Also, Volcanic Tongue weighs in on Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico:

Luminous new set of tone sorcery from Chris Madak’s Bee Mask, with a set of surreal 20th century sonics that mainlines the cosmic tones of Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith before taking off on hysterical gothic keyboard runs, thick beams of drone and ghostly radiophonic melodies. On Brother Raven’s label, hand-numbered edition of 200 copies.

Again, I’m flattered by the comparison! For now, however, I’m mostly gearing up to hit the road in a few days. Check the events page for more details on the New England steamed minotaur and Champagne of Fests IV!

While I’m telling you stuff, perhaps I should also tell you that I had a blast playing with Drainolith, Honed Bastion, Newton, and God Willing at Deep Pizza Zone last month. There’ll be another Philly show in July…updates coming very soon!

Also, Dialobe Warrior said some stuff about Colony Collapse 2 a while ago! Thanks!

First, Bee Mask, in collaboration with x0x-banger cryptounit DMT Stallynz is represented on I Just Live Here’s Fake Sound Routine double c92 compilation, by a new track, titled “The Marriage of Rosin and Squealer.” I’m fresh out of these, so grab them from Ren at IJLH. The two new joints from his Container alterego are worth the price of admission by themselves…

…and while we’re on the topic of Just Living Here, Bee Mask is also set to perform at IJLH HQ, aka Deep Pizza Zone on May 29th, with Drainolith (Alex Moskos of AIDS Wolf, Thames, et al), Newton, Honed Bastion, and God Willing. Egg sacs, similarly, cannot help but be worth the price of admission…

…and while we’re busy dispensing kind words, Tiny Mix Tapes has sent a few our way, featuring DI30 in the most recent installment of their TMT Cerberus column. (NB: I live in Philadelphia, but thanks! -Bee Mask) …

…and the kind words don’t stop there, either! Mimaroglu Music Sales has some pretty solid prose assessments and audio excerpts on offer for any of you looking to get current on the last couple DI batches…

…which brings us to one final point. The Deception Island Ombudsman reports:

While perusing the MMS page linked above, I found myself suddenly and thoroughly face-egged. Our description of DI28 ends with “I promised myself that I’d never end a writeup with the phrase “must grip,” but seriously“, while our description of DI25 (issued several months prior) concludes (albeit in a somewhat meanspirited fashion) with (you guessed it) “must grip.” Deal with it.

It’s been a while, no? Hope you’ve all been well! I’ve been keeping warm, getting settled in new digs, consuming immense amounts of cheap scotch and fried rice, and steeling my nerves to bask in the privilege of dropping epic full-length joints from three of my favorite going concerns, plus the first peeps anyone’s heard from Bee Mask in a veritable eon. But first, let’s clear things up: Wyatt had a dream that this batch was gonna feature fully accessorized action figures of Steve Kenney and Shane MacKenzie, and I’m sorry to say that I haven’t delivered. Ther

di23 – Chris Benedetto Madak “Bees Removed” c30:

First-ever all-acoustic, al fresco DI sesh, for fans of springtime and the “what the fuck is even happening right now?” aspect of ye olde high concept editions. The backstory is that, when the snow melted in my neighborhood a few months ago, an acquaintance of mine discovered a seriously corroded upright piano rotting on its back in a vacant lot. The material for this tape was recorded on-site, over the course of a week of daily visits, during which the skeletal remains of the instrument were thoroughly rearranged and new techniques and preparations tested and refined.

“Bees Removed” is, in a sense, the sound of the mangled/distended piano tapes featured on Bee Mask releases such as “How Softly Sings the Kettle, How Sweetly Chimes the Clock” (Arbor, 2008) unspooled and resituated as experiments toward the assembly of a technical vocabulary in real time, an absurd and open-ended array of stark impact, scrape, clatter, and the barest ghost of the instrument as resonant body, treated with a sensibility not dissimilar to the one found in the outdoorsy bits of Christiansen’s “Abschiedssymphonie” and throughout the Euro-postflux canon, generally speaking.

Hand-numbered edition of 50.

di24 – Fragments “Kinetic Sphere” c20:

Those of you who’ve spent any serious time in Cleveland know that it’s barely possible to leave your house without getting pancaked by some anvil or other of phenomenally damaged tapes. Jeff Hatfield and Zach Troxell, aka Fragments, were responsible for the last such anvil to have my name on it before I split for Philly last year, and their self-titled debut left me scratching my head at the point of impact for months, trying to fathom what the hell they could possibly be THINKING. Then again, as Hatfield confided in me at the bar after Fragments turned in a tense and gnarled basement set at the Champagne of Fests III this past March, “I’m not even really sure that I have a head right now,” so perhaps I’m overanalyzing it and the crux of the project is in fact the very billion-yard stare amply documented on the “Synthetic Spremulli” dvdr and made more than audible on a slew of subsequent releases for Hanson, Pizza Night, A Sounddesign, and Tusco Embassy.

Regardless, I can think of few contemporary synth projects as genuinely weird as this one, and “Kinetic Sphere” is incredibly gnarled stuff, kicking off like a steel door opening onto the gentle throb of miniature worlds under glass and staging it’s first crescendo as the inhabitants discover space travel, summoning a great purring of afterburners and flashing of lasers, then hanging out around the rafters in a cloud of acrid smoke. Side two begins with a wonderful settled/unsettled “Drift Studies”-esque detuned test tone that gradually accumulates filigree before blindsiding the listener with a split-second glimpse into the abyss, a pendulum that only swings farther and farther, and an ending reminiscent of the coda of Schnitzler’s “Meditation,” in which dub space, once appropriated, becomes literal, carceral, and oppressive, and our heroes keep on throttling the cosmic slot machine amid a beery haze, in a vain attempt to escape the tape itself.

