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Second Anxiety Crisis is a nervy ‘n’ nasty example of tautly tense walled noise form from Brazilian project Niili. The release comes in the form of a self-released digital download, which takes in a single around forty-minute track.
House On Cuckoo Lane is an ultra-low budget stab at the whole cursed videotape genre. It’s a British film set in the world of cult horror film collectors, and it’s has a creepy enough atmosphere, a few neat jumps, and some effective enough moments of gore. Here on SRS Cinema is a region free DVD of the film- featuring directors commentary and a few other extras.
Eye Of The Cat is a late 1960’s thriller that wonderfully seesaws between dark playful-ness, woozy moodiness, and moments of intense terror. It’s part low key crime caper and part when animal attacks horror- with a few twists of old hag horror, off-kilter romance, and dark comedy. From Powerhouse here is a very much needed Blu Ray reissue of the film, featuring a great new scan of the picture, a new commentary track and a few other extras.
From the late 1970s, The Big Fix is an often quirky & eventful comedy thriller featuring Richard Dreyfuss, as 60's radical-turned-bumbling-if- well-meaning private eye. The films set in the world of political campaigning, with Dreyfuss character been approached by an old flame, who needs his help to investigate a smear- with things rapidly moving from fond reminiscing, to the dangerous and even deadly. On Powerhouse here we have a Blu Ray of this playful and unpredictable film- with the disc featuring a new remastered print, and some neat extras.
Perdita Durango is Alex de la Iglesia’s first English language film and his follow up to the critically acclaimed Day of the Beast. It is based on the Barry Gifford novel “59 Degrees and Rainy: The Story of Perdita Durango”, which is the second in the Sailor and Lola series and a sequel to the first novel “Wild at Heart” which David Lynch made into a successful movie starring two of Hollywood’s up and coming actors at the time, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dearn who took on the roles of Sailor and Lola.
Aar & Dag is self-described as a collective of four Danish composers, with a number of releases since 2017. Their new album is an LP titled Tifold af Fri Form og Fælles Motiv, and it sits somewhere between free improvisation and electronic ambient music utilizing looping techniques.
The most extreme form within the experimental music scene is undoubtedly noise, in all its forms. An atonal, cacophonic and violent phenomenon that has little to do with music in general, this style has won a huge number of fans around the world and continues to attract new followers.
Donna Haraway’s classic essay of 1985, The Cyborg Manifesto, declared that ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism – in short, cyborgs’. Haraway wasn’t talking here about a race of Terminator-esque figures, but about the ways in which we are all carefully maintained ‘machines’, reliant on complex networks of food, medical, and self-fashioning technologies.
Destination Forbidden Planet is a compilation focusing on space/ sci-fi themed music from the 1950’s- be it rock ‘n’ roll, easy listening, Sci-fi B movie scores/ TV themes, quirky pop, and even a few trailers. The single CD features a whooping thirty-seven tracks/seventy-nine minutes of playtime, and I must say it’s a nicely consistent and varied compilation, with a lot of tracks that I’d never heard before.
Tomasz Sroczynski is a young Polish composer and violinist, whose work has one toe in grandly dramatic classical music and another in repetitive modern composition. Symphony n°2 / Highlander is a CD/ LP release, and it’s a four-track affair that highlights both his urgent-yet-dramatic and sometimes dizzyingly layered compositions
Threshold is a low-key psychological thriller-come-road movie, with touches of occultic horror and light humour. The film is a prime example of modern ultra-low-budget filmmaking, as it was shot on two iPhones, with a key cast of just two people, and a crew of three. From Arrow Video( in both the UK & US) here we have a Blu Ray release of the film- taking in two commentary tracks, and a good selection of other extras.
From the folks over at Cold Spring Records here’s a CD release of the soundtrack for the 2018 horror film Aura ( aka The Exorcism of Karen Walker). The film's plot tells of a couple who discover a Kirlian camera, a device that takes pictures of a person’s aura. The forty-minute/ fifteen track soundtrack is a decidedly varied affair- moving between creepily hoovering and grimly twinkling synth string scoring. Onto coldly pared back-to-brooding electronica, through to gothic horror house piano meets melancholic string swooning, onto dark-deep ambience.
