Tag Archives: Helicopter

GX Jupitter-Larsen
Nihil Ad Rem 2016
One-Sided 7-inch Lathe
Signed, numbered, and stamped
Packaged in a press sheet
with postcard
Edition of 22
Available at Hesse Press’s table
at the LA Art Book Fair,
Feb 11–14, 2016
Helicopter, HEL 96021
http://helicopter-la.com/

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http://www.villagevoice.com/music/here-are-the-36-best-noise-tracks-of-2015-8054338

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Airway
Live At Mark Moore Gallery
Helicopter, CD
HEL 95121
Release Date: December 15, 2015

Airway began as a solo project of Los Angeles Free Music Society member Joe Potts. The first release was the Airway 7-inch, which featured subliminal messages to coincide with an art exhibition in Tokyo. Since their August 1978 live debut at the LACE Gallery, the group has performed many concerts with different large lineups, always with Joe Potts’ subliminal message experiments as a central feature. Airway’s “Live At LACE” LP, first released in 1978, and introduced to Japan by Takuya Sakaguchi, was a direct influence on the projects Hijokaidan and Merzbow. Airway’s discography to date includes the albums “Live At LACE”, “Beyond The Pink Live”, a split LP with Hijokaidan, and now Helicopter is very pleased to present “Live At Mark Moore Gallery”.

“Live At Mark Moore Gallery” was recorded June 21, 2014 in Culver City, California. The line-up includes: Don Bolles, Ted Byrnes, Dennis Duck, Ace Farren Ford, Michael Foster, Juan Gomez, Fredrik Nilsen, Joseph Hammer, Kevin Laffey, Jorge Martin, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Dani Tull, John Wiese, and Vetza. The multi-channel recording was engineered by Jorge Martin and Greg Lenczycki, and was mixed by John Wiese. The cover was designed by Tinytown with photographs by Don Lewis.

This release continues a series by the label documenting West Coast artists. Other editions so far include The Haters, Damion Romero, Hive Mind, Smegma, John Wiese, and Sissy Spacek.

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Sissy Spacek
Gate
Helicopter, CD
H 73
Release Date: December 15, 2015

This release represents recordings which document the transition of the band into the current duo line-up of Charlie Mumma and John Wiese. It includes two 7-inches recorded in the same session, “Gate” and “Incomprehensible Dehumanization”, originally released by A Dear Girl Called Wendy (Italy) and Gilgongo, respectively. Uncompromisingly bleak and harsh noisecore made from drums/vocals and bass/electronics. A 6-minute bonus track is included.

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Hive Mind
Under Old Earth They Made Me The Keeper Of The Vineyards But Mine Own Vineyard I Have Not Kept CD
Helicopter, HEL 95091
Shipping September 28, 2015

Available to order now!

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Sissy Spacek/K2 review
Boston Hassle
http://www.bostonhassle.com/2015/04/sissy-spacek-k2/

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Sissy Spacek
First Four 2xCD + DVD
Helicopter, H 68
Shipping April 15, 2015

Sissy Spacek celebrates it’s 15 year anniversary with a boxset compiling their long out-of-print first four albums (s/t, Remote Whale Control, Scissors, Devils Cone and Palm), as well as an exclusive full-length (Coast To Coast) and DVD documenting live footage, exclusive videos and a tour documentary—all housed in a printed hinged box. From its blur-grind conception, through concrète experiments, finally coming full circle and re-emerging as a live grindcore band, Sissy Spacek’s unprecedented results are well catalogued in this crucial release.

———

Sissy Spacek made its first recording in June 1999. I had just finished my first year at CalArts and Corydon was visiting from St. Louis during summer break. We recorded four songs in the second year design studio, running bass, drum machine, and vocals through a Radio Shack mixer into an amp, and the RCA output ran into my tape deck. We did many test mixes, walking out to my car each time to listen to the mix on the car stereo. I was eager to release a demo tape of these tracks, but the lyrics weren’t quite finished. Corydon recorded rough vocals and we also recorded an instrumental version to finish later. But unfortunately in the end we still didn’t have something that we could release.

