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Here’s a truly special package from Gruenrekorder: a DVD and book in a neat cardboard wallet. The book is a beautiful size, more narrow than a ‘standard’ paperback (7” x 4” - your dutiful reviewer has tried and failed to find the official name for this size), and this gives me genuine pleasure as an object. Both disc and book concentrate on the works of two American composers, Christopher Shultis and Craig Shepard, both new names to me.
Five long years since their last full length, gloom and doom legends Dark Buddha Rising return with their seventh mighty slab, Mathreyata. Four thick and meaty slices of heavy duty grimness, their latest is true to form for the Finnish quintet, offering up beefy, doomy drones. Sludgy and atmospheric, Mathreyata continues on Dark Buddha Rising's quest for spreading their heavy message to the world and beyond.
The Chilean duo Gryftigæn throws us straight back into the second wave of BM with their album Graven til Måneåpenbaringer ( in English the grave of the moon revelations). And boy, this is blacked metal at it’s roughest & rawist form!
Tomoko Sauvage is a Japanese artist and musician. She grew up in the coastal city of Yokohama and has lived in Paris since 2003 after a stay in New York. Fischgeist is her new album and presents her experiments with the sounds of water. The release appeared in October last year on Bohemian Drips- it's available as 12” LP or digital download.
One Thousand Dead Swans is a noise album that sits somewhere between walled noise and wall-ish harsh noise. The five-track CDR nicely slides back and forth between seared moodiness, teeth-grinding intensity, and textural white-outs. This release appeared a month or two back on the British label Harsh Noise London- with the CDR coming presented in a DVD case, that features glitched out artwork & a paper inlay detailing the tracklisting, and the projects weblinks- this release got a numbered edition of ten copies, and as far as I can gather there are still copies of it available.
Here we have a harsh noise split bringing together two projects from London based noise-maker Ernesto Bohorquez- the projects here are Animal Machine, which is a solo project & for this release dwells in more twisting ‘n’ turning static based noise. And Clusterfuck- which is a collab between Bohorquez( electronics), and Jared C Balogh(drums), and offers up slight more chaotic/ jam type noise making.
NoScry Recordings presents Rusted Lock, the latest offering by SCARD available in both cassette and digital formats. Based in Portland, OR, SCARD is the long-running project by one J. Huston. Truth be told, despite beginning in 2001, this is my first experience with the project.
Devil In A Blue Dress was one of the batch of neo-noir films that appear in the 1990s. The largely African American cast film blends mystery & intrigue, with touches of lo-key humour & some fairly tense gunplay/ fights- all with a fairly authentic LA in the late 40’s setting. Here from Powerhouse is a recent region B Blu Ray release of the film, taking in a new 2k print & a good enough selection of largely archive extras.
Abandonment is an hour’s worth of crackle ‘n’ hiss bound walled noise- and as long-form wall matter goes it’s both entrancing & strangely lulling example of the form. This release appeared in March 2020, as both a CDR & digital download on Bangkok based Perpetual Abjection- sadly the CDR is now all long gone, but it’s still worth downloading the 'wall'- as it’s certainly a most worthy example of the long-form walled form.
There are only one or two films that truly manage to create their own unequally chilling & unsettlingly numbing atmospheres, and one such film is Crash- the 12th film from Canadian Auteur David Cronenberg. It’s a decidedly grim erotic drama/Psychological thriller, peopled by coldly perverse characters who are focus in on their own largely car connected sexual stimulation- yes it’s stark & at times deeply troubling, but at the same time oddly compelling & entrancing too. Here from the guys at Arrow Video is a well-deserved reissue of this transgressive classic- with a new 4k, and a good selection of new & old extras.
Mikey is an early 90’s killer-kid film, mixing elements of thriller, horror, and US soap-ness- all making for an enjoyable, if slightly unevenly paced example of the murderous nipper genre. Here from the folks at MVD Rewind is a collectors edition of the film- bringing together a new high definition print, a good selection of extras taking in a new feature-length doc about the film, as well as a slip-sleeve & mini film poster.
Returning with an interesting approach to indie-rock, Raoul Sinier's latest, The Dollmaker Tales, offers up ten slices of evocative and engaging rock 'n roll, complete with ups, downs, twists, turns, and all the feelings in between. Treading the thin line between radio friendly and esoteric, there are layers here for everyone, and each subsequent listen provides further takeaways. Taking on aspects of many different genres, The Dollmaker Tales is rock at its core, but the outer layers show that it is so much more.
Into The Velvet Darkness is a book that celebrates the many sides of respected US actor genre actor Vincent Price. It’s a glossy & full-colour coffee table book, which takes in just over three hundred and fifty pages. The 2019 book is from the We Belong Dead team, who brought us the books Unsung Horrors & its sequel Son of Unsung Horrors , We’re British Y’ Know!"-A Celebration of Peter Cushing, A Century Of Horror- A Pictorial History Of Cinefantastique, and of course the We Belong Dead Magazine.
