Hi, internet eyes/flickering lights/supernatural presence. Discos Mariscos, for now, is a way for a loose group of friends, but mostly two dudes in
particular, to pressure each other out of creative inaction. Working under the auspices of a label gives our activities some sort of organization and the
deadlines and arguments and detachment from obscurity that usually, hopefully go along with that. It is a headache joy. We get into car wrecks and sing onto tapes
and make photocopies all night long and would be completely thrilled if you were to take an interest, and we promise that we are trying to help bury The
Problem and make the world less of a nightmare in whatever small ways we are capable of doing exactly that.
Chad Matheny, using the goofy and kind of awesome high school-birthed pseudonym "Emperor X," is working on a several-volume collection of songs somehow inspired
by the eerie aura of Blythe, California-- through which he has passed several times while on I-10, and only once without some major trauma. I don't know all the
conceptual mechanics of these songs, but I think that it must be kind of bizarre to feel like you cannot pass through a specific, completely random, patch of geography without testing fate.
Maybe these songs touch on this sense of impossible dread or forceful pushing-through in some vague way. Maybe not. They're good songs, though! Really, really good and beautiful.
One way in which they certainly bring Blythe's arid desert-scape to mind is in the same way that they recall the feeling one gets when entering into a non-ventilated
car in the middle of summer. It is hot and the air doesn't seem to have any room for you. At the risk of evoking hyperbole and making Chad take even longer to finish these songs,
I hear them in their proto-stages as the ingredients to an epic sprawling science-fiction heart-story brain-melting hand-holding cocoa-drinking machine-destroying air-crispening vein-popping muscle-burning cornea-moistening masterpiece.
Volume One is currently available from Burnt Toast Vinyl. Chad has joked in the past couple of years that the rest will be released in its entirety "at some point prior to the Beijing Olympics." I no longer believe that.
"Hallelujah"
B. D.M. Text.
We plan on publishing text. Some of our friends are beautiful writers. How do you publish books and not lose a tremendous amount of money? We have nothing tremendous to wager on hypothetical success. Please contact us if you have any tips.
C. Dub Cassettes.
Dub Cassettes are standard audiotapes that retain the original four-track formatting of the master tape during duplication. This means that if
you own a four track, you'll be able to remix, sample vocal lines, re-EQ, add effects, and create your own unique versions of the music. If you
don't own a four-track cassette deck, don't worry -- all dub cassettes come with CD-Rs which contain CD player compatible audio tracks of pre-made
mixdowns by the artist(s) and .MP3 copies of each track in a synchronized, compressed session file.
The first band who is cooperating with us on this is Lanterns, from Glasgow. We will be selling the tapes on this website, as well as in some stores, later this year.
D. FORMAT.
FORMAT will be a semi-bi-annual journal celebrating and investigating a particular, specific medium through which audio is or has been popularly archived and distributed. The format of focus will change with each issue. We only expect to make eleven issues. We hope to have the first issue, focusing on the standard audiotape pictured above, released by the end of 2008.
E. No Sleep Ever.
No Sleep Ever is a book about the Circle of Life.
F. Some Photos Taken With a Cell Phone.
Some Photos Taken With a Cell Phone will be a book and series of small shows in art galleries demonstrating the hilarious (so funny!) disparity between what we approximate and what we actually are.
Our e-mail address is shrimpdisco a/t gmail d/ot com. You can call a person named Max on the telephone by using the following ten digits: 9 0 4 6 0 8 7 8 8 1. Our mailing address is 3764 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Jacksonville, FL, 32217.
"Emperor X" is looking to play concerts later this spring, although none are currently scheduled. I suppose
that is all for now.
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2.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - What humans we are.
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If you click on one of these photographs, you will be taken to a page that will divulge biographical information
about the subject(s) of that photograph.
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3.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - Some things we've done that we are proud of having done. These things are no longer available from us.
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D.M. 26 is "Sleeping Dreaming All Day in Your Room in Your Brain" by Adel Bengo: songs by polite, understated woodland creatures who live inside your brain and make it hard for you to wake up in the morning. Or, distorted grungy folk pop by a girl who lives in the the distant suburbs.
It was released in November, 2007. Each copy is individually-dubbed, hand-painted, and comes in a hand-sewn green felt pouch. Lyrics are included. It looks like coziness and sounds like a womb.
Please go to Adel's website and find a way to bug her about making/sending you a copy. We are all out.
"Keep You Here"
"Sea Life"
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D.M. 24 is "III" by Applied Communications. It is a short 13-15 page book with a spray-painted CD. The book includes drawings, song lyrics, and stories related to the songs. Each copy was individually hand-written, and we did not realize how absurd that would be until we started doing it.
A few months later, we released an expanded and streamlined version of this release as D.M. 25, "Heavenly Gospel."
"Echo Boom"
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D.M. 23 is "On the Death of Science as a Major World Religion" by the Cadets: noise squalls and deliberate rock songs from one of the dozens of Northeast Florida's unjustly-ignored weirdrock bands.
Contact them through their website, and somebody should be able to send you a copy.
"G-ville as Rare Factions"
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D.M. 11 is "Dirt Dealership" by Emperor X. It was released on February 2, 2006. The seven-inch record includes six songs and is packaged in a hand-cropped manilla folder covered in various different-colored stamps Chad made (which I think are supposed to form an alternately-dislocated Pangea?). The songs, of course, are pretty rad.
He sells what's left of this release at his website.
"Addison Aceh"
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D.M. 03 is "Tectonic Membrane/Thin Strip on an Edgeless Platform" by Emperor X. It was released in March, 2004. It is just very, very awesome. Even though Chad is my close friend and we released this together, I can detach from that and still appreciate this disc as a recurring fixture of long drives and winter longing. It is 100% on-point.
It remains available for $8 from our Sacramento pals at Tone Vendor.
