SKiN GRAFT News for You's

B A L L P E E N ( ! ) B U L L E T I N S

updated: February 14th, 2014

TWO NEW RELEASES OUT NOW!:

SAX RUINS
"Blimmguass"
LP / CD / ULTIMATE EDITION

STRANGULATED BEATOFFS
"The Beatoffs" (White Album)
LP / MOD CD / ULTIMATE EDITION

ALSO OUT NOW:

STRANGULATED BEATOFFS CD

U.S. MAPLE
DIECUT METAL LP

U.S. MAPLE
NON DIECUT LP

U.S. MAPLE
CD / LP

SKiN GRAFT LOGO
2-SIDED T-SHIRT

ARAB ON RADAR
LP / MOD CD

ATHLETIC AUTOMATON LP / MOD CD

YOWIE
LP / MOD CD

LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS LP / MOD CD

CHROME JACKSON
LP / MOD CD

DOOMSDAY STUDENT
LP / MOD CD

XADDAX
LP / MOD CD

PRE
EP / MOD CD

KOENJIHYAKKEI
LIVE DVD

RUINS ALONE
LP / CD

All titles available for ORDER at

Hi Everybody -

This is Mark writing. Hope your New Year is off to a great start!
Things are good here - we have two new releases out now!

SAX RUINS "Blimmguass" and
STRANGULATED BEATOFFS "The Beatoffs" (aka the White Album)

Both are available on LP and CD, as well as a "mailorder only" ULTIMATE EDITION, which includes a colored vinyl LP bundled with the compact disc. As an extra bonus and to take advantage of the longer playing time, the SAX RUINS standalone CD (and the CD packaged with the Ultimate Edition) includes an additional 4 track "Improvisation EP" pressed on to the disc, while The BEATOFFS "White Album" includes some additional medley snippets not listed on the official track listing.

You can place orders HERE and you can read all about them below!:

SAX RUINS "Blimmguass"
LP / CD / ULTIMATE EDITION

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LINE UP:
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Tatsuya Yoshida: drums, percussion
Ryoko Ono: alto, baritone & soprano sax, flute

Recorded in Koenji & Nagoya between December 2012 and August 2013

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ONE-SHEET

Though he's renowned for his roles in Acid Mother's Temple and Zeni Geva and for leading the bands Koenjhyakkei and Koekyojinn, Tatsuya Yoshida always comes back to RUINS. Since 1985, Ruins has been Yoshida's primary musical outlet – always minimalist in instrumentation, but maximalist in compositional complexity. Ruins' first two decades were defined by it's drum / bass line-up, with Yoshida remaining as the band's constant, while RUINS' bass duties would change hands four times. The last, Sasashi Hisaki, departed in 2004.

Since then, Ruins has evolved into a one-man show, with Yoshida doing what at first seemed impossible, playing it all himself - as documented on SKiN GRAFT's 100th release “RUINS Alone”.

Beginning in 2006, Yoshida would occasionally fill the vacant second slot not with a bassist, but with alto saxophonist Ono Ryoko. Ono has become one of Japan's most in demand studio musicians, performing jazz, rock, funk, rhythm & blues and hip hop, as well as leading her own band, "Ryorchestra."

Like Yoshida, she has created her a musical language all her own, using a "non-breath" circulation technique and multi-phonics to pursue endless, rich and complex sounds in a progressive and classical tradition.

In 2009, Mike Patton's Ipecac label issued SAX RUINS' debut recording “Yawiquo”, which found Tatsuya and Ono reinterpreting many of Ruins classics with brass in place of bass.

Their new album “Blimmguass” is highlighted by an all-new composition commissioned by New York's brass band Asphalt Orchestra which premiered at the Lincoln Center in April of 2012. Where the SAX RUINS' first outing focused on short pieces, “Blimmguass” expands it's reach to lengthier, meticulously orchestrated compositions, including RUINS classics like “Vrresto” and Bighead”, as well as improvised pieces which reflect the Sax Ruins Live experience.

SAX RUINS transforms Yoshida's compositions from heavy, nimble prog to dense, hyper-kinetic big band jazz, not entirely unlike Sonny Rollins sitting in with Magma and Carl Stalling on the Warner Bros. lot or Borbetomagus calculating a perfectly timed collision with Naked City.

