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CD
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TCD 009CD
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2006 release. The first studio album proper from Magik Markers since their incendiary Ecstatic Peace (Thurston Moore's imprint) debut of early 2005. Magik Markers started in Budapest in 1999. Elisa Ambrogio told Peter Nolan that she was a Smith College student who would one day write the great American novel. Pete was sold, so he uprooted from Michigan and began making noise music in the basement of Elisa's grandparents home in Hartford CT...
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CD
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DC 482CD
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"Stop right there, hands in the air! If you want to know what Magik Markers think is good for you, you'll Surrender to the Fantasy. For this long-desired alpus, they've been working in threes and stuff. Triangles. The hermetic trifecta of knowledge, Christ and the two thieves, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the original tagline of the Markers' symbol: '3 down, no to go.' Meaning, these three get it and literally no one else needs to, 'cept the record-buying public, tra la la, ha ha ha ha. STTF (never too soon for the acronym, kids) kicks off with that hoary old trope of punk records, the song about the Chesapeake Valley Runoff and the mating cycle of crabs. After that kind of in-your-face Attenborough-core, where could the record go? Nowhere but everywhere, all the creepy outposts of American detritus from other times, when hitchhiking and h-bombs were still hot, viable new ideas, and on beyond zed-bra. 'Acts of Desperation' is Shaggs-meets-Stones color commentary on driveway laying, your mom's Merit Ultra-Light 100's and the lengths we'll go to filch a feel of some arcane notion of greatness. Here Pete 'koan on loan' Nolan has nixed his kit and Straps Field Handily into a galvanic psych lead. No lame attempt to smoke nutmeg for this jam; it scored real weed."
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LP
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DC 482LP
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7"
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DC 573EP
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"What a single! Magik Markers put the 'sense-and-sensibility' back into 'sensuality' with 'Ice Skater,' which radiates the mystic allure and cool remove of the best of them pretzel people 'n cold-water dancers. There's always been that starched-collar, puritanical undercarriage to the MM vibe, right? Well here, it melts all over you with a winsome melody, bloodless disco beat and nu-romance synths blearing in pastel flares behind. This ain't your father's Magik Markers -- and now that you're ten, you can make up your own mind about what Magik Markers u want in ur life, LOL. Course, knowing the gutter-obsessional bent of Magik Markers, maybe 'Ice Skater' is just about blowing meth too, right? The B-side balances the new Markers scale with a blast of freejams based on the chords of... well, no chords."
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CD
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DC 376CD
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"Oh, Magik Markers -- you dirty fuckers! You look like a reasonably intelligent young woman and man -- perhaps a bit intense, but who isn't in these end times? Then the needle drops and you're amok, dusting us from the git-go, wild-eyed in a china shop where stop keeps meaning more. Ah, if it were only music -- but it would appear you've rethought that too. And would it kill you to crack a smile? When an album begins with a song called 'Risperdal,' one should assume a mind-and-body-slamming forty-five minutes or so are underway. And 'one' wouldn't be wrong, dickhead. Sure, Balf Quarry has moody space in its soul, melodies whether stretched over rock, ululating rhythm, chimes 'n piano and/or wah-wah. Regardless of the configuration, Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan are locked together, beating it out, listening to feeling the sound of their earth quake. And slicing through all the atmosphere, Elisa's voice is a spear of light, splashes of mud, an acid purple flashback. The Balf Quarry libretto reads like an inner monologue of some poor bastard from The Stand: desperate and vengeful musings from the head of a witness to and survivor of an apocalypse, in a world they never made, dreaming helplessly of the demons out west. 'Safe before their life sets in' might mean hope in this landscape. The world's not broken -- people ruin it every time. Working with engineer Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective, Sir Richard Bishop), Magik Markers have captured a lot of different moods and twitches on Balf Quarry. Tremoring mid-rhythms form the body, with a couple showers of hardcore, high flying free-duo style and several clinking music boxes of woe as well. On slower tunes, the mass of brooding guitar tone generated is Elisa's signature, a carving all of her own. Fills, licks and other touches move the songs a broken arm's length away from a fundament of chaos and horror. When colors actually match and you have grey music for grey days, it's great -- but what about grey music for cherry red lava days, or rainbow sounds arcing over six months of darkness? Anything goes -- and just your luck, Magik Markers have brought anything with them on Balf Quarry -- a multicolored projectile of vomit you can sing along to! If psychosis is your thing, Balf Quarry is like a jukebox just for you. The only thing it's missing is a brick attached to the CD to facilitate throwing it through your window! No, we're not talking about you, asshole. This is the royal 'you' -- the 'you' of all Magik Markers fandom, the 'you' of anyone with ears and the guts for this shit. Wot fun! Prepare for the birth of the second sun, y'all."
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LP
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DC 376LP
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LP version; printed innersleeve with lyrics.
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CD
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E#100F
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"When confronted with an example of magnificence in nature, such as a waterfall, Jane Goodall reported that the chimpanzees she observed were captivated, as if in awe of the beauty of the world. On BOSS, the Magik Markers have tried to capture the chimps' awe. A formality and restraint the Markers have never exerted on their previously recorded material is present on BOSS. Now the Markers are Jainists, with their mouths masked so as to not inhale even one tiny insect, here pursuing the killer gentle with a vengeance. Recorded in the cavernous dark of Echo Canyon West, with producer Lee Ranaldo working the boards like a diviner, BOSS documents the Markers with a previously unheard fidelity and orchestration. Idiosyncratic song structure and melodies interspersed with a destructive drum stomp are reminiscent of the early electrified blues of Junior Kimbrough, or the black hole rhythms of Kousokuya. Mixing a gentle vulnerability with a winded egomania, the Markers have always had a musical tunnel vision; BOSS is that vision made manifest. The tug of war the Markers enact, the way they are fully prepared to start yanking their world apart as they find themselves losing their place in, makes moot possibilities of greatness or mediocrity. It makes them unapologetic soothsayers with their ears pressed to the ground, waiting for footsteps. With Peter Nolan, we finally hear what Lou Reed would have sounded like had he sallied with the drums instead of getting seduced by the easy praise of front man status. Like Rashid Ali squeezed into the Teutonic leather pants of Faust, Nolan drums like there are hell hounds at his heels but he just can't be bothered. Here both laconic and frenzied, Nolan's drumming arms reach out like an octopus': tickling the ivories, humming the organ and blasting taps on some kind of endtime trumpet. As a pianist, Nolan reminds us that the piano is a percussive, beating out the whoomp of some old war dance, a bare foot-fall rhythm of fighters to battle and the heavy hands of a whiskey burlesque in the afternoon. Nolan is easy to underestimate, but finally, here is high fidelity record of the strange soul of one of America's most natural and quizzical musical minds."
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