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Dark Heart severs up a selection of greyly surreal, darkly seared, & at times violent slurred modern composition from Canadian composer & painter Lance Austin Olsen. The CD release appears on the always reliable Sheffield based Another Timbre- who are really the go-to label for creative & channelling modern composition, modern classical music, and improv.
Anne Guthrie is a composer and instrumentalist primarily working with French horn and electronically treated field recordings. Her work has emphasised the liminal spaces between field recording, avant-garde composition and the possibilities opened up by electronic processing. She is also the current managing director of the S.E.M Ensemble in Brooklyn who specialise in performing works by modern American composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. Brass Orchids is Guthrie's second record for Ohio's Students of Decay label.
From time-to-time, black metal bands form into communities or “secret orders”. For example, There’s the Inner Black Circle from Norway, or the French Les Legions Noires. There is something similar in Portugal called The Black Circle. This organization includes the black metal bands such as Mons Veneris, Decrepitude, Irae, Rainha Cólera and the band I'm reviewing today Vetala.
This review comes as something of a relief and change of pace as for the first time in a while I have approached the release with no prior knowledge of either the artist or the label. Fergus Kelly's "Local Knowledge" was released on CD by Unfathomless and was their 44th release at the time in September 2017.
Meander is the second album from Tañce Snu (The Dances of a Dream) and was recorded live in Warsaw in September of 2017. It features vocalists and mainstays of the project India Czajkowska and Sebastian Madejski, alongside guitarist Christoph Matyascheck and percussionist Adam Rozenman. The band describe the album as “a musical journey inspired by the sounds of the past, often interwoven with avant-garde sounds of neo-classical improvisation”. An interesting premise and one that certainly has some relevance to the project.
Gordon Grdina is a Canadian jazz guitarist who has been a part of countless ensembles. Inroads is the first album for this particular quartet comprised of guitar, sax/clarinet, keys and drums. It was released in 2017 on the Songlines label, my go-to for sophisticated melodic modern jazz.
120 Pieces Of Sound presents us with two thirty-to-forty-minute examples of moodily sparse- to- dread filled & dark modern compositions from Swiss composer and clarinettist Jürg Frey.The release comes in the form of a CD on Elsewhere Music- the up & coming US modern composition/ modern classical label.
In the past decade or so, many new, synthesizer based genres have spawned, covering pretty much any type of synth music one could want. Usually ending with the postfix "wave," these styles have a fun take on current music and often times a loving nod at the synthesizer music of the late 70's and 80's. Many of these acts find their way onto bills at metal and noise shows, showing the openness of influences and the ability for fans to cross over genres. While a handful of acts have done their version of blending genres (Gost's Possessor, for example), none have been as pure in this mash up as Abstract Void on his latest, Back to Reality.
Berserk! is a late 60’s circus set British murder mystery/ horror flick featuring Hollywood legend Joan Crawford. The film features fairly impressive- if-fleeting murder sequences, a fair bit of cutting & bitchy banter, a lot of overlong circuses performances, and the odd quirky/ bizarre twist like a sudden & un-prompted musical number. Here on Uk Powerhouse Films is a recent Blu Ray presentation of the film- featuring a good selection of interesting & informative extras, and a new 2k print of the film.
Here we have a release that poses, and then answers the question of what can be found in seemingly total silence. The work sees French electronic musician/multidisciplinary artist Julien Bayle recording two hours of silence in 'anechoic' room- then processing it through a Euroack Modular system- to create nine specific length tracks- and the results are both surprisingly varied, creative & often rather noisy.
Scald is a doom metal band that has not been active for over 20 years. The creative period for this project was very short. The band where formed in the Russian city of Yaroslavl in 1993 and ended in 1997. They recorded a rehearsal demo and, in 1997, their only full-length album, Will Of Gods Is A Great Power. A few months after the release of the album, the vocalist Maxim “Agyl” Andrianov tragically died, and Scald ceased to exist.
A year after their last release the somewhat lacklustre Catacomb Resonator. Here’s Eremos- a new full length nine track releases from dark ambient & occult music two piece Arktau Eos- it finds the mysterious Finish duo back on good form offering up a mostly consistent release that moves between & melds sinister retro electronic texturing, gloomy & dread filled ritual music, with brooding ceremonial organ simmers, and fleeting/ eerier field recordings.
Originally released in the early 2000’s Malevolence stands as one of the more effective, though sadly lesser known/ celebrated of modern slasher films. It apt brings together dread-soaked atmospherics, effective & at times jarring stalk ‘n’ slash action, the occasional brutal killing, with a neat rural setting. Here is a recent duel Blu Ray/ DVD release of the film- so let’s hope this helps raise the awareness of this film in horror fans minds.
