Mason Jones's San Francisco label, begun as Charnel House in 1988, which spent the 1990s putting American noise and psychedelia next to the Japanese underground.
Charnel began in San Francisco in 1988, when Mason Jones started a cassette label called Charnel House. The first tapes were his own: Dada Fish and Trance, Trance's Fatal Blow among them, followed by other local groups and, in 1989, a cassette by Survival Research Laboratories. Renamed Charnel Music, the label issued its first CD in 1990, the compilation Arrhythmia, and went on through the decade with what its own site calls "unusual music ranging from sheer noise assault" to rhythmic and psychedelic records.
The American side of the catalogue took in Crash Worship, whose first CD ¡Espontáneo! (1991) and Triple Mania II (1994) came out here, Gravitar, Pain Teens, Walking Timebombs and, from 1996, Jones's own SubArachnoid Space. Further afield, the label issued Hybryds' The Rhythm Of The Ritual (1994) and Aube's collaboration with Cock E.S.P., Maschinenwerk (1996).
What sets Charnel apart is its Japanese line. Jones published four annual issues of Ongaku Otaku, a magazine devoted to the Japanese independent scene, and the label matched it on record: the Dead Tech 3 compilation (1992), KK Null and Jim O'Rourke's New Kind Of Water (1992), the first single, shared by Hijokaidan, Trance and Allegory Chapel Ltd., Melt-Banana's Hedgehog 7", Ruins-Hatoba, two Mainliner albums, Fushitsusha's Gold Blood (1998) and three volumes of Land of the Rising Noise (1993, 1997, 1999), all Japanese acts.
Charnel ceased operations in 1999, after the third Land of the Rising Noise. Jones revived it in 2007 for two CD-Rs and again from 2021 for four LPs, the first a collaboration between Damo Suzuki, Numinous Eye and Steve Eto.
I keep Charnel Music at Tier II: a small American label which, with its editor's magazine, carried a good deal of Japanese noise and psychedelia to English-speaking listeners in the 1990s.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene