Shermia Love - "Nothing Is Ever Really What It Seems"

Recorded live from the audience during Catclaw Theatre Company's production of Toulouse-inations at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, Saturday, August 9, 2008.

Shermia Love - "Nothing Is Ever Really What It Seems"

Jeffrey Scott Holland - Two Minutes to Tornado

Comprised entirely of treated found elements, "Two Minutes to Tornado" was released by Jeffrey Scott Holland earlier this year as a teaser for an avant-garde musical project supposedly coming out sometime in 2009 and released solely on the USB Flash Drive format. This is unrelated to his caveman-jazz band The JSH Combo, who also have a new live album scheduled for the Spring.

Jeffrey Scott Holland - Two Minutes to Tornado

The Smacks! - Gentle Be My Bomb

Here's a classic track from The Smacks!, a glam-garage band from Lexington, KY.

"It’s exactly what would happen if a couple of retarded guys in a Harry Crews novel formed a band in between burning down the barn and fucking a goat in the ass". - Sleazegrinder.com

The Smacks! - Gentle Be My Bomb

Keep Circulating the RV&OI Tapes

Retrovirus & Opportunistic Infection (RV & OI) were one of the earliest bands to self-identify as "Creeps" music, and since they're still around to this day, they would qualify as the longest-running one. They also have their very own comic book series, albeit it's as simplistic and primitive as their music. We dig 'em.

RV&OI audio files on Archive.org

After years of purveying the finest in low-fi lowbrow atonal warbling from Kentucky street-busking duo Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infection, we've finally decided to enter the 21st century digital age by flooding the market and hopefully glutting cyberspace with these deliciously shitty archival recordings of raw squirming humanity.

Yes, that's right, you heard right, we're putting it ALL out there for FREE, thanks to the scary geniuses at the Internet Archive Open Source Audio Project. That's right, spontaneous street recordings made by manchild losers on a crappy Radio Shack handheld tape recorder in 1989 while chanting whatever nonsense pops into their heads are now available ALL OVER THE WORLD on this here dashed clever "INTERNET" thingie as variable-rate MP3s, zip files, M3U streams, and even OGG Vorbis files.

In true Creeps fashion, never before has so much effort been expended for something so little.

Creeps Records is grateful to the faithful consumers who have actually paid real money over the years for our cassette-only releases, and surely our sister label JLK Records, who compiled some RV&OI material into compact disc releases, feels the same gratitude as well. HOWEVER: it's now the new millenium. Up is down, black is white, day is night. We now want to GIVE AWAY Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infection's corrosively retarded jingles, and to do so aggressively. Your new mission is to take RV&OI's unholy jabberings and FORCE THEM DOWN THE THROATS OF EVERY LIVING BEING ON THIS PLANET. Host these mp3s on your own websites and blogs, or just hotlink to archive.org's versions. Email them to everyone you know. Email them to strangers and ask them to "please pass along". Let's make sure these pieces of sonic shit are so spread across cyberspace that they can never, ever, ever, be undone, and thus insure their magickal grip on this sector of the solar system forevermore. NOTHING YOU EVER DO IN YOUR LIFE WILL BE AS IMPORTANT AS THIS.

Also check here and here and here.

What is "Creeps Music"?

From the original 1996 "Creeps Headquarters" website, now defunct:

Yeah, late at night in Rockcastle County you hear 'em clonkin' 'n' bangin' on whatever they can find, drunk on cough syrup and mouthwash. They're havin' a good ol' time, even as they're grimly aware of THINGS WHICH YOU DON'T EVEN WANT TO KNOW ABOUT. Yep, they got the creeps.

"The Creeps" is like "The Blues". Not just a musical genre, it's a feeling, a state of mind. It's that indefinable something that passes ghostly and Neutrino-like between the cracks of your very perception; the stark, gut-wrenching awareness that time is passing.

You had the Creeps when you were a kid. Maybe you still have it now. Maybe it'll come back to haunt you later like a resurrected zombie of your former childhood, returning to check up on you.

From the original 1996 Creeps FAQ:

WHAT IS "THE CREEPS"? According to ancient Kentucky slang, it's a mysterious state of mind, satori-like yet continuous, indefinite yet obvious. JSH says that listening to tapes on his Creeps label is the best way to grasp the concept.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF CREEPS PRODUCTIONS? Well, primarily to promote the purveyors of musicians and artists who are a part of the Creeps "movement".

WHAT DOES CREEPS MUSIC SOUND LIKE? Usually it's primitive, very low-budget, low-fidelity stuff, Almost always poorly recorded. Contrary to popular belief, however, it is not limited to scratchy rural appalachian voodoo music, although this indeed lies closest to the heart of Creeps. Creeps Music can be as simple and infantile as Central Rock Company or as complex and infantile as Team Latex.

IS THE CREEPS MOVEMENT STRICTLY A KENTUCKY THING? Well, although it is as inherently connected to Kentucky as Zydeco is to Louisiana, there are Creeps artists in other places (such as Scott Armel, Jon Wiening, and most of Shay Quillen's buddies). Many artists are technically recognized as Creeps music even though they've never ever heard of it. (Daniel Johnston, The Tinklers, The Mummies, and Sexton Ming all embody the spirit of the Creeps).

From Mitchell Newport's 2003 essay "That Low Gruesome Sound":

The first modern Creeps album is generally considered to be "Sounds of the Pogo", an extremely low-distribution cassette by a pre-teen Jeffrey Scott Holland in 1974. The album's title refers not to the punk dance - which didn't yet exist - but to a character in a homemade comic book drawn by Holland and Greg Hisle. The star of "The Pogo" comics was a very "Incredible Hulk" type sympathetic monster whose head, bizarrely, resembled Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum. The "music" on the album mostly consisted of some "atmospheric" sounds that was quite industrial-noise before its time. There were also spoken interludes with Hisle, filled with in-jokes (the meaning of which have been long since forgotten). Among the juvenile chatter, however, are references to "the Creeps".

Retrovirus & Opportunistic Infection made their first early primitive recordings around 1976 and continued to record throughout the late 1970s, though their true career didn't really kick in until the early 1980s when they blossomed into the purest of all Creeps bands. The early recordings were heavy on singing along with other musical sources from radio, TV and albums, and also featured predominantly covers of then-popular classic rock songs. A common motif for RV&OI at this time was to try to cover the songs completely straight and serious at first (as best as possible with their extremely limited musical abilities) and then gradually let the song build up to a complete insane rant and freak-out, much in the way that Sam Kinison would do with his cover of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" many years later (not to mention The Soft Boys' cover of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin".)

The early RV&OI cassettes were all given names like "21 Heavy Hits", "Rock Gold", or "30 Rock N Soul Magic Moments", taking these titles directly from common cheesy K-Tel type compilations of the era. Years later, another Creeps group, The Hartman Band, nodded to this tradition with their album "20 Great Truck Drivin' Songs".

Grillo the Clown - Kiss Me

Grillo the Clown, famed and fabled street performer from Central Kentucky, here transforms the Sixpence None The Richer hit "Kiss Me" into a stirring anthem of pathos, angst, and terrible beauty.

If you disagree, you'll never get to Heaven.

Grillo the Clown - Kiss Me