After a handful of digital releases Bulles Noires is the first physical release from this new French project who sit somewhere between brooding electro-improv, textured noise making & pared-back electronica. The release appears as either self-released 3inch CDR or digital download.
Finnish doom merchants Dark Buddha Rising burst onto the scene eleven years ago with their demo, I. This supremely limited CDr (9 copies) shows the young band firing on all cylinders, ready to unleash their heavy, sparse doom upon the world. Releasing their next three albums on their own label, Post-RBMM, Dark Buddha Rising worked quickly to establish a solid following and get their future releases put out by the likes of Svart and Neurot. Considering their first three were on limited vinyl pressings, getting major distribution is great for the metal community, as their Post-RBMM LPs have become very hard to find. And, thanks to Svart Records, their first three albums, along with their 2007 demo, are now available in a remastered, limited, seven LP box set, The Black Trilogy.
Swans guitarist Norman Westberg steps out of the shadow cast by his former band to release his latest solo opus After Vacation on Room 40 Records. Westberg has been a huge influence on a generation of guitar players having played on the vast majority of Swans releases, enjoying three separate spells with the band, the first from 1983 until 1991 taking inall of their classic early material. He briefly rejoined for the album The Great Annihilator in 1995 and was a key figure in the band’s resurrection in 2010, when Michael Gira reunited the band for a run of rather excellent albums. He stayed until the end appearing on all of the band’s albums that were recorded during that final run.
Appearing from the prog/experimental rock scene of the late 1960s/ early 1970’s Third Ear Band where a British collective who centred their mostly instrumental, often fairly free-form & experimental sound around the core use of violin, cello, oboe and percussion. Here on Esoteric Records is a three-CD disc release of their second 1970 album Self-titled/Elements, & recordings from the time- expanding the original 35-minute album to three-plus hours of material.
Jess Franco stands as one of the most prolific, versatile & at times creative directors to appear from with-in the exploitation genre. Between the late 1950’s & mid 2010’s he directed one hundred & fifty films, which saw him dipping his toe in pretty much every exploitation sub-genre going from: gothic horror, erotic horror, Women In Prison, cannibal & slasher films, trippy erotic, hard & soft-core porn, 80’s action & adventure, and so on. This just shy of two hundred page book attempts to pick-out some of the gems from Franco’s truly massive filmography- giving each one a critical overview.
This is an expanded rerelease of a three track EP put out by Ulver at the end of 2017, functioning as something of an addendum to their very enjoyable album of messianic synth rock, The Assassination of Julius Caesar. The title - Thus passes the glory of the world - continues the themes of fallen empires and millenarian portent found throughout that album. Appropriately, given that the phrase was transmitted to modernity as part of the Papal coronation ritual, the EP is adorned with one of Francis Bacon's most well known Pope paintings based partly on Diego Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. What we have is the original three studio tracks (one of which is a cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love) and four live recordings of songs off the Julius Caesar record. The extra live tracks bring the record to over forty minutes in length.
On VCI Entertainment/ MVD Visual here is a recent duel format release of the classic & genre-defining Mario Brava film from the mid-1960s. Many of Brava’s films have made a big impact on the horror film form, but I think it’s safe to say that Blood & Black Lace is one of his most far-reaching & influential of his films- so it’s great to get this new Blu ray/ DVD edition of the film- which features a new 2k restoration of this classic, two new commentary tracks, and a few other bits & bobs.
Common Eider, King Eider are a California based project who work in a style that can be briefly described as Dark Ambient / Drone. Since 2007, the project has released twelve full-length albums and two EP’s. Initially, the collective started with a sound close to the likes of Birchwill Cat Motel, Pocahaunted and Natural Snow Buildings, with subsequent releases bringing in darker Ambient and distorted drone guitars into their sound, giving them a Drone Doom label.
Here on Second Sight, we get a much-deserved reissue of A Strange Calls- the late 1970 ’s blend of slasher & police drama, and it’s not often seen follow-up 1993’s When A Stranger Calls Back. Both films nicely mix together some very un-nerving chills, believable characters, and effectively twisting & turning plots. This new reissue offers up a two-disc & forty-page book set- which takes in the two films & extras on the Blu Ray, and on the CD the soundtrack for the first film.
After a few years of dormancy Hunting For Manflesh is the first new material from this notorious cannibal themed German HNW project. The release comes in the form of either a C30 cassette or digital download- both of these offer up two fifteen minutes examples of grittily seared wall-noise brutality.
The Graven Realm is a somewhat out of the blue release from a project I thought long-dead. Around 2015 this Newcastle project released a handful of decidedly grim & necro focused walled-noise releases, then promptly disappeared. This double disc CDR set appeared on Altar Of Waste in May of last year- so I’m not sure exactly when the material here dates from.