Audio samples and downloads of most Yik Yak releases can be found here.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz / Curtains - Make Us Two Crayons on the Floor CD (Yik Yak 001) Split CD coinciding with the arrival of legendary Japanese underground music collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz, who have come to the United States for the first time to tour the west coast with California music maestros the Curtains (members of Deerhoof, Open City). Features recordings from Maher's highly-acclaimed performance at Le Weekend in Stirling, Scotland 2002. Out of Print

Whysp LP (Love Tape Love/Yik Yak 002) Hugh & Josh play the Renaissance Faire, as these former Lowdown members befriend gnomes and play some impish faerie-and-unicorn folk inspired by the Incredible String Band and Forest. Second edition of 300. Recorded by Phil Elvrum. Out of Print

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Faux Départ CD (Yik Yak 003) Originally released as a limited edition souvenir of their 2003 west coast tour, Faux Départ remains one of the strongest releases in the Maher Shalal Hash Baz catalog. Recorded at Dub Narcotic with help from an all-star cast featuring Greg Saunier (Deerhoof) on synthesizer, Chris Cohen (ex-Deerhoof, Curtains) on guitar, Arrington De Dionyso (Old Time Relijun) on bass clarinet, McCloud Zicmuse (Le Ton Mité) on bassoon, and Andrew Maxwell (Open City) on drums, Faux Départ captures the Japanese shambolic-pop legends performing material inspired by the palm trees in L.A., seals & seagulls in Olympia and the long trek up Route 5, as well as thunderstorms, clouds, wind and lightning. $5

Le Ton Mité - We Need To Grow To Giant Size CD (Yik Yak 004/Zicmuse) Baptized in the flames of the music world as openers for the likes of Deerhoof, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and Calvin Johnson, Le Ton Mités "off hand influences simmer amid a mire of Morse-code tones resulting in the spirit of the guitar being thrown to the ground if not the actual instrument itself" (LA Weekly). Based in Olympia, Washington, Le Ton Mité takes its cues from broken folk to reinvent the wheels of rock. The trio of vocalists, duo of guitars and solo keyboard play songs based on group improvization and the boiled down compositions of ringleader McCloud Zicmuse. We Need to Grow to Giant Size documents the seed from which the band has indeed grown. This recording is a limited edition of 500 numbered copies in handmade letterpressed packaging designed and printed by Zicmuse. $5

Comets on Fire / Burning Star Core LP (Yik Yak 005) Comets on Fire meet Burning Star Core and his familiar [Hair Police] in a rehearsal space and get buckwild recording two long sides of noise-damaged psychedelia. One side is funkier than the other, and apparently a "roadhouse" number got nixed. What remains is pure expando-band blown-jam sorcery. Shirts were shed, inhibitions forgotten, magic was made. Limited edition pressing packaged in sweet screened sleeves. Out of Print

OCS - 3 LP (Yik Yak 006) The third album from this two-piece acoustic guitar project led by John Dwyer (Coachwhips, Pink & Brown). Given the nature of Dwyer's other pursuits, the muffled, far-off quality of 3 is a departure, and while some tracks are minimalist beauties, the majority are full of sharp ideas drenched in an intoxicating distance. Nicely packaged with hand-printed sleeves. Out of Print

Comets on Fire / Burning Star Core CDR (Yik Yak 007) Limited edition 20+minute CDR featuring another extended improv jam from the session that spawned the Comets on Fire/Burning Star Core LP. Most copies went to the bands but I have a small number of them available for sale here. Out of Print

Badgerlore - Stories For Owls LP (Yik Yak 008) The second full-length release from psychedelic bread bakers and bird whisperers Badgerlore-- represented on this release by beard-core ambassadors Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance, Comets On Fire), Tom Carter (Charalambides), Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans), and Rob Fisk (7 Year Rabbit Cycle, ex-Deerhoof)-- Stories For Owls features six beautifully lush, organic pieces that rise and fall with the group's broke-down, burned-up improv and the interplay of piano, vocals, and dual guitars. The music is organized around the conceptual theme of birds constructing nests, and each track explores this idea differently. Stories For Owls also showcases the talents of two newcomers; Tom Carter, whose playing seems beamed in from some entirely off-kilter universe; and Pete Swanson, who by grabbing and processing live sound, both in real time and through tape-delay, gives the already rickety skeletons of these songs an even greater fragility and tenderness. Beautiful and devastating. Out of Print

