MovieJawn Collaboration

This month we’re super excited to work with Philly friends MovieJawn, a gorgeous quarterly movie magazine in print and online. Joe has been reviewing films for the magazine for a few years now, and before we knew it a collaboration of another kind was in the works.

This year, we’ll partner with MovieJawn by producing a record to accompany each of its four issues. The first issue of 2025 is called Silence Please! and is dedicated to silent films, so we solicited music that plays with that theme.

On one side of the 6-inch record is a song by Corey J. Bewer, a Seattle-based musician who makes these amazing original scores for silent films. (We know Corey through Spencer Moody; he contributed one of his scores to Midnight Service, the fundraiser compilation Joe organized for the Mütter Museum back in 2020.) For Silence Please!, Corey contributed the song “The Cat and the Canary,” which was inspired by the 1939 film of the same name. On the flip side is “nosferatuUuUu,” a super fun, spooky dark synth track by iggy and izzy of starmouth. After having seen and loved Robert Eggers’ lush new Nosferatu, we couldn’t resist.

You can pre-order the issue and the record on MovieJawn’s website now. Orders ship in mid-March.

a-knife made an album!

We’re very excited over here today. Our rudely-named noise band, assholeknife, is having a proper album release!

The good people at Naan cül Press have created a gorgeous cassette of Wakes Up, an album that features 10 new songs. Katie Haegele, Chris Baldys, and Joseph Carlough made the music spontaneously using several methods and instruments, including a Yamaha CS Reface Virtual Analog Synthesizer, audio samples from old videos and films, the MM-XX T-APE stereophonic bytebeat generator, Ethereal Dialpad for Android, and Joe’s human voice. As they always are, it was a cathartic, invigorating, messy, and surprisingly harmonious session. Noise music is good for the soul.

The cassette will debut this weekend at the Jersey City Art Book Fair. Thank you to Matt and Kaitie at Naan cül for all that you do! We’re so proud of this beautiful object and the music that’s on it—please consider buying a copy from them, either in person or through the press’s website. We will have our own copies for sale soon, too. Here’s a sneak peek at the cassette (photos courtesy of Naan cül):

And here’s a video Joe made for the song “wake up (earth rise) + breakbeat remix”:

Found Footage Festival

We debuted a new dead-media project at the Found Footage Festival on Saturday: VHS to Vinyl. To make these bootleg records, Joe rips old movies from VHS tapes, creates “soundtracks” comprised of music and audio snippets from the films, then cuts them to vinyl. The Festival was an ideal place to launch the project. We felt at home with the other vendors, who had also made art inspired by their favorite movies. (And lots of them were selling VHS tapes, too—Joe made sure to pick up a few for future soundtracks, including The Dark Crystal.) We’d like to thank Tim at Tapes from the Crypt for hosting the vendors!

Enjoy this short film Joe made visiting the other vendors at the Found Footage Festival with his PXL-2000 pixelvision Video Camera.

Consonant Collection explores the other vendors at the Found Footage Festival’s 20th Anniversary celebration. Shot in glorious Pixelvision using a modified PXL-2000.

Artist Residency at Cloud Croft Studios

A few weeks ago, just days after the election, Joe and I (Katie) packed up our mobile record lathe and drove up to Cloud Croft Studios in New York state’s beautiful Southern Tier. Months earlier we were invited by the good people at the Tioga Arts Council to put on a record cutting event for the community and spend the rest of the week in residence at Cloud Croft. What a gift this was. We were already looking forward to spending time and creating art in this gorgeous rural place, but after getting sideswiped by the reality of the condition our country is in, the experience felt less like something we wanted and more like something we needed.

As planned, Joe and I spent the week tromping around the woods and fields of Cloud Croft’s 90-acre property, recording natural sounds and making music out of and in response to them. It was very peaceful and restorative to do this. During our time there we also connected with the people from the local community who came out to our record event and to the artist talk we gave on our last evening there. They made us feel welcome and supported; that human connection was as healing as the connection we made with the natural world.

Some kind of Yeti we saw in the woods

Casting a shadow

The view from the converted barn we stayed in

Getting cozy in the barn

The old schoolhouse at Cloud Croft where we did our events

Good advice

Our lathe set-up in the schoolhouse

Meeting people and making records

We created a few songs during our stay and plan to create a set of songs here at home that act as a kind of response to that music. Look for that record in January! Thank you to Suzy and Mike of Cloud Croft Studios and Christina from the Tioga Arts Council for inviting and hosting us, and thanks to our dear buddy Eric, who does one of our all-time favorite zines, Real Tioga, for recommending us for the residency.

The "Hour of Blue Sky" recordings

Last week we had the total pleasure of hosting two friends from Australia, Vanessa and Simon. Vanessa Berry is a writer and artist from Sydney who Katie met through zine-making, years ago now. All this time they’ve been pen-pals, trading letters and zines through the mail and collaborating on a few projects, too. This was the first time they met in person, and they got along famously, as you can see.

