GSR004: Negative Standards - I-V 10"

Greetings once again from sunny and occasionally tear-gassy Oakland, CA!

We’re extremely excited to announce that GSR 004 is ready for consumption: Negative Standards’ punishing I-V EP pressed onto the blackest vinyl. These already pummeling recordings have been given new layers of sonic depth and total soul krush by Dan Randall of Mammoth Sound Mastering.

In order to make this possible, we are extremely grateful to our collaborators, fellow labels Halo of Flies and Cop Grave Records. Cut into 10’’ of vinyl, the release features re-scaled art from the original cassette version, a 10x10 insert/poster, and a download card. 

With a new full-length out on Germany’s Vendetta Records, Negative Standards is all set to embark on a full tour of the U.S. and the Autonomous Nation of Quebec. To that end, we’ll be closing down the GSR distro for the next month and half or so and taking our wares on the road. You can purchase the I-V 10” from us at these shows, or if you just can’t wait to mail order these, they’ll be available from Halo of Flies while we’re indisposed.


Negative Standards US/Quebec Tour 2012

May 5 - Oakland, CA @ Sugar Mountain, 2515 San Pablo w/ Burmese,
Bruxers, A.C. Way, Hesitation Wounds.
May 8 - Reno, NV @ Holland Project w/ Criminal Code, Pissmixer, Fathoms.
May 9 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Boing! Collective w/ All Systems Fail,
The Relief Society, Society Miscall, Filthlord.
May 10 - Denver, CO @ Rhinoceropolis w/ Damaru, Reproacher, Dripfed.
May 11 - Omaha, NE @ The Sandbox w/ Kills & Thrills, Kublai Khan,
Bruja, Grimer, Flies @ the Sandbox.
May 12 - Minneapolis, MN @ The House of Lard w/ Indulge, Cokskar, and
Brain Tumors.
May 13 - Milwaukee, WI @ Creem City Collective w/ Protestant,
Sacrificial Massacre, Gnarrenschiff.
May 14 - Chicago, IL @ TBA w/ Canadian Rifle, Thieves, Calendar Boys.
May 15 - Cleveland, OH @ Now That's Class! w/ Tragedy, Lucha Eternal, Dismal.
May 16 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Roboto Project w/ Bacchus (Ireland),
Torch Runner, Pray for Teeth.
May 17 - Washington, DC @ Ras Hall, 4809 Georgia Ave. NW w/ Good Luck,
Spoonboy, Hop Along, Sundials.
May 18 - New Brunswick, NJ @ Ray Cappo's Cantina
May 19 - Brooklyn, NY @ Stolen Sleeves Collective, 538 Johnson Avenue
w/ Anasazi, No Sir I Won't, Sad Boys, Zatsuon.
May 20 - Northhampton, MA @ VFW Florence, 18 Meadow Street w/ Warrior
Kids (France), MFP.
May 21 - Montreal, QC @ Death Church w/ Æsahættr, Xothugua, Sand Witch.
May 22 - Portland, ME @ 442 St. John St w/ The Piper and the Salami,
The Correspondences.
May 23 - Boston, MA @ Whacky Kastle w/ Vaccine, VYGR, Nailed Shut.
May 24 - New Haven, CT @ TBA w/ Escalators.
May 25 - Philadelphia, PA @ Cloud City w/ Bacchus (Ireland), Torch
Runner, Hazards, War Emblem.
May 26 - Baltimore, MD @ TBA
May 27 - Asheville, NC @ The Get Down!
May 28 - Atlanta, GA @ Wonderroot Collective
May 29 - New Orleans, LA @ Hey Cafe w/ Mauser, Post-Teens, Mystic Inane.
May 30 - Houston, TX @ Vinyl Junkie w/ Napalm Raid, Sixbrewbantha.
May 31 - Austin, TX @ Chaos in Tejas (TBA)
June 1 - Austin, TX @ Chaos in Tejas (TBA)
June 2 - Austin, TX @ Chaos in Tejas (TBA)
June 3 - Austin, TX @ Chaos in Tejas (TBA)
June 4 - El Paso, TX @ The Horizon Club w/ Røsenkøpf.
June 5 - Phoenix, AZ @ TBA
June 6 - Los Angeles, CA @ McWorld, 5011 W. Adams Blvd.
June 7 - San Francisco, CA @ TBA

New Zines in the Zine Distro

--READ SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T SUCK--

GSR has a couple new additions to our zine and book distro! In addition to still hawking our selections from Little Black Cart (http://www.littleblackcart.com/), we're excited to feature No Thanks #7 and Overdosing In Republican World #1.


