eerie fragrance

'Eerie Fragrance' is a Etude re-issue of Climax Golden Twins official first long player originally available on tape way back in 1995. For those of you not familiar with the group Climax Golden Twins specialize in ambient/dreamy/art installation/field recording type stuff and they do it better than most, yo! 'Eerie Fragrance' a.k.a Eyeless Fabrication or Exclude Frank or Eat Fuck is classic collection of manipulated found sounds, strange tape warpings, percussive sounds, odd feedback and wonky looped-up samples all saturated in reverb and tape noise. It's a totally amazing collage of noises that does it's best to entertain and amuse as opposed to oppress, if you know what I'm saying. This is experimental noise with a sense of fun and adventure. For those of you who enjoy the works of fellow San Francisco freaksters Sun City Girls and the like. Amazing! Oh yeah, this re-issued vinyl includes three bonus tracks and a fucked up poster featuring two strange Siamese cats. YO!! -Norman Records

It’s a crying shame that the very term ‘jam band’ now conjures visions of so many college-boy duds playing workman-like elementary three chord rock while passing it off as the keys-to-the-goddamn kingdom. The idea of the ‘jam’ (rock’s very own ‘surplus value’ according to Joe Carducci) is so intrinsic to everything that matters about rock music – spontaneity, exceeding the demands of structure, total freedom, the activation of the group mind – that it oughta be front-row center in terms of judging the worth, or otherwise, of any given unit. I mean, do they fucking jam or not? Or are they weeds in service of the form? Climax Golden Twins may sound nothing like The Grateful Dead but the jams they have laid down over the space of their back catalogue –music in the service of nothing but its own internal demands – make for some of the most satisfyingly fucked up sound-as-sound ever fed through the fingers of non-mainstream thinkers. Eerie Fragrance is an LP reissue of their second ever release, a cassette that came out in 1995 that is both cruder and less demonstrably of its time than anything that they released in its wake. It’s a collection of all sorts of sonic detritus, from mainlined guitar/bass/drum jams that channel the ethno-forgery style of their buddies Sun City Girls through cut-up tapes, warps of no sound, found records and odd, creepy avant experiments that reflect more on what was going on in Dylan Nyoukis’s basement in the 1990s than anything comparable stateside. Throw in some west coast Smegma-isms, the logic of the Faust Tapes and the kinda vision that would extend the logic of ‘the jam’ beyond a buncha chords over a bass groove and you have an exemplary modern psychedelic album. -Volcanic Tongue

Eerie Fragrance (along with Climax Golden Hiss) is considered to be one of the first real, albeit formative and fumbling, manifestations of the otherworldly and unique Climax Golden Twins aesthetic. The “band” at the point of these sessions consisted of only Jeffery Taylor and Rob Millis, however, as their career progressed the duo added new members and collaborators and eventually evolved far beyond their sloppy noise roots into the realm of sublime ambiance and serious art (perhaps culminating in their 2001 soundtrack for Brad Anderson’s Session 9). The core duo of Millis and Taylor are also responsible for curating Dust-to-Digital’s amazing Victrola Favorites compilation, so their growing renown as respected musicologists is quite likely to someday eclipse the band’s influence (Millis in particular is actively hastening that process by lecturing and making films for Sublime Frequencies).

While thankfully CGT’s deeply aberrant nature has not significantly waned with their growing professionalism and success, the band’s self-professed “free hillbilly noise epilepsy” and ideologically punk roots have become much less prominent with age. As such, the clumsy (yet inspired) amateurism of their early work still holds a great deal of charm (and is much more similar in spirit to Seattle’s other bastions of cultish eccentricity, The Sun City Girls). While Eerie Fragrance undeniably lacks the nuance, cohesion, and beauty of more recent Twins releases, its crackling, skewed, free-form experimentation is still quite compelling in its own right.

