MP3 The Harmful Free Radicals - Duplicate Factories of Washington State

Electronically augmented experimental acoustic indie pop, we make the Animal Collective look like choir boys.

9 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Experimental Rock, AVANT GARDE: Electronic Avant-Garde

Details:
OKS Recordings of North America is pleased to announce the release of The Duplicate Factories of Washington State, our seventh major release. This CD is now available through cdbaby.com as well as Amazon.com, Los Angelesâ Amoeba Records, Austin Texasâs End of An Ear, New Yorkâs Other Music and Kimâs Underground. It will be available for digital download at iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music, and many other digital download services.

This release is very near and dear to the heart of this label as it is the project that started it. It began in 2003 when childhood friends Bill Byrne (The Painful Leg Injuries, BIOS) and Jonah Goldstein (The Unevenness of the Moonâs Surface), found themselves briefly living on the same coast for first time in many years. They decided to resume their habit of recording bizarre experimental pop music together and see what became of it. The Duplicate Factories of Washington State is result of those sessions plus four years of songwriting, re-recording and editing.

Bill Byrne is an internationally exhibited multimedia visual artist, and college professor who performs wildly experimental electronic and noise music as The Painful Leg Injuries, with his wife Suzanne and as a member of BIOS with Marco Oppedisano and John Ibarra (of El Plan De Aguavodka). Jonah Goldstein is a director who has collaborated with artists such as counterculture icon Crispin Glover, actor Kal Penn and comedy pioneers The Lonely Island, as well as releasing melodic abstract song shards as The Unevenness of the Moonâs Surface. Throughout 2003 the pair met at Byrneâs apartment in Brooklyn, and recorded and arranged song fragments, without a clear direction or intended purpose, just two friends making noise. In 2004 Goldstein returned to Los Angeles, and The Harmful Free Radicals became a long distance project conducted through email, snail-mail and file sharing services. After much back and forth and the decision was reached to turn their core group of eight instrumental sound-scapes into the foundations that the vocals were laid upon. The pair reconvened in 2007 to record the final vocals and add all of the finishing touches.

The result is a marvelous collection of nuanced, idiosyncratic tracks that bare the influence of avant rock pioneers Gastr Del Sol, laptop performer Christian Fennesz and the haunting abstracted songs of David Sylvianâs Blemish. However their influences only tell half to story as these two artists have a unique spin on the future of the pop song. Their bold palette includes Goldsteinâs melodic acoustic guitars, Byrneâs circuit-bent instruments, warped field recordings, mandolins, computer generated feedback, trumpets, software based instruments, and meticulously arranged vocals.

Beauty (After Peer Review) opens the album with a lovely bare marriage of guitar and glitch while the concept of attraction is addressed when Byrneâs voice comes in with lyrics derived from the definition of the word âbeautyâ from Wikipedia with lines from Eddie Murphyâs âParty All The Timeâ. The First Time I Heard The Word âBillabongâ has Dirty-South-style down pitched vocals from Goldstein singing about teenage awkwardness and concludes with a comically over-dramatic chorus. D. Is None Of The Above is a raucous upbeat number with effected voices and digital-meets-analog sounds, it makes the Animal Collective look like choir-boys. The Truth and Toes is the only track here whose roots donât date back to 2003, recorded during their â07 session, this anthemic improvised instrumental features the duo playing two very circuit bent keyboards.

This CD-R release marks the latest major release from the Brooklyn-based OKS Recordings of North America label run by Bill Byrne and his longtime collaborator, Jonah Goldstein. OKSRNA specializes in artist created CD-R releases that cater to the tech-savvy listener ready for new arenas of creativity in musical expression.

People who are interested in Gastr Del Sol Brian Eno Animal Collective should consider this download.