"Jerman Barnes sounds like a fancy men's shoe brand, but it's actually a duo comprised of two of the American underground's most prolific wanderers -- Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes. Jeph has explored everything from primitively brilliant free jazz with Blowhole to deep electronic explorations under the name Hands To, although in the latter part of the 1990s he shifted his focus to music made with found natural objects. Tim Barnes entered our consciousness as fluent master of experimentally canted percussion before he threw us a curve by joining Matt Valentine's Tower Recordings ensemble and going deep-prole for a while. Regardless, he and Jeph started releasing duo recordings almost 15 years ago, and they all brim with a very specific type of spectral weirdness. The instruments listed in the credits are: metal, bamboo temple blocks, springboard, wood, feathers and electrics. Furthermore the sho is played by Ko Ishikawa. So what about the three horn players pictured on the cover? In fact, they are Alex Bruck, Ramón Del Buey, and Misha Marks. This ensemble is briefly heard as distorted source material on the a-side (a penny to the first listener who finds them), but it turns out for this project they're mostly just dancers who use the horns as props, visually key to the process; aurally, not as much. But as you listen to The Finger'd Remove you'll probably start to wonder, 'Hey, where are the instruments not listed? Because surely that's the sound of a dead horse full of bees being dragged down gravel road. Or, wow -- a Texas rain-toilet.' Right? Well, Jeph and Tim aren't saying, but maybe it's just that there are instruments too complicated to notate. Dig? The wild collection of sounds here are designed to live primarily in your imagination. Do you really need to name all that stuff? Our suspicion is you'll be just fine if you lay back, close your eyes, and open your mind to the infinite possibilities suggested here. Words are just too drab to fully capture it all." - Byron Coley.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