All of the tracks included here are essentially formless, disquieting miasmas of ethnic field recordings, long-forgotten snippets from 78s, mangled and distressed tapes, found sounds, and sludgy garage rock flailings. My favorite track is the opener, "EF Part One," which is memorably constructed of rumbling de-tuned bass, eerie flutes, a child’s voice repeatedly stating “listen…I’m really sorry,” squiggling and squelching noise blasts, and meditative Chinese percussion. It is followed by the much more abrasive and deranged “EF Part Two,” which begins on a deceptively muted note with a slowed-down and pitch-shifted reggae sample. The side ends with the brief, but dense, lunacy of “Toyland,” which combines calliope, children’s records, and early comedy records into a flurry of ADD-addled, anachronistic disorientation.

The second side begins with the haunting "EF Three," which centers around creepy, quavering string samples combined with field recordings from some mysterious foreign street environment, and a host of oft mangled and vaguely Indian stringed instrument improvisations. That atmosphere of dread, however, is dissipated with “EF Part Four,” which begins with some dissonant ringing and layered Chinese or Indian percussion before degenerating into a cathartic gale of static, rumblings, and radio noises. There are two more tracks on the side, “Cowboy Weather” and “What was Pointless,” but it is very difficult to tell where one track ends and the next begins: the important thing is that neither the quality nor the unrelenting lysergic weirdness show any signs of lessening.

Eerie Fragrance is a charismatic and idiosyncratic album that sounds quite like nothing else I have heard: this is the musical equivalent of taking an enormous amount of cold medication and watching television in the middle of the night, while constantly flipping through channels, flickering in and out of consciousness, and having very strange and disjointed dreams (albeit in a good way, of course). This is a rather instructive example of how great art can originate from the most minimal of materials. -Anthony D'Amico (Brainwashed)

Réédition d'une cassette sorti en 1995 (leur deuxième production) plus trois morceaux bonus. Où l'on retrouve ce groupe de Seattle à ses débuts dans un intelligent mélange de collages, de bribes punk rock, d'accents orientaux et de bricolages magnétiques. Passionnés d'enregistrements 78 tours - voir leur projet Victrola Favorites - les Climax Golden Twins occupent une place toute particulière dans la scène étatsunienne entre les Sun City Girls, les expériences du LAFMS et l'archivage de tous les maniaques du disque. Excellent ! -Metamkine

The Climax Golden Twins have always had their hands in as many cookie jars as they could; and all of the records are true adventures in sound that could include fucked-up collages of old 78s, thudding art-rock that has earned them opening spots for Sonic Youth, blissful ambience for narcoleptic art-installations, clattering urban gamelan presentations, and plenty more. Eerie Fragrance hits all of these marks and then some, having originally been released as a cassette back in 1995. The original title to the cassette was Eyeless Formation, but has been redubbed as Eerie Fragrance for the vinyl reissue. There's also a couple of extra tracks which didn't appear on the original cassette which had appeared on compilations from around the same time period.
The album quickly revolves through a collage of improvised bursts that accelerates up to an unsettled loop of a woman possibly in the midst of a breakup repeating her pleas over a turgid thrumb of static and rumbling drone which spills out of a series of peculiar squeaks and squiggles. As such, these moments have more in common with Nurse With Wound than their geographical and spiritual neighbors in the Sun City Girls; but is certainly well within the scope of CGT's esoteric collages. Noirish loops and raucous crowd noise tumble out of the beginning of the flipside, with guitar plucks that sound more like rubber bands snapping in the distant. Artifacts of tape noise and crusty debris inhabit a set of overlapping loops topped with gnarled scrapes on the guitar. Crunches of leaves and thick industrial field recordings give way to seasick wooden creakings, laughing gulls, and bellowing foghorns. As disconnected as all of these elements appear after the fact, they all work rather effortlessly in the context of this recording. Really great! -Jim Haynes (Aquarius Records)

