Mandible Chatter.

Mandible Chatter is the San Francisco ambient-industrial duo of Neville Harson and Grant Miller, formed in the autumn of 1991. The catalogue's biographical note places the meeting as fatalistic: Harson had moved from Pennsylvania to be closer to The Residents, Miller met him in the Bay Area, and both held roots in experimental music prior to the duo's formation. The earliest documented Mandible Chatter recordings are improvised ambient electric-guitar pieces in the Fripp and Eno vein · per the band's own note: strangers to one another they were clearly playing it safe. Across the first year (autumn 1991 to autumn 1992) the catalogue's idiom shifted as the duo's rapport solidified, with progressively harsher textures entering the recorded material.

The spring 1992 LaVey episode is the catalogue's first anchor anecdote. One of the members found himself living directly across the street from Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan; the duo decided to throw open the windows and improvise a live performance for an unwitting neighbour across the street · this recording later became the cassette Serenade For Anton (1992, the catalogue's first documented release). All the noises on the cassette are improvised on electric guitars. Whether LaVey ever heard the record is undocumented; the band's own note leaves the question open.

The 1992–1993 method shift. Across this period the duo dropped the guitar-only method in favour of non-conventional sound sources: microphones, springs, grinding wheels, baby monitors, shoes, household objects. The first full-length release, Drinking Out The Hourglass (CD, Russell, 1993), documents this method · per I Heart Noise, much of it was recorded with household objects (as well more traditional guitar and flute); per the band's own biographical note: Alan Splet would have been proud. The Death Of Sweetness (cassette, Ladd-Frith, 1993) extended the method with two side-long tracks recorded live at the duo's garage in Palo Alto, California. By 1993–1994 the East Palo Alto garage had become the catalogue's primary recording location.

The East Palo Alto garage carries the catalogue's most-cited material trace. The garage's previous resident · a figure named Juergen · had perished while attempting a climb of Yosemite's Half Dome and had left behind a wonderful assortment of oddities from Pompeiian art prints and diaries in German to jam jars and metal objects indiscernible in origin to this day (per the band's biographical note). This dead-resident's-garage staging informs the catalogue's 1993–1997 manner · the recovered objects as instruments method, the home recording rather than studio recording, the home-and-garage palette that the band's discography occupies across this period.

The mid-1990s catalogue continued the experimental method while integrating more compositional structure. Hair Hair Lock & Lore (CD, Russell, 1994) was the band's second CD, characterised in the band's own note as darker, deeper, and more brooding than their debut, and included a shorter version of the title track from The Death Of Sweetness. Grace (CD, Manifold, 1995) brought together ambient soundscapes and live sound · this LP was later reissued by Magnanimous Records in 2008. Food For The Moon (CD, Manifold, 1997) integrated vocals and traditional songwriting alongside the experimental textures and included the band's cover of Spacemen 3's So Hot (Wash Away All Of My Tears) · the cover marks the catalogue's shift toward the song-form integration the late-1990s and early-2000s catalogue continues.

The 1998–1999 turn toward song-form. After a brief hiatus and an early-1998 regrouping the duo found themselves strumming folk tunes (per the biographical note) · this material became the 1999 Measuring The Marigolds, the catalogue's most pop-and-folk-leaning record, integrating British pop and folk references with the experimental textures the duo had developed across the early-to-mid 1990s. The 7-inch The Drone EP (Drone, 1999) sits alongside Marigolds as a contemporary release. The band became bicoastal across this period with Harson's relocation to Boston (and later to Boulder, two years later); the duo was effectively in hiatus but kept active by promoting Marigolds and conducting interviews.

The 2001–2003 reunion and final record. For three weeks starting at Christmas 2001 and continuing into the earliest days of 2002, Harson and Miller reconvened in San Francisco to work on a new ambient-experimental project. Two years of separately gathered ideas were brought together in that first week. The studio was later moved up to Portland for a reunion with longtime Mandible Chatter collaborators from years past; days and nights were spent improvising and cultivating new sounds. The resulting record, Of Foreign Lands And People (CD, Relapse Records, 2003), was produced by Robert Rich (the long-standing American ambient and dark-ambient producer / artist) and constitutes the band's sustained ambient-experimental return. The 2003 record is the catalogue's closing entry; per I Heart Noise reporting from 2009 the band remained around but had not produced another record.

Adjacent activity. Grant Miller's later side project Ballustrade Ensemble released the full-length Capsules in 2007. Mandible Chatter also contributed a cover of Renaldo And The Loaf's Mahogany Wood to a Renaldo And The Loaf remix compilation. The catalogue's later activity is documented intermittently rather than continuously; the band's biographical note has not been comprehensively updated post-2009.

Citation. The Bureau files Mandible Chatter at Tier I as a documented San Francisco ambient-industrial duo of the 1991–2003 period and as one of the catalogue's entries for the post-Residents Bay Area experimental music lineage. The cross-references across this archive: the Robert Rich production of Of Foreign Lands And People 2003 (Rich's longstanding dark-ambient and sleep-concert practice sits adjacent in the archive's F·17 dark-ambient mode); the Spacemen 3 cover So Hot 1997 (Spacemen 3's psychedelic drone and space-rock catalogue threads through the same Fripp / Eno influence the early Mandible Chatter catalogue holds); the Anton LaVey episode 1992 (an anecdote rather than a documented connection · the cassette is the catalogue's first release); the San Francisco lineage citation alongside The Residents, Flipper and Tuxedomoon. The Bureau holds the East Palo Alto garage recordings as the catalogue's methodological centre.