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In the mid 1980s a young Dutch director Alexander Oey set about capturing something of the strange sub-cultural music scene centred around London which had grown out of the breech created by Throbbing Gristle and the first wave of Industrial music in the 1970s. The groups he chose to work with were Coil, Foetus, Current 93 and Test Dept. The result was a collection of interviews and live footage released on VHS in 1988 called The Sound of Progress which Cold Spring have now seen fit to give a remastered DVD release.
Cornucopia della Morte is the latest album from American doom legend John Gallo. Originally recorded in 2013 and shelved whilst Gallo worked on his solo project John Gallow, whose debut album Violet Dreams was also released on I, Voidhanger Records.
On this their third album for Cyclic Law, Beyond Sensory Experience have produced an enjoyable and immersive musical adventure filled with lush yet unsettling melodies and that wonderful sense of darkness that pervades much of Swedish culture. BSE are the Dark Ambient project of Swedish duo Drakh and K. Meitzer from Uppsala to the north of Stockholm and have been making music together since 2001.
Wolvserpent hail from Idaho. Using drums, guitars, violins and vocals this “metal” (apparently) duo are writing some of the most intense, dark and eerie music I have heard in a very long time.
This might be Troller's second album, however it’s my first experience with the project. And given the press release I was really looking forward to checking it out. Here’s a snapshot of said press release “Lush, lugubrious sound ...heavy synths, slow-motion rhythms...haunting vocal melodies... brooding blasts of dark pop...the songs seemed to emanate from some cavernous subterranean chamber.” So does it live up to the claims made? In my opinion sadly not. On the whole the album smacks of the year 1982, with it’s sub-standard light-goth & hint’s at prog rock.
Receiving The Approaching Memory is a new composition from British minimalist/modern classical composer Bryn Harrison. The work is for Violin & Piano, and is built around an entrancing & subtle shifting selection of interweaved notation patterns.
Tales of the Scissor Killer comes in a slim DVD case, with no-nonsense, black and white graphics and design - though the thing that will catch your eye first (fittingly), is the cover image: a pair of scissors, nestling points first between someone’s thick eyelashes… The CDR contains three tracks, with the shorter, second piece - 10:38 minutes - bookended by first and last tracks around the half hour mark.
Dave Ball & Jon Savage's collaborative album "Photosynthesis" is a synthesizer odyssey with a deep underlying warmth, a resounding low end that comfortably drones as dramatic intervals are struck like ominous horn calls. It has the reassuring consistency of a machine steadily running for hours and hours and all night, the hum of the motor persisting even in the darkness. It brings to mind patiently scrying for anomalies in a softly shifting bed of static, and long planetary orbits.
The Glittering Thing On The Mountain brings together a selection of fascinating, beautifully recorded, and varied field recordings made in one of the more remote & untouched jungles of Japan.
Synopsis:…is the latest selection of dense ‘n’ depraved sonic noise fruit from this mysterious collective from Northern England. The release comes in the form of a three C90 set, offering up four & a half hours worth of perverse noise-craft. The set moves between: dense blends of grey pummelling harsh drone & soured harsh noise. Unmoving & crude walled noise, and blends of both harsh noise & HNW.
This rather wonderfully named and seemingly quite mysterious project brew-up a heady & subtly genre mixing sound that moves from: drifting ‘n’ psychedelic, onto smoky/ filmatic, through-to-moody-yet taut, onto quirky & loosely Avant-grade. Ectopic Apiary is the project’s debut release, & it comes in the form of a CDR released on UK's Reverb Worship in an edition of 50 copies
Geräuschmanufaktur presents Ate Gena, a full-length CD by Miguel A. Garcia & Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Released earlier this year, Ate Gena is the first offering by this collaboration of multi-media artists. I wasn’t at all familiar with either artist, but Geräuschmanufaktur has released a pretty solid slate of releases over the years, so color me intrigued.
Now legendary noise/industrial outfit, Controlled Bleeding, released their debut, Distress Signals I, on Broken Flag in 1984. Having never been properly reissued on CD or vinyl, this tape debut became much sought after and very hard to find. Working with Paul Lemos, Artoffact reissued Distress Signals I, and also unearthed an interesting tidbit: this wasn't what was originally intended for Broken Flag. Lemos had a second version that has been unheard to this day. This version will also be released later by Artoffact.
In recent years there has been a glut of horror films trying to recapture both the vibe, plot, character make-up, and setting of slasher films from the early 1980’s. And these have worked to varying results, Lake Nowhere is one of the more successful of these ‘tributes’ to the golden age of the slasher. As it almost perfectly replicates the feel, look, & atmosphere of said slasher's, yet adds in it’s own creative & darkly arty twists to the formula- making it rise above it’s influences.
