubbed on play-heads of dismantled walkman, tape deck hum, feedback (all from a live performance). Vinyl surface noise.

   This was the first piece I did for this project, but was victim of a hard drive crash. I lost most of my work except for a cassette mixdown of the work in progress. I ended up using some of the cassette mix and reworking the piece quite a bit. Since one of the sources was cassette noise in the first place, I went a little further in that direction and incorporated more tape and vinyl glitches.