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Striations
One of the stand out noise releases of last year was Vietnamization by Oakland based Industrial/ Power Electronics project Striations. The release originally appeared back in 2018, but was reissued last year as a 2 CD that added in a whole disc of bonus material- the fascinating, engrossing and meaningful noise release blended elements of moody noise-scaping, harsh noise, and PE, with keen & cleverly placed weaves of news footage/samples based around the Vietnam war- all very much focusing on the how the American army both brutalized, maimed & destroyed both the landscape, the counties people, and their soldiers. I tracked down the man behind the project Mike Finklea for an email interview.
Spectrum Zine interview
Being a fan of experimental or extreme music, sound, or, film was certainly a lot more tricky /time-consuming proposition before the onset of the internet in the late 1990s, which changed pretty much everything - for better or worse. In those pre-net days, the only way to find out about such things was by picking up fanzines, smaller print underground magazines, or wait for the next catalog mail out of your favorite cult mail-order company. One of the last great and far-reaching publications of the last days of underground printed zines was Spectrum- it covered a huge amount of sonic ground under the banner of Post-industrial music- which takes in the likes of dark ambient, noise, neo-folk, martial and industrial music. The zine was all the work of Melbourne based Richard Stevenson- who turned his passion for post-industrial sounds into one of the important/ impactful zines of the scene. This year Cult publisher Headpress released a wonderful compendium of the zine- bringing together the five published issues, the unpublished 6th issue, and new interviews/ insights. We caught up with Richard for an email interview.
