Thanks for all your support, as always!

We know, we know…it’s been a long time coming, but just in time for summer, Deception Island is back in the game with four immense jawns from some of our fave going concerns!

DI35: Quicksails Silver Balloons in Clusters c40

Few artists have played a more central role in the recent explosion of high-quality, chops-posi experimental outfits in Chicago than Ben Billington, jammer’s jammer, chinese takeout connoisseur, and member of Tiger Hatchery (with Mike Forbes and Andrew Scott Young) and White Prism (with Josh Burke). With Silver Balloons in Clusters, his most fully realized solo outing since last year’s brilliant Madison Lakes (Cylindrical Habitat Modules), Quicksails has completely fused the finest aspects of everything Billington brings to the table in his other projects, and his highly idiosyncratic synth style finds its natural and inevitable foil in his own drumming.

Tracks like “Must Never Catch It” and “Home in Trees” evoke an alternate history in which time ran backwards for just long enough to permit Milford Graves to blast Departure from the Northern Wasteland on headphones while tracking drums for Black Woman, while “Constant Air Reservoir” and “Deep Creak” stake out a thoroughly subterranean aesthetic turf, filled with the humid whisper of microorganisms describing their favorite hollow earth haunts to buried Lee Perry reels and the hypnotizing throb of jeweled pipe organs encircling a hypothetical ideal pineal gland. On the far side of the core, the unreservedly beautiful closer “A Million Knots” unspools like an impossible Spiegel/Dinger sesh on an infinite subway platform. Silver Balloons in Clusters is a bar-raiser from one of the most deeply rewarding projects going in the contemporary post-electroacoustic underground. It’s majestic in its scope and dazzling in its intricate patternedness, at once liquid, gestural, organic, and absolutely essential.

Hand-numbered edition of 200.

DI36: Night Burger What Happens Next? c36

Since he landed in Philly a couple years back, Noah Anthony of Social Junk has participated in a dizzying number of warped units, including Mirror Men, Mindless Attack, the late Form a Log, and of course Night Burger, solo vehicle for his virtuosic command of postdub/postjunk technique in the service of a stunningly bleak, utterly forlorn, and eerily refined agenda. That this project, which has cultivated a well-earned reputation for prolific and mind-erasingly intense live performances remains sparsely represented in terms of studio recordings makes an immaculately structured album-length release such as this one particularly special.

What Happens Next? gets lurching with a slo-mo jackhammer riff that hits like a thousand telephone switchboards getting sucked into a neutron star. Anthony’s vocal persona is hollowed-out and resigned, a terrifying shell of the dosed everyman angle worked in SJ. The A side progresses through dessicated combo organ perc of “Profligate”, wrapped in tick, melt, and whisper, to the keening rust belt-style reedwave, iq-annihilating bass drops, and bucket brigade gurgle of “As Always,” “You Drive” and “My Turn to Hide”. On the reverse, “What Happens Next (Dross)” transforms the numbing bonecrunch impact of the original into a sick thud/clatter beneath a frigid organ riff, while “Settlement” stretches into epic territory, an unintelligible interior monologue dissolving in a stiff bleach solution amid a hail of highway flares, giving way to a muted psychedelia of the hyperclean factory sort, surprisingly not unrelated to a plausible interpretation of, say, early Chain Reaction recs. Phenomenal.

Hand-numbered edition of 200.

DI37: Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman Advanced Dungeons and Dragons c30

Ryan Kuehn is as total an enigma as they come, and is probably more responsible than any other individual for the persistence of Cleveland’s status as a hub of utter strangeness, between his long-term stewardship of “The Record Exchange”, a nosebleed haven for human/audio fuckery and deep afterhours gurgle on WCSB, and Thursday Club, his collaboration with Brian Detrow, which spent the early oughts mapping much of the territory within which an ensuing wave of northern Ohio fuckups, from Fragments to Moth Cock, would operate. In that sense, Thursday Club’s DNA is woven every bit as deeply into the Cleveland aesthetic as that of Skin Graft or Tusco Terror, and despite the name, Ryan’s solo recordings as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman hew much more closely to the psychedelic free electronics and mossy synth throb of TC than, say, the righteously pointed misanthropy of Hot Air Balloon Ride (with John Elliott), the thousand-yard-starin’ tape zonkery of The Reel Deel (with John Elliott and Chris Madak), or the negative-wavecrust hose blast of DPI (with Wyatt Howland, Amanda Howland, and J Guy Laughlin).

