With Cailtin on drums, Jake on bass, and Seth on guitar, the incomparable Warm Climate takes aim at the center of the target and shoots yet another bullseye of jawdropping outsider-rock. Sounding like nothing that's come before them, this tightly-rehearsed L.A. group fires one psych groove & infectious hook after another. In a parallel reality where the music industry isn't steered by tasteless major label trends, Warm Climate would be ringing out on all worldwide hi-fi's the liberated rush that comes from their marriage of songwriting genius with a gutsy combo of seasoned rockers. As our label's salutatory cassette release, 'Pigeon Brides Weigh In' is firmly perched at Stunned's summit, a pinnacle experience of music at the end of a trail that can be climbed no higher.

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Let it spill through you like the peak experience of your choice. In your hands is 'The Empty Space' and pouring into your head is Stunned's most trusted synthesizer medicine man M. Geddes Gengras. This is an album dealing with freefall, the ground suddenly dropping out, the fierce void we rush against that resists our naturally preferred trajectory. The cycles and patterns appear to dominate — yet MGG boldly transcends such conditions with his fearless navigation through an unpredictable modular synth patchwork, taking a plunge into analogue novelty in its most naked state. Roots run deep in a tree bearing aural fruits this sweet.

Stunned Records

The boys are cut loose and Myste takes up the solo Nite Lite reins on her new peripatetic audio-tour 'Marlene'. A tribeswoman from the black time of innocence discovers interdimensional gates within Nature. The sounds of forest animals, machines, and people mingle with subtler sounds welling up from the earth's very core. All vibrations become indiscriminately suspended in her ear, their energies funneled from hidden brain glands into the alchemical chamber of her heart. It is from this activated place of love that 'Marlene' is captured, held for a while, then released back into the wild again. Keep your nite lite burning.

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Epic pieces like "Lay Down Real Slow" have contributed to Pimmon's career being quite an impeccable one over the last decade. It's no secret that many masters of their craft eventually return to the piano, seeking its raw tactility as a fundamental starting point for new articulations. Pimmon takes this approach here on his second essential release on Stunned Records, and the results are invigorating. Samples from the ivory keys glide beautifully within a patient matrix of laptop manipulations, a technique that draws cosmic gestures from humble origins. A national treasure not only to his homeland of Australia but to all of us around the globe, Pimmon is paired best with a relaxing and carefree listening environment, going down like the finest of red wines.

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One of the most flat-out incendiary debut tapes ever shared with this label, Social Drag's 'New Age Healer' employs wickedly smart noise structures as a necessary remedy for any digital-age depressions. In the hands of this frequency surgeon we are provided a reboot and awaken fresh to what has made the last decades of experimental music worthwhile in the first place — starting with the artist's scandalizing and unapologetic plunder far beyond all safety zones erected by society. Opening his aperture into this lawless place of awesome possibility, Social Drag directs red hot mutagenic forces through writhing cables and circuits fried to crispy perfection.

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Parashi returns with his signature branded on forty fresh minutes of amplified turbulence and gnarled electronics. While his "Troika" (Stunned no. 115) ushered in longform pieces of crackling scuzz, the opening side of this split with Granitkorridor reveals Parashi isn't treading the same ground for long. Listeners behold six distinct scenes that evoke images of malevolent applications of nanotech, wastelands glowing green with radiation, and lab-weaponized parasites slithering their way into flesh. None of these perceived traumas seem to daunt Parashi, however, as he brings the magical powers of a sonic warrior to the fore of his side's entirety. Germany's most somber string-puller Granitkorridor knows a thing or two about a warrior's skills, having spent a half dozen releases now exploring cavernous realms that few else dare to entreat. His time here is split evenly between two huge pieces of pure bass guitar blackout. Amazingly spacious, it possesses everything that has made Granitkorridor's previous cassettes so repeatable and essential in our psychedelic music collection.