Here are two short, but highly effective shots of walled noise barbarism. This C20 takes in two side long slices of crude, suffocating, and totally nihilistic wall-craft. Featured here we have the master of unchanging wall-nastiness Vomir, and scene newcomer Polish project Pudren…with both parties offering up suitably crushing 'n' searing slabs of HNW bleak-ness.
Tera-AntiQu presents Kapot, an 80 minute full-length cassette by Uitgeschakeld. This Dutch wall noise project has been kicking it for a couple years now. I reviewed their Die Zwei Großen Europäischen Narkotika cassette a few weeks back and wasn’t exactly floored by it. That said, time has passed and with a clean slate I approached Kapot.
Painkiller (John Zorn, Bill Laswell and Mick Harris) is somewhat of a legendary outfit among John Zorn fans and those who enjoy extremely aggressive free jazz. While I can't say I ever really feel like listening to it, I have respect for the ferocity of their initial 'jazzcore' EPs, "Guts of a Virgin" and "Buried Secrets". Across the rest of their career, however, my opinion diverges from many, as I find Zorn's blatant, snarky aggression to be increasingly at odds with Laswell's relaxed new age and dub aesthetic.
The Glowing Man is the third and seemingly last album from the present line-up of the Swans. Just like the two previous albums, 2012’s The Seer, and 2014’s To Be Kind, it’s another double CD affair. And once again it features mostly very lengthy tracks, that are taut/ tensioned in their repetitive sound. Also their is often quite amassed orchestrated sound to proceedings; which blends together elements of noise rock, apocalyptic rock, & post-rock.
Aaron Funk is something of a veteran of front line electronic music by now. His most well known project Venetian Snares has continued to put out a steady stream of quality releases ever since the high watermark of critical acclaim reached in 2005 with Rossz Csillag Alatt Született. That record's heady mix of hyper-speed jungle rhythms and cut-up classical music has only occasionally been re-visited since, mostly successfully on My Downfall from 2007. As well as with his numerous other monikers Funk's recent output with Venetian Snares has diversified considerably, notably on Cubist Reggae from 2011, Fool the Detector from the following year which saw Funk introduce his own voice into the Snares sound and 2014's mammoth My Love is a Bulldozer which revealed some of his most complex and ambitious arrangements to date. Now he's taking his signature programming skills in another direction by producing an album made entirely from one modular synth.
This double CD set brings together three early 1980’s albums from respected US jazz/ jazz fusion guitarist Steve Khan. We have 1980’s Eyewitness, 1982’s Modern Times(which is a live album), and 1983’s Casa Loco- all three albums see him joined by bass player Anthony Jackson, drummer Steve Jordan & percussionist Manolo Badrena. And mostly the set offers up fairly successful blend of jazz fusion, world music rhythms, and precise/ highly accomplished musicianship.
Well, here’s a tape that comes via two excellent wall artists: Julien Skrobek and Greg Gorlen. Both are known for the individual paths they’ve cut through wall noise, and both continue to explore those paths. Skrobek’s Gesis guise provides the sounds here, whist Gorlen brings the distinctive artwork associated with his label - though the linocut which adorns the card tape sleeve is actually the excellent work of Emily Huston. The cassette has two tracks, one on each side, and both a mere ten minutes in length; both pieces are exemplary HNW.
Veteran ambient composer Steve Roach is a longtime personal favorite of mine, and I've drifted off to sleep to his sound countless times. He has continued to create vast quantities of music even into his his 6th decade, at times producing gripping works of astonishing, undeniable genius, such as last year's Berlin School homage, "Skeleton Keys", a complex mesh of interlocking shifting analog synth arpeggiations. The newest album "Shadow of Time" forsakes percolating scalar blips in favor of fluidity, lush chords and long tones, employing a sound palette of smoothed over synthetic strings, brass chorales and round waves.
Here’s another CD from the Line label, presented in its customary, smart style: a card wallet with a photo on the front, and album details and a short text on the back. Crouch presents us with five tracks, the first nearly reaching nine minutes, the others all past ten; all of them are cut from the same cloth: concentrated, detailed modular synth explorations that are - above all else - very focussed. There is none of the chaotic ‘bleep and poot’ that can often come with this territory, instead, Crouch pursues slow, steady transformations.
The Endurance At Night is the second full-length release from this four piece band from north-western England. And it offers up a often speedy, memorable & at times quite creative selection of symphonic black metal craft.