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Thrown To The Wolves. Now Packleader offers up two hellishly thick, terminal oppressive & crushing slabs walled noise. The release comes in the form of a C60 or digital download and was released late last year on Stockholm based Ominous Recordings.
Abstructum is a new project consisting of members Andy Ortmann and Hanna Elliott (Hogg). Their self-titled debut shows the project dabbling in a few different styles, from post-industrial to musique concrète to near sea shanties and folk jazz. An interesting debut with fun electronic flourishes, Abstructum makes the most of its abbreviated run time and is a decidedly different approach than the members' previous projects would suggest.
Psychic Activation Ritual is released on a C-46 tape via Nihilist Recordings and features the sonic talents of Ka Baird, founding member of Spires That in the Sunset Rise, and Andy Ortmann founder of Nihilist Recordings, and musician in his own right who has recorded under various guises throughout the last 28 years, most notably as part of Panicsville with David Forquer and Ryan Kohler. This album appears to represent the pair’s first collaboration together.
Experimental ambient guitarist and composer Mike Fazio has been playing and performing for decades now, really coming into his own during the 2000's with a profific string of soundscape albums under a variety of aliases on his own Faith Strange label.
Pulsing Dot brings together a selection of fairly quirky & at-times surreal examples of modern composition utilizing piano, live sound processing, electronics & voice. The release appears in the form of a CD on demark based Clang Records- who focus in on releasing adventurous & experimental music from a few different genres.
From early summer 2017 Dunkelgraue Lieder is an extremely re-worked & expanded version of Allerseelen’s 1990’s album Sturmlieder. The release shows the Austrian Industrial/Neo-folk innovators bridging the gap between the past, present & future sound of Allerseelen.
From the early 1970’s Dark Dreams was an attempt to blend together hardcore action, with unsettling & horror fed atmospherics. And it does so to fairly mixed results- not fully satisfying as an arousing skin flick due to the unsettling mood, and lacking enough depth of story to be an effective chiller. Though that said it does summon up so quite effective moments of unease & puzzlement- making it worth a look, for those looking for something a little unusual in their 70’s sleaze hit. Here from Vinegar Syndrome, we have the first official DVD of this cross-breed oddity.
Megalophobe debut release spans four tracks of somewhat unusual ambience mixed with synths, percussion and theramin. There’s a vaguely musique concrete feel to the spartan nature of these recordings, that add a beautifully haunting nature to the proceedings.
Long running, Swedish ambient juggernaut raison d'être is back once again with his newest release, Alchymeia. Making his debut on Cyclic Law, Peter Andersson's latest journey bases itself in the works of Carl Jung and his work with human archetypes. Intriguing subject matter aside, this long slice of ambient goodness provides a lovely soundtrack to contemplating life over a cup of tea and a long stare out over a snowy landscape.
Bloodway are a three-piece progressive Black Metal band hailing from Romania, the country renowned for being home to Transylvania, the Carpathian Mountains and of course count Dracula himself. A Fragile Riddle Crypting Clues is the third release for the band on I, Voidhanger Records, and their second full length album following on from debut EP Sunstone Voyager and the Clandestine Horizon, and their first full length album Mapping the Moment with the Logic of Dreams. The band are led by the incredibly talented graphic artist Costin Chioreanu, on guitar and vocals, this three piece certainly know a thing or two about making a metal record.
I Said, She Said, Ah Cid is a CD box set celebrating Alshire Records- one of the more groovy & quirky exploitation record labels to appear in the late 1960’s. This three-disc set brings together a selection of the label's output from between the years 1967-71, when the label was trying to cash-in on the growth & interest in both psychedelic & Acid rock.
Originally released back 1986 Truth Or Dare is one of the more creative & unhinged low-budget horror films of the 80’s. Blending together slasher tropes, with original & total un-PC killings, inside-the-killers mind reality, and mixes in tone of unsettlement & humor. On SRS cinema here we have the most recent region free DVD release of the film.
Here we have a great OTT, campy, and fun celebration of heavy metal in movies. This truly huge tome nears six hundred page mark, and takes in everything from head-banging documentaries & fist pumping concert films. To a host of metal related horror films, onto tacky & lo-rent Mad max rip-offs, through to crazed creature features & monster movies, onto campy muscle-bound barbarian films, and beyond.
