"Community Library is proud to bring you the first ever legitimate reissue of San Francisco’s synth-punk legends, UNITS! You can finally get rid of the crappy bootlegs: this is the definitive remastered collection of the band’s most sought-after early singles and selections from their first LP, Digital Stimulation. It also includes unreleased material culled from early demos, recordings made for art happenings and film, and more. This anthology is a view not only into the Units’ seminal years, but is also a step into the rich and under-reissued history of San Francisco’s punk, new wave and post punk years.
The end of the 1970’s saw Units and their compatriots (Pink Section, Voice Farm, Tuxedomoon, and Screamers) storming punk clubs like the Mabuhay with a new electronic punk sound. The co-opted, predictable guitar rock of the era had given way to aggressive synthesizers, film collage, and punk DIY ingenuity. Units were a cornerstone of this unofficial movement, later called “synth punk” and which would come to define a greater west coast DIY culture combining new synthetic sounds, ranging from Nervous Gender, Screamers and Monitor, to The Blackouts. Units’ tight keyboard riffing, raw electronic texture, monotone delivery, raging synth arpeggios and growling Moog basslines practically define synthpunk’s futuristic, alienated disposition. Thematically, Units’ music explored and exploded the very nature of “unit-like” conformity- perhaps using their synth blasts to tear away the very fabric of it. This compilation includes “High Pressure Days,” a testament to the loneliness and urgency of the times, and one of synthpunk’s greatest anthems.
Like other bands of their era, Units’ musical language did not end with the three chords of punk or the drama of new wave. Many of the songs here clairvoyantly anticipate the rise of underground pulse driven electronic dance music (“Cannibals,” “Warm Moving Bodies”). Others feature complex arrangements, almost embodying an epic prog-rock ethic (“I-5,” “Tight Fit.”) Unlike Suicide and DEVO--their contemporaries from the east coast--San Francisco’s Units are overwhelmingly Californian in their sound and ideas - whether it’s a satire of drag-racing car culture (“Go”) or a celebration of SF’s Mission district (“The Mission is Bitchin”). The demos and film soundtracks included here further highlight the band’s significant influence from experimental synthesizer music from a community that bore Buchla synths and Chris Burden’s performance art at the height of the 60’s, ten years earlier. Even Californian heavy guitar/hair rockers Trakstod Station get an ironic nod in the rare Units cover of “Contemporary Emotions.”
We hope you enjoy this anthology, the results of over three years of negotiation, selection, and remastering. Units will soon be the subject of several remix releases, including a 12” for the Relish label (Switzerland) from Headman and Rory Phillips, and an album from the Opilec label, on which Units are remixed by Italian dance music legends Danielle Baldelli, N.O.I.A, Und, and I-Robots!"

-Community Library

Tracks:

Side A.
-High Pressure Days
-Cannibals
-Work
-Bug Boy
-Town By The River

Side B.
-Warm Moving Bodies
-i-Night
-Go
-Digital Stimulation

-The vinyl version of History of the Units which made dozens of year-end best reissue lists for 2009. While this vinyl version features a shorter tracklist than the CD, it includes a download card which redeems for all 21 songs that are on the CD.

