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No Hope is album number two from Maginot- a project that brings together Frenchman Romain Perrot (Vomir, Trou Aux Rats, Free As Dead, Roro Perrot), and Brit Paul Hegarty (Safe, author of Noise/Music: A History). I must say it’s a difficult album to put under one genre, as the three-track album blends da-da doom/ avant jazz, sluggish/ spastic noise rock with mumbled vocals, and found sound/loose jamming.
Upward Curve is a CD box set bringing together all the 1970’s work released by the British fusion band Isotope. The four-disc set takes in three albums, BBC live recordings, and rare tracks. The material here goes from knotty, complex and raw. To more groovy & atmospheric fare.
The Assassin of the Tsar (aka Tsareubiytsa) is a 1991 Soviet historical drama from writer/ director Karen Shakhnazarov (Zerograd, Day of the Full Moon and White Tiger). The film stars legendary English actor Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Cat People and Caligula), Oleg Yankovskiy (Nostalgia, The Lover and Come Look At Me), Armen Dzhigarkhanyan (Vanished Empire, Hero Quest and Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat) and Yuriy Sherstnyov (Zerograd, Master I Margarita and Hamilton).
Here we have the sixth in Imprint's excellent Essential Film Noir box sets. The Blu-ray box set features four films dating from between the mid to late 1950’s. As with the other sets in the series, we get a nice selection of different takes on the noir genre. We go from a police drama-focused thriller. Onto a circus performing drama, escaped madman thriller, and noir blend. We have a mix of noir, romantic drama, and island/ holiday set adventure. And finally, a Bahamas-based melodrama and noir mix,
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a mid-1950s Mexican-set psycho drama/ pitch black comedy from key cinematic surrealist Luis Buñuel. It regards a well-to-do pottery, his psychotic tendencies, and whether or not he’s a murderer. The film blends skewed/ mocking drama with moments of woozy macabreness, uneasy surrealism, and almost giddy derangement. Here from Second Run is a new Blu-Ray- featuring a 4k scan, a selection of video essays, and a few other things.
Crafting ritualistic rebirth and psychological transformation through drones, analog synths, and varied ambient textures, Nam-Khar's latest has the artist leading the listener through alchemical transformations of sound through a Jungian lens. What sounds like a lot of paper is easily understood by the body when Antimon begins to play. The seven parts present a meditative ambient that allows the listener ample opportunity for introspection, the music serving as a boatman through the stygian rivers of the mind.
Latrodectus Mactans is a thirty-three-minute slab of grinding, rumbling, and shunting walled noise from this Russian project. As with all of this projects work- it’s themed around a form of spider- this is the subject Latrodectus Mactans, aka the black Widow, or Shoe Button Spider. It’s native to North America and is venomous.
Faint Imprint Of A False Deity severs up three walls, each blends crude ‘n’ crusty weight with smaller jittering ‘n’ juddering detail. Each wall hits dead on the twenty-minute mark, and I believe this is my first taster of the work of this Utah project.
Here’s a wall noise split bringing together two US projects- Florida’s Ivan Reash, and Portland’s Hana Haruna. Each party offers up two twelve-minute tracks- the formers are rather churning ‘n’ numbingly pummelling affairs, while the latter are all about dense grind ‘n’ sear.
Here’s a wall-noise split bringing together Florida’s Wilting GOd and Turin’s Rumonoise. Each party offers up a thirty-minute track that’s both seared and dense in their takes on the walled noise form.
Here’s a new twenty-five-minute wall from Cincinnati’s Whore’s Breath. And as we’ve come to expect from the project, it’s another creative take on the form- mixing rewarding textual detail with atmospheric unease.
Only Human is a progressive/alternative metal band from Denmark that I might describe as similar in style to the latest Karnivool album, In Verses, that came out this year, in that it combines the directness and emotionality of radio-friendly metal with more advanced musicianship and ambitious song structures. This album, Planned Obsolescence, appears to be their first release, on the ethereal extreme metal label Season of Mist. I'm a bit surprised, but not dismayed, to hear music like this coming from that label
In this epic volume, the follow-up to Armin Junge’s much-acclaimed Banzai! Japanese Cult Movie Posters, the writer once again takes us into Japanese cinema poster heaven.