Hand-numbered edition of 150.

di25 – Bee Mask “Shimmering Braid” c20:

“Shimmering Braid” features two of the latest pieces in the austere, trillion-oscillator heterodyning mode of last year’s “Elusive Lunar Bow” (Together Tapes) and “Versailles is Not too Large … or Infinity too Long,” (Chondritic Sound) taken to new extremes of ghostly bass weight, mind-splitting acoustic illusion, and frostbitten architechtonic contour, making audible the eternal frying of the phantom breakfast on a slo-coasting ice sheet.

This is one for fans of a certain historically sited vein of minimalist electronics, brobdingnagian timbral redundancy, and the principled avoidance of temperament. In hindsight, it recalls a half-remembered passage from some essay or other, regarding how genuinely screwed up it must have been to be a pre-reformation European peasant in a cathedral, ego cooked by malnutrition, ergotism, etc, surrounded by debauched authoritarian shitbags muttering in Latin, flattened by titanic standing waves from the pipe organ, and subsequently unable to stop seeing the afterimage of all that fucking stained glass for the entire next week’s worth of backbreaking toil. “Must grip.”

Hand-numbered edition of 144.

di26 – Skin Graft “Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” c20:

As proof that some small amount of justice lingers in the world, Cleveland veteran Wyatt Howland is finally getting his dues, having spent the past several years amassing a discography studded with many of the all-time classics of fucked rust belt electronics (“Soft Police Murder,” “Drug Addict,” “You Deserve Nothing,” and the watershed “Blackout” lp on Tusco Embassy, to name but a handful), collabbing tirelessly with the likes of Ryan Kuehn, David Russell, Emeralds, and Aaron Dilloway, and turning in an endless stream of punishingly focused, concise, and pissed-off performances that simply must be witnessed to be believed.

“Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” is both a fitting introduction to Skin Graft and a bar-raiser for those already initiated, on which Howland continues to wax subtle, detailed, and glowering, as though drawing cross-sections of harsh noise with a drafting pencil, allowing us to view the creaking, dripping, and hissing armature under its skin. This is a strategy that could never be sustained without the patience and technique that are present in spades across the six tracks that make up “Brick,” meticulously crafted vignettes that range from the principled scraping of bones and bodyslamming of trashcans to waking up brutally hung over beside a rustily copulating heap of sonar equipment. Essential filth.

Hand-numbered edition of 149.

All tapes are $7ppd in North America, $9 rest-of-world. Wholesale rates are available as well; please contact me via email if you’re interested. To order, please contact me via email at bee.mask@gmail.com.

As before, every one of these tapes is a first generation, real-time dub on high bias BASF chrome tape. DI23-26 also feature full-cover cardstock J-cards, full-color adhesive labels, and one-color transparency inserts.

$1 from every copy of DI23-26 mailordered from me (retail or wholesale) will be donated to Steve Hauschildt and Joe Raglani’s relief fund, organized by Kvist Records to help Steve and Joe recover from the theft of their equipment in New York this past May. Steve, as many of you know, has worked with Deception Island in the past, and Joe had a project under discussion at the time of the robbery. If you’d like to consider a larger donation, I’d strongly encourage you to visit the Kvist site and check out the associated PayPal donation fund.

Finally, I’ve also got a fair stack of many recent Bee Mask releases available for order, including copies of the “Hyperborean Trenchtown” lp on Weird Forest. If you’re interested, please visit deception-island.com/beemask for an up-to-date stocklist.

PLEASE NOTE: This will very likely be the last Deception Island batch to be announced any message boards. If you’d like to be kept in the loop regarding subsequent releases, you can now subscribe to a low-traffic, announcements-only mailing list or an RSS feed, if that’s more your cup of tea.

“Very excited to announce a new Bee Mask tape.

Frozen Versioning (Hyperborean Return) (C40). 50 copies only.

A suite of four pieces that represents the end results of attempts to integrate materials and signifiers (tape loops and handmade electronics) from the “Hyperborean Trenchtown” lp (recorded late 2007) into a live performance context relevant to Bee Mask circa mid-2009.”

TE57-BEE MASK-COLONY COLLAPSE 2 c20 edition of 40… chris madak has been away from cleveland for a long time now it seems and thinking back to the first time i saw him perform seems like it was in a different lifetime…. nonetheless i have never been disappointed by any of bee masks’ work… chris has an enthusiasm and fresh approach to sound that i feel transcends any comparisons between him and his contemporaries. no idea what he used to generate the amazing spaced out sound on this tape. but wow!!!!!!!! such an amazing chunk of electronic music by the first dude that ever inspired me release music by people other than myself ,, haha… essential shit – Nathan Bowers

Bee Mask “No Mutant Enemy” c20

If you keep your ears to the ground, you most likely have already gripped his latest LP on Weird Forest, “Hyperbolean Trenchtown”. If not, then consider yourself the last to know about Bee Mask. He’s been a staple in the midwest/east coast for years now. With a wide array of set-ups and an endless amount of sonic possibilities, it’s hard to tell what’s next with him. The two sides flow together like one dense piece using heavy mind warping drones and hazey bells that chime in to relieve some of the tension. The tape offers an alternate universe that is neither dark nor light, ugly or beautiful. Neither sounds of love or of hate. – Sam Goldberg