The WASP FACTORY!

Yes, this may seem like an entirely random inclusion in the Glass Throat Recordings archive. However, it stands as a humble document of a brief but formative period in my life, one that proved meaningful for many reasons. What follows is a concise account, as everything took place within the span of roughly a year. I also encourage any former members to contribute or clarify details so this record can be as accurate and complete as possible. Some of you may be hearing this music for the first time - enjoy.

In 1996, while living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NYC), I started a band with Eric Cooper (guitar/vocals) shortly after his brief stint with Kiss It Goodbye. Eric and I were heavily inspired by many of our early to mid 1990s contemporaries, including Craw, Dazzling Killmen, Glazed Baby, Iceburn, Today Is the Day, and Zeni Geva, as well as labels such as Amphetamine Reptile Records and Skin Graft.

We began as a three-piece and recorded a rough demo with this original lineup. That demo was never publicly released. We rehearsed in Brooklyn at Coyote Studios, which is also where the demo was recorded. It’s worth noting that during this period, three of the four songs in our live set were newly written and did not yet have lyrics; consequently, they were not included on the demo. To my knowledge, many of these songs were also untitled, and I have no recollection of their lyrical content otherwise, I would have included that information here. Perhaps Eric may be able to provide further insight. Eventually, we lost our original drummer, Matt, who went on to join the percussive theater group STOMP!. He was replaced by Jim Paradise from Go! / Hell No, and we later added a second guitarist, Greg.

As for the band’s name, nothing was ever definitively agreed upon. The name remained a point of discussion between Eric and me, and if memory serves, we may have performed our only show without an official name. “Sons of Light” and “Belial” were both considered at various points. For the purposes of this document, however, I will refer to the band as The Wasp Factory, as it was initially proposed by Eric and feels most fitting given the sound.

Our sole performance took place as part of a large holiday matinee lineup that included:

ASSTROLAND

DISTRAUGHT

MOSES

PRY

SWEET DIESEL

There may have been additional acts, though I can’t recall them with certainty. The show was held at Z-Bar in NYC, located on Avenue A, on December 22, 1996.

In the end, it was an incredibly informative and meaningful year for me, and I’m deeply grateful that this moment in time was captured. I’ve often wondered how the band might have evolved and what we could have accomplished. Now, 30 years later, it’s remarkable to reflect on the many projects these members have been part of since, as well as those that came before. These include: Bad Powers, Blood of the Black Owl, Die 116, Go!, Hell No, Human Impact, Made Out of Babies, Moon Mourning Earth, Moses, Pigs, Pushman, STOMP!, The J.J. Paradise Players Club, The Kill Van Kull, and Unsane.

I’ve uploaded our only live performance to the Glass Throat Recordings YouTube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_fx2nXPYnY

The final Blood of the Black Owl release directly supports...

A reminder post that all sales of this final release: The Sound of Flowers Dying Carry Messages Through the Wind from Blood of the Black Owl directly supports the following vital organization:

https://boardingschoolhealing.org/

(All images provide direct links for more information)

"I've been listening to Blood of the Black Owl (BotBO) since around 2013 or so, starting when I stumbled upon the BotBO Celestial Split at a record store in Oakland that year. Chet’s side of the record, Contemplating the Death of An Old Friend,  instantly moved me. I would spend hours wandering both the dingy urban environs of West Oakland and the young redwood forest tucked away in the hills, listening to Ruhr Hunter, BotBO and Rain (Fearthainne), enraptured in cathartic states of connection to place and dream. All of Chet’s work is of a spiritual quality–prayerful and alive–and so when he sent me his newest record, I knew that it would contain messages deeper than one could catch from a casual listen. 

The Sound of Flowers Dying…

The first track from Blood of the Black Owl’s newest album The Sound of Flowers Dying Carry Messages Through the Wind sets the tone of possibly the darkest recording that I’ve yet heard from Chet, not in atmosphere, but in the heart wrenching and prayerful song crafted to honor the young ones who left this world too early…

To be in this world alone…

Útburður: a child left in the wilderness to die. A child to a ghost. A ghost to the place it was forgotten… For those who have searched deeper into the vast well of Chet’s offerings, you might have found that he has an undying gratitude towards our Indigenous communities in prayer, and in embodied action. 

