Carbon Bands:

 
Ada le O
Andy Gilmore
Asthmatic
Autumn in Halifax
Chad Oliveiri
Crush the Junta
Deciduous vs Conifer
Entente Cordiale
Finkbeiner
Hilkka
Hinkley
Joe+N
John Charlton
Kelli Shay Hicks
Nōh
Pengo
SHED
Sheet
SQ
Transcendental Manship Highway
Tumul
Tuurd

Crush the Junta

Stats:

Birth: June 18, 2005
Members: Joe Tunis, Chris Reeg, Dennis Mariano

Contact:

joe@carbonrecords.com
website: Crush the Junta website

Bio:

Crush the Junta is a trio featuring Dennis Mariano of Tiger Cried Beef and Hungness, Chris Reeg of Blood and Bone Orchestra, The Years, Ada le O and Entente Cordiale and Joe Tunis of Joe+N, Ada le O, Entente Cordiale, Tuurd, SQ and formerly of Pengo and Hilkka (he also runs Carbon Records). the three play a variety of instruments, but mainly stick to drums, synth/electronics/bass and guitar respectively. this music is usually heavy and loud, hints of metal/stoner-rock/heavy-psych. recent recordings have ventured into more varied realms. (banner image by Andy Gilmore)

Releases (9):


MySpace:
www.myspace.com/crushthejunta

Upcoming Shows (1):

Past Shows (16):

Media:




  • Title:2008_08_23_Day-Tour_CTJ (part 1)
    Description: Crush the Junta at Infinity Park, on the 9th Annual Joe+N Day-Tour, Rochester, NY on August 23, 2008
    Watch Full Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtGQ29s6_KM

  • Title:2008_08_23_Day-Tour_CTJ (part 2)
    Description: Crush the Junta at Infinity Park, on the 9th Annual Joe+N Day-Tour, Rochester, NY on August 23, 2008
    Watch Full Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx6oVtMcX2k

Related Reviews (7):

Crucial Blast
RELEASE: lord of the trees
The experimental noise/drone scene that revolves around Rochester's Carbon Records has produced a very small but exciting crop of heavy free-rock groups like Stone Baby, Crush The Junta and Entente Cordiale, and I've become a pretty big fan of all of them. This little scene is as incestuous as these kinds of insular communities usually are, with just a handful of bands swapping members back and forth and forming into different permutations of one core sound, which in this case is a kind of burly, guitar-based brand of improvisational riff-ooze that takes the New Zealand free-rock sound of the Dead C and Gate and pumps it full of volume and testosterone and crushing distortion. Transcendental Manship Highway is the latest project to grow off of the Carbon/Rochester free-skuzz trunk, and it's pretty heavy stuff. Featuring members of Crush The Junta and Stone Baby, TMH go for the sludgy, improvised heaviosity shared with Crush The Junta, but the half-hour track that makes up this debut disc is much more free and trippy. Sprawling metallic sludge riffage goes off in twenty directions at once, the guitarists grinding away at thick droning powerchords over a battery of pouding, somewhat tribal sounding percussion. The riffage weaves its way through a dense fog of swirling feedback, black plumes of amplifier smoke and formless guitar solos that race skyward and send off fiery sparks and chunks of melody; halfway through the track, the music dissolves into this crushing wall of blackened amp drone teeming with extreme wah-pedal abuse and reverb and cymbal noise that stretches out for several minutes, until the band crashes back in, krautrock drums pulsing deep underneath the layers of delayed vocals and blackened shrieking and feedback. Formless and massive, feedback is the focus and TMH spit out monolithic gobs of the stuff across this set, and deliver a thunderous sludge-drone blast that sounds like the loudest sections of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless being blasted at full volume over another sound system spinning Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper. You can smell the amplifier smoke all over this. Even the disc itself, painted silver with a weird bubbling texture across it's surface, looks like it has been in the presence of a powerful heat source. The disc comes in a full color ardstock folder with nice wintery photography of frost-covered woodlands, which ties in nicely with the group's bleak, blasted tribal psych sludge