Climax Golden Twins remain among my personal favourite experimenters, for many reasons – their work is unclassifiable, they have an offbeat sense of humour, but mainly because they always produce beautiful music. Recent releases that have drifted my way have shown their field-recording exploits and/or their potential for quiet and very blissful ambience. Eerie Fragrance (ETUDE RECORDS 020) however is more dynamic and aggressive, and finds them in extremely playful and experimental mood, on a record packed with cut-ups, loops and edits, samples perhaps from old 78s, plus vari-speeded tapes, all overlaid with confusing and unpredictable deconstructed rock noise playing. Aggressive noise and baffling mystery appear in equal hearty doses. Of course, this is how the band/duo sounded in 1995, which was when this was originally issued as a cassette tape and constituted item number two in their catalogue. This vinyl reissue, quite handsomely presented with a nice poster insert, includes three bonus tracks and is limited to just 500 exemplars. -Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector/website)

An excellent vinyl reissue, with lush colour sleeves and poster insert, of the second release by CGT. It originally came out as a cassette in 1995, following their first double seven-inch record. If you’ve been following the work of this exceptional band, you’ll realize it’s virtually impossible to pin them down and predict what may happen next in their entertainingly confusing catalogue of sonic activity. As the label points out, this early rather rough-edge work containts little indication of some of the art-gallery ambient work and releases for Anomalous Records that would follow, but it does manifest in embryonic form many of their regular preoccupations –loud guitar noise, unidentifiable field recordings, old 78 rpm records, exotic overseas travel, and a determination to never explain anything. Protect the ancient mysteries at all costs, that’s their motto. Indeed the Twins sit Sphinx-like throughout this Lp, much like the two kitsch Siamese cat sculptures we see pictured on the poster insert.
Eerie Fragrance, also affectionately know under variant titles such as Eyeless Fabrication or Exclude Frank, is fundamentally a record of cut-ups and tape mayhem, using varispeed with reckless abandon, forming strange collages out of strange materials in ways that make no sense whatsoever. Field recordings, found voices, rock music, crackly vinyl, and generally impenetrable clouds of rumbling abstractedness. The A side is noisy and more likely to change direction suddenly and shockingly, while the B side is muffled and bizarre.
The whole record creates a puzzling, magical and dream-state effect very quickly, guaranteeing that the listener sits there riveted with alarm and surprise throughout the whole duration. It would be interesting to compare hearing it on the original cassette tape, not for the sound quality but for the different experience that it presented by spinning a slab of vinyl which has to be turned over. At least with an Lp you can be sure your hi-fi is not at fault when you hear tape slipping over the heads in some seriously malfunctioning ways.

A tremendous example of lo-fi garage musique concrete, which will hopefully lead to further reissued gems from their back catalogue. –ED PINSET (The Sound Projector/magazine)

This is an LP reissue of CGT's second ever release, a tape from 1995. There's a few bonus tracks: a song recorded for a compilation that may or may not have ever been released, and two tracks from another cassette released in 1995. The album itself was mastered onto cassette, rendering it super-lo-fi, which makes it the wrong record for me to review when my crappy speakers have wires held together with tape and I'm paranoid that my speakers are dying because the sound is so fuzzy and I need to upgrade to something better soon.

Anyway, the album is a bizarre, unpredictable collage of various found sounds, noises, melodies, field recordings and what have you. At any random moment's notice you'll hear piercing feedback, Eastern flutes, clanging metal, tape loops of children speaking, running water, scratching records, deranged instrumental skronk-rock, and any number of other things. Nothing seems to follow any rhyme or reason here, so you either go with the flow or just shake your head and give up. It's fairly enjoyable for this sort of thing, though, so as long as you don't demand too much "sense", it should be worth checking out. 7/10 -- Paul Simpson (Foxy Digitalis)