While prior DQMW jawns have flaunted their opacity and insiders-only scruples, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons simply shrugs, pulls back the curtain, and takes out the trash. As effective and consistently surprising a cereal box decoder ring as any in Kuehn’s vast ouerve, it’s a rare opportunity to stagger your way across a hypercube tumbling through the ether, sipping nectar through a straw in a storm of mercury droplets (“D20″), passing out on the deck of a heavily filigreed hovercraft (“Soloflex”), wrapping your head around Salvia Jaws (“Vin Diesel”), spraying tar from a whipped cream can (“Suburban Blaster”), and waking up on a screwy plateau on the edge of time, where a drop of water takes eight hours to roll down your face (“Keyless Entry”). …and that’s just side A, with the reverse taking in the GRMmy hamminess of “Fortune Cookie”, the zonked/dissociated lesswave of “Coin Toss”, the glassy, celestial glide of “Sub-Zero”, and the bleary, tumbling wool-fi minimalism of “Room Temp Beer.” Extra fucked classic rust belt basement tapecult aesthetic. One for the true heads.

Hand-numbered edition of 150.

DI38: Alterity Problem / Outer Space split c26.

Bonkers split concept: Alterity Problem, the Montreal-based duo of lifer oddballs Alex Moskos (also of AIDS Wolf, Drainolith, Thames, and The Medicine Rocks) and cryptic associate Joel Taylor turn in a suite of extra-damaged jams about kids, heaters, and problems, these titular concerns reflecting a certain noirish surrealism and a slightly outre pose–both very much present in the audible payload–that distinguish Alterity Problem from their most obvious contemporaries. Sometimes it’s like a Matra 12″ heard through a wheelbarrow of pills and six miles of bulletproof glass; other times it’s like spinning d-beat recs under general anaesthesia. Sometimes there are oddly, immensely satisfying syndrums in all the right/wrong places.

The flip finds John Elliott (of Emeralds, Mist, and many others) back on DI with a fresh side of Outer Space tracks that work a polished, high-impact aesthetic angle very distinct from the decaying hyperabstraction of last year’s massive Lightyear Demonstrations while continuing to radiate the same throughgoing trippiness and post/antihuman drive. First, “Aspartame” materializes from a glowing sandstorm of synth and vocals, coalescing into one of the most dazzling and aqueous examples of Elliott’s signature endlessly unfurling klein bottle riffstyle to date. The ensuing nine minutes of this piece display a mastery of the “Dusseldorf style” of building deceptively intricate, episodic tracks on metronomic backbones, as claustrophobia and a sense of awakening to the reality of being chased by something superfucked gradually dawns, only to give way to an epic sunrise over a desert of ash and bleached bones. The finale, “USA Endless” (dark commentary?) has hung around long enough to see all inclination toward propulsion surgically removed. We’re floating six inches off the ground, in the driveway with the doors open, engine running, and wheels spinning endlessly, far too fucked to do anything other than sit back and watch the dash boil while sunlight falls like iridescent jelly on the seats. Extra weird.

Hand-numbered edition of 300.

Materials:

DI35-38 are pro-dubbed on the same BASF chrome stock used for every Deception Island release since DI15, with imprinted clear/clear shells, packaged in crystal polys with pink glitter spine detail and full-color prints on 80# matte coated card.

Pricing and Ordering:

DI35-38 are available for $8 postpaid in North America, $10 rest-of-world. Retail orders are filled on a first-come, first-served basis and shipped via USPS First Class/First Class International, typically within two business days of cleared payment. PayPal (to orders@deception-island.com) is currently the preferred means of payment.

Please email to confirm availability prior to ordering; an emailed inquiry secures your place in the queue as orders are filled. Also, please try to avoid submitting inquiries via a message board or social network; these may not be factored into the queue in a timely fashion.

Wholesale rates are, of course, available. Please email for terms.

Contact:

We’re in the midst of changing up how we handle this stuff, so as some of you may have observed above, the preferred address for payment and order-related inquiries is now:

orders@deception-island.com

For the time being, payment may also be sent to bee.mask@gmail.com as in the past. The mailing list is still being sent from that address to avoid some sort of hypothetical spam filter trainwreck.

