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No More Unity EP – Summer 2020 vinyl release

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Raccoon Tycoon is proud to announce the vinyl release of Guns N’ Rosa Parks “No More Unity” 7″ EP, available July 1st, 2020.

This 10 song EP of blistering Denver Hardcore has never been issued on vinyl before. Recorded in the summer of 2009 at The Furnace Room in Denver Colorado with Trevor Morris (Hooper, Pink Hawks, Bailer, Pariah Caste, Ross Etherton & The Chariots of Judah) behind the mixing board. Dan Randall from Mammoth Sound in Denver mastered the original tapes for vinyl, Gotta Groove Records in Cleveland Ohio pressed the vinyl during the Coronavirus pandemic where each record was painstakingly wiped down with a 50/50 solution of Clorox and Hydroxychloroquine before being assembled by trained specialists from OSCA wearing hazmat suits. Large carbine rods were used to place the inserts inside the record sleeve to assure the maximum level of safety for our shitworkers. Each sleeve was then wiped with a polyblend fabric that resists bacteria and cat hair, then the fabric was left on the couch where a small dog sat on it. Rest assured, if you purchase one of these records during the pandemic, we want you to know that we did n̶o̶t̶ sneeze into each individual sleeve.

Anyway, this slab of wax is the swan song of GnRP, their final recordings. The record comes with a 32 page booklet filled with lyrics, flyers, photos and ephemera from the Blast-O-Mat era of Denver, roughly 2008-2010. The record is a love letter to Denver and Blast-O-Mat, a place where GnRP played over 25 times. They played so many benefit shows at Blast-O-Mat that they used to joke that they paid for the PA system. At a time when Denver was ripe for something new and the city was still letting letting very small businesses take chances, Blast-O-Mat was a place to call home for everybody in the scene, not just one segment of punk or hardcore. Their booking policies and all ages shows kicked off an explosion of DIY creativity in Denver that the city hadn’t seen since Monkey Mania in the late 1990s.

The band made a demo for No More Unity first – a cassette tape with 13 songs and no lyrics, just a sort of ideal version of how they wanted the song structures to go. Starting in February 2009, the band took over the basement of a West Denver home and starting hashing out the details of what would become their final record. The demo tape gave the band a chance to hammer out the songs and fine tune them with timing, solos, background vocals and phrasing. When you really take the time to study your music up close with a microscope, it makes a better final product. In the band’s past, their methods of recording were somewhat questionable, so in a way, they were eager to work in a “real studio” with somebody who really knew what they were doing.

In June 2009, when the band entered the studio in South Denver they had a really good idea of what they wanted their EP to sound like. Each person in the band brought Trevor a 7″ EP to reflect how they wanted the record to sound. Somebody brought the DRI “Violent Pacification” EP for it’s pounding rhythm section, AJ brought the Cause For Alarm 7″ on R Radical Records for it’s raw guitar sound that is right up front in the mix. Trevor was the first person to record GnRP – up until that point in the band’s career they had recorded, mixed and engineered almost all of their recorded output entirely themselves. So, with some hesitation, the band agreed to submit to Trevor and his reindeer games, you know, things like proper mic placement, doing overdubs, fixing mistakes, actually backing up your work. Fancy things that GnRP were not accustomed to. But, luckily, the band and Trevor found a way to work together to create this EP and take the ideas out of their brains and put them onto vinyl.

Recording No More Unity was a project unlike the construction of a massive dam. It took a lot of work and a lot of hours, and fortunately, some of those hours were documented on film. GnRP allowed a small film crew to capture them rehearsing the record at their practice space in West Denver as well as at The Furnace Room during various stages of making the record. There is a lot of film footage from GnRP and specifically this era but the problem is, all of it is on 8MM tapes. The tapes have to be transferred to digital and cleaned up in Final Cut Pro and edited etc, so it’s a huge project that will take years. But one day, we’ll have No More Unity – the mini documentary. Me personally, I can’t wait to see Seneca Flowers eating a sandwich and Mark falling down the stairs in HD 800 Gigbit 5G Pixels. Fingers crossed for that.

No More Unity 7″ will be available through distro and stores – we are working on that as we type. Updates of where to find the record soon!