	Climax Golden Twins "Eerie Fragrance " 12" vinyl Date: Juny 2009 Ref: Etude020 mp3: Fragment from Fragment I / Fragment II Price:19$ usa/can; 18€ eur/world (shipping included in both prices)
About Eerie Fragrance
A lovely vinyl reissue on Etude Records of a long obscure Climax Golden Twins gem. Originally issued in 1995, on cassette, Eerie Fragrance or Eyeless Fabrication or Exclude Frank or Eat Fuck or etc (forever) was Climax Golden Twins second official issue after a self-released double seven inch gatefold record. Cassettes--the cockroach of the industry--were a necessity at the poorer end of the music spectrum prior to CDRs and file sharing…the good old days…EF was a collage of noise, found sounds, punk rock disasters, Chinese climaxes, broken records, and tape failures mastered directly to cassette on a reverberant wooden floor in an old building in Seattle, Washington. It seemed an inauspicious start and little presaged the ambient/dreamy/art installation/field recording/Anomalous Records darlings CGT were to become with releases such as Lovely, Dream Cut Short in the Mysterious Clouds, Locations, etc. However, secret free hillbilly noise epilepsy has always lurked under the button up shirts, white wine sipping and gallery-opening snack-munching. The noise informs the dreams which informs the ambiance which informs the chaos and so back to the beginning and vice-versa. Etude Records discovered CGT through their work on the horror film Session Nine and have been wanting to release something ever since.
Reviews Eerie Fragrance
'Eerie Fragrance' is a Etude re-issue of Climax Golden Twins official first long player originally available on tape way back in 1995. For those of you not familiar with the group Climax Golden Twins specialize in ambient/dreamy/art installation/field recording type stuff and they do it better than most, yo! 'Eerie Fragrance' a.k.a Eyeless Fabrication or Exclude Frank or Eat Fuck is classic collection of manipulated found sounds, strange tape warpings, percussive sounds, odd feedback and wonky looped-up samples all saturated in reverb and tape noise. It's a totally amazing collage of noises that does it's best to entertain and amuse as opposed to oppress, if you know what I'm saying. This is experimental noise with a sense of fun and adventure. For those of you who enjoy the works of fellow San Francisco freaksters Sun City Girls and the like. Amazing! Oh yeah, this re-issued vinyl includes three bonus tracks and a fucked up poster featuring two strange Siamese cats. YO!! -Norman Records It’s a crying shame that the very term ‘jam band’ now conjures visions of so many college-boy duds playing workman-like elementary three chord rock while passing it off as the keys-to-the-goddamn kingdom. The idea of the ‘jam’ (rock’s very own ‘surplus value’ according to Joe Carducci) is so intrinsic to everything that matters about rock music – spontaneity, exceeding the demands of structure, total freedom, the activation of the group mind – that it oughta be front-row center in terms of judging the worth, or otherwise, of any given unit. I mean, do they fucking jam or not? Or are they weeds in service of the form? Climax Golden Twins may sound nothing like The Grateful Dead but the jams they have laid down over the space of their back catalogue –music in the service of nothing but its own internal demands – make for some of the most satisfyingly fucked up sound-as-sound ever fed through the fingers of non-mainstream thinkers. Eerie Fragrance is an LP reissue of their second ever release, a cassette that came out in 1995 that is both cruder and less demonstrably of its time than anything that they released in its wake. It’s a collection of all sorts of sonic detritus, from mainlined guitar/bass/drum jams that channel the ethno-forgery style of their buddies Sun City Girls through cut-up tapes, warps of no sound, found records and odd, creepy avant experiments that reflect more on what was going on in Dylan Nyoukis’s basement in the 1990s than anything comparable stateside. Throw in some west coast Smegma-isms, the logic of the Faust Tapes and the kinda vision that would extend the logic of ‘the jam’ beyond a buncha chords over a bass groove and you have an exemplary modern psychedelic album. -Volcanic Tongue Eerie Fragrance (along with Climax Golden Hiss) is considered to be one of the first real, albeit formative and fumbling, manifestations of the otherworldly and unique Climax Golden Twins aesthetic. The “band” at the point of these sessions consisted of only Jeffery Taylor and Rob Millis, however, as their career progressed the duo added new members and collaborators and eventually evolved far beyond their sloppy noise roots into the realm of sublime ambiance and serious art (perhaps culminating in their 2001 soundtrack for Brad Anderson’s Session 9). The core duo of Millis and Taylor are also responsible for curating Dust-to-Digital’s amazing Victrola Favorites compilation, so