Katie and Vanessa looking witchy on the morning of EastFalls Fest

We all did a creative project together as well, making this visit something of a writing residency. Vanessa and Katie took a long walk one afternoon, letting their conversation wander. Afterward they chose four topics they’d covered—blue sky, aunts, nests, and falling leaves—and wrote short meditations on them. Then we made a recording of K & V reading their pieces and right away began cutting the recordings onto vinyl. It was so gratifying to conceive of and completely execute this project over the course of Vanessa and Simon’s visit; the resulting records (and accompanying zines) stand on their own as objects of literary interest, and they also serve a kind of artifact of this brief moment in time. We feel lucky to have had the chance to do this.

The record and zine, which is called “Hour of Blue Sky,” will debut at the Philly Zine Fest next week on Saturday, November 9th. Please consider stopping by to check out this popular event, which has grown even larger in recent years. There will be lots of interesting work to check out.

Vanessa, Katie, and Joe cutting the records and making sleeves for them

Happy Lathe-versary to us!

It’s been exactly one year since Joe acquired his first record lathe and learned to cut records on it. In that time he’s gotten a few more lathes and has also taught me (Katie) how to cut records, and together we’ve made a lot of them. It’s been quite the journey so far. To honor the occasion I asked Joe some questions about all this, for your edification and our amusement. Enjoy!

Katie: When did you first find out about and get involved with lathe-cut records?

Joe: Well, I had my first record made in 2012. It was a 5” square record of my own music called Worry About Your Future. I was a fan of People in a Position to Know Records, and label owner Mike Dixon mentioned in an email that he was now making short run, lathe cut records. I had him first explain what they were, then hired him to make me 50 copies of Worry About Your Future that I funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

Skip ahead a few years and I’m running my own cassette label, This & That Tapes, and making zines for Joyful Noise Records’ bands Tall Tall Trees, Deerhoof, No Joy, and Sound of Ceres, and hear word that they’ve just hired Mike to make a monthly lathe record series for them. He and I reconnected, and it turns out that he’s spent the past decade purchasing old record lathes and mastering how to restore them.

After I had a few disastrous pandemic pressed record releases—one of which, a split I put out with Murder City Devils’ Spencer Moody and Dead Milkmen’s Joe Jack Talcum, took 13 months from the time I submitted it to the time I received the records—I thought it was time to take control of making my own records.

Katie: Mike is the one who taught you how to use a lathe, right? Tell us about what it was like to attend his Lathe Cut Camp!

Joe: He sure was! Mike runs this great weekend-long lathe cutting camp from his studio in Tucson, Arizona. I learned about the history of lathes, what type of machines are in use today, how to use the most popular Presto 6N lathes, and a lot about lathe maintenance and best practices. I flew home from that weekend with my own Presto 6DSP, “The Original Presto Record Lathe.”

Joe with his Presto 6D on its first night at home with us

Mine’s likely from ~1937-1939, and was used in a radio station to record and replay news broadcasts on 16” records. It’s a real beast, you should have seen me wrestling it through the airport on my way back home to Philly! When I got home, I rebuilt the lathe with your help, and the help of Antiquated Future’s Joshua James Amberson, who happened to be staying with us for a few days. Little did we know that in just a year’s time there’d be THREE lathes in this studio!

Katie: I remember that weekend well. It was the start of our lathe adventure! Tell us a little about the other lathes you use.

Joe: Oh boy, you shouldn’t have gotten me started, I can talk about them all day. In March of this year we got our second lathe, a Rek-O-Kut Challenger from ~1947. As you know, we colloquially call that the “Katie Lathe” since that’s the one you use when making records. The ROK is more modern and more compact, probably used to cut test records in studios and for home use. That was was also restored by Mike Dixon, and has a great backstory: it was bought from Sam Phillips Jr., son of Sun Records founder. We don’t know exactly how it was used, but we know it was in his Sun Studios in Memphis in the 60’s, so who knows whose records have been cut on this machine! The third lathe we have is what’s referred to as a “franken-lathe” and it’s my first restoration project: the overhead system is from a 1939 Rek-O-Kut we bought from a nice guy in Pittsburgh, and the original amp and body are from a different ROK Challenger we bought from the RCA Victor headquarters in Camden, NJ. When we went to pick it up, we could hardly believe where we were, but there was a huge stained glass image of Nipper, the dog listening to the gramophone! This one I’m building to be ultra portable to we can cut records on the road, directly from people’s cell phones.

Katie: Once you trained me up on how to cut records we were off and running. We’ve put out a bunch of interesting stuff in the last year. Which projects were the most exciting for you to work on?

