KRIVCHENIA, JAMES - Blood Karaoke

Reading Group

KRIVCHENIA, JAMES - Blood Karaoke

"James Krivchenia (b. Minnesota, 1988) is a many-armed sculptor of music. Known primarily for his roles in Big Thief (as drummer and producer), Mega Bog (as longtime engineer, co-producer and percussionist) and his various other groups and session work (ranging from the experimental improvisation of Causings to the likes of Taylor Swift) Krivchenia has been quietly building strange musical worlds in parallel with his own experimental records. Krivchenia’s solo works are tableaus of his conceptual particle colliders: interlocking idea and process, of determinism and chance, of abstraction and concreteness.

His previous solo works, You’re Useless, I Love You (Reading Group, 2016), No Comment (Left Door Tapes, 2018), and A New Found Relaxation (House Arrest, 2020) show an increasing clarity of intentional framing while never sacrificing the material joy of making music. You’re Useless decoded the pop palate through a mutation of the sounds for a strangely unsettling sugar rush; No Comment worked through heavier concepts, culling from the audio of body camera footage of gun skirmishes from wars around the world uploaded to the internet; and Relaxation was composed from over hundreds of tiny fragments of “internet spa radio” processed through Krivchenia’s magic box of sonic transformations.

Blood Karaoke has perhaps the widest palette of any of Krivchenia’s work to date. Driving through a near-constant barrage of sound and information, Blood passes through zones of hardcore techno, poptimistic kitsch cruisers, glitched out quasi-grooves, and deeply weird YouTube ambience. Composed mostly from hundreds of tiny samples of unwatched YouTube videos found through random online generators (think Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations, video game walkthroughs, old local news clips, etc), mangled midi (fed into Krivchenia’s rig of synthesizers and pedals) and then meticulously layered and collaged, Blood often sounds like an experiment in accepting the disparate sounds and feelings of our world, online and otherwise, and trying to find the poetry contained within the chaos.

Bold combinations abound and the result ends up being a baffling translation. As if an alien were composing a mixtape as a misguided offering of understanding to the humans of 2022. The laughter it provokes is as much an effect of the juxtapositions of its musical worlds as from the strangely uncanny seriousness of AI-generated poetry––we laugh
because we’re not sure what’s real. The driving, skittering pulse, the crooked arrow through time, at least, seems real. Beyond that, much of the most memorable fused signifiers flash up and scatter before they can be fully grasped or located. A private dance record appropriate to the chaotic, stimulant, glorious weirdness of the world." - Reading Group.

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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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