Corydon returned to St. Louis. By December I was visiting for the holiday and we played our first show on Xmas day, 1999. Our friend Paul Staples performed as “The Baby Jesus” and we played our four songs plus an improvised noisecore batch with Danny McClain on drums. A recording of this was made behind the amps using a karaoke machine. It’s the worst quality recording I have ever heard, with a suffocating amount of hiss burying a thin, anti-fidelity approximation of our set. It was later released as an 8-minute side of the “Nice Gems” double 7-inch.

When I came back to California I started using the demo recording and the live set as source material, making tracks and experiments with it out of frustration that it wasn’t finished, and to mask the unfinished vocal version. The next December we played another show at the same venue, Centro Sociale. The venue was a theater on the ground floor, and it had a massive basement, basically the same plot line, and apartments above. Our first show was in the basement and the second in the theater. It was the last show they had there because the space cost $250 a month and they didn’t figure it was worth it. (That’s St. Louis for you.)

At that point, with the demo and two live shows, I had enough source material to generate what I considered an album. 78 tracks in under 20 minutes, but a reasonable intensity to duration ratio. This ended up being the first self-titled CD. I still thought of the project as a grindcore band, despite working well outside the conventions, so I designed the packaging (in my mind at least) to try to look like a hardcore album, using Corydon’s linoleum block print as the front cover and some photos our friend Kate took on the back and inside.

The next time I found myself in St. Louis in March of 2001, we didn’t play a show, but we did have a recording session at Grand Ulena’s practice space. Danny played drums and I played electronics and guitar. Corydon was there but didn’t feel like playing, so mostly Danny and I kept switching, recording duo and solo takes that were used to make the “Remote Whale Control” album. It’s basically a duo record, except for the trio take we managed with Corydon that ended up being the 3 minute centerpiece. These recordings were edited, processed and mixed into a series of tracks that had a totally different vibe than the first CD. Danny was a great drummer. He could shift between tumbling free improv and blasting in a way that’s rare. He really came from both places. His solo takes in this session were great, and showed what a talent he had.

2001 turned out to be a fairly busy year considering our pace up to that point. When I was invited to play on Bret Berg’s radio show on KXLU, I played in the studio and for one part we mic’d a speakerphone with Corydon calling in from St. Louis, ad hoc’ing vocals blindly over improvisations, and even doing vocals over one of our songs, starting on cue from a countdown established before switching over the phone. A few months later I returned to St. Louis for Xmas, as was tradition, and we played a show with Wolf Eyes at Lemp Arts Center.  

I was always working on recycling the rare recordings we were able to make. I was still developing my Max/MSP patches and sometimes even extraordinarily simple adjustments could really change the way I would look at things. The session with Danny (Remote Whale Control) was still unreleased, and I spent some time experimenting with processing it in different ways, using more hard cuts and juxtaposition rather than layering. With the RWC session I finally had much clearer separated elements to work with, and started combining them with older sounds and other things that I had recorded that were non-band related.

By this time things were getting a bit confusing—the band was becoming established as a remix project of itself, with no “original” material actually being released; the listening experience being far from anything made as a band-collective. The next batch of tracks became the Scissors album. It was comprised primarily of that RWC session of Danny and me, and was full of bits and scraps from non-Spacek sources, but still made in the spirit and trajectory of what had been going on. I still wanted to release the demo, but it would be about nine years before the vocals were finished. Instead, the band’s output became almost exclusively cut-ups and collages. Scissors was released before Remote Whale Control, but chronologically, the tracks were produced after. It came out on CD and sold out immediately, then released as a gatefold LP, 100 of which came with a bonus LP of the KXLU session stuffed through into the sealed side of the cover. 

Next Xmas, December 2002, we played a show at Radio Cherokee in St. Louis, this time as a trio with Danny, with the intention of playing an all-electronics set. It ended up a painful 45-minutes of no one listening to each other and no one stopping. It was at this point that I decided the project was not something I wanted to put a lot of effort into anymore, it simply didn’t work as a band, so at that point it just stopped. 