Crucial Blast
RELEASE: our lungs are bleeding, but we keep breathing
When it comes to delicate, beautifully constructed handmade CD-Rs of crazed improv-noise and droning, rumbling free-rock, the Carbon Records label out of Rochester is one of the coolest. We've been carrying their heavier titles for years and some of the more recent stuff that the label has been putting out (Entente Cordiale, Crush The Junta) has been really massive in a Dead C-on-steroids, buzzing amp-noise and spontaneous riff-mangle sort of way, and every one of these CDs and CD-Rs looks amazing. This split release is the latest from Carbon, a two-disc set that features a different 3" CD-R from the Rochester bands Entenete Cordiale and Stone Baby, and both of 'em deliver about twenty-some odd minutes of dark, shadowy free-sludge/psych/drone that hits the spot.
The first disc is from the mysterious Stone Baby, who I'd never heard of before picking this up, but who craft these really dark and creepy free-drone ambient scrapescapes. Their twenty minute disc features the three-part "Silicosis Suite", which begins with echoing plucked strings of some sort looped over what sounds like a violin being slowly played and a dark expanse of shimmering ambience and distant, pulsing tympani-like thuds. The piece slowly becomes more detailed as creepy distorted voices, warbling electronic melodies and heavy, Earth-esque dronemetal guitars begin to appear, the latter being a slow rumbling cloud of looped amp-crunch that hovers over everything like a toxic thundercloud. Things become heavier and darker as moaning choral voices and some really depressing violin melodies rise to the surface, and the distorted guitar textures swell in volume, sometimes forming into a murky droning riff. The third and final part of the suite drops the distorted guitars and has processed violin weeping over waves of blackened droning drift. Imagine a doped-up Tony Conrad playing with doom-psych basement trogs Robedoor and yer almost there.
Moving on to the Entente Cordiale disc, we get a single twenty two minute track called "96/89", an epic piece of dark free-drone-rock that starts off with softly rising swells of low-end feedback and a softly plucked melody, simple and pretty, played over and over. Droning bass notes and scraping guitar strings drift around as the playing slowly builds steam and the volume gradually rises, and as the melody and chords start to change, the sound moves from airy prettiness to darker shadows of buzzing bassy rumbling and droning strings that seem to slip in and out of tune. The sound melts and distends, turning sickly as all semblance of melody evaporates leaving only the nauseaous warbling feedback and atonal humming of guitar strings. But then it all transforms again in the last eight minutes when a simple tribal-type drumbeat enters and another melody appears, a basic, catchy indie rock hook on one of the guitars that kinda sounds like Sebadoh or something, played for a couple of minutes over the murky tom-tom beats and then swamped by waves of loud amplifier feedback and guitar noise. Definitely poppy by Entente Cordiale standards, but still in the vein of their dark Dead C brand of free-noise-rock jamming.
Amazing packaging as always...this set comes packaged in a brown kraft gift box with full color artwork glued to the front, the two mildly spray-painted discs enclosed inside with an insert card, and tied together with a thick piece of twine. Limited to 100 copies.