"A beguiling, classic new release comes to Community Library this spring: Documentary , the debut album by solo artist Rolan Vega . Synthesizer expert, art-film aficionado, and enthusiastic upstart of Chicago 's vibrant electro/synth scene, he has compiled years' worth of his favorite synthesizer vignettes into a comprehensive debut album. We first heard his stuff as a handful of mp3s from friends in Chicago a couple years back; track-swapping and culling ensued, resulting in this final collection.
Is Documentary a collection of works for actual short films and media, or an attempt to pay tribute to the synth epics of media music's past? The answer is, ultimately: both. Most of the music in Documentary was written as live scores for short films, including Vega's own Super 8s. But at the core of this effort one finds his love for ‘library music' (the anonymous, public-domain music composed for UK media in the 60s and after), as well as the synthetic, futuristic theme music of 1980ies American Public Broadcasting programming.
But like all ComLib artists, Vega is too individualistic to simply be re-enacting musics of the past: all kinds of extra elements leak into Documentary , making it a work that straddles the line between classic and alien. Vega's ambiguous, dream-like presentation and tendency to shift between shorter, passing pieces- as we think of them, vignettes - gives a sense of constant motion and change. These vignettes are not TV-studio enabled audiophilia; rather, these are home-recorded, four-track-tape inflected morsels of sound. Vega has collided the melancholic, low fi aesthetic of early 90ies Bristol artists like Flying Saucer Attack with the epic, arpeggiating ambience of synth maestros such as Michael Stearns, Richard Pinhas, Biosphere, and TONTO. A few of his tracks even resemble the sand-blasted melodic noise of composers like Tim Hecker or Chris Herbert
Rolan Vega's mixed-up revisions of anonymous media music, and his recombination of lo-fi experimentalism with synthesizer majesty hits a perfect spot for us, and we hope it does for you as well. Vega is perpetually working on new material in this vein, as well as yet-to-be-released pop electro. Stay tuned for more great music from this new artist, ComLib associate, and Chicago scene-motivator."

-Community Library

Tracks:

-Painted By Children (1:16)
-Motion Crisiis (3:22)
-Surface Cleanse (2:59)
-Viva Myria (2:39)
-Skypoint Fall (1:04)
-Playlite (3:52)
-Bells of York (1:18)
-Lense Flare On (1:26)
-4 Autiim (5:04)
-Nether (1:51)
-Surface Cleanser (3:58)
-Morning Call (2:04)
-Something Wrong with Today (2:41)
-Guiitav (1:54)
-Documentary (4:46)

"Christmas Decorations' second full-length Communal Rust should please fans who have been following the lineage of processed-guitar heroes and anti-heroes (Fennesz, Ambarchi, et al). But where those icons are making forays into drone and noise, Christmas Decorations are taking the other fork in the road, back towards the melancholic, crisp strum of post-punk and indie, and back towards an atomized, crumpled, improvised sound design.
Communal Rust documents essential "anti-guitar guitar music." The songs revolve around a dichotomy between guitar-pedal-and-computer induced fragmentation, on one hand, and the intricate, melodic guitar motifs referenced to classic post-punk and forgotten lo-fi indie music. Pull away the layers of glitches, snippets, trills, and echoes and you might discover a core guitar disposition that recalls the contemplative, steely tone of early Factory, 4AD, or New Zealand music. That's not to say that the duo is boxed in by reference points; moreso, these influences are exerting the most gravitational pull on the band's temptations to commit all-out, fractional sonic disintegration.
This tension between new and old, rough and smooth, or chaos versus control, puts the band squarely in the ComLib sensibility of sublimely balancing problem and accessibility in music. Following on the band's debut release, the criminally underappreciated Model 91 (kranky 2002), Communal Rust marks a key point in the band's development and is a crucial addition to any collection of experimental music."

-Community Library

Tracks:

-Upstage the Drips (4:10)
-Closer to Carpet (4:50)
-Twig Harpoon (4:32)
-Aphid Text (3:03)
-Browning Out (6:03)
-Clay Margins (3:18)
-Mice Over Feathers (3:43)
-Mirrored Mold (3:36)
-The Umbrella Fell (4:33)