Across Turtle Island, our Indigenous communities continue to reel from the echoes of America's earlier genocidal practices such as that of the Indian Boarding School era, where children were taken from their homes and forced to assimilate to Christian/Catholic/American ideologies. Children were tortured for practicing their language, their culture, their identity. Many children were left to die due to conditions of neglect, and outright violence. Every Indigenous person I know, here on Turtle Island, has a story about a relative who has been victim to this era of genocidal violence. I preface with these words because Chet’s offerings are not simply songs, they are carefully and emotionally crafted prayers. The Sound of Flowers Dying is a stunning tribute to the young ones left behind, carried skyward through dulcimer, flute, voice, guitar and bass instrumentations. This song moves in emotional segmentations–timed with space for reflection and attunement to stillness. This song feels to me like a child's song. A song for the lost children to follow on their journey home. 

…Carry Messages Through the Wind

This final song starts with a well placed quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, where she invokes that to become part of this living world again (one we may not be Indigenous to) we must practice the “grammar of animacy”, which is a practice long central to Chet’s medicinal (and in my humble opinion, cultural) work through Glass Throat Recordings and his associated projects.

The lyrical watershed of this song alone contains tributaries of wrathful grief and spiraling prayer. They also speak to the horrors upon the living world–one that aches for us to return again. 

This song holds all the elements that one might expect to hear in a BotBO record. Yet this time, Carry Messages Through the Wind, brings the listener from slow trickling streams and mournful movements into a widening cascade of psychedelic melodies. Emerging all at once primal and ethereal and creating a unique sound to his offering. I encounter, again, an awe of how well placed Chet’s dulcimer and sacred wind instruments are, catalysing transition and sounds’ capacity for animate conversation. This album marks a new era that his work has entered musically. The song’s dreamlike conclusion features keys from Glass Throat Record’s Rachel Scott, which throws those of us familiar, into an alternate reality where BotBO were a band in the 70s. A true climactic end to another unique offering from my most cherished label in the Pacific Northwest, Glass Throat Recordings."

-Heron

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I also strongly encourage you all to take interest and support these other indigenous links provided. All of which hold direct inspiration towards the curation of The Sound of Flowers Dying Carry Messages Through the Wind.

The curation of this collection is inspired by the poetry and spoken word of Uncle John Trudell, as well as the Kuper Island Podcast (an eight part series).

Please watch and support this series here:

Please view this film here:

Please read this book and seek out the very hard to find documentary that coincides.

A very special thank you to my indigenous family, Aunties, Uncles, Sisters and Brothers I've personally had the profound and emotional experience of speaking directly with regarding their personal battles with spiritual cancer at the hands of Christian Nationalists and the tribal traumas deeply endured through cultural genocide and religious colonialism! I am unconditionally grateful and truly thankful for their medicinal teachings, trust, strength, understanding and respect confided within me.

Glass Throat Recordings stands in solidarity!

I raise up with honor and gratitude the Coast Salish land itself and the Dkhw Duw’Absh.

I dedicate my final album under the moniker of Blood of the Black Owl, to all my relatives of this great Turtle Island, and to all whom continue to suffer under Christian Nationalist rule and colonial suppression!

Mitakuye Oyasin

-Cante’ Waste’ ObMani’ Wicasa / Chet W. Scott

Blood of the Black Owl's - WARmth 2nd Edition 2xCD...

Excited to announce for those of you that may have missed out on the leather bound and burned first edition of my Blood of the Black Owl - WARmth 2xCD, a second edition is now in the works.

Releasing Friday August, 7th 2026, this second edition will be available in professionally replicated two disc color variants: A black on black (as before) and a matte black on matte silver, packaged in a rare, discontinued heavyweight black stock (gatefold) with black ultra gloss art courtesy of  Samaritan Press. If you haven't heard it, please click a pic to explore the sounds of this deeply personal journey.

