‘Sound collages, bitter laughs, and deranged miniatures based on poetry and percussion recorded in a punk burst, along with field recordings and other oddities.
‘200 copies, screen-printed sleeves, risograph insert.’

His comeback, forty years after Histoire De Melody Nelson, with the same signature mix — Axelrod-style orchestral sensibility and stoner funk-rock framing his own louche vocals, and poeticised and punning verses.

‘A celebration of the ever-expanding and evolving label family, LLI008 comprises an LP, a fifty-odd-page booklet (and eight page photobook and insert), further digital tracks and some web-based stuff contributed by friends new and old from far and wide.’

Half-speed mastering.

Demdike Stare and Andy Votel.

‘Investigations of the secret dialogue between the trickling of pond waters and the faint percussive reverberation of stalactites and stalactites. Rocky sediment played as tubular organs, glockenspiels, xylophones, stone marimbas. Crystalline timbral variations and subtle microtonal passages recall the chimes of Tibetan gongs and bells, the scales of Java and Bali. Amidst muffled pauses and silences, trills and rings, echoes and tremolos, hisses and pops of vibration, Maioli — often responding directly to polyrhythms created by dripping and falling water — builds his most imaginative sound-world.’

Says Maioli: ‘Beginning in 1986, my daughter Luce and I started experimenting with sounds in the spectacular caves of Toirano. We lived in this Ligurian town for three years at the beginning of the 1990s. A total immersion in prehistory. There are traces in the Upper Paleolithic of repeated percussion on stalactites and stalagmites. Not all stalactites and stalagmites make sounds when struck, but some reveal truly extraordinary and incredible sounds, from powerful low gongs to subtle, crystalline sounds. We also recorded (exceptionally) these fantastic sounds in the caves of Borgio Verezzi by hitting the stones directly with our hands or with special clappers so as not to damage them, with the supervision of the speleological guides.’

Electrifying extracts from a Sunday service in the last snake-handling church in the Appalachians: the trance-like rhythms of a demented kind of rockabilly punk, with duelling guitars, concussive trap drums, and possessed, howling vocals.

“I’d sworn to stay far away from the snakes at the service,” recalls the recording engineer, “but instead they were waved in my face as they coiled in the preachers’ hands, and I crouched down at the foot of the altar tending to the equipment. The pastor soon was bitten and blood splattered, pooling on the floor. The female parishioners hurriedly came to wipe up the mess, and it instantly became clear just what the rolls of paper towels stacked on the pulpit had been for. You can actually hear this moment transpire towards the end of the track ‘Don’t Worry It’s Just a Snakebite (What Has Happened to This Generation?)’. The congregation leapt to its feet and a mini mosh-pit formed. The tag-team preachers huffed handkerchiefs soaked in strychnine, as they circled like aggro frontmen and an elderly worshipper held the flame of a candle to her throat, closing her eyes and swaying. The church PA blew out from the screams as a bonnet-wearing senior whacked away at a trap kit that dwarfed her. It was the most metal thing I’d ever seen, rendering Slayer mere kids play.”

‘A psychoacoustic odyssey through the American South, influenced as much by Dock Boggs as by Luc Ferrari. This isn’t ‘avant-folk’ as per, but more expansive avant-garde compositions using components of traditional music as tools for storytelling. There are banjos, but they bounce around the stereo field in hypnotic patterns; there are autoharps, but they’re bowed, left detuned by time and humidity, and augmented with sounds of screeching cicadas.
‘Check out the haunted, ambient interpretation of the murder ballad Omie Wise, featuring fourteen different versions of the song time-stretched and overlaid with pedal steel by Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey. It’s a wild listen!’

Deep-fried rural psychedelia, primitive drum-machine grooves and woozy country-funk — including unlikely covers of The Blackbyrds, Michael Hurley and Jimmy Cliff — by Matt Valentine (MV) and Pat Gubler (PG Six), locked down in Vermont with pals S. Freyer Esq, Jim Bliss, Coot Moon and Carson ‘Smokehound’ Arnold.