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Leak Eternal is release number two from Damien De Coene’s lo-fi and crude wall noise project, My Demons Pissing in A Bucket. It takes in a single thirty-seven-minute ‘wall’, which is compelling battering in its blunt ‘n’ bumbling flow.
This lengthy and rather clunky titled release features two fifteen-minute examples of texturally battering ‘n’ baying walled noise. The tracks here are created around source recordings of actress Nichole Kidman- both on the red Capet and being interviewed- during the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, which saw her acting alongside her then real-life husband Tom Cruise.
Markus Mehr’s newest release, Pressure, is exactly that: a sonic force pushed to extremes, both in tonality and arrangement. Dealing largely with the environmentally unfriendly phenomenon of concrete construction, Mehr’s electronic minimalism grinds each sound source and field recording down to a granular level, as acoustic metaphor for the sand that makes up a large percentage of concrete materials. Pressure perambulates through different existing architectural structures, and reflects the brutalism of their style and acts, as they stand-in for the rapidly dwindling availability of sand in the world today.
Released in the year 1971 Jade Warrior’s self-titled debut stands as a fairly distinctive slice of prog rock. It features a heady blend of meaty guitar riffing, grooving-to-moody flute work, and world music touches- with some nice shifts in pace, as well as some more pronounced psychedelic/ otherworldly moments. Here from Esoteric Recordings, Cherry Red’s prog focused sub-label is a CD reissue of the album.
Benedicte Maurseth is a Norwegian hardanger fiddler and singer, and Hárr is her fifth full-length solo album. The nine-track affair brings together element’s of traditional Nordic folk, rousing-yet- earthy soundtracking/ improv, rural field recordings/ voice recordings, and subtle ambient/ electronic texturing.
The Boy Behind The Door is a kidnap thriller-come-horror film told from the point of two twelve-year-old boys, who are snatched one sunny afternoon. The film is a tight ‘n’ taut affair, pretty much flowing with tension and unease from the off- barely letting up over its one-hour twenty-eight-minute mark. It features two great young leads, with an effective blend of taut anticipation, coiled tension and gloomy-to-shadowy moodiness. Here from Acorn Media International is a Blu Ray release of this Shudder original film.
Globe spanning collaboration of The Leaf Library and Teruyuki Kurihara sees their debut, Melody Tomb, out on Mille Plateaux as a double vinyl press. With The Leaf Library handling the synth drones, and Kurihara in charge of arranging and combining their pieces to establish their whole. A delightful 50/50 style of collaboration, Melody Tomb is a droning, noisy, electronic descent into the belly of the robotic beast.
Rest is a new double CDR release from Expose Your Eyes Aka West Yorkshire based noisemaker Paul Harrison. Over the two-discs, we get a total of twenty-eight tracks, with electro noise-based sound shifting from harsh noise droning & searing textural work-outs, to more rhythmically fired affairs, through to more surreal/ playful if still seared noisy experimentation.
Noisksidation severs up four ten-minute slices of bucking, baying, at times semi rhythmic electro-fired harsh noise from RDKPL- which is one of the pseudonyms/ projects of ultra-prolific Czech noise maker Radek Kopel.
One for the Road is the 2003 comedy film by cinematographer/ director Chris Cooke, which, to this day remains his only full-length feature film. Cooke’s only other directorial efforts are the shorts, Shifting Units and Map of the Scars. All three films are notable for their shared theme of alcoholism, with Shifting Units representing something of a preparatory piece for the longer form film. One for the Road stars the renowned British actor Hywel Bennett (Shelley, Twisted Nerve and The Virgin Soldiers), Rupert Procter (Notting Hill, The Last Enemy and the remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Gregory Chisolm (Wycliffe and Peak Practice) and Mark Devenport (Bronson and Eden Lake).
Discreet Angel brings together three pieces composed between the late 80s and early 1990s by Calgary, Alberta based Mark Ellestad. One is for solo guitar, one for pump organ and Hardanger fiddle, and one for violin & cello. Ellestad's sound is often starkly wondering in its intent, where hoovering discord is met with flecks of dartingly harmony and dusty earthiness.
Jana Irmert is a sound artist and composer based in Berlin. What Happens At Night is her fourth and latest album, which finds her sonically stepping into traditional eerie ambience, with darts into darker cinematic-like scoring.
Delving into the decade of 1970 in the field of electronic experimental music is like excavating at the Acropolis, an undisputed origin of a certain civilization containing multiple tributaries responsible for establishing the genre itself. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that affordable synthesizers were produced, which fundamentally altered acts from Kraftwerk to Pinky Floyd to the recently passed Klaus Schulze.