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The dream logic Berber Ox weaves throughout 'The Great Parenthesis' presents an immersive environment with no orientation to time. It bends linear constructs with duality-erasing fields of lifelike detail and backward flowing sound motions. A beautiful specimen unlike many registered in the books, its astral quality simply eludes classification.

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Sitting down with a Queen Victoria album proves to be a profound time spent by the stereo, as those who tuned into last year's "There Will Come Soft Rains" tape can testify. QV's enigmatic lyricism, graceful guitar composition, and wizened vocals sure can sneak up and take hold of those happily entranced by bandleader Nick Malkin's mellow delivery. Ageless ways of rock, blues, and folk fluidly channel through this incredibly promising musician from Los Angeles, and "The Present Tense" is his unforgettable calling card. The entire program repeats on the B-Side for a conveniently-looping listening experience.

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An invisible, imbedded ecology is accessed through the voltage gyres and electro-therapeutic devices of Super Minerals' final release for Stunned. The raison d'etre is clear; we are all nearing critical mass and preparing to inherit our sovereign birthright against the wishes of the powers that be. This tape celebrates the ending of their world and the beginning of ours. Here we have landed, walking this planet — we are the Contacteers.

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David Suss has tuned his project Millions into a truly cosmic channel since 2006, sculpting a brilliant body of work across labels like Tape Drift, Blackest Rainbow, Peasant Magik, and 2:00AM Tapes. Suss opens his side with dulcet synth swells that evoke a placid sea evaporating into neon gas. Rather than rushing on from his carefully crafted scene, Millions engages each unfolding second with a composer's patient and subtle touch. Much the same can be said for Mike Haley's new synthesizer-based project Spectrum Tickets, who follows up his own awesome 905 Tapes label debut with 'Space–Time'. Laden with crisp arpeggio runs and mega hypnotic pan & fade technique, this is an example of the entrancing – and dare we say melodic – realm Haley enters with Spectrum Tickets in hand.

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Unnamed experts and compromised authorities have been managing our perception far too long, suggests A.M. Shiner on his last tape ever before early retirement at age 18. He has received all his yearly vaccines and daily fluoride. He's ingested genetically-modified everything, and he's been living under the gift of nuclear power since birth. For AMS, the jig is finally up and the coast is clear. He stuck around when they sent in the Good Cop to work us over (Stunned no. 27). But before they send in the Bad Cop, he knows its time to post bail and bounce the hell out. Keep in mind that no matter where and no matter when, assume A.M. Shiner to be in contempt of court — with permission granted to regard him as hostile.

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We became aware of Stewart Adams' project Ugly Husbands in 2009 when we received his debut cassette which was released by Roll Over Rover inside a hollowed out vintage book. It was definitely a novel first impression, and the packaging along with the jams inside was a highlight of that year in music. Fast forward to the present, and we find that while Adams has refined his sound, the Husbands' ethos remains intact. Using his 4-track recorder as a conduit for the unhurried sounds of western America, Ugly Husbands includes all manner of rusty slide guitar, warbling old tape loops, and hazy sunset reverberation. It's a vibe worth many repeat visits, but not before first traversing the strange lands of Gul Bara. Here we find two familiar members of the Stunned family: Warm Climate's very own Seth Kasselman & Caitlin C. Mitchell. Gul Bara is essentially an off-hours WC, cigarettes lit on the midnight prowl with dented horns and blackened drums. A true inversion of band dynamics, the duo takes passage through five dank alleys in their own unexpected and mesmerizing way. More evidence that whether it's disorienting drones or tight rock tunes, the members of Gul Bara ceaselessly push any and all limits aside.

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Remote Islands ringleader Colin Pate joined up with fifteen of his other talented Philadelphian friends and over the course of a year crafted 'Days of Heaven,' the leftfield pop masterpiece proudly presented on this c46 cassette. Whether it was unpredictable fate, good karma, or sheer serendipity we don't know — somehow this crew connected with Stunned Records and shared with us the best unsolicited demo the label has received in three years of operation. Colin's nimble songwriting turns a dozen numbers into absolute gemstones in the hands of his ensemble who represent themselves on 24 different instruments. Take everything that's been effective, uncompromised, and lasting about rock & pop music of the past and present. It'll be found in spades here, and with its own distinctly unique Remote Islands twist.