their growing renown as respected musicologists is quite likely to someday eclipse the band’s influence (Millis in particular is actively hastening that process by lecturing and making films for Sublime Frequencies). While thankfully CGT’s deeply aberrant nature has not significantly waned with their growing professionalism and success, the band’s self-professed “free hillbilly noise epilepsy” and ideologically punk roots have become much less prominent with age. As such, the clumsy (yet inspired) amateurism of their early work still holds a great deal of charm (and is much more similar in spirit to Seattle’s other bastions of cultish eccentricity, The Sun City Girls). While Eerie Fragrance undeniably lacks the nuance, cohesion, and beauty of more recent Twins releases, its crackling, skewed, free-form experimentation is still quite compelling in its own right. All of the tracks included here are essentially formless, disquieting miasmas of ethnic field recordings, long-forgotten snippets from 78s, mangled and distressed tapes, found sounds, and sludgy garage rock flailings. My favorite track is the opener, "EF Part One," which is memorably constructed of rumbling de-tuned bass, eerie flutes, a child’s voice repeatedly stating “listen…I’m really sorry,” squiggling and squelching noise blasts, and meditative Chinese percussion. It is followed by the much more abrasive and deranged “EF Part Two,” which begins on a deceptively muted note with a slowed-down and pitch-shifted reggae sample. The side ends with the brief, but dense, lunacy of “Toyland,” which combines calliope, children’s records, and early comedy records into a flurry of ADD-addled, anachronistic disorientation. The second side begins with the haunting "EF Three," which centers around creepy, quavering string samples combined with field recordings from some mysterious foreign street environment, and a host of oft mangled and vaguely Indian stringed instrument improvisations. That atmosphere of dread, however, is dissipated with “EF Part Four,” which begins with some dissonant ringing and layered Chinese or Indian percussion before degenerating into a cathartic gale of static, rumblings, and radio noises. There are two more tracks on the side, “Cowboy Weather” and “What was Pointless,” but it is very difficult to tell where one track ends and the next begins: the important thing is that neither the quality nor the unrelenting lysergic weirdness show any signs of lessening. Eerie Fragrance is a charismatic and idiosyncratic album that sounds quite like nothing else I have heard: this is the musical equivalent of taking an enormous amount of cold medication and watching television in the middle of the night, while constantly flipping through channels, flickering in and out of consciousness, and having very strange and disjointed dreams (albeit in a good way, of course). This is a rather instructive example of how great art can originate from the most minimal of materials. -Anthony D'Amico (Brainwashed) Réédition d'une cassette sorti en 1995 (leur deuxième production) plus trois morceaux bonus. Où l'on retrouve ce groupe de Seattle à ses débuts dans un intelligent mélange de collages, de bribes punk rock, d'accents orientaux et de bricolages magnétiques. Passionnés d'enregistrements 78 tours - voir leur projet Victrola Favorites - les Climax Golden Twins occupent une place toute particulière dans la scène étatsunienne entre les Sun City Girls, les expériences du LAFMS et l'archivage de tous les maniaques du disque. Excellent ! -Metamkine The Climax Golden Twins have always had their hands in as many cookie jars as they could; and all of the records are true adventures in sound that could include fucked-up collages of old 78s, thudding art-rock that has earned them opening spots for Sonic Youth, blissful ambience for narcoleptic art-installations, clattering urban gamelan presentations, and plenty more. Eerie Fragrance hits all of these marks and then some, having originally been released as a cassette back in 1995. The original title to the cassette was Eyeless Formation, but has been redubbed as Eerie Fragrance for the vinyl reissue. There's also a couple of extra tracks which didn't appear on the original cassette which had appeared on compilations from around the same time period. The album quickly revolves through a collage of improvised bursts that accelerates up to an unsettled loop of a woman possibly in the midst of a breakup repeating her pleas over a turgid thrumb of static and rumbling drone which spills out of a series of peculiar squeaks and squiggles. As such, these moments have more in common with Nurse With Wound than their geographical and spiritual neighbors in the Sun City Girls; but is certainly well within the scope of CGT's esoteric collages. Noirish loops and raucous crowd noise tumble out of the beginning of the flipside, with guitar plucks that sound more like rubber bands snapping in the distant. Artifacts of