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Early To Late brings together two lengthy works from two composers who blur the line between modern composition & detailed/ quiet improv. Each of the pieces here manager to be both lulling moody & angular soothing, as well as creatively eventful & involving in their unfolds.
Satan’s Cheerleaders is a tame-if-enjoyable slice of 1970’s exploration campiness, bringing together the teen sex comedy with light satanic themed horror. This is a dual format reissue of the film, which offers up a new 2k remastering & two new commentary tracks.
What is it to capture a place in sound? Ever since the advent of portable recording equipment that question has taken on a more realist tone. A question of technique perhaps, but also one of decisions, omissions and edits. The sound artist or field recorder can never abstract their presence from the midst of the subject they wish to capture. As such every sound portrait betrays a particular embodied experience of place and of listening. There is no neutrality, no objective conveying of the place in question. Rafal Kolacki appears aware of these aporias and has carved for himself a suitable standpoint from which to record his subjects without however any need for the semblance of neutrality. His previous work Hirja. Noise from the Jungle was a reportage style collection of recordings made in the refugee camp which sprung up at Calais during the height of the migration crisis in 2016. Kolacki's recordings exposed both the dire conditions in the camp but also the compassion of aid workers and solidarity and wit of the refugees themselves. This new set seems to continue along a line of flight from the Jungle camp to one of the countries from which many migrants were arriving, Ethiopia. A'Zan. Hearing Ethiopia draws its title from the Arabic word for the Islamic call to prayer and focuses the microphone upon the capital Addis Abeba.
Master Of All Times is a double CD set worth of work from the Paul Chain project. The release features a selection of eight tracks recorded in 1999, and these offer up the expect creative blend of throbbing 80’s synth scaping, experimental blues rock, and dark, at-times prog bound rock.
Any B-movie or cult film fan worth their salt will know the name Charles Band. Since the 1970’s this director, producer, writer, and publisher has been heavily involved in the B- movie market, producing near on 300 films, directing 55, and writing around 50. He was most known in the 80’s/ 90’s for his company Empire Pictures- which release such B classics such as Ghoulies, The Dungeonmaster, Terrorvision, Re-Animator and From Beyond. In the 1990’s, after the demise of Empire, he formed Full Moon Features- releasing cult fare such as the Puppet master series, Pit and the Pendulum, Castle Freak, and the Killjoy series. It Came From The Video Aisle!, is a 500-page book charting Bands career from the 1990’s up to present day- bringing together 50 exclusive interviews, honest overviews/ reviews of all his output from this period, plus a host of rare artwork, and behind the scenes pictures.
23 Treads last album 2015’s Conspicuous Unobstructed Path was somewhat of a revelation, with its angular & darkly psychedelic brand repetitive & sonically locked down neo- folk. Really giving this often cliché ridden genre a different twist & unbalancing flavour. The Ornaments( The Ghost Of Miranda) deepens their experimental & atmospherically unsettling tendencies, to create another extremely worthy trip to the outer limits of Neo-Folk.
British electronic act Colossloth is back with his second release on Cold Spring, Heathen Needles. Featuring eleven tracks of diverse but well connected electronic grimness, Colossloth defies classification and has the freedom to do compose as he chooses. Heathen Needles benefits greatly from this freedom, and Colossloth's textures and tones can be appreciated fully for what they are.
Black Metal is a genre that has always intrigued me beyond just the music. Many bands have drawn on fascinating events in history and folklore to create their own personal mythology by which they live. Much is particularly known about the Scandinavian Black Metal scene which has seen numerous attempts to catalogue its near 30 year history. Most famously Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, with its contentious front cover of a burning church, and more recently and less controversially Dayal Patterson’s Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult.
Here we have a double blast of caustically dense, ear-scorching, and perversely seared Harsh noise. The C40/ digital download sees the bringing together of US smut noise jam-mers Black Leather Jesus, with the often high pitched ribbed noise nastiness of Stockholm based JSH.
Here from Severin we have a much deserved & long needed reissue of the ultra-bleak, extremely harrowing, yet highly compelling British Docu-drama detailing the day(s) after the bomb drops. Originally released back in 1984, and broadcast on the BBC during the height of the cold war. Treads stands as one of the most intense & disturbing things to ever appear on TV- and it still has so much bleak power & soul-shattering impact even after all these years, which I don’t think can say about many films 30 plus years old.
Free As Dead is (as far as I’m aware) the first film foray from Frenchman Romain Perrot- most known for his walled noise project Vomir, as well as spastic folk & rant project Roro Perrot, and avant funerary chapel projects Trou Aux Rats & Free As Dead. Here on Perrot’s Decimation Social label we have a region free DVD, and it’s certainly a crude, ghoulish & ugly slice of ultra lo-fi art house horror- think a shorter, more nonsensical, corrupted, and unsettling take on Begotten- and you’ll get a rough idea what to expect.