Oxygen Room is a wonderfully moody, at points downright haunting/ uneasy trip into primally slurred and ritual tipped improv. The four-track CD appears on Slovenia’s Inexhaustible Editions, and I must say it's a most compelling and often eerier ride of an album- really taking the improv form down a fairly original and distinctive path.
Here we have the fourth in a series compilation from Bear Family Records, which revisits the sounds of my favourite genres of music, the Kosmische or Krautrock scene that flourished in West Germany during the 1960s and 70s. These compilations are great because they mix artists who became stars outside of Germany (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and Cluster) with those who never managed to break out and achieve worldwide success (Lokomotive Kreuzberg, Mythos and Dissidenten). This set concentrates on bands from West Berlin, and as such comprises of an interesting selection of artists who hail from the very frontline of the socio-political battle taking place in the 60s and 70s between capitalism and communism.
MUHD's debut, Dilogia, originally appeared back in 2014 as a limited cassette release. Now available for the first time on CD through Cyclic Law, this drifting, droning slice of ambient is now getting into more hands. Despite being seven years old, Dilogia sounds amazingly fresh, showing just how far-sighted MUHD's debut really was.
A Hard Day’s Night severs up two slices of rough ‘n’ ready walled noise with a heroin fix theme. Each track rolls in just over the thirty-minute mark, and each is as weighty and body crushing as each other.
Here’s a rather odd package from Gruenrekorder, which consists of a printed piece of cardboard with a CD attached to the reverse, and a booklet held on with a rubber band - it's unclear if this is conceptual or just pragmatic and somewhat ugly. The CD contains one long 42-minute track, ‘Stadt [Land Fluss],’ based on the music theatre piece of the same name by Daniel Kötter and Hannes Seidl, whilst the booklet compiles text from the piece and photographs from a performance of it.
Lubanje i kosti ( translated Skull And Bones) is a recent two-track release from Croatian wall noise project Placenta Lyposuction. The release appeared as a digital download on Gates Of Hypnos, and self-released CDR/ tape by the project itself. Each of the two tracks lasts around the thirty-minute mark- with each been nicely dense and bone bowing intense in their attack.
Here we have a split digital release bringing to two sonic coffin slabs of ANW/ grim drone craft. Featured here we have Poland's Sado Rituals, and Uk based Mass Grave. The release appears on Poland’s Gates of Hypos, and can be found just here.
Smeared Makeup is an example of numbing and blunt walled noise making. The just shy of twenty-minute long single track release is suitable constricting and glum, creating a feeling of both detached unsettlement & clammy unease.
Zoom Up: Murder Site is a pink film, that blends nasty roughie action with intense Giallo like kills. This late 1970’s film certainly has its moments of shock/ unpleasantness, but unfortunately, the surrounding storyline/ characters leave a lot to be desired- meaning at points this just over hour-long film feels twice that length. Here on Impulse Pictures is a region one release of the film.
Temple Songs is a recent four-CD boxset bringing together all of the studio albums from UK prog band Greenslade. They have a decidedly keyboard focused sound, which is often fairly playful and creative in its genre-blending. In all the set takes in four albums- Greenslade, and Bedside Manners Are Extras both from 1973, 1974’s Spyglass Quest, and 1975’s Time And Tide- which is often seen as the band defining release, though each album here has its charm/ worth.
Finnish ritual dark ambient label Aural Hypnox has distinguished themselves from their contemporaries with the deep organic timbre of their work, often sourced from acoustic instruments, and the otherworldly transporting energy they put forth, with great sincerity. This new cassette, Transcendental Radiations I, is the beginning of a new multi-artist series for the so-called "Helixes" collective, which encompasses all of the label's major artists. This first album in the series is created by the pair of Anti Haapapuro (of Arktau Eos, Halo Manash, Aeoga and more) and Jussi Saivo (of Tiermes and Aural Holograms, an Aural Hypnox project also including Anti).
Here we have another reissued/ expanded release from US necro-fed/ unease industrial noise project Himukalt. Originally released back in 2018 Between My Teeth, is a blend of tautly bounding-yet-often unwell synth lines, constricting and grey beats/ electronics, and tightly cut or muffled samples/ vocals. It’s a release that’s primed to unbalance and unsettling, and once again it’s easy to see why this project has been gaining such praise/ interest of late.