Eventually Corydon moved to Los Angeles, but we didn’t record or play any shows. In 2005 Phil Blankenship invited us to play his birthday show at Il Corral (a crucial experimental-only venue off Melrose during this era). We agreed and asked Jesse to join on guitar, which seemed natural. Because of Phil’s birthday the atmosphere was great, and the show was a good one. We just played our original four tracks, which was pretty much what we used to do. We made 150 copies of the double 7-inch “Nice Gems” for the show—that was our first release in a long while. When I look at our discography, I usually see this record as a turning point for the band, a time when we became active again. It included an alternate take of a track off Scissors, the demo at half speed, and that recording of our first show at Centro. After the Il Corral show, the project really seemed like something that we should revive, despite a formidable build up of baggage. It took us almost a year to play another show, in Oakland this time, and we still had no recordings as a band. As was the tradition, I took recordings of both shows and our rehearsals and turned it into the Devils Cone And Palm album. I think that one is effective in adding fidelity as a collaging element, going from walkman, to hard disk recorder, and open-air to direct sounds within short blasts. At the end you can hear the Il Corral set as recorded on walkman by our screaming pal Katie.

The first CD in the boxset has our first four albums on one disc (they fit), and includes a track off the Psychic Facts LP, which was the KXLU session as hidden-LP in Scissors. That takes you from 1999 to 2006. We only played 8 shows over that period. People sometimes think of us a functioning band, but up until that point we never really were (up to that point at least). I never really wanted to be in a band and looking back I think Sissy Spacek’s take on being a “band” was truly bizarre, and rarely worked. We didn’t do our first tour until 2008, which was up the west coast. Our goal was to double the amount of shows we’d ever played. The second tour we did was the full-US tour from 2010 where we tried to double the amount of shows we’d ever played again. That tour was a real nightmare. 

As you can see from the DVD, we eventually came full circle when Charlie Mumma joined the band playing drums. We wrote new material that came back to our roots as blur/grindcore and started to focus on this as our consistent live mode. Our first 7-inch of grindcore as a band, thirteen years after recording our first demo, was Contretemps. It was released on PPM by Dean Spunt—a kid in a Locust shirt that we met by chance in the CalArts parking lot and invited to join us in the car to listen to rough mixes while recording the original demo. Despite moving back to “band” territory, we’ve managed to keep a significant question-mark present in the recordings. In a sense it’s great that the music industry tanked—if people “don’t buy records anymore”, then all the more reason to make them experimental without fear. It makes sense to me to keep the live experience more dependable, and make the recordings experimental—both rewarding in their own way. The people that are interested will still be the ones who are interested. 

A few quick notes about the DVD. It starts with the Il Corral show in 2005 and takes you up to 2013, in a sense passing the baton chronologically from the First Four CD—as I previously said, the Il Corral show was a re-ignition and made us want to play more again as a band. The No Fun Fest video was made using only clips found online, which informs the strange edit. At the ATA show in San Francisco, Paul Costuros joined us on clarinet due to Jesse’s illness post-Vancouver show (read the full story in the description for the RIP CD on Gilgongo). The show at Paegent Soloveev was on our full US tour in which we played primarily electronics sets. The Experimental Half Hour segment was filmed in Portland for one of their episodes. They started as a public access show, using a local studio and facilities, now relocated to Los Angeles. All the episodes can be viewed online. The DVD that came with the Window Hammer 7-inch is also included as a bonus, featuring the 2011 tour documentary filmed on the west coast at shows and a recording session with Smegma. Our friend Matt Purse edited it together from a pile of raw material. The two extra live sets were from our next west coast tour, filmed in Olympia and Portland. The Portland show at Valentines ends with Aaron Montaigne delivering the lyrics to We Bite (Misfits) before our only live rendition.

John Wiese, December 2014

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Sissy Spacek
Dash/Anti-Clockwise CD
Helicopter, H 69
Shipping April 15, 2015

58 tracks of unrelentingly destroyed music, cautiously partitioned into short bursts of truly obliterated hardcore, redefining “raw punk”, and an even more destructive force than the already damaged tone of recent output. “The same vein” in a sense, but ruptured and bleeding out, heavily.

After the original CD edition on Gilgongo sold out almost immediately, this album is finally available again from Helicopter as a digipack CD.

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The Haters Live! DVD at Amoeba, Hollywood

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Available at Vacation Vinyl in Los Angeles

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Smegma—Mutant Stomps LP
Helicopter, HEL 94111

These American legends of outsider avant-garde need little introduction. Since becoming core members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society over four decades ago, they have retained their focus, determination and unmatched originality, influencing generations and never ceasing to advance further avenues of progress. Mutant Stomps is a result of Smegma’s living room recording sessions at their pink house in Portland. All tracks were produced 2012–2013, with one dating back to 1975 for good measure. The line-up of Dennis Duck, Ace Farren Ford, Rock and Roll Jackie, Ju Suk Reet Meate, Madellyn Villano, John Wiese and Donkey Flybye deliver a consistently amorphous, surreal-concrète sound.