Crucial Blast
RELEASE: the disappeared
The Rochester, NY free-sludge trio Crush The Junta first came to my attention last year with their crusher of a debut, the Curse Of Abraham CDR on Carbon. Featuring members of Entente Cordiale, Blood And Bone Orchestra, SQ, Pengo, and Hilkka and taking huge open chord riffs and syrupy, slow moving tempos and using them as the foundation for extended improvised jams that are filled with heavily textured feedback and amplifier noise, Crush The Junta's sound fell somewhere in between the Grey Daturas and Gravitar at their most psychedelic and the austere slowcore of Codeine. Massive and expansive, the trio uses synthesizer and electronic drones along with their core drums/guitar/bass lineup, their music is almost entirely instrumental (save for the occasional howl of ecstasy rising up above the dirge), and their first 'real' CD release The Disappeared further expands upon their trippy metallic jamming. "The Mist Rolls In" opens the album with a series of thu nderous, distorted open chords and saw toothed drone, somewhat Western in feel, almost like a rougher version of the newer Earth stuff crossed with Codeine's Barely Real. But the following track "Skull Against Stone" shifts the album into the abstract, a loop of guitar noise spinning off above guitar noise and buzzing cables and an quasi-krautrock beat until it starts to sound like a riff from the The Who stuck on repeat. "Steps Of The Temple" is one of the only tracks to feature any sort of vocal accompaniment, a few lines of spoken word poetry delivered over slow, sludgy dirge riffing. The rest of the album explores similiar territory, huge blown out psych-sludge jams, thick amplifier drones, pretty indie rock tunes played at glacial tempo, all of it surrounded by a vague sense of political unrest and dystopia. Check 'em out if you're a fan of high energy, distortion laden improv/psych/dirge rock like Heavy Winged, Alasehir, and Grey Daturas. Packaged in a cardsto ck jacket that comes in a heavy plastic mylar sleeve.

Foxy Digitalis
RELEASE: the curse of abraham
Made up of two tracks “Curse of Abraham” is the first full length CDR by Crush the Junta; a trio that bring forth a blend of pounding doom-inflected sludge with hints of math and indie rock weaving their way in and out of the mix. To lay it out simply this trio really knows how to lay it all flat out and show no mercy with their sonic assault.

The first track starts out with some guitar swells and ambient drum noises slowly but surely coalescing into a lumbering monster. What really sets this track ablaze is the rumbling undertones of Chris Reeg’s stand-up bass, as it forms a foundation for the drums and guitar to play over as well as maintaining its own directional clarity. As the first track trudges forward a sudden silence is reached until a quickly strummed guitar moves in and out and then explodes into more extreme heaviness. But the real clincher comes in the third movement of this track where the guitar becomes the rhythmic foundation, laying it down with a jazz infused math-rock swing, while the bass and drums find their way in and out of its simple repetition.

The second track, another live effort continues on with similar energies, beginning a bit more melancholy than before, invoking the desert airs of Earth’s latest forays. Slowly the beast reappears moving forward with its single-minded energy to destroy, littered with some melodic leads that soon explode into all out chaos only to recover and find a new path to trod down, before making a half tempo return to the main riff that got the set going in the first place and eventual return to a (slow) full speed accompanied by the faintly heard cries of someone screaming vocals over the din and finally chaos takes us out. 9/10 -- Cory Card (26 September, 2007) - Cory Card

Crucial Blast
RELEASE: the recognition of common interests
Rochester free-rockers Entente Cordiale return with their first "real" CD after a couple of CD-R releases that were well received over here at Crucial Blast HQ. Exploring themes of alliance and collaboration, Entente Cordiale (named after a historical agreement created between the English and the French at the dawn of the 20th century) craft a nearly 50-minute jam that while broken up into seperate tracks, seems to flow together as one huge organic piece. At first, this feels like the quieter side of members Joe Tunis and Chris Reeg, whose other band Crush The Junta just came out with a hefty new CD-R of improvised free-rock sludge that buried me beneath a heavy blanket of distorted goop. Here they are joined by Will Veeder (also of Hinkley, Torpedoes, and Muler), and the first track, "An UNderstanding Is Met", is a fragile, drifting tangle of folky guitar strum and clanging pipe chimes, almost like the Dead C lazily playing on the backporch of some country farm, idyllic and folky and dreamy. But when the second track "Roots" emerges, the guitars take on a darker hue, the strings suddenly detuning and coiling up like serpents, scraping fretboard growls sliding across the neck of the guitars, fluttering heavy synthesizer electronics buzzing ominously beneath Entente Cordiale's deformed blues licks and buzzing amplifiers. The following tracks continue in a similiar vein, sparse guitar lines repeated ad infinitum over buzzing synths and droning melodica, distorted mangled riffage clawing it's way through clouds of thick feedback, quietly pretty passages of amp hum and simple strummed chords, occasionally dipping into pools of Earth-y guitar rumble and raucous skree. It's the last five minutes of the album, however, on the last track "How Long Can It Hold", where the band cuts loose and whips up a scorching tempest of noisy guitar racket and reverberating speaker float. While not as "heavy" as their previous CD-Rs, The Recognition Of Common Interests still occupies that hazy realm between Iversen/Bjerga's trippy guitar-based improv, The Dead C at their most formless, and occasionally, the deep rumble of Earth's 2. Simple but effective packaging in a heavy mylar sleeve that holds the disc in a professionally printed card sleeve.

