Longmont Potion Castle is the pseudonym of an anonymous American prank-call-and-noise operator working continuously from a Denver, Colorado base since 1986. The catalogue runs to twenty numbered volumes (Longmont Potion Castle through Longmont Potion Castle 20, the latter issued January 2023) plus three retrospective box sets and a periphery of singles, splits, soundtrack work and side-project releases. The operator was born in Texas in July 1972, raised in Littleton (a Denver suburb) where his family relocated during his childhood, and attended Columbine High School in the mid-1980s. The real name is held private across the catalogue: it is known to a small number of interviewers who have agreed to keep it off the record, and to some call-recipients who have recognised the operator's voice in real-time, but the catalogue itself does not publish the name and the Bureau does not. The Bureau files Longmont Potion Castle at Tier III and the wildcard on the position that the catalogue is genuinely outside the industrial-and-noise taxonomy but consistently adjacent to it across the documented period.
The catalogue began on a parents' two-way cassette answering machine: an early-1980s home consumer device with a built-in record-both-sides-of-the-call function, intended for legitimate domestic record-keeping but adapted by the teenage operator for the systematic recording of outgoing prank calls. The machine emitted a mandatory ten-second beep through the recording to alert the call recipient that the call was being recorded; the beep is preserved across the entire early catalogue as a continuous audible time-stamp, and is one of the catalogue's defining sound-signatures of the pre-1990 period. The first numbered release, Longmont Potion Castle (Volume 1), and the immediate follow-up Subliminal Propaganda (also known as Longmont Potion Castle and issued under both names in different runs, 1986–1988), document the answering-machine origins; the catalogue's first cassette under the operator's pre-LPC pseudonym Implement of Prognosis (Butcher the Paleontologist, 1987) sits in the same period and forms the bridge between the prank-call work and the noise-and-anti-music manner the catalogue would later develop.
The working palette that distinguishes Longmont Potion Castle from the conventional prank-call tradition is, in the Bureau's reading, twofold. First, the editorial position: the operator has consistently characterised the work as phone work or absurdist art rather than prank calls, with the deliberate distancing from the Jerky Boys / Crank Yankers shock-comedy lineage and the deliberate closeness to alternative-comedy and anti-comedy figures (Neil Hamburger, Scharpling and Wurster, Gregg Turkington). The comparison the catalogue's critical reception has consistently produced is to Salvador Dalí (Rainn Wilson's description, characteristic of the surrounding critical mode: as if Salvador Dalí were doing prank phone calls); the calls operate through non-sequitur, fake products and services, absurdist premises (the UPS-delivery-of-a-tank-of-insects premise being one defining example), and a deadpan monotone delivery that the recipient cannot quite locate in any conventional category. The calls are rarely mean-spirited: the comic vein is built on the recipient's confusion rather than on hostility, with the call-recipient's attempts to apply normal conversational rules to the absurd premise generating most of the catalogue's humour.
Second, the production idiom: the audio is built from prank-call recordings, original thrash-metal instrumental interludes composed and performed by the operator, and sound-collage transitions assembled from samples and tape-cut work. Each numbered album is the catalogue's working release-form, averaging 60-120 minutes in length and structured as a sustained sequence of call-collage-instrumental-call material. The Digitech RDS 8000 rack-mounted digital delay unit is the catalogue's voice-modulation device: the operator's voice runs through it during the calls themselves, producing the pitch-shift, repeat-echo, ring-modulation and stutter-effect treatments that have become the catalogue's most-recognised sonic signature. The recipient is therefore not just confronted with the absurd premise but with a voice that is itself audibly mediated, processed and unstable in real-time. The Bureau reads this as the catalogue's sharpest point of methodological contact with the industrial-and-noise tradition: the same voltage-controlled signal-chain logic that built the industrial-electronic catalogues of the 1970s and 1980s is here applied to the live telephone call as compositional material.