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We welcome back our favorite audio raconteur for a fourth round on Stunned in the form of a special double-c40 set. "The White Paper" is Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand's most thematically-focused work to date, spending four ambitious tape sides in sonic dialog with recent literature published on anthropoeia, or "people-making." Each of his complex chapters raise up their own ear-catching specter: genetic code gematria, petri dish pranksters, odd effigies crafted & burned, and glimpses into futuristic hive mind hatcheries. It's clear "The White Paper" is an unmistakable hybrid of the MABH laboratory — fertile with unexpected turns and undeniably scintillating to the core.

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Using guitar, synthesizers, metal objects, pieces of wood, kalimba and contact mics, Parashi summons eerie shadows and drops anchor in the underworld. Here, crumbling circuitry hums alongside lone wolf cries and whispers from subterranean ruins. With masterful focus and deliberation, 'Troika' finds New York's Parashi in top form after an impressive three album run-up on his home label Skell LLC. Few are willing to align their ship straight into the gritty unknown, but Parashi does just that with an array of entropic frequencies as his travel companions. When the hammer comes down during Side B's 18-minute long apex, watch for the white-hot sparks emitting from your electronics.

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Following up their recent 905 Tapes burner, Garrincha & The Stolen Elk's members Davy Bui (Weird Forest Records) and Matt Kretzmann uncork a bottle of straight up rock & roll. It's pretty damn refreshing having a band like this around, ready to rip through four tremendous songs in twenty minutes and still managing to cover all the right bases along the way. G+SE's chops are unarguably tight and not a second is wasted as fun house blurt and a wicked sax (!!) spice up the group's own totally original brand of rock madness. It'll be hard putting the cork back on this one for a long, long while.

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Cody Brant is a man of many talents, known best for his involvement with renowned Portland groups Flaspar and Smegma as well as helming the Meandering Recordings label. Most recently, he's honed his solo game and has apparently pitched the drone in favor of sounds with a decidedly strange bounce. Cody resumes the unpredictable Toning program here on the heels of his Eggy Records debut. With the help of a handful of buds along the way, nine numbers are stacked end-to-end which forms a chain of wheezing analog electronics and disembodied chant. Acetate patterns are diced and dried in the sun, then spliced and reconstituted from their dehydrated state back into gelatinous electro-tribal tape goo. Sound weird? It is.

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Back for a third time on Stunned, Torture Corpse delivers a fierce and fire-licked side appropriately titled 'Ignorance'. Like being herded through a geoengineered tweak of the weather, or standing under a sky checkered with persistent trails of aerosol spray, the consequences of exposure to TC's guitar-crush has been verified to generate psychic mutation. Our hero from Rotterdam thankfully holds nothing back, and signals with his arsenal of pitch-black electronics the final malfunctioning of all civic and political institutions. Pestilence spills through cracks in the merciless wall of noise erected in Torture Corpse's anarchic defiance, trickling over to the second side of this split. One can practically hear the vermin scampering underfoot in Architeuthis Rex's haunted churchyard exploration. What begins as a desolate wind-whipped scene of terrestrial tension ends with something akin to encountering the first of four apocalyptic horsemen, turned loose and swinging low its scythe. Hold on tight.

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Students of the trickster and servants of the goddess, Minutiae carve a lit path through the nocturnal forest canopy on 'Plane Sight'. Manifesting a song cycle intending to reflect the harmonious web of plant, animal, and mineral energies, they hypnotize the serpents who guard the gates of celestial imagination. Entering tribemind with vision cleared of physical impurity, the trio simmers until dawn, entranced in resonant tones generated by guitars, percussion, and salvaged electronics.