No More Unity EP

  1. Blast-Beat Doldrums
  2. Glass Bottom Boat
  3. Hungry Hungry Hippocrites
  4. Dick Cheney Beyond Thunderdome
  5. Diminishing
  6. Shitwolf
  7. Retarded Potential
  8. Chain Of Command
  9. No More Unity I
  10. No More Unity II

April 11th at Club Scum

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apr11

April 11th a buncha bands played at Club Scum and I took a few pictures. Club Scum was on Brighton Blvd, they had a handful of shows and then the building got demolished.

n1.jpgnervous2.jpgThe Nervous

goon.jpggoon2.jpgGoon

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Product Lust

Loud Slow Rules! Mixtape Vol. 2

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RC019

Loud Slow Rules! Raccoon Tycoon Mixtape Vol. 2 is now available right here!

 

Loud Slow Rules is a compilation that defies both logic and reason. Some may ask – why does it exist? I’m not sure I can provide an answer. Much like Shakespeare’s classic play “All’s Well That Ends Well”, this is part comedy, part tragedy. It defies classification or reason.

This compilation is a focused study of an error I made in Audacity back around Christmas time. While tinkering with the tempo setting I accidentally slowed down a project I was working on and laughed at the results. Some days later I wondered what would happen if I applied my slowdown technique to popular music.

Before we dissect punk rock with the power of modern computing we should stop to ask ourselves an important question. How valuable are the tenets of punk rock and hardcore? How important is it to be loud and fast in 2015? Sometimes I hear new bands that are supposedly “fast” and they turn out to be tepid and slow. Likewise, sometimes I hear new bands that are not very loud, even though they may be carrying the banner of some long forgotten DIY band every night. The structures and formatting found in punk and hardcore are rigid, unchanging principles that were written before many of us were born. They tell us that it is important to be both fast and loud but are these superlatives mutually exclusive?

Surprisingly, detuned guitars from 1981 sound very similar to the heavy metal of today. Here, The Effigies sound like the latest Satyricon record. Washington DC hardcore pioneers United Mutation slowed down 33% sounds like Exhumed. The gigantic rhythmic tempo at the heart of 45 Grave’s “Wax” is uncovered for all to see when its speed is diminished.

When you slow down the breakneck hardcore tempos, strange things start to happen. Here, the Sex Pistols wall of guitars sounds like Carcass. The frantic guitar work of The Germs becomes unwound when the tempo is frayed and distorted to a crawl – turning “Richie Dagger’s Crime” into what could be an unreleased Fu Manchu song. The Angry Samoans and the Dead Kennedys both sound like the beginning of a campy monster cartoon when reduced to by twenty-five percent. The strange wobbly melody at the center of the Beastie Boys “Riot Fight” is heightened when the speed is reduced by 39 percent. Lyle Preslar’s guitar on this Minor Threat classic is transformed into a lush detuned wall-of-noise. Some of these songs may even surprise you. I was amazed when I first heard the tortured, pulsating guitar tone that is buried underneath The Randoms “Let’s Get Rid Of NY”.

But the real reason I chose to slow down these classics isn’t to mock them – it’s to reveal how fragile the composition is. After hearing these songs for twenty or thirty years it becomes easy to forget that Punk wasn’t well produced or over-directed by studio executives in satin baseball jackets. These recordings are raw – they have cracks and flaws in them and those pronounced areas of awesomeness become clearer when we hear them at a different speed.

  1. X-Ray Spex – Oh Bondage Up Yours!
  2. The Germs – Richie Dagger’s Crime
  3. Sex Pistols – Bodies
  4. Crass – Darling
  5. Angry Samoans – Lights Out
  6. The Clash – Lost In The Supermarket
  7. Descendents – I Like Food
  8. Dead Boys – Sonic Reducer
  9. Randoms – Let’s Get Rid Of NY
  10. Dead Kennedys – Religious Vomit
  11. Agent Orange – Bloodstains
  12. United Mutation – Own Way
  13. The Effigies – Haunted Town
  14. Wasted Youth – Fuck Authority
  15. Ramones – Beat On The Brat
  16. Beastie Boys – Riot Fight
  17. 45 Grave – Wax
  18. Gorilla Biscuits – New Direction
  19. Minor Threat – Steppin’ Stone
  20. Side By Side – Backfire
  21. The Damned – Neat Neat Neat
  22. Youth Of Today – Slow Down
  23. X-Ray Spex – I Live Off You
  24. The Faith – Slow Down

Raccoon Tycoon Records R019