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Vistas is a five-track journey in starkly bounding and angular forking improv for double bass, two cellos and electronics. It’s a grim-yet-torque-tight affair, which hums with both shady inner doubt & foreboding anxiety.
Landmarks is a largely glum and gloomily droning collaboration between Canadians Katelyn Clark who is an early-music specialist, and composer-improviser Isaiah Ceccarelli. The eight-track album is an often simmering and pressing affair, which will please those looking for droningly doomy church organ-led composition.
Rock 'n' Roll High School was a Roger Corman-produced anachronic comedy-come-musical. It's centred around a cheekily delinquent and Ramones fanatic played PJ Soles (Halloween, Carrie, etc), who wants to overthrow her school's new strict principle, get her song sung by her favourite band, and have an all-round good time. The film also features the likes of Clint Howard, Vincent Van Pattten, Mary Wornov, Dick Miller, and The Ramones- and it's a bubble gum-blowing romp, that’s high on fun and music. Here from 101 Films is a recent region B Blu-Ray release of the film, which is baggy with extras and quirky 70s campness.
Márton Illés is a Hungarian modern classical composer who creates darting, often angular and sometimes shrill work- that at times flirts with avant jazz sensibilities. Watercolours and Psychograms is a seven-piece/fifteen-track CD release, featuring work composed by Illés between 2013 and 2021, taking in work for clarinet, an accordion, piano, and string trio, and blends of piano, wind and string instruments.
Aggregate Forms is a double CD set bringing together two searing -to- droning works from American modern classical composer/ violinist Catherine Lamb. The two lengthy works featured here are for two Violins, viola, and cello.
Veteran digital soundscape artist Richard Chartier returns with a new offering from his most sensitive and emotive ambient alias, pinkcourtesyphone. Far from the cold pure tones and minimalism of his early days, this new album All Intensive Purposes, like others from the alias, sees Chartier creating a billowing reverberant sound closer to traditional space ambient.
Making quite the name for themselves by pairing famous writers with astounding soundtracks, Cadabra raises the bar by making their latest a triplet. Heading back to 1978's The Eyes of the Cat, this release sees the graphic novel by the legends Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean “Moebius” Giraud getting a wonderful score by the near-mythical Fabio Frizzi. For this release, Frizzi returned to his 1978 self and utilized his vintage synthesizer collection. This adds an air of familiarity to fans of his late 70's/early 80's work with Lucio Fulci, but there is so much more. Despite the soundtrack's short run time, The Eyes of the Cat manages to intrigue and inspire as well as classic era Frizzi.
Pastor Hall is a WWII drama from the early 1940s. It is based on the true-life story of pastor Martin Niemöller- who was sent to Dachau concentration camp after criticising the Nazi party. The film builds from a comfy village drama, into a troubling and at times moving and powerful indictment of what the Nazis did to the normal people of Germany. Here from Powerhouse films is a new Blu-ray of the film- with a new 4k scan of the picture, and both new & archive extras.
It’s getting increasingly harder to tell what newer improv actually is, or where it comes from: free jazz, open composition, electronic improvisation, or just plain old prepared music? Central points of departure and an overall mood are more dominant than styles or musical heritages. And while post-genre is a catch-all and seems like the easy way out, it’s abundantly clear that there’s not an acoustic musician working today who isn’t versed in post-production and the occasional synth patch or two. Enter Nakama, a group of spectacularly well-trained musicians in familiar garb – drums, piano, reeds, bass, and even voice – whose latest album, New World, is just what it claims to be: work beyond the horizon of the known.
Anatomy of a Psycho is a 1961 crime thriller from director/producer Boris Petroff (Red Snow, The Unearthly and Shotgun Wedding). Adapted from a story by Jane Mann, Boris Petroff’s wife, whose writing credits include just three movies, Anatomy of a Psycho, The Unearthly and Shotgun Wedding, all for her husband, and cult movie legend Ed Wood Jr who’s writing credit is under the alias of Larry Lee. The screenplay is courtesy of Don Devlin, who would go on to share a creative partnership with Jack Nicholson that included production credits on The Witches of Elswick (1987) and The Fortune (1975) as well as co-writing Thunder Island (1963) with Nicholson himself. The film is also notable for starring Ronnie Burns, the adopted son of George Burns and Gracie Allen and co-star of his Dad’s TV vehicle, The George Burns Show, as the clean-cut Mickey.
Om Shanti Om is the 7th album from Polish post-punk/ noise-rock project Schröttersburg. The seven-track album sees the band weaving in elements of locked krautrock groove and industrial texturing into their sound, as well as a fairly pronounced Middle East air to some of the tracks
Moljebka Pvlse is solo project of Stockholm, Sweden based Mathias Josefson. The project blends electronic and acoustic instrumentation with field recordings, and Borrowed Scenery is a twelve-inch vinyl release taking into two twenty-minute slices of dense ambient soundscaping.