No Doctors - T-Bone 7" (Yik Yak 009) "Another well-smoked slab of glorious "what the fuck?" by visionary caterwaulers of chaos and ex-Chicago blues cruisers, No Doctors. Equal parts backwards boogie and straight skullfucking confusion, T-Bone Pt. 1 stomps one through hard and thick, slinging broken barn-boned riffs that collide head on with sputtering cross-eyed measures of brilliance and back again. T-Bone Pt. 2 ensues after a quick flip to side B as you and your square-minded notions are slapped straight in the face with a wet hose spewing talkin' box (!) snarl and ultimately delivers your blown mind on a broken piece of hobo-stew stained porcelain." - Noel Von Harmonson $5 (domestic shipping included)

NVH / Chasny - Plays the Book of Revelations LP (Yik Yak 010) Vinyl debut of the long anticipated LP by Noel Von Harmonson (Comets on Fire, NVH) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets On Fire). Guitar and electronics are deposited in a sacrificial heap at the gates of hell, sickly intertwined and indistinguishable. Bathed in the blood of apocalyptic alchemy, this caterwauling creature rears two heads and screams one wrathful scream. Recorded to two-track tape in San Francisco over the winter of 2005 and mastered by Hans Gruesel at the Krankenkabinet; features deluxe, hand screened black-on-black multipanel packaging. Limited to 666 copies. Out Of Print

Tori Kudo Neti Pot (Yik Yak 011) Primarily known as the chief songwriter/guitarist for Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tori Kudo rounds out his living as a ceramicist. Here he has created a limited edition of 25 Neti pots, each one unique and hand stamped with a catalog number and Tori's name. $30 (domestic shipping included)

Common Eider King Eider - How to Build a Cabin CD (Yik Yak 012) With raw viola, haunting vocals, and noise guitar, Rob Fisk (Badgerlore, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, ex-Deerhoof) has created an exquisite album that sounds perfectly at home in the natural world between dusk and dawn. Packaged in a hand-sewn book of drawings by Fisk entitled How to Build a Cabin. $10

Robert Martin - Long Goodbye LP (Yik Yak 013) "I first heard Robert Martin's Long Goodbye while surrounded by friends. Even over the din of voices rallying to quantify, qualify, contain, bag and tag what we were all hearing, I was sure I'd never heard anything quite like it. Long Goodbye opens with some broken acoustic noodling that sounds like a Derek Bailey slow motion replay, over which a double-tracked cry of voices transmits mournfully, meticulously, and with an unnerving sense of purpose. From there it gets stranger and more beautiful, as Martin sings with unique abandon - is there such a thing as sad joy? - often wordlessly, frequently incoherently. The tunefulness of Martin's achingly beautiful voice sits in sharp contrast to the crudely played guitar, and sets Martin apart from his lamentably more 'in the know' contemporaries. There are few touchstones for the magic contained herein - Bobb Trimble at his most wounded, Tony Caro and John's All On The First Day LP, the earliest blues recordings of Guitar Roberts - but Martin's intensely private music is all his own. And now, ours to share." - James Jackson Toth $10