The full length LP comes in an edition of 100 copies.

Tracklist:

1. Vout #9
2. Mutant Stomps
3. Hot In There
4. Variations VII
5. Code 61
6. Jug Band Waltz

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The Haters—Live! DVD
Helicopter, HEL 94091

Sometime in 1999, I was invited by GX Jupitter-Larsen to play my second ever live show opening for The Haters at their 20th anniversary in San Francisco. Not long after, a package from GX arrived in the mail. It contained a VHS tape filled with footage of The Haters, covering performances from the 80s all the way to that 20th anniversary show—all classic stuff I had read about and seen photos of many times in zines and interviews. First generation industrial music as conceptual performance: smashing, wrecking, and destroying everything. The glorious entropic breakthrough of The Haters’ youth. I watched it over and over again—to me this was the essential Haters document.



The years went by. For the Haters 25th anniversary Phil Blankenship and I organized and released a 25 disc boxset on Troniks. To celebrate the 30th anniversary, I published a book called Drilling A Hole Through The Sky on Helicopter, collecting short descriptions of every Haters performance, an interview, and reproductions of early zines and ephemera. 



My one regret at that time was that I could not include the image that was pasted to the back of the VHS tape GX had sent me. It was a printout of a photo of GX sitting in a chair, hood and suit, holding an identically dressed ventriloquist dummy, a microphone facing them both. Truly a crown jewel that I had not seen published anywhere else. Unfortunately, GX didn’t have it, nor did anyone who contributed to the book from their collections; no one seemed to have recalled ever seeing it aside from GX and myself. I couldn’t track it down as my copy of the tape was locked away in an LA storage unit, inaccessible to me while I remained touring for years on end.



Fast-forward to 2013. I had just released two volumes of “These Things Happen” on Helicopter; transfers of unearthed DAT masters of Haters 7-inches and comp tracks from the 90s. When GX came over to pick up his copies of the release I pointed him towards the old VHS tape on my shelf, finally liberated from storage. 



GX looked at the photo depicting him with the ventriloquist dummy. “Oh, yeah!” He flipped the tape over and inspected the list of contents. “Oh… wow… I don’t even remember sending this… I don’t have any of this stuff.” Puzzled, I grilled him for a few minutes trying to understand what he was telling me. I had always assumed this was the “Hater TV” release or something similar, and I just happened to have a handmade version of it. While in fact, as I came to find out, it was never released. The tape was just an informal collection that GX had shared with a handful of people. I was shocked.



To me, for the past 14 years, this tape WAS The Haters. It was hard to believe that the actual footage of the live shows that gave The Haters their reputation had been sitting on my shelf in total obscurity. I had assumed that everyone had seen it. Obviously, I immediately made reservation to rectify the situation and release the tape on DVD.



In all, there are 23 segments adding up to about two hours of material, spanning the years from 80s to mid-90s with a handful of later dates, the latest being the 20th anniversary show. I tried to improve the quality of the audio and video where possible without distracting from it’s original nature. I’ve included a “Loop” option on the menu so you can let it play all day. 



The bonus features consist of nine documents and films that I’ve made, either of or about or in tribute to The Haters, over the last few years. 2014 marks The Haters 35th anniversary, and their 35th anniversary show is included in its entirety. Luckily this DVD also made it in just under the wire to celebrate it as well.

—JW

(NTSC, All Region)

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Sissy Spacek/K2 CD/Digital
Helicopter, H 66

• Regular edition CD, or
• Special edition CD with exclusive one-sided 7-inch (numbered of 43 copies) in special die-cut sleeve.

Track list:

1. Sissy Spacek “Slang Imprisonment” 15:45
2. Sissy Spacek/K2 “S2K2 (Ambulette)” 14:43
3. K2/Sissy Spacek “Lemmings March To The Abyss/1” 15:44
4. K2/Sissy Spacek “Lemmings March To The Abyss/2” 14:41

Mailorder information here: http://helicopter-la.com

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John Wiese — GGA 7-inch (Helicopter)
Numbered edition of 50 for Now Open 24 Hours
Last copies available, email sadpsychics@gmail.com

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