Crucial Blast
RELEASE: the curse of abraham
Just found out about this new trio from Rochester, NY, which includes Joe Tunis somewhere in it's lineup. When the fuck does this guy sleep? In addition to running the massive avant-noise label and mailorder Carbon, doing one-day tours where he performs short, fast sets of his solo experimental electronics at various locations around Rochester, collaborating with a million different artists, and playing in the amp-cranking free-rock unit Entente Cordiale, Tunis apparently also operates this killer group alongside Dennis Mariano (also of TIger Cried Beef and Hungness) and Chris Reeg (Blood And Bone Orchestra, The Years). Reeg and Tunis are actually both in Entente Cordiale, and that group's hazy, droning noise rock improv is sort of the starting point for what Crush The Junta are doing. But this outfit however definitely gets more raucous, combining formless guitar riffs and feedback, meandering basslines a la The Dead C and likeminded rock deconstructionists, electronic textures, synths, and freeform percussive splat into waves of amorphous rock action that crest with loud and burly bursts of psychedelic sludgery that come close at times to Grey Daturas-levels of sonic muscle. The Curse Of Abraham is one of the group's first recorded works, a document of two live tracks that each toe the twenty-minute mark, and which run the gamut between brooding, pummeling krautrock workouts, spidery meandering math rock jams, and punishing metallic sludge dripping with woozy, detuned guitars and howling screams. One of the heaviest releases from Carbon to date - keep it up, Joe! I'm looking forward to hearing more from this band. The spraypainted disc comes packaged in a hefty, hand-assembled chip-board envelope similiar to that Pengo disc we carried last year, with full color artwork glued to the front and splattered in dual-color paint, with a color insert.

Volcanic Tongue
RELEASE: i don't think the dirt belongs to the grass
Massive, genre-defining 3xCD set packaged in a DVD case with full-colour artwork and full colour card stock insert housed in a natural-colour cotton bag with single-colour ink stamp art/logo and featuring exclusive tracks from a gob-stopping selection of underground players orbiting the Carbon universe. Limited to 500 copies. Tracks from: Aaron Rosenblum, Andy Gilmore, Anla Courtis, Antony Milton, Asthmatic, Autumn In Halifax, Blood and Bone Orchestra, Blood Stereo, Carlos Giffoni, Carpentry, Caustic Solution, Chad Oliveiri, Chris Reeg, Cock ESP, Coffee, Craig Colorusso, Crawlspace, Crush The Junta, The Davenport Family, Dead Machines, Entente Cordiale, Foot and Mouth Disease, G55, Gastric Female Reflex, Heathen Prayers, Hilkka, Hinkley, Howard Stelzer, Irene Moon, Joe+N, John Charlton, Justice Yeldman, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Lunt, Mike Shiflet, Nancy Garcia, Neil Campbell, Pengo, Phroq, Pumice, Rainbeaux, Sindre Bjerga, Sindre Bjerga/Jan-M Iversen, Sq, Taiwan Deth, Taurpis Tula, The Body, The North Sea, Thurston Moore and Tinnitustimulus. Highly recommended.