Audio & Video – Sea Urchin Editions

PIGFACE RECORDS

Since 1979 Pigface Records has had a dual mission: reflecting Smegma’s personal, L.A. centric freak aesthetic and revelling in aspects of the current and past Portland scene. After the initial burst of vinyl and cassettes (1979-86) there was a 25 year or so break. Pigface Records has been reinvented by founder Ju Suk Reet Meate as a cassette label to carry on this work into the future.

ERRATUM MUSICAL

Erratum Musical is a small label and concept dedicated to adventures and rarities in sound art, experimental music and poetry. Erratum is based in Paris and has been run by the artist Joachim Montessuis since 1993. The label has released Henri Chopin, Raoul Hausmann, Charlemagne Palestine, Junko, Maja S. Ratkje, Joachim Montessuis himself a.o. on vinyl and CD.

MIKE KELLEY'S COMPOUND ANNEX

Artist, performer, musician, critic and provocateur Mike Kelley co-founded Destroy All Monsters while still an arts student in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After he moved to California he built a reputation as a performer, provocateur, and uncompromising critic. Kelley’s cutting and witty artistic output covers a broad field: sculpture, performance, drawings, writings, video, and audio-experiments, which he released on his label Compound Annex until his death in 2012.

BOOK BEAT / THE END IS HERE

Artist and musician Cary Loren is one of the founding members of the influential artists’ band Destroy All Monsters, and as such worked with artists and musicians like Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Niagara and Ron Asheton. Later projects include The Nightcrawlerz (with Barry Roth) and Monster Island. Cary runs The Bookbeat, an independent book store, in Oak Park, Michigan and publishes books and CDs that are firmly rooted in Detroit’s radical and psychedelic counterculture.

LUDO MICH

Belgian artist Ludo Mich (1945) has walked and trespassed the line between life and art since the early 1960s. Ludo was trained as an artist in his hometown Antwerp, where he was part of the vibrant and international art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by sources as varied as dadaism, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Dutch Provos, Fluxus and Situationist International, Ludo developed into a anarchic and subversive performance artist and a gifted filmmaker. With a keen eye for new developments in the technical field, he also emerged a pioneering artist in modern media such as video, holography and electronic music.

SLOWSCAN

Dissatisfied with the limited availability on vinyl or tape of good artists’ recordings, Jan van Toorn founded his own cassette label Slowscan in 1983 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. In the first 10 years of its existence Slowscan produced 10 important releases, the highlight of which was an 8-cassette Fluxus Anthology box set that met with international acclaim. After having been dormant for a number of years Slowscan made a restart as a vinyl label in 2000. Since then the label has released important and rare recordings of artists and electronic music, such as Liam O’Gallagher, Le Forte Four, Richard Maxfield and John Perreault.

90% WASSER

90% Wasser is an experimental label from Großwoltersdorf, north of Berlin, run by Robert Schalinski and Jürgen Eckloff. Both artists used to be members of the Column One collective. The label has released beautifully packaged CDs and LPs since 2001. Beside Column One, their artist have included Frieder Butzmann, Jürgen Ploog, Marc Wannabe, Jürgen Eckloff, Asmus Tietchens, Felix Kubin and Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg and others.

MOLOKO+

Moloko+ is an independent label and press run by Ralf Friel from Schönebeck, Germany. Rooted in the East-German and Berlin experimental scenes, Moloko+ has published a wide rang of German poets and authors such as Jürgen Ploog, Gottfried Benn, Jörg Fauser, Georg Heym and Wolf Pehlke, but also publishes English and bilingual books, often Beat related, such as Oliver Harris’s William Burroughs trilogy.

SEA URCHIN AUDIO & VIDEO

Sea Urchin is an independent publishing house which was started from Rotterdam as an artist’s project by Ben Schot in 2000. Sea Urchin ‘s main focus is the historical avant-garde and counterculture. Apart from publishing its own editions, Sea Urchin also distributes the works of like-minded presses, labels and artists. Anneke Auer is responsible for Sea Urchin’s website and some of its book and sleeve designs.

SLOOW TAPES

Sloow Tapes is an independent cassette and vinyl label that has been run from Stekene, Belgium by Bart De Paepe since 2005. Over the years Sloow Tapes has released in small editions an impressive amount of recordings of psychedelic music and poetry readings of interest. Lately Sloow Tapes has started publishing poetry broadsides as well.

ACE FARREN FORD

Ace Farren Ford (Los Angeles, 1957) began writing poetry at the age of 10. He is considered to be a founding member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society and has recorded and released experimental and improvisational music since 1976, founding his Ace & Duce Record label in 1978. Ford has performed with various music ensembles, like The Child Molesters, Rancid Vat, the Mystery Band, Ace & Duce, EXP and Smegma (which he first joined in 1974). Ford lives in Los Angeles and works as a tattoo artist in Hollywood.

TAPETOPIA

tapetopia is a series of releases based on cassettes from East Germany’s 80s underground, particularly from the East Berlin Mauerstadt music scene, featuring original layouts and track lists. For over 30 years after their initial “release” the music on these tapes was neither available on vinyl nor CD, but they were important statements in the canon of the GDR subculture. tapetopia is run by Henryk Gericke from Berlin.

JOHN SINCLAIR CDs

John Sinclair and his wife Leni founded the multimedia Detroit Artists’ Workshop in 1964. The anarchist and psychedelic collective radicalised after continuous police harrassment and merged into the White Panther Party after the Detroit riots of 1967. The White Panther Party grew into one of the most radical exponents of the counterculture. In 1969 Sinclair was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for having sold two joints to an undercover FBI agent, but was released two years later after the John Sinclair Freedom Rally (with Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, a/o).

SUN RA

Sun Ra was one of the most innovative Afro-American composers and thinkers of the twentieth century. In the course of his career as a jazz muscian and a mystic he developed his Astro-Black Mythology, a colourful artistic concept which combines Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism. Sun Ra thought of himself as an angel from Saturn whose spiritual music formed a “blueprint for a better world” and offered the listener a glimpse of infinity.

VARIOUS

Acidic Male, Michael Morley, Post-Materialization Music and more…

VARIOUS

Acidic Male, Michael Morley, Post-Materialization Music and more…