TLASILA Album Flood: Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson (1996-8, released 2000)

Glorious Comrades,

Here's the latest in our continuing series of archival offerings. The chronology is slightly freakin' jumbled, owing primarily to our rapacious mid-to-late 90s fecundity - so many of the albums we created then remain either unreleased or abandoned, or had elements scavenged outright which were later reinserted into other, officially issued recordings, or splintered, distressed, pulled into viscous, mile-wide skeins of malodorous taffy, or disintegrated altogether. (Viz. Horóscopo.)

There's no definitive TLASILA discography, as nothing is ever fixed, cemented into a trophy case or timeline. The raw materials remain malleable, their essential elements unstable, years after "release."

With those caveats in mind, today's confection will likely hew to its nascent organic template for at least a couple more spins. (Actually, that's already untrue, but for the purposes of this presentation...)

To Live and Shave in L.A. / KF36 - Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson

(2000, Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, no matrix number, edition of 100 CD-Rs in full-color printed sleeves.)

Availability: out of print, label long dead.

Today, Kasra Mowlavi is a successful London-based drum and bass DJ and owner of the Critical Music label. In 1995, however, he and the other members of the KF36 crew were wreaking psycho-linguistic havoc within European noise cells. Employing (now ubiquitous) swallowed microphones, amplified room tone, home two- and four-track recordings of running water, urine streams, and fuck knows what else, and, most impressively, roots, bulbs, and stalks transplanted from someone's untended collection of East Asian folk arbors, they created an oddly analgesic sub-dialect of sound, a mollifying, absorptive mass almost certainly without precedent, but at the time sounding suspiciously de rigueur. It took a few listens to catch on, but I did, and an invitation to collaborate was extended.

Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson was the result. It was begun at The Studio in Miami in 1996, and completed at Atlanta's Microgroove complex in 1998 (following a round of test listens in Chicago with Weasel Walter as we prepared for rehearsals for our ultimately aborted duo project Jaws 3), and released via Phil Todd's superbly spotty Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers imprint in 2000 in an edition of 100.

Forget about those overpriced eBay artifacts - this comes from the source.



01 Huh, Baby?
02 Wheah Yoah Limit Is...
03 Five on Number Five
04 Wasn't Poah Galin'!
05 B for Baby Ida
06 So Flush on Rubbin' Lips Befoah
07 Like Triphammers
08 Peahs Lak Life Jus' Picks
09 Trucks for Carnival Jeeps
10 None of My Wheels Is Gimmicked

Composed and performed by KF36 / TLASILA.

Kasra Mowlavi - voice, turntable, devices.
Unnamed KF36 Others - ditto.

Rat Bastard - bass
Ben Wolcott - oscillators
Tom Smith - voice, exteriors

Mixed and produced by TS 1996-1998 at The Studio, Miami and Microgroove, Atlanta.

(92 MB, ripped at 320 kbps, compressed into a RAR file.)

Get it here.

Next up? Where a Horse Has Been Standing, or Amour Fou, or God and Country... It's that damned inconsistent timeline.

Comments

Anonymous said…
the ever incredibly generous tom smith... it is much appreciated.
storm the vaults! documentation is endless fun, i wish i had all my old tapes
ommyth said…
Hello Mikey,

The doors of the vault have been opened just slightly - a mere filament of sunlight flares into the darkness. Some of the contents are still a little too chemically volatile for public display or consumption, but others are slowly being made available. The Miss High Heel studio album, for instance, should be on release through Blossoming Noise in April, May at the latest. Most of the work on that project was completed 11-12 years ago. Magas, Weasel and I are in agreement that the Earthly hive-mind would not have been prepared for it earlier...

Regarding the TLASILA and related uploads: the albums are out of print, we don't need to make any more money from them, we have no plans to repress any of them, and we want interested parties to have access to them.

Soulseek and other Usenet/P2P habitués have been trading our albums in low bit-rate/poorly encoded versions for several years. Why not supply the dealers with high-quality product?

We're not solely altruistic: there are a few dozen copies of both 30-minuten mannercreme and Where a Horse Has Been Standing and Where You Belong still available, and we're offering those physical artifacts for sale on our toliveandshaveinla.com website until they're gone. (Those were the two Shave releases we financed out-of-pocket.)

Anyhow, thanks for your very kind comment, Mikey. Enjoy the flood!

Cheers,

Tom
Anonymous said…
Thanks for making this one downloadable (is that a word yet?), as it is one that I never got ahold of previously. Listened to it on headphones at work, and it made my fucking day!
ommyth said…
Hello Swampy K!

Happy you're enjoying PCvPC. I wish more people could have heard it upon its release, but, y'know, now's as good a time as any. Many thanks.

---

Re "downloadable," a usage notation from Merriam-Webster:

download

Function: transitive verb

: to transfer (as data or files) from a usually large computer to the memory of another device (as a smaller computer)

- down·load·able /-"lO-d&-b&l/ adjective

---

So, yes. It's a recognized adjectival form of the transitive verb download. Converse in comfort!

Best,

TS

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