Accident Fantôme is the portmanteau for the project of two otherwise autonomous, established musical duos, Accident du Travail and Fantôme Josepha. United by shared interests in historical instruments and long-form, ambient drone composition, the four gathered in an old church in a village just west of Metz (where some of the group are based) early last year to perform and record together.
Here’s a CD serving up three works for flute composed by Italian avant-garde/ modern classical composer Luigi Nono (1924- 1990), with a fourth by Nono collaborator Roberto Fabbriciani, who also plays flute/ piccolo here. The sound on offer here is a nice mix of moodily seared, eerily abstract, and tautly ambient, with a great use of compositional space.
Revolutions is a long-form drone work from American composer/guitarist David First for twelve players. It’s based on the 16th through 32nd harmonics of the note G—a sound world, which resides largely outside of traditional Western musical instruments and training.
The Hazing is an entertaining ‘n’ fast-moving mix of horror, dark fantasy, and comedy. The early 2000’s film regards a group of pledges being sent to a creepy mansion for an initiation. But instead of pranks & tricks, they come face-to-face with a body jumping demon, that is focused on killing them all….think like if Hell Night and The Evil Dead had a straight-to-VHS baby. Here from Wild Eye Releasing is a bare bones DVD release of the film.
Forbidden World (Mutant) is an early 80’s shot of camp, gooey, gory, and sleazy Sci-fi horror. It’s largely set within the confines of a science facility on a desert alien planet. The film has a great breakneck pace, with moments of jerky/ jarring visual collage- flashing back & forth through the picture's timeline. From 88 Films, here’s a new dual UHD and Blu-Ray release of the movie. It features two versions of the film, three commentary tracks, and a good selection of extras.
Released in the early 70’s, Desire First Sex Experience ( aka Yokujô Shotaiken) was the first of six roman porno films filmed in Sweden by Japanese studio Nikkatsu- making for a curious blend of Scandinavian and Asian takes on softcore erotica.
Following up 2021's Additive Inverse, Jim O'Rourke & Jos Smolders come together again for more sonic experimentation and procedural processing with Albumin. Their second on Moving Furniture, these two tracks showcase Jim's Kyma System generating the basis of the album before both he and Jos altered them separately in their studios. The result is a shimmering and ambulating collection of textures that flows, drifts, and pulls the listener into its midst to carry them forth through the duo's process. Working very well together, the pair combine sounds to form an enigmatic sonic stew, unpredictable and enjoyable, collected and concentrated.
From the early 60’s Los Golfos (The Delinquents) focuses on a youth gang in Madrid. As the film progresses, their crimes get steadily worse, though one of their number has possibly found a way out of a life of crime, becoming a matador. It’s a neo-realist film, shot in a gritty documentary style, really giving one a feel of the city & its suburbs. Though the film does have a rather unpleasant tone, with moments of animal cruelty. Here from Radiance Films is a Blu-ray release of the film, taking in a 4k scan, and a selection of old and new extras.
From the early 1980’s, Special Effects was Larry Cohen's (It’s Alive Trilogy, The Stuff, God Told Me To Do It) take on the then-popular erotic thriller genre, with a twist of snuff-focused horror. It regards a blonde-haired Dolly Parton look-alike coming to NYC to make it in acting, who ends up dead, and a down-on-his-luck director played by Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio, Uncut Gems) decides to make a film with the lead suspect in the case. Here from Transmission, Radiance sub-label is a Blu-ray release of the film, featuring a new & archive commentary track, and two new interviews.
Cécile is Dead is an early 1940’s French detective mystery- blending in touches of noir, and light brushes of humour. It’s a decidedly dialogue-heavy affair, with a fair few suspects for the murder of three women being investigated by the cool, calm, and pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret. Here from Eurkea’s Master Of Cinema series is a Blu Ray release of the film, taking in HD scan, a new commentary track, and a mix of new archive extras.
Woken (2024) is a dystopian sci-fi thriller arriving on UK digital on 25 May via 101 Films. Written by Alan Friel (Cake) and Rebecca Pollock (Stolen Girl), and directed by Friel in his feature-length directorial debut, the film follows Anna (Erin Kellyman), a pregnant woman who wakes on a remote island with complete amnesia, surrounded by strangers claiming to be her loved ones. As she struggles to piece together her fractured memories, she discovers a horrifying truth: humanity is on the brink of extinction, and nothing on this island is what it seems.