Noise pop saboteur, Emperor X, today announced the multi-city deployment of Western Teleport Nodes, a geocaching scavenger hunt for translucent purple audio cassettes and visual artwork concealed in locations around the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The tape archives contain songs, sound collages, and artwork produced during the making of Western Teleport, the first new Emperor X album in six years, due out October 4th on Bar/None Records.

GPS coordinates and location hints for the 41 hidden tape nodes will be posted September 20 at: WesternTeleport.com. Representatives of the artist are also distributing notifications announcing nearby nodes in cities across the continent.

>People who find the nodes will own the only physical copies of the audio and artwork, but digital copies of all music and artwork are also encrypted and archived at WesternTeleport.com. Successful scavengers will see tagged instructions explaining how to decrypt the digital online version of the node, making it available to the general public. The first three finders will also win a free Emperor X concert at their university, home, or favorite local venue as well as a copy of Western Teleport.

The Tusk-era-Fleetwood-Mac-inspired rhythms of Western Teleport take the listener on a hallucinatory journey of an alternate universe Los Angeles where paramilitary groups rain fallout-filled mortars on the Harbor Freeway, loved ones get tasered while jogging, and doomed epileptics steal Segways in a vain attempt to escape from an abandoned mall.

Emperor X is the project name of American songwriter, C. R. Matheny. In 2004, Matheny dropped his pursuit of a master’s degree in physics to self-release a string of critically-acclaimed lo-fi speed folk albums. Emperor X has toured extensively, often on Greyhound buses, including several international forays into Mexico, Canada, and Australia. The performances – half Billy Bragg-inspired anarcho-electric singalongs, half Lee “Scratch” Perry lo-fi dub live sessions – brought Emperor X’s music to art galleries, bars, bookstores, university symposia, college radio stations, garbage-strewn pedestrian tunnels, and one very confused laser tag arena in Connecticut.

Matheny lives in Los Angeles where he writes and records new music from the top floor of a tenement building overlooking the megaphone preachers, fake ID salesmen, and tamaleros of MacArthur Park.