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This debut cassette from Seattle's Rogue Cop rips it up from a hundred different directions with electric guitar being the sole cause of all the excitement. Fusing semi-calculated loops of red hot plink-plonk with agitated riffs dipped in booze, an entirely original stance to the six-string is fleshed out in under an hour. It may blindside you as it did us — totally unprepared for its wild methods and funny way of getting us to root for yet another cop gone rogue.

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When 'Equal Phesance' was first issued in 2008 as a Housecraft CDr limited to 60 copies, it's maker had this to say: "Seemingly hidden in a sedimentary layer of the collective subconscious, is the ever-more-detectable hum of an arriving world, calling for receptive ears and accessible memory banks upon which to unfurl its banner." Stunned Records has always found 'Equal Phesance' to be one of the more challenging and unique slices from the sturdy Xiphiidae back catalog. Now re-issued on cassette for the first time in an expanded edition size with all new artwork, it's high time to give this jewel a closer listen. In the few years since this deep-ambient dream was shared with us, the hum of the arriving world has nearly become a roar. As mere observers to an annihilative Mystery, we joyously invite its unfurling here at the threshold of a new year.

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In outer Firnu from two z z eight to two z one z were corded then recorded these sounds. The music of 'Città Invisibili' invites up out of overextensi in sixtyfour evolutions per second audtac overlap: the chopstack uke lay with the yarnstruck drum; rattles on the rise over foghorn-string syncos; dreamsplicing onto scoglitti seaweed; breathing as swimming; passage through open city as a particle of dust, yielding to three-part sunrise; warble-waves the message. ComisoDJ ora, now, noi? Ecco lo statico.

Stunned Records

His third release with Stunned finds MABH's Peter Taylor explaining: "The journey to fatherhood took a turn I never expected. Upon the birth of my daughter I felt compelled to communicate in the early stages of her life. A newborn has a whole world of sound and shapes to contend with. I used this as a point of reference to begin a sonic trip into nebula static, white noise and otherworldly tones. I built a pallet from a hundred culled cassette tapes, eroded vinyl and electronic tones. 'sleep,' is conceived for ultimate spatial displacement, allowing the listener to absorb, focus and drift. Each tone is focused on a particular emotion and state of slumber — the drift, the doze and the deep sleep.

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I got lost. In thinking about the past I put myself in it. When I came back, I was the only thing holding it together. There's a force in the mind, a river current that picks up speed as you fall asleep. Where you write whole novels in a matter of minutes only to forget it all when you're startled awake. 'Present Heap' delves into the mainframe — a guided tour of biological circuitry. It drifts in and out with no specific theme but vagueness. Sounds and phases that almost get remembered before the user is ushered off to another area of the diagram. The album operates from a cool central core, alternating between old memories that won't come back and a familiar calm zone. Snap out of it.

-Chad Parsons (excavacations)

Stunned Records

Even those familiar with Warm Climate's last decade of underground madness will find 'Camouflage on the River Wretched' a most combustible cocktail. Shaken, stirred, or molotov – any preference? No matter, it's all going to be pleasantly poured down the hatch when Warm Climate's iconoclastic bandleader Seth Kasselman grips microphone and guitar. Moving along from 2009's pop dementia sleeper-hit 'Edible Homes', now Warm Climate explores dark urban noir, graffiti-speckled rock n' roll, and mysterious cinematic narrative. Sounds about right for a group who was publicly declared "Best Band in L.A." to the hearty agreement of the audience at this year's Bottled Smoke Festival. Hell, Warm Climate IS Los Angeles, or at least one especially crucial aspect of its tremendous Voice. In all its befuddling and inscrutable glory, the city itself seeks purest expression through the genius minds who roam its Escher-like sprawl. Warm Climate has deftly responded to the schizoid urges of L.A. in good measure: with an incredible music that will be remembered long after the cars, buildings, and sea of people.