Hototogisu + Burning Star Core LP (Yik Yak 014) "Hototogisu -- the duo of UK experimentalist Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Sunroof et al.) and New York-based-guitarist Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ) -- are all about impact, about taking the physical aspect of sound and hallucinating it to the point of abstraction, so much so, that for all of the complexity of their music, it often sounds like it's standing still, simply hanging in the air and vibrating without anything approaching a 'plot' to bring it to a point. By contrast, Burning Star Core, the trio of drummer Trevor Tremaine, Robert Beatty on electronics (both of whom also play in Hair Police alongside Mike Connelly of Wolf Eyes) and C. Spencer Yeh on violin and electronics, are more overtly propulsive, usurping 'classic' rock form via electronics and drums, but still focused on momentum, on the jam as a form of structural gravity, on the unfolding of action via development over time. This all-improvised studio meeting is the perfect reconciliation of both tendencies, of Hototogisu's obsessive layering of strata after strata of violently-conceived noise and of Burning Star Core's epic, post-Kraut thunder-punk style. Bower has long been on record about his opposition to anything approaching 'dialogue' in improvised music, favoring a senses-devouring simultaneity over anything that might pass for actual exchange, so it's no surprise that there is little on this new record that sounds even close to conventionally-improvised music. Instead, it feels more focused towards the zone where energy begins to spontaneously birth form, where the monomaniacal pursuit of the nowhere zone bears fruit in the shape of a music that transcends its constituent parts while being totally based around -- and rooted in -- the individual response to the moment. BXC play it ginchy and garage-pop right from the start, simultaneously inverting and amplifying Bower and Bassett's vertical constructs with drums that sound like they might have been lifted straight from the most flower-power parts of the Silver Apples' back catalog and bass patterns that are as tactile and rock-anchored as Can's Holger Czukay. To hear Hototogisu's music given this kind of injection of dynamic energy makes them seem more obviously sourced in 'classic' rock music than you might otherwise have guessed, with a dense, implosive sound that feels like a hyper-distilled take on all of rock's most outlaw aspects, the feedback that makes you feel like you could explode in a ball of electricity, the anti-gravity effect of heavy fuzz, the seductive, alien tongues. It's certainly the most 'garage band' side that either of the groups have cut to date, albeit in the form of a Gnostic, post-acid re-think where the vibration is more important than the outer forms, where energized enthusiasm makes for a more fundamental guiding principle than verse/chorus/verse and where the only direction left is out. Which is another way of saying it feels genuinely bad-ass. In an era where even the best groups seem polite, pro, participatory, democratic, this is music that is disregarding in its overwhelming power, exhilarating in its irresponsible spontaneity. And in an underground scene where self-conscious notions of avant-garde and 'free improvisation' have long displaced any concept of an intuitive rocks-off style, well, it feels like a re-connection to the source. So file this one closer to Kill City or Sticky Fingers than Persian Surgery Dervishes or the Black Album and feel the gravity of your whole record collection shift." - Volcanic Tongue Out of Print.

Dylan Shearer - Planted/Plans LP (Yik Yak 015) Beautiful melancholic bedroom-pop informed by west coast composers such as Van Dyke Parks and Harry Partch. A nice follow-up to the Robert Martin LP from another Santa Cruz long-gone. Second edition of 100. Out of Print.

Basshaters - Harsh Lovers Sick Zoo CS (Yik Yak 016) Totally seamless electric/acoustic mindmeld from the duo of Jacob Heule (Ettrick) and Tony Dryer. Double bass, floor tom and cymbals trigger electronics, which are processed to create spontaneous compositions ranging from articulate harsh noise to quiet moments reminiscent of Comus, U.S Maple and Brigitte Fontaine. Out of Print.

Sic Alps / Magik Markers - Tour 12" (Yik Yak 017) Sic Alps give up three tracks with help from Lars Finberg (Intelligence) and Ty Segall, the highlight being a great punched-in guitar solo from Matt Hartman that makes one song reminiscent of a Safe as Milk outtake. Markers show up with a 7ft bass player who throws the band into Guru Guru mode. Great all around. Second edition of 600 with different colored artwork. $11

Tashi Wada - Alignment LP (Yik Yak 018) Yik Yak is proud to present Alignment, the first ever release of music by Tashi Wada, son and collaborator of Yoshi Wada. Alignment pairs the direct and retrograde motions of an eight violin canon in just intonation. The canon gradually cycles through the first 128 pitches of the harmonic series which are transposed into one octave. Marc Sabat plays all eight violin parts, resulting in a true synthesis of vision between the composer and performer. Mastering by Rashad Becker. Design and silk screens by Alan Sherry. Includes a letterpress print of a type drawing by Tashi Wada. Edition of 400. Out of Print.

Patrick Mullins - Don't Go to Sleep LP (Yik Yak 019) When Thee Oh Sees were still OCS, Patrick Mullins was half their sound. After the band expanded to a four piece, changed their name and recorded Sucks Blood, Patrick left San Francisco for the greener pastures of Louisville, Kentucky, where he started working as a bread baker. In his spare time and with his arsenal of field recordings, electronics, musical saw and guitar, he started working on Don’t Go to Sleep, an album of experimental/ambient folk music that expresses his love of Luc Ferrari, folk music and horror movies. Edition of 100. Out of Print

Shipping rates within U.S.: 1-2 LP/CD   $4.00 plus $.50 for each additional LP/CD 1-2 CD        $3.00 plus $.50 for each additional CD All items will be sent USPS media mail. Please contact me via email (yikyakrecs@gmail.com) for International rates. Paypal payments can be made here: Yik Yak P.O. Box 460511 San Francisco, CA 94146-0511