Here are two selected testimonials regarding the double album when it was released back in 2015.

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"This is gorgeous. The mix is so clear, honest and alive. The pain and love which went into this creation transfers easily and in a welcoming manner. As a listener, I hear and feel the heart beating. The production is flawless, I'm trying to wrap my head around the quality of the timbre you have captured, it's really inspiring. Your craft is true and the local communities close and distant have much to gain from your work.

  

As a composer, your work seems to have always carried a whisper of Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh's cinematic transcendence, it is so wonderfully present on this album but there is also something else. A deeper side of your wisdom and personal energies that is coming through. It's quite refreshing and stirs many different emotions within me. There is this bridge that the songs walk, it goes between two valleys, in one meadow I am brought to tears because the struggle is often to relentless and vast for me to conquer.  But on the other side, across the bridge, lies another, a valley that I am able stretch out in, to dance, and circle the ones I love. I am at peace with that dichotomy because it is what this life is often about and what many of us are working through, healing from, and or transcending beyond. In my own spiritual work, I am becoming aware there is not two separate pieces of land that are connected by way of a bridge, but that there is still a larger valley that contains the two, and there is even a larger mountain range, a thousand lakes, clouds, trees, etc. I am free to travel and commune with all of it, we can be that fearless and free. These are the thoughts that your music awakened in me."

-Garek Druss

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"I am grateful to have found your music...it really restores, heals and reflects a beautiful and deep relationship to the land that I love here in the Northwest more than anything I've heard (along with various tribal music and stories). When I listen I hear the heartbeat of land, sea and sky of this so accurately...THANK YOU! It's so good to know someone else "listens and understands." Many blessings to you!

-Lady Heron

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Eremition debut limited edition cassette...

We are excited to announce an extremely limited new release and the debut of a new project entitled Eremition - arriving May, 1st for Bandcamp Friday.

Limited to 50 antique gold cassettes, each numbered and housed in handmade tip-on sleeves using obscure gold leaf stock. This format includes a 20-minute bonus track, “Echoes VII,” from the forthcoming full length LP Echoes of Eremition: Vol. 1. The cassette will be available only through the upcoming GTR store and Bandcamp on-line artifact shop, and will not be released digitally until the release of the debut LP as an additional bonus work, where it will appear with a slightly different mix making this edition fully exclusive.

Eremition deliberately eschews narrative frameworks in favor of an ontological restoration of being articulated through somatic soundscapes and solivagant spiral trajectories. It constitutes an ongoing personal investigation into worldly isolophilia, examining and exploring ritual as an interiorized and phenomenological practice.

Through Mellotron, fretless bass, sympathetic acoustic drone instrumentation, organic ritual implements, restrained rhythm, and gentle composition, the project evokes an unseen fire, one that burns as a silent votive flame, offering illumination without spectacle.

Eremition feels forever held within Asiatic traditions of tranquil ritual music and worldly fusion, rooted deeply in stillness, breath, and ceremony, while quietly honoring the Kosmische visionaries of the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Its lineage can be felt in the devotional atmospheres of Popol Vuh and the solitary compositions of Florian Fricke, drifting alongside the currents of Wu Ziying, Jacques Roman (Pulsar), Yatha Sidhra, Bo Hansson, Tony Scott, Klaus Schulze, Between, Dead Can Dance, and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki.

More to come regarding the debut full length LP Echoes of Eremition Vol. I.

Thank you all for your time and interest.

WARmth,

-Chet

 Hey folks, starting tomorrow at 12:00am Pacific Standard Time, in relation to Bandcamp Friday, you'll be able to BUY ONE-GET ONE FREE! This deal will last for 24hrs!

Please note: said deal only applies to all deluxe gatefold & jewel case CD's & cassettes as your free item. Please make sure to indicate upon check out what free item you wish to receive.

Please support the real underground and tangible media.

Be well everyone and so much more to come regarding releases and performances. Please stay tuned and follow and subscribe for updates!

-Chet W. Scott

We also have a new release! Click the image for more information.

Labyrinthus Solitudinem - Tenebras Mentis Excessus : Possession (Teaser ...