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Ecstatic

COP KILLERS, THE - S/T

"Ecstatic presents a reissue of The Cop Killers' self-titled album, originally issued in 1982. A genuine holy grail of Italian post-industrial music, The Cop Killers' sole, eponymous tape is remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time via Alessio Natalizia's Ecstatic label. Fetching triple figures on the second hand market (there's a copy on Discogs presently for £300) this is an indispensable slice of '80s Europe's underground experimental rhizome. An important release for Ecstatic and one very close to their heart, The Cop Killers was originally released on the legendary Trax label and features the industrial power trio of Trax co-founder Vittore Baroni and label regular Daniele Ciullini assisted by UK's Mark A. Phillips (Five Times of Dust) in supposing a sci-fi narrative set in a not-so-distant future society. While clearly drawing influence and literary license from classic sci-fi by OrwellRay Bradbury, and William Burroughs, the trio also take cues from the not-so-distant history of Italian fascism to offer a subtly coded and subversive warning against right-wing ideologies. In the process The Cop Killers distinguished themselves by preferring to plants seeds of hope amid the rubble of their peers nihilistic/apocalyptic visions, implicitly turning the album into a sort of "pacifist parable". The political aspect wouldn't be half as crucial without the music, though. A coarse blend of Italian-accented English vox with backing tracks ranging from jaunty synth figures to cloven drum machine malfunctions and noisier wig-outs, it was mixed on a dual cassette deck and mixer from numerous tapes in just over 90 minutes, and successfully carries the narrative and its message to the point it's become such a sought-after classic - not just for its obscurity, but also its charged energy, a condensation of candescent anger focused into a pointedly oblique yet smartly allegorical condemnation of fascism. Baroni: "As a music journalist and fan of radical and avant-garde audio researches, at the start of the '80s I was becoming increasingly bored by the mannerism of so many industrial and noise bands, and also annoyed by their gratuitous and stereotyped use of images of death, Nazism, war, with titles and texts soaked in right-wing ideologies. I wanted to produce an antibody to this depressive trend, with seeds of hope well concealed under a nihilistic-apocalyptic "industrial" camouflage." Mastered by Matt Colton." - Ecstatic.
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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.
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