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CLIFF NOTES:
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o Recommended if you like: Naked City, Fantomas, Slayer, Casrl Stalling, King Crimson, High On Fire, Magma, Asphalt Orchestra, Henry Cow, John Zorn, Koenjihyakkei, Sonny Rollins, Yes, Borbetomagus, Massacre, Lightning Bolt

o Debut Sax RUINS CD was released on Mike Patton's Ipecac label in 2009

o Includes “Improvisation 1-4” EP - four bonus tracks - included on the CD and as a free download in the LP

o Yoshida Tatsuya has a tremendous following as the leader of RUINS, KOENJIHYAKKEI and KOREKOJINN, and a player in renowned bands Acid Mothers Temple and Zeni Geva.

o Features an all-new composition commissioned by New York's Asphalt Orchestra which was premiered at the Lincoln Center in April of 2012

o Sax Ruins tour worldwide

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PRESS QUOTES:
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o "How do you describe Sax Ruins? Late-60s chase-scene music run through a blender? The soundtrack to an Hieronymus Bosch painting? Elevator music in a David Lynch dream sequence? A Jazz Holiday, if Benny Goodman had been raised on No Wave? Japanese avant-garde composer Tatsuya Yoshida packs more signature changes into a two-minute song than most artists can fit on an entire record. In saxaphonist Ono Ryoko he's found a performer capable of matching him turn-for-maniacal-turn, complementing his rapid-fire percussion with a chorus of screeches, wails and melodies from a variety of brass instruments. This is a mind-bogglingly complex work of pure musicianship, that is for all its impenetrability, surprisingly fun." - Tiny Mix Tapes

o "What's most immediately apparent is how naturally the faithful transposition of these tunes from bass to sax changes them from heavy prog into mutated big-band jazz. These songs seem instantly at home in a jazz context, as if Yoshida was secretly channelling Mingus all along. Within this aesthetic, their wild transitions, melodic oddities and restless nature seem more natural, less coldly calculated to disorient – even if that is their ultimate effect. But if this is a jazz band, it's one from your most feverish dreams. This is gobsmacking stuff." - The Quietus

o "Ryoko's sax is rich with echoes of free-jazz masters Ornette Coleman and John Zorn - lots of intensely passionate links borne of bebop, highly focused high-register wails, and artfully-placed squeals and shrieks. Meanwhile, the harmonious, darting unison passages (massed, overdubbed saxophones) evoke Frank Zappa's jazziest instrumental works (think Hot Rats and The Grand Wazoo). Tightly arranged, droll-sounding horns borne upon furious, rapid-fire cadences that recall the Minutemen at their peak - but for the unconventionally minded, it's exhilarating. Clever and irreverent, sidestepping the stuffy, this-is-serious-stuff mindset that plagues some avant-garde music." - East Bay Express

o "Punk is theoretically about nonconformity and freedom, so it’s curious that much of it follows a common musical formula; there’s nothing nonconformist about playing three chords loud and fast while barking in monotone. On the other hand, much jazz is played with such independence and freedom, it’s curious that most of it inspires nothing more than head-bobbing and finger-snapping, instead of, say, a mosh pit. Enter Sax Ruins" - The Onion / A.V. Club

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TRACK LISTING:
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1) Vrresto
2) Refusal Fossil
3) Quopern
4) Blimmguass
5) Lariko Shodel
6) Warrido
7) Del Fanci Kant
8) Bighead
9) Zwimbarrac Khafzavrapp

BONUS TRACKS
(included on the CD / Ultimate Edition & as a free download in the LP):
10) improvisation 1
11) improvisation 2
12) Improvisation 3
13) improvisation 4

Preview MP3: Refusal Fossil
Mail Orders: SKiN GRAFT Records PAYPAL SHOP

STRANGULATED BEATOFFS "The Beatoffs"
(aka the White Album) LP / CD / ULTIMATE EDITION

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LINE UP:
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Stan Seitrich: guitar, vocals, drums
Fritz Noble: guitar, vocals,
------------------drums, bass, moog

Additional Musicians:
Jim Broyles: bass on Don’t Let Me Down
Wings Schwarz: additional vocals

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ONE-SHEET

In honor of the band's 25th anniversary, SKiN GRAFT unearths "The Beatoffs White Album”, the lost debut LP from Strangulated Beatoffs.

"Today, I don’t think people can accurately understand the cultural void that was the suburban Midwest in the early 1980s. No internet. No email. No cell phones. No social networking. Shit, there wasn’t even cable in 1983." - Joe / Last Days Of Man On Earth

In 1984, Fritz Noble was performing in “White Suburban Youth” the faster, snottier act that would later evolve into Ultraman, St. Louis most commercially viable punk-rock band. Meanwhile guitarist Stan Seitrich and cohorts formed Drunks With Guns in opposition to the fast-louder-faster punk mantra and slowed the whole works down to a crawl, driving three chords into a primal relentless pound, years before the Melvins, Mudhoney and Sub Pop took the sound to the bank.

Drunks With Guns imploded in 1987 and Seitrich teamed with Noble to form Strangulated Beatoffs, picking up where Drunks left off, but going even further out. The Beatoffs would drive the riff to its logical extreme starting with their debut 7” single “Shake Your Dick”, ultimately reducing their music even further on the “Days of Our Lives” LP (newly re-relesed by SKiN GRAFT Records), and then refining their sound by devolving into a series of loops as on their breakthrough “self-titled” album also known as “Beating Off All Over The World”.