Joe: Gosh, it’s hard to pick just one. Here are some of the highlights: in January, we put out a book of my poetry accompanied by a record shaped like a leaf called Dark Nature. I recently put out the self-titled debut album from a jazz supergroup called The Blind Seekers which is phenomenal. But my absolute favorites are the really strange projects, the thing you just couldn’t do with traditional record pressing, like a clear 6” record titled Three Minutes of Philadelphia Gas Works Working Outside My Home Studio, And The Guys Are Doing TV Impersonations which is exactly what it sounds like. And Cats on My Mind, a song I wrote with my friend Chris Baldys to accompany the launch party for your book Cat Party, which we cut onto cat-head-shaped records, complete with whiskers and ears and everything. We're just about to hit our 1,000th record cut, and we’ve had 22 different record release projects in this year alone. It’s so magical to have an idea and then be holding a record of that idea soon afterwards.

Spencer Moody cutting live records with us this summer

Cool old records

Last week Katie braved the heat and visited librarian Dr. Abbie Weil at Swarthmore College’s McCabe Library. What fun: Together Katie and Abbie pulled and listened to poetry records from the library’s amazing spoken word collection. This fall the Consonant Collective will cut records of student poetry for a literature class, and beforehand we will play records from the collection for the students to enjoy. Dorothy Parker, Nikki Giovanni, the Dial-a-Poem project, Allen Ginsberg, Sidney Poitier reading "Poetry of the Black man" in his beautiful voice, Vachel Lindsay (what a character!), Sylvia Plath at Harvard—there is a lot of cool stuff here to inspire the students (and us). Thanks for the experience, Swarthmore!

Reykjavik Art Book Fair

In the latest installment of our ongoing love affair with Iceland, we went back to that incredible country to attend the Reykjavik Art Book Fair, and we had the most beautiful time. Great conversations, tons of interesting work on display, a few pieces of Hjónabandssæla (happy marriage cake) … what more could you want? Here are a few shots of our table and of the other exhibitors in Hafnarhús, the hall where the fair took place at the Reykjavik Museum of Art. Many thanks to Edda, Joe, Agnar, and Einar for organizing the event!

Live record cutting at the Athenaeum

Last week we did our first live event with our Rek-O-Kut Challenger, the ~1950 lathe cutter we use at home to make records. We packed up the machine and all its components and brought it to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, where we made cuts of people’s voices and digital recordings onto records for them to keep. While they waited, the workshop participants created album art :D

The event went pretty smoothly and taught us a lot, and it was lovely to see and share in the participants’ excitement at having their music or voice made into a record in the moment. We hope to do many more of these. Thank you to the Athenaeum for hosting our first one! (Uncredited photos below taken by either Katie or Joe.)

Photo: Alexa Perillo 

Photo: Alexa Perillo 

Photo: Alexa Perillo 

Photo: Lena Tran

Photo: Lena Tran

Mini zine fest at Kelly Writers House

We stopped by a small zine fest yesterday at Kelly Writers House at Penn. It was organized by Kayla Romberger, the instructor of a class called Pixel to Print, and the exhibitors were students who were sharing their zines and prints, likely for the first time. We had fun eating snacks and checking out the work on display (and left a few of our own zines to share).

Katie especially enjoyed the zine “Love,” for which creator Kepler Boonstra made symbols representing several friends and excerpted text conversations with them in which they used the word love. Another favorite is the zine “I Can’t Bake You a Cake But I Can Draw You One” by Yune Kim, which extols the wholesomeness of celebrations that involve decorating and sharing cake. In a different way, this zine is also about love. It has nifty features too, including a sheet of decorations you can cut out and add to one of the cakes, and an envelope pasted to the inside back cover for storing them.

We also love the zine “promises: blue” by annie su, and the quote from it that is photographed below. It reads:

 
“ok! ~ sparkles in eyes ~
we have to do our best to make every
week different so we can slow down time
as much as possible!”
— annie su
 

Highly relatable. Love the Writers House. Great to see what these young folks are bringing to zine culture. Thanks, everybody!

Cat Party! Release Party

Last week Katie announced her new book, Cat Party!, an anthology of stories and art by more than 50 contributors, and Joe made a cat-shaped record with a cat-themed song he and collaborator Chris Baldys wrote for the occasion. Tattooed Mom’s, aka the best bar in the city, was kind enough to host us for a launch party, and a whole bunch of people came out, including several contributors to the book. What a fun time. Thank you for supporting us, everybody!

Zines and Fair Use at Swarthmore College

Yesterday we had the pleasure of leading a zine workshop at McCabe Library at Swarthmore College. Several enthusiastic students came out to work on zines using typewriters, collage, and other methods. In honor of Fair Use Week, we talked about the importance of fair use of intellectual property in creating works of parody and critique, both of which are crucial components of this kind of punk rock self-publishing. Thank you, Swarthmore College and librarians Abbie Weil and Maria Aghazarian for inviting and hosting us!