No Thanks comes from Mike Thrashberg, former member of Slave Revolt, and features an interview with Lebenden Toten along with lots of great music writing that foregrounds the personal/subjective realities of growing up a suburban punk nerd.


OIRW comes from Kevin Failure/Pink Reason and combines dark retrospective on a life marked by drugs, depression, and punk rock with thoughtful features on bands and artists whose creativity is too often uncharted by the cannons of the mainstream and self-proclaimed "underground".

We're asking $4.50ppd for Overdosing... and will be selling No Thanks in person for a donation of your choice.

Special thanks to Joe Figs for hookin' it up.

Swamp Witch's 'Gnosis' is SOLD OUT

You read right, all our copies of Swamp Witch's debut 'Gnosis' CS are either gone or spoken for. If you've already got an order in and we haven't said anything to you, assume you'll be getting what you ordered. Otherwise, many thanks to everyone who picked up a copy and of course to the mighty Swamp Witch.

The above video is from last week's show at Oakland's First Church of the Buzzard where GSR comrades Swamp Witch and Negative Standards were joined by Portland's Folivore, New Jersey's Planning for Burial and some surprise jump-on sets from Mortuous, Theories, and Transient. All in all it was an evening of total, excessive heaviness and a communal celebration of sharing in these experiences of aural and spiritual punishment.

Stay tuned for more Bay Area brutality and, somewhere out there, a forthcoming second press of 'Gnosis' to spare the snoozers the shame of completely losing.

GSR 003: Swamp Witch - Gnosis

The wait is over; let the weight fall: Swamp Witch's mighty Gnosis EP is now available on cassette from GSR. Swamp Witch, whose members come from Oakland and California's Central Valley, have been steadily building the ranks of their burgeoning doom cult in recent months, gathering worshipers in a stream of smoke-choked live rites that recall the hedonistic frenzy of Ancient Greek mystery religions. Alongside modern doom lynchpins Corrupted, Moss, and Noothgrush, Swamp Witch tap into the warped legacy of psychedelic and progressive music, from classic groups Flower Traveling Band and King Crimson to contemporary explorers such as SubArachnoid Space. These influences fuse into a dense entanglement of trance-inducing riffs that spiral downwards before crumbling into murky, bongwater-black sludge. Greg Wilkinson of Earhammer Studios once again applies his metallurgical skill to these enigmatic recordings, a meeting of minds (and amps) whose resulting heaviness has rarely been paralleled within the confines of Earth's atmosphere.

In addition, for those of you who have always felt that metal simply does not "slap" enough, the b-side contains a recording exclusive to this release: the entirety of the Gnosis EP, chopped and screwed by Houston's legendary DJ Dreamz. While any attempt at the fusion of doom and hip-hop will quite rightly raise a red flag for discerning listeners, a closer look (and listen) reveals numerous common threads linking these seemingly disparate sonic movements: an emphasis on thick, bass-heavy production, the cultivation of slowness for slowness' sake, and an unapologetic devotion to the use of mind-bending drugs for the cultivation of higher planes of consciousness. Simply flip the tape, light a blunt, and celebrate the memory of the late DJ Screw the way he would have wanted it: with disgusting, detuned doom.

We are offering these tapes for $6 PPD, contact us at gayscientistrecs@gmail.com for distro pricing and international shipping rates. You can stream all three tracks below along with the chopped and screwed version of Novem, and we are also offering the entire A-side of the tape as a free 192kbps MP3 download here.

Gnosis by SwampWitch

Negative Standards Cassette EP Out NOW

We over here at the Gay Scientist HQ are extremely excited to announce the release of GSR 002: Negative Standards' "I-V" EP, which is available in the form of kvltgasm-inducing hand-numbered cassettes AS OF RIGHT NOW. The going rate of $6 ppd will land you with your very own copy of this bafflingly enormous onslaught of d-beat mayhem, and dripping with the most thick and putrid sludge. Featuring members of Acts of Sedition and the late Kentucky Fried Doom, Negative Standards has been keeping their aural offensive at a sinister simmer over that past few months, perfecting the minutae of their profoundly heavy hardcore punk stylings in their Oakland, CA lair. Speed-loving doom fans and hardcore heathens with the burning desire for an ear-ripping facemelt will only pass this one up on pain of shameful death. Recorded with Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios.