"Welcome Project Perfect to Community Library's cast of contributors! PM+ is the definitive document of this elusive duo, as well as a key release for us that draws together ComLib's threads of musical coverage, such as abstract electronic music, jazz, free improvisation, and noise musics.
Project Perfect (Andy Brown- synth, electric piano, drum machine, and Charlie Smyth- guitar, radio) were the tricksters of Portland 's music community during the days of their frequent and strange performances (2002-2004). Appearing live in costume or with exotic dancers on stage, the group's deadpan humor was at odds with their profoundly introspective, abstract music. Following from their membership in Fontanelle, the two longtime collaborators came into their own with a reputation for consistently dextrous live performances, a distinctively insular sonic vocabulary, and a fluid, telepathic improvisatory rapport.
Project Perfect's mastery over sounds takes them jump-cutting from squiggles, squonks, and blurts of random (yet eerily on-target) radio broadcasts, to moments of austere, dry guitar-and-piano interplay. Hopping between tender and bombastic moods, introspection and extroversion, delicacy and jarringness, the band's sense of variety within a narrowly defined sonic palette is unmatched. Their approach comes from some oblique musical reference points (Runegrammofon label, Cabaret Voltaire, Conrad Schnitzler, or Cluster come to mind), but this was a group that truly did not sound like any other.
PM+ adds additional tracks to the original recording PM , a CD that was essentially privately released by conceptual arts group Red76, in 2002. Completely undistributed, and never exposed to local or outside press, PM came to us as a crucial piece of lost Portland music, along with additional recordings the band made in 2003.
Andy Brown was a founding member of the celebrated early kranky band Jessamine, as well as of its less-understood successor, Fontanelle. He has also been part of the drone group Southerning , and is now of the audio/visual trio Paint & Copter. Charlie Smyth (also ex-Fontanelle) has worked in everything from skronking jazz-rock (with Seattle 's Laundry in the 1990s) to free improvisation (in the early 00's) and most recently, as a folk-rock songwriter (!) in Chicago, Berlin, and Seattle once again.
Please share our enjoyment of this singular, intimate, and cosmic recording with us."

-Community Library

Tracks:

-Rome (2:55)
-Montage (3:03)
-Three Titles (4:35)
-The Down Time (5:08)
-444 (4:30)
-Missing Concept (3:09)
-After the Event (4:15)
-The Situation (3:23)
-Routine (3:38)
-Closing Credits (4:00)

--bonus tracks--
-Furniture of Water (4:57)
-The Massive Lawn (3:44)
-Avian Catastrophes (4:06)
-Retirement Community Overthrow (1:50)
-The Stop Stops Here (3:47)

"From the vaults of Portland's underground we bring you Reanimator, one of the city's most unusual electronic music groups ever. The master tapes were nearly destroyed in the Hurricane Katrina disaster last year, so we are incredibly thankful to get the chance to release these now!
Directly inspired by leftfield electronic, noise, and techno artists such as Pan Sonic, Force Field , and Mouse on Mars , but most closely resembling the first of these, Reanimator were experts at improvising heavy, synthetic, syncopated, and dubbed-out minimal beat music using the barest machinery. With a handful of mismatched drum machines, test-tone oscillators, budget samplers, and delay pedals, and improvising directly to ¼” tape, they created a huge body of work, ranging from the pacific, chord-backed “Phase Constellation” to the polyrhythmic thump of “Special Powers.” This collection demonstrates the band's rugged “pirate” ingenuity and DIY inspiration as they forged into the unknown hinterlands of minimal, handmade electro-techno- or as the band called it then, “evil dub."

-Community Library

Tracks:

Side A.
-Clicks and Drones May...
-Blown Subidah

Side B.
-Special Powers
-Mayne is an Orange Animal

"Nudge were augmented to a 5-piece band for a couple of recording sessions that resulted in these two monstrous tracks...gnarly dubber's rock. "stack" is propulsive, complex meta-rock with melodica and distortion-driven echoes. While most electronica preoccupies itself with being a sound- track for the city of shining skyscrapers, "stack" is urban music for the decaying city of rain puddles, cracked sidewalks, and hidden skate spots. "Div" is the imaginary, "what if?" meeting of Skam and Chain Reaction, with lo-fi live drumming samples and sweeping synths- possibly one of the band's most complex compositions to date. Excellent crossover mixing for next-level DJs. "

-Community Library

Tracks:

Side A.
-Stack

Side B.
-Div