Now here’s a nice surprise new work from Russian wall noise Train Cemetery. Nothing takes in two forty-minute examples of the walled noise, and as with much of these projects' other work, the focus here is on layered and texturally detailed wall craft.
Here’s a wall noise split bringing together two eighteen-minute examples of the genre, which blend murky to roasting wall craft with an uncurrent of surreal/ wackier texturing. Featured here are Ottawa, Ontario-based Reaching Needles, and Portland Oregon-based Hana Haruna.
Portuguese machine gun Black Cilice started pounding against humanity around 2009 with their first release Demo 1. Thirteen years later, their latest blacked attack Esoteric Atavism is unleashed. Raw and muddy black metal, from the swamps of hell!. The meaning of Atavism is ‘a tendency to revert to something ancient or ancestral’- so most fitting for grim BM.
New York state-based Chris Seaver is a micro-budget comedy-horror creator- who since the late ’90s has carved out his own distinctive often video-captured path. It’s fair to say his work is very much a love or late affair, with little middle ground- his films featuring hammily acted and overbearing characters, cult film and music references, fart jokes and sexualized humour, and OTT cheapy effects. Friday The 12th: Triple Feature brings together three films from Mr Seaver- two slashes- Terror at Blood Fart Lake, and its sequel Return To Blood Fart Lake, and a sort of Evil Dead parody with red necks 'n' jigging breasts The Evil Dead Inbred Rednecks.
Here’s an exhaustive package from 901 Editions: a CD in a cardboard wallet, accompanied by a 60-page colour printed book, all containing materials from Steve Roden’s Gradual Small Fires (And A Bowl Of Resonant Milk) project, commissioned by the University of Hong Kong’s New Media School and first presented in 2012. The installation originally consisted of plexiglass sculpted forms and accompanying sound pieces, but here we merely have the audio tracks; the book prints an associated series of drawings, as well as texts from Daniela Cascella, Michael Ned Holte, and Steve Roden, all reflecting on and providing context for the material.
From Eugene Oregon-based Isolation Practice Cwt. is a just under twenty-minute example of grimly buffeting ‘n’ bleakly droning walled noise. This is a digital self-release from the project, and as far as I can recall is my first taste of its work.
From the late 1970s, The Initiation of Sarah is a TV film that pulled together two of the most popular horror themes of the decade- telekinesis and the satanic. It’s a female sorority set affair which mixes bitching drama, moving things with the mind action, and lightly horrifying mystery. Here from Arrow Video, both in the UK and stateside, is a new blu ray release of the film. It features a new 2k scan of the picture, a commentary track from respected TV Movie expert Amanda Reyes, and a few other extras.
A Mother’s Fury is a family drama-come-low key crime thriller focusing on the abhorrent act of Sorority hazing. It’s a well-acted, troubling, and often emotionally moving picture- which certainly pulls you into its story, though I’m not completely sold on the turn the film in makes in its last quarter. Here from Signature Entertainment is a VOD release of the film.
Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, a series of protest marches took place in/ around the Berkshire UK village of Aldermaston. On the outskirts of the village, there were plans to build an Atomic Weapons Establishment, and the marches were an attempt to sway the then government to stop their funding of nuclear bomb research. A big part of these marches was the music played & recording during these protests. And here we have a two-disc set compiling together said music, with the sound moving between rousing folk, acoustic protest music, choral music, and (lots of) trad jazz.
Originally released in 1989 Morpheus was the second album from Delerium. It found the Canadian two-piece offering up a varied ten album, which moved from dark ambience, brooding to slightly ethnic tinged electronica, light electro-industrial, and more beat bound score like fare. Here on Metropolis Records is a recent CD reissue- which adds in five bonus tracks.
Now here is a highly sleazed, often nasty, at times unpleasant take on the Giallo genre. Released in the late 1970’s Gore in Venice is one hell of a scuzzy and at times extreme ride that blends strong softcore, sexualized gore, and all manner of rape/ perversion- with a thin vein of who-done-it mystery running through its brutally misogynistic length. Here on Full Moon is a total uncut Blu-Ray release of the film.
General Magic have returned to tickle and tease eardrums with their newest EP, Softbop. The frantic and hard to pin down duo of Andi Pieper and Ramon Bauer have been off for nearly two decades, but triumphantly descend upon eager ears with this seven-song release. Quick beats and bright electronics flesh out Softbop as something post-dance, or a work that is built for hip robots. Utilizing this loose framework, General Magic craft an engaging and fun EP that bears repeated spins.