TO ORDER: Email us at gayscientistrecs@gmail.com and we'll set your order up. We accept Paypal or, if you're too much of a luddite for that sort of thing, you can send well-concealed cash to an address that will be provided to you upon ordering.

And do cruise on over to check out our co-releasers Five-Ten Tapes for some truly top-shelf punk cassette offerings.

Until you get your hands on one of these, we've deigned to provide you with one of the five tracks of the EP to keep the palm-sweat and shakes at bay 'til your package arrives. Enjoy.

Negative Standards - V

GSR 001: Ensorcelor-Urarctica Begins

We over here at the Gay Scientist Recordings HQ are sacrificing goats and shotgunning mead in a frenzied melee of excitement at the release of our very first release: the US edition of the very first offering from Ensorcelor, some of Montreal's finest artisans of blackened, crusty doom. Entitled "Urarctica Begins," this cassette contains three epic forays into the yawning ominousness that is the unfolding of the cosmos, the all-encompassing fecundity and brutality of timeless cycles of birth and death. Creating this dark and massive atmosphere, Ensorcelor's music is at once sparse and crushing. Long, deliberate explorations of atmospheric drones and haunting, distant melodies morph patiently into the heaviest of metals. It is in these sections that Ensorcelor stakes their claim as doom megaliths, with pounding drums and throat-ripping vo-kills interlocking with a thick, ominous fog of complex riffage to create something unusually melodic and evocative, yet undeniably heavy. This release is the most complete example available in the US of Ensorcelor's truly awesome ability to fuse the apocalyptic and visceral atmospherics of black metal with doom's epic enormity, and the result is not to be missed.

We're unbelievably psyched to be releasing this tape and want you to have your very own copy! Cassettes are $6PPD in the US, and come with a legitimately gnarly Ensorcelor poster, whose design you can see in the picture above. If you want this totally kvlt ass shiznit, send us an email at gayscientistrecs@gmail.com so we can figure out shipping costs and a payment method (we do paypal, checks, and well-concealed cash) to get this soul-rippingly brutal tape into your hands as soon as possible.

While we hope to have future GSR releases available for free download, we're not doing that for this release because the venerable imprint Alien8 Recordings is selling digital copies of Urarctica Begins on their site. You can also try before you buy right here on the GSR website by listening to the streams below. Then you can come back when you want to listen again, and then break down and buy the tape...right? Anyway, you'll want to keep checking back because exciting things are going on over here in GSR land...hawt new releases, the first batch of distro titles, stickers and buttons, and a whole table full of rad shit for sale on a table at a Bay Area diy show near you!


01 A Crown of Smoke on the Brow of the Earth

02 Sleep Forever in the Brine

03 This Even Doom

GSR 000: Gorekraken Bongdirge

GREETINGS DIS-EASED HORDES!!

We at Gay Scientist are proud to make available our pre-first release: The Gorekraken Bongdirge cassette split between Sea Legs and Kentucky Fried Doom. Originally self-released by the bands, GSR is in possession of the last 20 existing copies of this document of the Middletown Doom Explosion, which can be yours for a mere $3 a pop.

Spring 2008 saw a short but powerful explosion of doom metal in the city of Middletown, CT. Experts continue to disagree about what caused so many of the city's young residents to translate the frustration of post-industrial, quasi-suburban isolation and boredom into crushing, depressive riffage, but bands like Bright, Kentucky Fried Doom, and Sea Legs stand as a testament to a springtime of melted faces in central Connecticut. Gorekraken Bongdirge is a split that documents the latter two, now defunct bands. Fans of classic, stoned-out sludge will feel right at home with Sea Legs' marriage of massive-yet-groovy stoner riffage to the heavy, soul-crushing sludge. Those with more avant-garde tastes will probably gravitate towards the flip-side: KFD's droning doom attack with amp stacks buttressed by the interminable roar of contact-mic'ed food frying live in an actual deep fryer. While unlike KFD's audiences you will not be fed pieces of fried tofu and sweet potato, you will feel the heat, grease, and crushing heaviness of both bands that scarred the soil of Connecticut just a couple short years ago. Do enjoy.

Samples:

KFD - Captain Canola

Sea Legs - Box Canyon


Want to try before you buy? Head on over here for a free audio download!

And don't forget to keep it here for the soon-to-be-released GSR 001: Urarctica Begins. This glacial crush of sci-fi influenced blackened doom from Montreal slayers Ensorcelor is gonna be a truly brutal inauguration of the Gay Scientist catalog. And, if you're too stoned to remember this (or you're just friendly) go ahead and FOLLOW US!