Weasel Walter's ugEXPLODE Records hit the scene in 1991, built upon his wiley notion that extreme metal, noise rock and free jazz could exist peacefully on one man's mail-order imprint. Albert Ayler, Captain Beefheart, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, The Residents, Deicide, Cecil Taylor, Whitehouse, Iannis Xenakis and Black Flag all contributed to the catalog's formation.
Even better? Walter paid every act--fairly and on time, no less--for each and every release.
With his penchant for non-commercialized sounds (despite the haters' credo that the very idea of recording is commerce in and of itself), ugEXPLODE was the primary outlet for Walter's brutal "no wave" outfit The Flying Luttenbachers.
After the label dissolved in 2013, Walter set up a Bandcamp page to digi-release some of ugEXPLODE's classic titles: The Flying Luttenbachers' Trauma, Walter's own Firestorm and David Buddin's sorely underappreciated Canticles for Electronic Music.
As expected, some of the bitterness of the label's collapse made its way into this recent disclaimer from Walter:
"Please remember that there was cause and effect in the end of the label operations. People were decreasingly paying for the releases, which meant I was not able to recoup the budgets, or budget for new releases. This is a buyer's market and the market decided that ugEXPLODE was no longer economically viable.
Please feel free to enjoy the free streams of the material here (or purchase them if you like), but posit that the reason why there will be no more releases is largely because not enough people supported the label financially. Life will go on--there's plenty of music in the world to listen to. This chapter is over and others will begin."
Currently, ugEXPLODE's Bandcamp is streaming Normal Love's Survival Tricks, available in the 1s & 0s format of your choice for a paltry $7.
So, quit dilly-dallying and lap up the discog from that other side of the '90s before it all goes down, never to be heard again.
As an added bonus, Weasel Walter will perform with Retrovirus (Bob Bert, Tim Dahl and the incorrigible Lydia Lunch) at the West Village dwelling (Le) Poisson Rouge on Tuesday, February 25.
Showtime is 10 p.m. And since this is the only Retrovirus gig in America on the books for this year, you won't want to miss it, punk.
Treat yourself, indeed.