But “Days Of Our Lives” was not the Strangulated Beatoffs true first LP. In 1988, the Beatoffs embarked on recording their debut LP, consisting entirely of Beatles covers. Tapes of the session were lost and Chopper Records, the label responsible for releasing the Drunks With Guns LP, was able to salvage four of the songs which appeared as the band's second 7”, “The Beatoffs”.

Now, a quarter century after it was recorded, Strangulated Beatoffs debut long-player has surfaced, bathed in tape-hiss, beer and tongue-in-cheek misanthropy. While some songs would be at home on Sub Pop a few years later, others anticipate the sound Drag City became renowned for in the 90's. Beatles standards like “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" fit shockingly well into the Beatoffs' oeuvre, while songs like “Norwegian Wood”, “Ticket To Ride” and “Don't Let Me Down” take on new layers of meaning under the Beatoffs watch - and their cover of George Harrisions' “Savoy Truffle” sounds like a lost Drunks With Guns track with a tanging snare, vitriolic vocals and Seitrich's head-crushing sludge guitar.

Recorded 1989 in St. Louis, Missouri and mastered by Mark Richardson in 2013.
All Songs written by J. Lennon and P. McCartney, except Savoy Truffle by G. Harrison.

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CLIFF NOTES:
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o Recommended if you like: The Beatles, Drunks With Guns, Mudhoney, Palace, Shit and Shine, Cows, Current 93, Smog, Melvins, Plastic Ono Band, Brainbombs, Throbbing Gristle, Sebadoh, Sightings, Whitehouse

o Strangulated Beatoffs "lost" debut LP recently discovered - released a quarter of a century after it was recorded

o Includes Stan Seitrich and Jim Broyles of the original Drunks With Guns

o All songs originally performed by the Beatles and licensed from the rightsholders specifically for this release

o Recorded 1989 and mastered in 2013. All Songs written by J. Lennon & P. McCartney, except Savoy Truffle by G. Harrison

o Strangulated Beatoffs are true originals.

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PRESS QUOTES:
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o Here are a pair of musicians, Stan Seitrich and Fritz Noble, who have made a career out of living at home with their mothers, smoking pot, and playing hockey, while getting together at odd intervals to play around with guitars, samples and percussion loops. - Last FM

o Tom Smith writes: "From an early draft of a review of 1998’s brilliant "Strangulated Beatoffs": Dignity is the enemy. At least of the "rock" part of rock (and "rock" for this humble truth serum guzzler encompasses every extant sonic particle -- from Anthony Braxton’s time-compressed home recordings of the turbid fizz of a terrarium lamp to those dusty Menudo posters you’ve lodged between your Air and Gomez albums). And you can just tell that Stan Seitrich and his worm-riddled compatriots in Strangulated Beatoffs bid a not-too-weepy adieu to dignity a long, long time ago. They’re braver than you, you see." - Blastitude

o Not many bands manage to perform live once in ten years, and then entertain their audience with a video tape of dancing monkeys for two thirds of the show, and retain their fanbase. Yet, this and other similar stunts seem to have the adverse effect in Strangulated Beatoffs’ case. - Last Sigh

o Strangulated Beatoffs "s/t" aka "Beating Off All Over The World" - Best Albums of the '90's / Listology

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TRACK LISTING:
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1) I Am The Walrus
2) Norwegian Wood
3) Ticket To Ride
4) Rocky Raccoon
5) Don't Let Me Down
6) I'm So Tired
7) Savoy Truffle
8) You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)
9) Dear Prudence
10) Happiness Is A Warm Gun / Her Majesty...

Preview MP3: Savoy Truffle
Mail Orders: SKiN GRAFT Records PAYPAL SHOP

Click HERE for MORENEWS ( ! )

ALSO OUT NOW:

STRANGULATED BEATOFFS CD	U.S. MAPLE DIECUT METAL LP	U.S. MAPLE NON DIECUT LP

U.S. MAPLE CD / LP	SKiN GRAFT LOGO 2-SIDED T-SHIRT	ARAB ON RADAR LP / MOD CD

ATHLETIC AUTOMATON LP / MOD CD	YOWIE LP / MOD CD	LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS LP / MOD CD

CHROME JACKSON LP / MOD CD	DOOMSDAY STUDENT LP / MOD CD	XADDAX LP / MOD CD

PRE EP / MOD CD	KOENJIHYAKKEI LIVE DVD	RUINS ALONE LP / CD

		------------------------------- LINE UP: ------------------------------- Tatsuya Yoshida: drums, percussion Ryoko Ono: alto, baritone & soprano sax, flute Recorded in Koenji & Nagoya between December 2012 and August 2013 -------------------------------
ONE-SHEET