Dutch trio Farer, including two members of sludge band Ortega, were formed in 2013 under the name Menhir. Then, in 2019, the shifted in the Farer name. The band emphasized on a more extreme and experimental approach to doom, eliminating guitars and using two basses. Farer's debut album Monad was released by British label Aesthetic Death as a Digisleeve CD. There is also a cassette version released by the Dutch label Tartarus Records.
How Forests Think is the third album from this Norwegian based string duo, and their decidedly moody & nature led brand of acoustic improvised music. It finds the pair deepening their bound between sound and recording spaces, with the double CD album been recorded in four different locations in & around Oslo- letting the acoustic conditions and atmosphere of each location becoming critical in both the musical composition & their creation.
KRAFFT is an example of modern orchestration, at it’s most malevolently punishing & unrelentingly thick. The piece brings together the joint power of two-chamber orchestra German collective Zeitkratzer and French Ensemble 2e2m, with a total of eighteen musicians taking part in the piece. This release comes in the form of a CD, packaged in a rather innocent-looking black, grey, blue and black striped digipak.
I know from its title this may sound like maybe a wacky-jazz fired release or something similar. But in reality, it’s a two-way walled noise CDR split from a few years back- where each artist offers up an around thirty-minute wall.
Sitting somewhere between a US army race-led period drama & a murder mystery, A Soldier's Story is a well made & well-acted early 1980’s film. Sadly it seemingly slipped between the gaps of the other military dramas of the decade, which is a pity as it’s both thought-provoking & very well realized. Here from Powerhouse is a recent welcome Blu Ray release of the film- featuring a new 2k restoration of the film, and a selection of archive material.
Roadgames is a rather charming-if-at points slightly protracted early 80’s road-based thriller, that blends in moments of sly humour, with subtle trances of dread/ unease, and fleeting action. The character actor edged film sees Stacy Keach as easy going-yet philosophical & harmonica playing lorry driver, and Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitching young heiress in the films joint lead. Here from Powerhouse is a recent Blu Ray release of the film- with a new print, and a good selection of old & new extras.
Just in time for Christmas, Cadabra releases The Festival, the closest the world will ever see to an H.P. Lovecraft Christmas story. Teaming Andrew Leman and Fabio Frizzi together again, this interesting holiday tale is a perfect pairing of two masters, both wholly in their elements. True to Cadabra's high standards, The Festival is issued on 150-gram vinyl, with gorgeously grim artwork by Jesse Jacobi and liner notes by both Frizzi and weird fiction scholar and frequent Cadabra collaborator, S.T. Joshi.
Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Band was an ensemble begun in the latter half of her long career as an avant-garde composer. It was an improv group focused in on lush, reverberant spaces not unlike the space ambient drones of dark ambient creators such as Lustmord, or synth musicians like Steve Roach, but with a decidedly organic quality, no usage of synthesizers and an out of the box approach. For Oliveros, this music was a turn towards the intuitive and away from the intellectual, away from the college campus and towards mythic abstract pagan dimensions.
Over their nearing fifty-year career The Residents- American’s top Avant-popster's have released a lot of concept albums, and gone down more than a few theme rabbit holes. One of the more visually elaborate, and layered was Cube-E – The History Of American Music In 3 E-Z Pieces, this project spanned almost four years in the late ’80s/ early ’90s. It was meant to do exactly what its sub-title said, tell the story of American popular music, from its birth around the campfires of the Old West to its death at the hands of Elvis and the British Invasion. Like with many of The Residents large/ far-reaching projects- it didn’t exactly fulfil its promise- but it did result in a stage show, a live album, and a studio album of Elvis cover versions. Here from New Ralph Too/Cherry Red/ MVD Audio, as part of their pReseverved series- is a boxset covering all that was Cube E- including a whole host of rare/unreleased material- which in total takes in seven-discs, making this the largest release yet in the pReseverved series.
This French production was directed by Swiss porn director Pierre B Reinhard in 1987 and has since caused quite a stir in the horror industry, what started life as a homage to French horror/exploitation director Jean Rollin has become celebrated as one of France’s most recognisable sleazy, low budgets splatterfests. The only real name attached to the film was that of producer/writer Jean-Claude Roy who had worked in the French film industry for many years as a writer, director and producer. Roy is most well known as the director of the 1957 movie, A Night at the Moulin Rouge and the 1971 comedy Good Little Girls, neither of which would have prepared him for writing Revenge of the Living Dead Girls.
After releasing around fifteen shorts & a few splits Hell is the first full-length release from Philippines project Francesco Terrini. And what we get here is a fairly even mixture of noise & ambience. The release comes in the form of a five-track CDR- which appeared on British noise label Harsh Noise London a few months back.