Reissue of a bunch of key documents – the Golden Calves Money Band LP and Century Band 12”  – from this pre-Wooden Wand/Vanishing Voice freakout jam band led by Mr James Toth and released in the mid-90s. The sound has that classically fractured post-ESP Disk Siltbreeze feel fully down, with Skip Spence style oblivion ballads further dislocated by almost Shadow Ring-styled idiot avant and drug-dazzled cultic jam blasts ala early Tower Recordings. The spirit of Jandek hovers over the bulk of the recording and Toth makes expressive use of Sterling Smith’s barbed guitar sonorities while orbiting the kind of cultic downer ballads that he would base much of the Vanishing Voice material around. A beautiful sound from a beautiful time. Comes with some hilarious in-depth liners where Toth fesses up to the multiple inspirations behind these still-magical recordings. If you’ve never heard these before then it functions as a key to a whole lot of what was to come later. Highly recommended.

Major album from The Vanishing Voice minus Wooden Wand and Satya Sai in an edition of 200 copies with gold silkscreened sleeves. Starts off in a beautifully evocative almost Mirror-esque glassy trance style before levitating through screaming radio waves ala MEV into something quite unlike anything else in their back catalogue, something that more closely resembles the more Bower-reverent moments of Pete Nolan's early Spectre Flux material. Either way, it sounds fantastic and might just be the best release by this cabal to date. OOP.

Limited edition 7 inch that bundles a hypnotic country dirge from James Toth aka Wooden Wand and a psychedelic nursery rhyme from Keith Wood aka Hush Arbors. Cool pic features both of our heroes wife swappin' and leerin'.

From alla the pre-release noise surrounding this new album from Wooden Wand you might've been led to think that was gonna be some massive misstep into the tepid waters of airbrushed mainstream oblivion for Mr James Toth. But then that's the problem with press releases; send em out to a bunch of jobbing journos and they'll swallow the program without even tasting the meat. And if any of those duds had bothered actually listening to the rec they'd have figured out that alla that 'big-time' production hoo-haa was just another red herring. Fact is James And The Quiet sounds a lot like the last few Wooden Wand albums and feels more like a further refining of the less improvisatory road that he has been heading along since The Vanishing Voice pretty much set out on their own. Which means it's a fucking doozy. Sure it has a slightly more 'produced' feel, but all that really means is that James's voice has more space to hypnotise and the arrangements seem to sit a little neater around all the kinda serpentine shapes that his quixotic song-writing logic has always seemed to demand. In fact, if anything, this album feels even more stripped back than previous entries, with James and Jessica's vocals working malevolent harmonic smoke rings around blasted country ballads with the kind of supernatural grace that will almost have you reaching for Chris D's Divine Horseman side in order to compare notes. Anyone who has caught him live recently or kept up with the archival From The Road series will recognise a bunch of the songs here but honestly, they never sounded better. So, it's another record from James, and another fucking great one. Simple as that. So can the fucking press release. Recommended.

Third limited-edition CD-R (run of only 150 copies) from this new project led by James Toth aka Wooden Wand and featuring Jessica Toth and original Golden Calves vocalist Max Mev Wicker. Following in the wake of their shelved second album, Jazz Improve, Contemporary Suicide Music feels more like the repository for alla Toth’s more outré sonic strategies, almost as a companion to his more classic song-based work as Wooden Wand. Here there’s a whole bunch of weird, private press style gambits, with tracks that range from devouring, almost Hototogisu-esque dinosaurs-in-the-fog style drones, squiggly early-Tietchens inspired synth magic, instrumentals that sound almost exactly like Department Store Santas playing “That’s Just Fine” by Spacemen 3 and some shredding solo punk guitar. Another highly recommended instalment.

New limited to 150 copies self-released CD-R from this Wooden Wand offshoot featuring James and Jessica Toth (aka Chazz Improv and Norma Bates) and Max Wicker: “Latest and best from this mysterious tribe finds them in full synthesizer horror mode. Taking cues from the soundtracks of John Carpenter, the mutant space techno of Allan Bryant, the time-lapse mesmerism of Robert Fripp, and the intrepid synthesizer experiments of Ruth White, Hot Lead deals in nightmarisharpeggios, shapeshifting noise and ominous melodic variations. Recorded direct to 8 track - no boring, sterile microhouse polish here - and comprised of mostly solo tracks by individual members. Complete with dreamy Sisters of Mercy fanboy cover art.” – MM.