The catalogue's first announced retirement came in 2007, with the box set Longbox Option Package framed as the catalogue's closing statement. The retirement held for about one year; Longmont Potion Castle 6 appeared in 2008 and the numbered sequence has continued at the rate of roughly one new volume every twelve to eighteen months across the later fifteen-plus years. The post-retirement catalogue has moved further into the celebrity-call direction (the Alex Trebek, Rick Derringer, Eddie Money sequence on Volume 7 being among the most cited sequences) and into the cross-platform-call direction (Skype calls, online customer-service calls, automated-system-engagement calls) as the telephone network has restructured underneath the catalogue's working medium. The Bureau notes that one of the catalogue's sustained internal questions is, in fact, the telephone network itself: how the medium changes, what new conventions emerge for legitimate calling, and what new absurd premises the operator can introduce to violate them.
The catalogue's documented direct connection to the industrial-and-noise network is one of the Bureau's favourite single archival anomalies. At about 1996, the Longmont Potion Castle personal phone number was printed inside a Merzbow CD, resulting in late-night calls from Akita's readers placed back to the operator across a sustained period afterwards. The exact CD has not been definitively documented, and the operator's account is the source for the anecdote; the Bureau notes the connection as the catalogue's one direct bridge between the Denver prank-call work and the Japanese noise tradition, and as a case of the noise-network's archival apparatus operating in unexpected directions. The surrounding sampling-and-influence network around the catalogue runs through The Orb (electronic), Doormouse (breakcore), Tit Wrench, The Amino Acids, and Tobacco / Black Moth Super Rainbow (the latter the catalogue's most-sustained electronic-musician advocate and a documented LPC remix partner). The operator also contributed live guitar to Electric Six's I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master (2007).
The documentary Where in the Hell Is the Lavender House? (2019) is the catalogue's extended visual record. Directed and produced through the operator's own apparatus, it is the closest the catalogue has come to a public-facing biography; the operator's identity is not revealed, but the Denver base and the historical arc are shown for the first time at feature-length. The Burger Records soundtrack release in 2018 (one year before the film's 2019 premiere) is the catalogue's rare example of a release through a label other than D.U. Records, and one of the catalogue's few entries on a higher-profile garage / experimental imprint. Following each documentary screening through the 2019 US-and-Canada tour, the venue placed a live phone call to the operator from the screening room itself, with the audience submitting questions and witnessing live prank calls in real-time as a deliberate audience-engagement event.
Live performance is rare across the catalogue. The operator does not perform the prank-call material live (the recipient on the other end of an actual call cannot be reproduced on stage), and the live appearances that have occurred have been the thrash-metal instrumental side of the catalogue, with the operator on guitar over pre-recorded drums, bass and processed-vocal tracks. The catalogue's live-performance count is in the low-double-digits across nearly forty years of catalogue; the recording-and-publication apparatus is the working surface, in a position the Bureau notes is structurally similar to the Doc Wör Mirran position on live performance (deliberate rejection of the live-performance-as-validation paradigm).
The Bureau's sustained reading is that Longmont Potion Castle is one of the archive's clearest cases of an artist sustaining a body of recorded work across nearly forty years through a deliberate refusal of the conventional music-industry apparatus (anonymous operator, own imprint, no commercial-radio reach, no streaming-platform compromise, no live-performance economy) while operating in a manner (prank phone calls processed through industrial-electronic voice-modulation, structured as album-length works with thrash-metal interludes) that genuinely sits outside the industrial-and-noise taxonomy but is consistently adjacent to it. The wildcard filing is, in the Bureau's reading, the most accurate-form designation: the catalogue is not industrial proper, not noise proper, not anti-comedy proper, but a deliberate working combination of all three with the telephone network as the catalogue's native compositional surface. The Merzbow phone-number anecdote, the Tobacco remix collaboration, and the operator's consistent self-positioning within the absurdist-art palette place the catalogue inside the Bureau's working frame in a way that the conventional prank-call tradition would not warrant.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Elizabethan era · last revised c. Late Antiquity