Megafaun
Bury the Square
2008

Radium/Table of the Elements
TOE-CD-815
Compact disc

From the vibrant Southern quasi-capital of Durham emerge Megafaun, wearing earnestness across the chest and abstraction along the sleeves.  They pour forth dulcet harmonies, as seeking vocals tug banjo lines up the Appalachian mountains; redemptive noise soaks everything, like thick air wafting from the Atlantic.

Bury the Square, Megafaun’s debut, is a triumph, bearing an essential consequence: folk music has been wrested from purist hands.  Clawhammer banjo and strummed acoustics lock and roll with electric guitars and electronic textures. They don’t add freak to folk or folk to freak; rather, they realize that folk implies deep, personal, intense expression, whether the instrument is a parlor piano with the lid thrown back or a distortion pedal with the case cracked loose.   In this band, orthodoxy and unorthodoxy flow together as one.

“Instead of dressing up polished alt-country songs with veils of hum, Megafaun pickles rickety back-porch folk reconstructions in a brine of chaotic field recordings and organic, free-form atmospheres. It's an album so ingeniously balanced that it stands a chance of satisfying both folk and experimental music fans. For the former, there's the clattering bluegrass/rock of "Lazy Suicide" and twinkling weeper "Drains.”
— The Independent Weekly                          

A Conduit for History Exploding in the Present Moment

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS is a curatorial network and interdisciplinary platform, live-event presenter, and fine-arts publisher of print, audio, and film, lauded by Pitchfork Media as “a national treasure.” Since its origin as a record label in 1993, TotE has been dedicated to preserving, promoting, and promulgating works by international creators of experimental audio, electroacoustics, free-improvised performance, sonic sculpture, microtonality, and modern composition. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of sound and vision.  Each project demonstrates how a publishing concern might romp wild, unbridled from the carousel of convention.

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Tony Conrad: Completely In the Present
A Film by Tyler Hubby

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Since 1993, Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise. It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century -- and beyond. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider sounds.

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