Stunned Records

Now here is the summer album we've been absolutely craving. 'Jams and the Giant Peace' is the kind of psychedelic monster that immediately transports us back to being seventeen again, cruising around town invincible and high while blowing the car's factory-installed speakers to shreds. When the shop owners and neighbors demand to know who's responsible for all the sudden ruckus, tell them Pittsburgh-based trio Dire Wolves just got to the party. And they aren't leaving until every cymbal crash & scorching chord has been loosed. Along the way curveballs are thrown of classic Kraut/Japanese psych, liberated studio deck manipulation, and free-sound meltdown. This is simply par for these dude's course. Twist one up and take that top off, summer's best jams are just beginning to drop.

Stunned Records

'Supercontinent' is Donato Epiro's freshest hypnotic adventure, and a glimpse into some future tropical world where lysergic acid rain waters the neon foliage. Animatronic apes and mechanical birds flock around Donato as he expertly fashions his sonic hieroglyphs, while sibilant rhythms and humid chants pour freely into the deviant ceremony from all sides. Join the intoxicating celebration, and play this tape whenever you need a little break from the continent you're currently standing upon.

Stunned Records

Jeremy Kelly's previous albums on Digitalis and Tape Drift contain gutsy undercurrents & explosive centers that hold our attention like nothing else out there. Stunned is glad to announce that 'It Sounds Different In the Dark' is a similar drop through the blissfully unknown with our trusted guide JK. It doesn't take long before we realize that sense of direction & determinacy are exchanged for sheer disorientation in Jeremy's world. Exhilaratingly torn between poles of all possible guitar forms, it matters little what is up, down, straight or crooked within the first few minutes. After all, this is in the Dark — an excursion for the daring listener who desires something quite different in their audio diet.

Stunned Records

Crown, Mineral & Sacred Well: alchemical antidotes to planetary toxicity. Our heroes Alberorovesciato combine these ancient elements in a half-hour ritual of percussive glossolalia, summoning assistance from outer realms. Now Skorpio is back, and he's way pissed about this oily fuckin mess everywhere. Seriously, humans. If you can't plug your holes, stop drilling them. Skorpio knows. He stopped needing oil a few millennium ago. Now he survives purely on the ecstatic anti-rhythms of freedom that Francesco Cavaliere & Marco Lampis have been celebrating with Alberorovesciato since Stunned no. 21. Thanks for making the call guys, and welcome home Skorpio. Do whatever it takes to make yourself clean & comfortable here.

Stunned Records

Forces to be reckoned with in their own right as farmers of prime Delaware sound crop, Mike Haley (Wether, 905 Tapes) and Dave Doyen (2:00AM Tapes, Vales) tag team a set of bent synthesizers on this c40, bringing their new duo Roped Off into snarling maturity. We presume that blowing glass in space leads one to smoke something especially dank out of that glass in space. Let's further assume that the discovery of a new angle was not only novel, but an inevitable consequence of these actions. No matter how it's sliced, or slices through the listener, it's an entirely unpredictable ride in the opposite direction of a safe synth reality. These boyz mean biz.

Stunned Records

Deep zones of bowed-bass infinitude assist our anti-kinetic midnight vigils with Granitkorridor's 2nd release on Stunned and 5th overall chapter in his ongoing saga. Elevation into "V" discovers its maker hovering with tremendous patience like a god of thunder, expanding his sonic domain to an ocean's breadth. Seducing us through chambers of refreshingly minimal décor, Granitkorridor draws every unnecessary particle away from the space, leaving little behind but the unmistakable afterglow of a drone master.

Stunned Records

With eyes dilated as wide as the bandwidth's spectrum, A.M. uses his Radio to wrest open abandoned frequencies on the dial. Bidding brain & body adieu, Shiner slips inside to play, joining metallic ghost voices as they surf through a strangely erotic vacuum. Weird new Canadian crew Musculus similarly reaps the generative union between flesh & electromagnetic possibility on this split's flip. Their microfiche machines hum like monks on night watch, murky mantras preceded by 4th-dimensional feminine counterparts who emerge from a motorized surround."