tape noise and crusty debris inhabit a set of overlapping loops topped with gnarled scrapes on the guitar. Crunches of leaves and thick industrial field recordings give way to seasick wooden creakings, laughing gulls, and bellowing foghorns. As disconnected as all of these elements appear after the fact, they all work rather effortlessly in the context of this recording. Really great! -Jim Haynes (Aquarius Records) Climax Golden Twins remain among my personal favourite experimenters, for many reasons – their work is unclassifiable, they have an offbeat sense of humour, but mainly because they always produce beautiful music. Recent releases that have drifted my way have shown their field-recording exploits and/or their potential for quiet and very blissful ambience. Eerie Fragrance (ETUDE RECORDS 020) however is more dynamic and aggressive, and finds them in extremely playful and experimental mood, on a record packed with cut-ups, loops and edits, samples perhaps from old 78s, plus vari-speeded tapes, all overlaid with confusing and unpredictable deconstructed rock noise playing. Aggressive noise and baffling mystery appear in equal hearty doses. Of course, this is how the band/duo sounded in 1995, which was when this was originally issued as a cassette tape and constituted item number two in their catalogue. This vinyl reissue, quite handsomely presented with a nice poster insert, includes three bonus tracks and is limited to just 500 exemplars. -Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector/website) An excellent vinyl reissue, with lush colour sleeves and poster insert, of the second release by CGT. It originally came out as a cassette in 1995, following their first double seven-inch record. If you’ve been following the work of this exceptional band, you’ll realize it’s virtually impossible to pin them down and predict what may happen next in their entertainingly confusing catalogue of sonic activity. As the label points out, this early rather rough-edge work containts little indication of some of the art-gallery ambient work and releases for Anomalous Records that would follow, but it does manifest in embryonic form many of their regular preoccupations –loud guitar noise, unidentifiable field recordings, old 78 rpm records, exotic overseas travel, and a determination to never explain anything. Protect the ancient mysteries at all costs, that’s their motto. Indeed the Twins sit Sphinx-like throughout this Lp, much like the two kitsch Siamese cat sculptures we see pictured on the poster insert. Eerie Fragrance, also affectionately know under variant titles such as Eyeless Fabrication or Exclude Frank, is fundamentally a record of cut-ups and tape mayhem, using varispeed with reckless abandon, forming strange collages out of strange materials in ways that make no sense whatsoever. Field recordings, found voices, rock music, crackly vinyl, and generally impenetrable clouds of rumbling abstractedness. The A side is noisy and more likely to change direction suddenly and shockingly, while the B side is muffled and bizarre. The whole record creates a puzzling, magical and dream-state effect very quickly, guaranteeing that the listener sits there riveted with alarm and surprise throughout the whole duration. It would be interesting to compare hearing it on the original cassette tape, not for the sound quality but for the different experience that it presented by spinning a slab of vinyl which has to be turned over. At least with an Lp you can be sure your hi-fi is not at fault when you hear tape slipping over the heads in some seriously malfunctioning ways. A tremendous example of lo-fi garage musique concrete, which will hopefully lead to further reissued gems from their back catalogue. –ED PINSET (The Sound Projector/magazine) This is an LP reissue of CGT's second ever release, a tape from 1995. There's a few bonus tracks: a song recorded for a compilation that may or may not have ever been released, and two tracks from another cassette released in 1995. The album itself was mastered onto cassette, rendering it super-lo-fi, which makes it the wrong record for me to review when my crappy speakers have wires held together with tape and I'm paranoid that my speakers are dying because the sound is so fuzzy and I need to upgrade to something better soon. Anyway, the album is a bizarre, unpredictable collage of various found sounds, noises, melodies, field recordings and what have you. At any random moment's notice you'll hear piercing feedback, Eastern flutes, clanging metal, tape loops of children speaking, running water, scratching records, deranged instrumental skronk-rock, and any number of other things. Nothing seems to follow any rhyme or reason here, so you either go with the flow or just shake your head and give up. It's fairly enjoyable for this sort of thing, though, so as long as you don't demand too much "sense", it should be worth checking out. 7/10 -- Paul Simpson (Foxy Digitalis)