Audiopile Review: After launching the label in 2022 with a handful of mega rarity noise/punk/art-fuck reissues from deeply obscure artists like Violin Sect, Smelly Feet and Zyklon B. Zombies, New Jersey imprint Minimum Table Stacks has held our gaze, slowly inching it towards the shadowy corners of the US experimental rock scene. That’s not as much as a slam-dunk as it once was when labels like S-S, De Stijl, Sweet Rot and Columbia Discount ruled our racks a decade+ back, so when a label stick their neck out when times aren’t as kind to certain genres, well, we doff our hat. Enter Rat Henry, the project of NYC artist and musician Ray Zarnowitz, who already had a couple self-released cassettes of street-wise Calvin Johnson via Lou Reed downer jangle prior to arriving at this new LP. Still firmly sticking with his bedroom-fi aesthetic, Zarnowitz has sunk his feet into some radiated psychedelic dirt here, bridging a chasm that we never knew existed between Chrome’s scrapyard industrial-racket and Smog’s early 4-track efforts. Zarnowitz’s vocals, a bleary-eyed baritone, cuts through hissing drum machines, affected guitar scrawl and rudimentary keyboard lines, reminiscent of the kind of unwound and idiosyncratic rock that would have sat neatly alongside releases from Dan Melchior or Nothing People back in those aforementioned glory days of early 21st century underground rock. Rat Henry may not currently have a lot of company in the bins, but we’re more than happy to make the space for this delightfully out of time album.

The debut full-length by this NYC-based solo artist Rat Henry (aka painter and visual artist Ray Zarnowitz). “After a couple of self-released cassettes and a stint as a full band live concern featuring some of the cream of NYC punk, Ray Zarnowitz’s Rat Henry project has gestated and bloomed into its most complete form with Material Pop Vol. 1. This record weaves lessons well-learned from the modern American noise underground, the loamy heritage of UK DIY, and punk as lifestyle / vocation into a strikingly personal statement. The comparisons that will form in the mind of the astute listener – This Degenerate Little Town as a mail collaboration between Jim Shepard and Storm Bugs, Afterbathinginturpentine with cutting social critique in the place of dilaudid fog, a production of Bad Lieutenant held on the Street Level Studios soundstage with Pierpaolo Zoppo heading the AV crew—are rendered secondary in light of Ray’s vision. Material Pop Vol. 1 wields genuinely idiosyncratic songcraft and rock and roll joie de vivre like corrosive agents, eating away at the tape loop sediment encasing its songs, and at the indignities of modern urban existence.”—Daniel Dimaggio, Home Blitz. Limited to 300 copies on black vinyl. Includes a poster insert and logo sticker designed by Rat Henry himself.