Stunned Records

The last time we heard from Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand, the London cipher-weaver spun a most quixotic tapestry alluding to a nearby Other (Stunned no. 46). This next chapter raises the tension ever higher, thoroughly exploring ancillary avenues of nocturnal field recording & alien found sound. 'Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden' is an amalgamation of organic and inorganic energies fused into a beautiful, breathing contradiction. Special recording & editing techniques employed over its hour align the sacred geometries uncovered in spider webs, fishing nets, and tantric sex positions. The luminous sub-dimension revealed by such transgressive use of tech might take some getting used to; its' presence suggestive of a Contact experience right under our own skins.

Stunned Records

After Torture Corpse debuted the gritty 'Particular Sufferings' on Stunned last year, we followed closely as his statement of devastation continued unfolding with an excellent EP on Italy's Radical Matters. Now with a renewed ferocity and focus, this Act II casts an unflinching gaze at the brutal state of the world through Netherlands-zen/apocalyptic-Buddhist lenses. With the schemes of the globes' shadow elite being exposed daily and the emperors of the world appearing quite unclothed to all who care to notice, Torture Corpse urges on toward the next necessary stage: 'Stop the Mind'. Bracketed between black noise apparitions are vast stretches of radioactive chant and meditation bowl strikes, cerebral activity cooling to zilch. Circuits open and fully offline, there comes a bracing visit from none other than Manjushri — inevitability we can believe in.

Stunned Records

In our pursuit for the most flipped out noise on the globe, we're always brought back to the area code of 905 Tapes' Mike Haley and his long-running project of pleasure and pain Wether. 'Here's the Bet' is a mean half hour of Haley's hot circuit purgation where sweat stings the eyes and nausea synchs in time to icicle-sharp oscillations. The uncompromisingly clinical meat locker mechanics on display here might be a punch in the gut for those uninitiated with modern devices of sonic weaponry and crowd control. But once the gauntlet of tinnitus dipped 666-pitch has been weathered on the first pass, 'Here's the Bet' becomes an experience likely to be often repeated — it's venom doesn't seem to kill us, but only serves to make us stronger.

Stunned Records

Geiger counters, crystal radio sets, sonar consoles, and broken walkie talkies chatter their way through a binary snowdrift on the opening side of 'Siberia/Hinterland'. Chilly, spooked, and Siberian for sure, but it could just as well be an eerie code transmitted from the dark side of Pluto. Who knows? Brooklyn's Nat Hawks might begin to answer, as he is the purported brains behind this sprawling enigma. He's also responsible for running the totally fresh label LittleFuryThings and performing in avant NY outfits like Christian Science Minotaur. Clearly, his solo Padna role is no stranger to wrangling strange cargo such as found at the front of this c56. Side B's 'Hinterland' reciprocates these anti-drone motions with a brightened palate of its own. Seven protean orchestrations run a whole rainbow range of opaque tones. Both sides of Padna's coin are landed on throughout the trip, flipping from dark atmospheres to warped merrymaking at a whim. Being introduced to these creations has definitely been one of the highlights of Stunned HQ's listening year, and echoes of the Padna endeavor are bound to be near.

Stunned Records

This follow-up full length to editions on such labels as Blackest Rainbow and Housecraft finds Black Eagle Child rowing his boat ashore and sparking the campfire wide and bright. Let's stretch out our legs, because we have a nearly hour long psychfolk excursion of delight on our hands here. Once BEC's Michael Jantz starts dronin' and fingerpicking his acoustic around the flames, things chill way out and the ears get a good cleanse. Just crack a brew and mind you don't get sick on the s'mores. This release happily marks Black Eagle Child having created a child of his own. Along with Mike & Celeste, we welcome Mary Jantz into the world, the newest and most special sprout of summer.

Stunned Records