If you’re not on a mailing listy tip, you can also get new release announcements via:

http://www.twitter.com/editions_DI
http://www.facebook.com/deception.island

Thanks!

ALSO, DI34 is now sold out at source. Tomentosa Records just took the last minigrip off our hands, so by all means, get ‘em there!

Yeah, we know…that’s a picture of the DI31-34 covers being printed, but the signifying heft of it is (or at least should be) in the direction of letting you know that DI35-38 are in production and planned for a mid-April 2011 release. Further information will be trickling in soon, but for now, check out that sidebar to your right!

Also, this might be a good time to let you know that we’ve finally owned up to the fact that we don’t have the time to run a mailing list for any purpose more intricate than announcing new editions, so the mailing list is now officially for new release announcements only (which it always was anyway).

Also also, after what feels like years of equivocating, we’ve decided that:

1. DI has no current plans to get back into the business of producing live events (hence the disappearance of the “Events” page). If you’re in/around Philly, you might want to check out GOVT List, though.

2. Information regarding Bee Mask will no longer be hosted here. Instead, it can now be found here.

With any luck, this will keep everyone marginally less confused than they might have been otherwise. More spring cleaning and batch updates forthcoming!

Yet another post about two things follows. The first of those things is that a chunk of Bee Mask’s Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico is stitched into Autre Ne Veut’s recent mix for Altered Zones!

The second is that DI31 is now sold out at source, albeit still available from distros. Thanks everyone who gripped; it’s one of my favorite DI’s to date and I’m happy to have found it some good homes.

Two things! First, we’re thrilled that 2010 honors keep rolling in for DI and related projects. The latest crop includes EOY nodz from Akteon regarding DI31, Visitation Rites on DI32, Greg Davis (via Root Strata) on DI33, and WFMU’s My Castle of Quiet on DI29.

MCOQ also reps Bee Mask’s Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico, which has reared its head in lists from John Twells (for Boomkat), Saniel Bonders, and Tiny Mix Tapes, plus a nomination in the Brainwashed readers’ poll (where I believe one can still vote for it, if that’s the sort of thing one’s into doing).

This is probably a partial list at best and we’ll be sure to update it as necessary. We mention all of this mainly to say thanks to everyone who thought we made their 2010 kick more ass than it would’ve otherwise! We also wanna extend our congratulations to all extended DI family who continue to grip well-deserved plauditz this year! It’s been a good one all around!

The second order of business alluded to above is this: holiday travel will be going down from 12/25-28, so any pending bizness will be attended to starting on the 29th! Thanks for the usual patience, etc.

Thanks to Sounds from the Rust Belt for including DI33 in their year-end best-of!

In other batch-related news, DI32′s getting love from The Fader, Pitchfork, Dead Formats (dead? really?? why’d you check it, then? -ed.), and Earmilk. Thanks everyone for your support!

We considered getting our own year-end list together and even went so far as to turn Tranquility Base inside out in the interest of establishing a stack of recs, but then we had a better idea. You’ll be hearing about it soon!

While we’re at the keyz, we might as well take this opportunity to welcome Aguirre Records to the distro fold. Anyone on the continent looking to grip DI33 and/or DI34 (to say nothing of a whole other jawn raft, incl. a crucial LP reish of Brother Raven’s Diving into the Pineapple Portal) would do well to check them out.

(We’re trying really hard to close this out without saying “the purest distro the world has ever seen.” Instead, let’s talk about how there’s a room at the Great Lakes Science Center that looks like fucking Caroliner. Seriously, these are not, I repeat not pictures of the Whitney Biennial.)

…and it bears noting that while I was gone, TMT Cerberus and Altered Zones (NB: for the millionth time, thanks for the review, but I live in Philly, not Cleveland. Also for what it’s worth, I have never knowingly sold a tape to a bird.) had some stuff to say about DI31 and DI32, respectively.

In case you’ve already synthesized the implications of the preceding paragraphs, lemme take this opportunity to point out that we’re down to maybe one copy of DI31 and out of DI32. Both of ‘em, however, are still very much available from your favorite distro.

…and speaking of distros, the inimitable KFW’s back with some considered assessments of the new batch!