Excellent new release from another solo project of James Jackson Toth/Wooden Wand. This one is dedicated to maximum guitar destruction/amp confusion and sees Toth taking his electric guitar the fuck apart in a way that parallels Mats Gustafsson’s work with the saxophone. Extending the explorations of players like Rudolph Grey, Ray Russell, Donald Miller and Stefan Jaworzyn, this is guitar as maximum sonic disruptor, played like it was the first time he ever encountered it: “Thrash, Jr, named after Houston Mazda (RX-7) Cup driver Thomas Thrash Jr, is yet another guise of James Jackson Toth, and released on Toth's new MAD MONK ANNEX CDR imprint. This racing-themed album comprises three extended pieces of bleak and visceral solo guitar cacophony / catharsis. If Hassara was “boogie,” Thrash, Jr is “bombardment.” From the artist: "Like most American kids my age, my life was changed irrevocably by the music of bands like Courtesy Flush, Army Nightmares, Lil Johnny Eightball & the Secret Society Dildos, and The Canker Sores. This premeditated and unprovoked attack on my electric guitar is in tribute to those bands and their myriad imitators." “Lux Interior” is a duet for raging rainstorm and goat hoof-guitar, “Victory Is Hers” is a naughty little respite of delay blast and Toth’s patented “animal-tapping” fuckitude, and "Militant Walls (Is Poser Noise For Pussy Emo Fags)" finds Toth turning up the gain on his solid state amplifier and proceeding to audibly pull his Stratocaster apart - you can literally hear the entire tremolo system being slowly removed. Ouch! "Makes Rudolph Grey sound like Steve Vai" - William Blake Cobblestone, local television personality. "The best guitar noise album of the year" - The Other Dude in Claudio Two, Claudio Two. Improvised and recorded entirely live over two stormy Nashville nights, with nothing added post production.” – MMA. Limited edition of 150 copies.

Private press album from Mister James Jackson Toth aka Wooden Wand aka Wand. Recorded on the lam downwind of some fairly destructive personal/artistic episodes, rejected by his record company, fuelled by bad blood and mental cobwebs, Born Bad is both the most intimate, the most bloody-minded and the most revelatory album by Toth to date. The sound is very stripped down and lot more countrified than the bulk of his catalogue. Imagine Nicodemus or Jim Collins playing Gram Parsons “Hippie Boy” (reputedly Dylan’s favourite Parsons track), or how about Townes Van Zandt circa the nihilistic/black hole style of “Nothing” given a one-chance live album for Siltbreeze or how about just Dylan circa The Basement Tapes, prowling his Woodstock home with a shotgun while fans creepy-crawl across the roof? Either way this is a stark postcard from the void and won’t stick around for long. Edition of 500 copies, already sold out at source, hand-screened covers, limited numbers available. Recommended.

Excellent collection of demos, home-recordings and out-takes from James Toth, recorded to portastudios between the years 2002-2007. Up-close, intimate atmosphere on this and combined with the quality of Toth's throwaways (which for anyone else would be prima material) this almost has the feel of his Nebrasaka, a series of dark, loner postcards from the other side of America that would bolster and explode traditional country, folk and ballad forms. Excellent. "To quickly address the elephant in the room - certainly, collections of demos, outtakes and home recordings are mostly bogus, but obviously you're reading this, so obviously I've somehow been coerced into releasing this batch of tunes, and you've bought it or stolen it or borrowed it or gotten a promo or whatever, so let's cut to the chase. In my defense, all of the cuts contained herein are 'songs' in the traditional western sense - my experiments in "surf harmonica" and "doom zydeco" will not be chronicled here, deep and plentiful as those archives may be. Everything here was recorded by me on either a Roland BR-8 digital 8-track or it's flashier, more cosmopolitan cousin, the BR- 1600, with incalculable assistance from Jexie Lynn, who accompanies me on many of these songs and who's encouragement and creativity allowed many of them to be. Most of the recordings were done at my then-home in beautiful Knoxville, TN between October 2002 and January of 2007, just prior to the retirement of the Wooden Wand name.  You've already pardoned the narcissism, now pardon the cliche: I stand behind these songs as snapshots and enjoy them despite their many flaws. I hope you do, too." - Wand.

Second limited edition (with slightly different sleeves) of this much-anticipated new private press album from Mister James Jackson Toth aka Wooden Wand aka Wand. Recorded on the lam downwind of some fairly destructive personal/artistic episodes, rejected by his record company, fuelled by bad blood and mental cobwebs, Born Bad is both the most intimate, the most bloody-minded and the most revelatory album by Toth to date. The sound is very stripped down and lot more countrified than the bulk of his catalogue. Imagine Nicodemus or Jim Collins playing Gram Parsons "Hippie Boy" (reputedly Dylan's favourite Parsons track), or how about Townes Van Zandt circa the nihilistic/black hole style of "Nothing" given a one-chance live album for Siltbreeze or how about just Dylan circa The Basement Tapes, prowling his Woodstock home with a shotgun while fans creepy-crawl across the roof? Either way this is a stark postcard from the void and won?t stick around for long. Recommended.

All proceeds from the sale of this release will go to Tom Carter. Read more about the appeal here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/tomcarterappeal

Edition of 500 copies compilation LP with exclusive tracks from Akron/Family, Joanne Robertson & Matthew Ashworth, Wand, Natural Snow Buildings, Married In Berdichev, Moon Duo, The See See and Seadog. Comes with a full colour zine featuring artwork by Jake Blanchard, Pete Fowler, Andrew Rae, Will Sweeney, Sarah King, Olange Gularte, James Trimmer/Mirt and Mat Pringle.

Feral trumpet/drums exchange, torn from the hearts of James Toth aka Wooden Wand and Lucas ‘Bones' Crane. Crane's trumpet playing sounds a little like Cosey Fanni Tutti or Pete Nolan playing Cherry-styled bugle calls and Dixon-spits with a sad, martial force while Toth's drumming style works the kind of horizontal planes previously levelled by Denis Charles into new realms of punk. Free fucking folk. Recommended. Limited edition of 150 copies w/liners by, ulp, Carlos Castaneda...