This short, single track collaboration between Richard Chartier’s queasy, somnambulistic Pinkcourtesyphone and Dutch harpist Gwyneth Wentink is something of an oddity in the former’s discography. Chartier’s project has been associated with coldly anaesthetised ambient music, with a strong thematic focus on contemporary feminine subjectivity. All releases under the name have similar pink artwork and usually feature sampled female voices at some point threaded through complex drones and microtonal experiments. Central to the listening experience is the feeling that amid the tense, vaguely paranoid minimal electronics there’s something like a medically coshed Freudian Id struggling to break free. Elision however is striking for the lack of these sensations, exchanging anxiety for beatific panorama.
Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed is the fifth full length release from doom/death masters Hooded Menace. It is also the first to feature new vocalist Harri Kuokkanen, whose addition has allowed Lasse Pyykkö to concentrate his time on his guitar playing and songwriting. Kuokkanen’s vocals are a perfect fit for Hooded Menace, they are brutal and guttural but with a quality that sets them aside from the vast majority of generic death metal vocalists working today. This is an important point for me as Hooded Menace are certainly no generic doom/death band. The album is released in late January via Season of Mist records and represents the band’s first release for the label having split with Relapse who released their previous album Darkness Drips Forth.
Ténèbres Des Marais is a tar black 'n' greyly moody mixture of bass heavy walled noise bombardment, & barren noised-up dark ambient elements. It comes in the form of either a C6o tape or digital download- and features four fifteen minute examples of stark & bleakly battering noise making.
Statichor is a meditative & therapeutic focused walled-noise project from Corona, California. As far I can make out the project started sometime in 2017, and Smolder is the projects first physical release- though it has also released a few digital only releases.
Life As Seen Through A Distorting Lens is two track shot of ultra thick & brain churning walled noise from this Vienna based project. It comes in the form of a digital download, and is my first taste of the projects work- thanks for the recommendation from one of our Patrons for this.
Shurayuki-hime's "In The Beginning, Woman Was The Sun" is a C-40 release on the esteemed Geräuschmanufaktur label run by Jan Warnke in Osnabrück, Germany. It comes in a white casing with an extended artwork inlay - featuring a portrait of Raicho Hiratsuka and some explanatory text surrounding the theme of the release. As explained in said text, the release's title quotes the opening lines of the first edition of Hiratsuka's literary magazine "Seitô". The project itself has long been fascinated with the early feminism of Japan and this release extends the projects gaze into that realm.
Cold Spring's release last fall of Visions of Darkness is an eye opening experience. Not a country well known for their musical scene, Iran might as well have been a musical black hole for Western audiences. Music is an amazing outlet for the creative mind, so it's wonderful to hear and feel what's going on at a personal level in Iran, at least among the electronic/experimental crowd. Visions of Darkness (In Iranian Contemporary Music) is a wonderful document of a really interesting scene, and hopefully this will put more ears on the musicians captured by this compilation.
Following on from Krzysztof Penderecki’s – Kosmogonia, Kernschmelze II is another foray in modern classical/ modern composition from Cold Spring Records. The forty-one minute composition is an often nightmarish & seared blend of violently wavering & brooding female operatic’s. Spoken word elements, noise & modern composition cross-breeds, and the occasional dips into psycho-ambience.
The Legendary Pink Dots have been a powerfully unique, visionary force uniting goth/industrial and psychedelic music since the early 80's, charting a relentless prolific path of avant pop music centered around the transporting and detailed lyrics of front man Edward Ka-Spel, who often describes a dystopian or totalitarian future. Amazingly, the pace of their releases has never let up in almost 40 years. "High on Station Yellow Moon" is a new solo album from Ka-Spel, released last year in 2017.
Leatherface is the most recent addition to the long running Texas Chainsaw franchise. Timeline wise it’s meant to be based before the original 1974 film. And it’s somewhat of a bloody-road-movie-meet-mystery-thriller - charting the escape of a group of young adult mental patience’s, and one of their number is to become Leatherface. I’m review the recent Lionsgate blu-ray/ DVD release of the film.
Places And Pages is a two-CD collection of varied & moody modern composition/electro-acoustic works from this British-based, Japanese performer and female composer. The release appears on the always worthy & dependable Sheffield based label Another Timbre.