Here’s the second in the recently rediscovered wall releases, that ‘repapered’ in the M[m] sort-out. This split C60 comes from early 2016, and brings together Serbian Dead Body Collection & Eugene, Oregon based Willowbrook.
While having a clear-up/sort-out at M[m] we came across a few wall noise titles from a few years back, which had slipped through the cracks, and here we have the first of these. It’s an excellent C60 split from 2015 bringing together the taut & shifting textured detail of Italian project Nascitari, with the dense & crude shredding walled noise power of Frances Vomir
Although Fred Weldont Warmsley III (Dedekind Cut) made his mark as a hip-hop producer, he's continued to grow and expand and show his talents in other genres of music. Differing quite a bit from last year's The Expanding Domain, Kranky's release of Tahoe shows Dedekind Cut with a more refined, further reaching scope. The fun, fairly disconnected, near-industrial beats have given way to lush ambient, and reveal Dedekind Cut's passion for artistry.
The split between Clive Henry and Trou is untitled, that is the spine gives us only the titles given to each artist's track ("Untitled / Scorch I"), and comes in a white case with black text on grey paper for the artwork.
Robert Schwarz' previous effort on Gruenrekorder, The Scale of Things, was a superlative amalgam of dense musique concrete, treated field recordings and modular synthesizer that conjured worlds of amplified natural processes and disquieting soundscapes. The beauty of that record was how it showcased a variety of techniques in such a way to produce a unified, highly composed, not-to-mention dramatic vision of avant-garde electronic composition. Like its predecessor, Double Negative features a cover that hints at what lies within the grooves of the record. The strange almost claustrophobic collage which adorned The Scale of Things gives way here to a seascape, on the horizon of which drifts the unmistakable geometric form of an iceberg, or could be a shark fin or even the prow of a sinking ship? The picture is almost abstract in its composition and finds kin among the similarly abstract and musically dissociated music on the record.
Talibam describe themselves as Dadaist provocateurs with an innate love for the history of music. Talibam! grew out of the New York avant garde/improv scene and have two members Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea. Stretching out from basic musical concepts Talibam! explore sound and structure to create something interesting and unique that lies beyond classification. "Endgame of the Anthropocene" is their latest in a long line of releases spanning the last 11 years and apart from being a wonderful title, it is a record cramp packed with possibilities and ideas.
Toxic is a modern free jazz trio consisting of sax and wind player Mat Walerian, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, who apparently hasn't been in the studio since he appeared on Frank Lowe recordings in the 60's. This new album, entitled "This Is Beautiful Because We Are Beautiful People" is the group's first release, though Walerian and Shipp have been quite active in recent years, including some previous collaborations with each other.
Jazz' Mad is a decidedly quirky & sometimes outsider tinged synth album from the early 1980’s- it blends together elements off-kilter synth pop, epic & at times spacey synth-scaping, and more unhinged/indulgent moments. Behind the ADN Ckrystall project was Érick Moncollin, who was somewhat of a self-funded synth geek who decided to create his own distinctive blend of synth-focused music- which at times brings to mind the work of more recent synth outsiders like John Manus & Ariel Pink.
El Prêtro Maniaco is a one-man French project that creates an unwell & darkly hued blend of ambience, wonky synth 'n' slurred noise craft, and moody post-industrial sound-scaping. By all accounts, Opus Premum is the projects debut release- which originally appeared as a digital release in late 2015, but here it appears in both physical CDR & digital form on Required Of Rate Records.
Before the two Airplane films, The Naked Gun series, and the Scary Movies- there was this silly, at times amusing,and occasionally laugh-out-loud cult classic from 1978. Here on MVD’s new Rewind Collection line- we have a deluxe duel format reissue of the film, featuring a host of extras, commentaries, and even a poster.
Released on Unearthed Films & with connections to Ruggero Deodato (as producer & actor) one might expect Lilith's Hell is going to be something either brutal, or extreme & promisingly arty. But instead it’s a sadly rather a run-of-the-mill found footage movie- with a fairly interesting concept, that’s really not developed enough, and the odd effectively jumpy/ gore bound moments.
Hour of the Wolf is the eighth studio album by Canadian rock legends Steppenwolf, originally released in 1975. This new reissue courtesy of Talking Elephant records features the regular album and two additional bonus tracks, the single version of Caroline as well as the single’s flipside Angeldrawers.
From 1972 Shearwater was the seventh album from respected British folk guitarist & singer Martin Carthy- who was a member (twice) of Steeleye Span in the early & late 70’s, as well as a member of The Watersons, & The Albion Band. Here we have a 2017 CD reissue of the album on Uk’s Talking Elephant. And it’s wonderfully urgent-to-haunting folk album, mainly based around a pared-down & stripped backed guitar & vocals- with a few tracks been built purely around Carthy’s powerful sing-song/ folksy chanted vocals.