So here’s a blast from the (recent) past: Eine Stunde Merzbauten’s 7305 arrives in a very black digipak that gives very little away, featuring just track titles, and high contrast, black on black photos of band members. I say blast from the past because the Czech project features Radek Kopel of Napalmed (project and label) who old heads will recognise as an active and prolific musician and tape/CDR trader back in the day (and still active!); I say ‘recent’ because this album was actually released in 2014. Eine Stunde Merzbauten is an ‘industrial noise revival’ band which plays noisy improv/improv noise in tribute to noise acts, and on 7305 they pay homage to Napalmed, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Merzbow across three tracks and about 78 minutes. The three tracks are mashed into one long piece on the CD, but for the curious they are: ‘Žádná Hudba Znamená Hluk,’ ‘Deutsch Rum Im Wasserturm,’ and ‘Japahnis.’
Ame features forty-six minutes’ worth of evenly rolling ‘n’ droning walled noise from this Everett, Washington based project. The vibe/tone here is very much starkly wintery encasement, with the whole thing coming off like being rolled into a massive snowball, or buried under an avalanche- where all you see/ feel is white and cold crispness.
Together on the way is a single sixty-seven-minute work that's all about glum tension and grim unease. The works for pipe organ, piano, percussion- and over its lengthy runtime the work keeps you locked inside its taunt-yet-bleak grips.
Welcome To Exit is a new slab of enchasing sonic nihilism from French HNW king Vomir. The CDR release takes in a single twenty-eight-minute ‘wall’, which is all about locked shredding ‘n’ churning noisemaking- that effectively blocks out the world around you.
Reign Of Terror, or as it’s sold here under its French title Le Livre Noir, is a late 1940’s historic action-drama set during the French revolution, but filmed as if it was noir. With horse and carriage chases replacing car chases, flintlock shoot-out, a great selection of shady/ double-crossing characters, and a marvellous use of atmospheric shadow and silhouette. Here is a recent DVD release of the film from Artus Films.
Between the years 1970 and 1984 the BBC aired the anthology drama series Play For Today- in all, there were three hundred and eight made. Many of them highlighted both great scripts, well-observed acting, and interesting/ at times provocative subject matters. Here we have the third of BFI’s Play For Today blu ray boxsets -it takes in six plays from between the years 1971 and 1979, and they cover a good range of subjects/ topics. We go from a homeless character study, onto fly the wall-doc meets gritty drama regarding Glasgow’s Orange band march. There's a Jewish coming of age drama, a little Britain bureaucracy comedy-drama, a siege drama/ light thriller, and a coming to terms with sexuality drama.
Dropping their first full-length on Redefining Darkness, French death metal band Disfuneral are set to tear apart eardrums with Blood Red Tentacle. Although French, there is a distinctly Swedish sound to their brand, and this tone hearkens back to a much simpler time in death metal. Pushing forth their brutality with finesse and aplomb, Blood Red Tentacle is an excellent freshman album for this hungry four-piece.
Calm Brutalism brings together Norwegian guitarist/ composer Svein Rikard Mathisen, from Brumunddal in the county of Hedmark north of Oslo, and Norwegian/ American electronic music genius, John Derek Bishop from Stavanger, who has been recording under the alter ego, Tortusa since 2016. Mathisen himself has been busy since making his debut with The Copenhagen Diaries in 2015, as well as recording the album Monsters with his band Somebody’s Quartet.
The Perfume Of The Lady In Black, is a wall-noise collaboration between Scott Kindberg (She Walks Crooked) and veteran noise makers Richard Ramirez and Sean E. Ramirez Matzus. And what we find here is a plain and uncompromised example of the harsh noise wall form.
You Are Not My Mother is a creepingly slow-paced mix of mental health drama and very low-key Irish folklore-tinged psychological thriller/ horror. It’s a well if glumly acted film, ribbed with moments of lulling disquiet and subtle menace. And while it’s maybe not quite as effecting, or effective in its blend of genres as it thinks it is- it’s certainly an interesting enough trip into troubling emotions and brooding folklore. Here via Fright Fest and Signature Entertainment is a digital release of the 2021 Irish film.
The River of Appearance is part of Zoharum’s reissue of classic ambient albums from Vidna Obmana. It originally appeared back in 1996 on Projekt Records, and presented the listener with eight examples of lullingly drifting and crystalline ambience that’s bountiful with soothing and serene melody lines. It’s an album, that is largely high with bright and glowing mystery, which never descends to new age bland-ness.