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Excavacations — c56 (Stunned no. 65) —out of stock—The Offices of Moore & Moore guys often have a thing or two up their sleeves when it comes to their design and label curation. But now OMM’s Chad and Nicholas have gone and slammed down the wild card. The formation of their musical arm signals a refreshed zeitgeist with little prior warning. Excavacations nod toward just about everything that’s worked right in rock/kraut/indie/pop/drone the last 40 years while still managing to sound entirely original and future-bound. With this fine balance in place, the duo execute a veritable opus for our WTF times in under an hour. Expansive, ambitious, endlessly-repeatable, and oftentimes fist-pumping fun like tearing through Big Sur on a motorcycle. With all requisites met for a holiday in the sun, Chad and Nicholas along with Stunned invites everyone to kick back with this soundtrack, rest up, and tilt our shades toward a brand new decade. Limited edition of 111 pro-dubbed & imprinted c56 tapes with double-sided color jcard and insert.
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— Blog Eagle Child— Ear Conditioned Nightmare
M. Geddes Gengras/A.M. Shiner — The Blue Push/The Red Kush c46 (Stunned no. 64) —out of stock—A dazed high-5 thrown between two dudes celebrating the good leaf & west coast living. MGG curls his dense smoke signals into hypnotized pythons the hue of purest sativa on ‘The Blue Push’. This uber focused A-side arrives at dawn after some heavy out-of-body wandering over a diverse nightscape. It’s breakfast time and AMS orders an indica off the menu, proceeding to side B with bong lit brightly. Seven hiccups and a big long belch. Wha’ happened? ‘The Red Kush’ might have something to do with it. Or maybe it was ‘The Blue Push’ we had earlier? Whew… what’s that you said? Pass the tape again? Have at it. Limited edition of 111 pro-dubbed & imprinted c46 tapes with double-sided color jcard.
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— Vampire Basketball— Ear Conditioned Nightmare
Analog Concept — Impressions cdr (Stunned no. 63) —out of stock—Alexey Pushkin of Analog Concept made his inaugural visit to America last summer with audio recorder in tow, capturing as many natural city sounds in NYC as possible before returning home to Russia to edit these source tapes. What resulted from this intricate documentation is ‘Impressions’ — an album quite unlike anything we’ve heard in recent memory. As Analog Concept navigates lonely subway tunnels, bustling city parks, and ominously desolate corridors, his layered travelogue yields to borderline-subliminal synth accentuations. Never entirely unaffected field recording, never entirely a formal synthesizer composition, this one sits on our shelf marked ‘unclassifiable’, and we’re delighted to offer it here for your own unique collection. Special edition of 111 cdrs with double sided color sandwich-covers in vinyl jacket.
_______________________review:— Animal Psi
Ossining/Afterlife — split c52 (Stunned no. 62) —out of stock—This split is a convergence of forty fingers and four heads belonging to 2 crews who are no strangers to the school of modern synthesizer work — Kevin Danchisko (Sovetskaya Gone), Brad Rose (Digitalis/The North Sea), Ryan McGill (Bones of Seabirds/Cliffsides) and Franklin Teagle (Anathema Sound/Meditations). To say that each of these members has had a helluva ’09 is total understatement. Dudes have burned it up on all levels audile & visual. Case in point: the opening side’s all-hands-on-deck approach of Ossining. Kevin & Brad launch laterally in warm g-force tones for the remainder of Side A’s high-altitude analog cruising. There’s no need to come down from such birdflight bliss with Afterlife’s B-Side, offering a bounty of dilated-eye synth trance. Here Ryan & Franklin reach for the gooier forms which emerge at dusk on the horizon. Crisply telepathic in their chemical trailblazing, they dare to chisel flashing arpeggios down to quark level. Ladies and gentlemen, we have drift off. Limited edition of 111 pro-dubbed & imprinted c52 tapes with double-sided color jcard and insert.
Pine Smoke Lodge — Haligdaeg cdr (Stunned no. 61) —out of stock—Pine Smoke Lodge’s Hillary & Matt hail from Portland Maine, where Matt also runs the awesome label Existential Cloth. The timing of the arrival of their ‘Haligdaeg’ is perfect for us northern-hemisphere-huggers who are now getting hit with the full thrills and chills of winter. Together Pine Smoke Lodge summit snowy banks of acoustical drone in ever-ascendant strides of bowed & plucked strings, icicle bells & xylophone, and heat-generating vocal mantra. The trail they follow is never steep, but vista-revealing peaks are reached in good order. Bookended between two stretches of sparkling activity comes a middle passage where one feels the clock has frozen as solidly as the ground underfoot. Such moments of palpable harmonic stasis trickle throughout ‘Haligdaeg’, making the climb worth it every time. Limited edition of 111 hand-stamped cdrs with color cover in vinyl jacket.
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— Foxy Digitalis— Ear Conditioned Nightmare
Connector — STEEL/RUST c50 (Stunned no. 60) —out of stock—Carnal energy meets primal masculinity meets 360 tons of public-art-installation STEEL. Entering the belly of this beast for two separate midnight sessions, Bryce Loy (Abaddon Records) and Peter Lamons scratch and beat the RUST nearly clean off their instrument of creation/object of destruction. This is Connector — both the name of the experimental percussion project of Bryce & Peter’s, debuting on this cassette, as well as the name of a Richard Serra mega-sculpture erected last year in the belly of yet another beast: Orange County, California. The Connector duo’s pacing and control is tremendous within Serra’s massive acoustical space over both their 25-minute sides. The intimate sounds of crickets, heaving breath, and torqued steel moans are given just as much footing as vocal eruptions & volcanic percussions upon the 66-foot-tall sculpture sides. No electricity. No effects. Just the quickening of sweat, absorption of metallic shock, and shedding of blood in a thrilling attempt to locate one of the deepest ancestral rites — discovery though smashing shit up. Special edition of 111 pro-dubbed & imprinted c50 tapes with double-sided jcard and foldout color insert.
_______________________review:
— Ear Conditioned Nightmare
Eureka — Big Breath cdr (Stunned bonus #8) —out of stock—If you’re going to take a jump, make it high. And if you’re going to take a breath, make it big. And if Eureka is at the bench of a piano, he’ll take it dancing in loops of transcendent minimalist-jazz. This special edition bonus EP is Eureka’s one & only burned offering to 2009 — rare insight to elemental rituals of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. Limited to 66 hand-stamped cdrs with found-photo cover in plastic case. Not for individual purchase; available as complimentary item with purchase of Stunned’s December batch.
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— Impose Magazine
