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As I’ve gotten older and wiser I’ve come to recognize several immutable truths about our lives and universe: everyday the sun rises and falls, somewhere in the world there is a child being born at this very moment, and with most glaring regularity...I will always find a K.K. Null release in my review pile. On this outing the Nux Organization presents another long form CD entitled Edging.
Here’s the first in a series of CDR releases from this Newcastle Upon Tyne based walled noise project. This project likes to often use quite thought provoking themes for its work, focusing in on works of literary, mythology, and legends etc. For the Flora Series the theme is feminism with-in mythology, and each of the three releases are themed around a certain goddess or female entity. For this first volume the focus is Saraswat (Sara for s-hort) which is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, arts, wisdom and learning.
Out To The Great Silence offers up taut & cleverly detailed slices of static texturing/ jumpy wall craft. The C20 tapes features two tracks, and each is a rewarding & subtle shifting excise in masterful static noise craft.
From late summer 2015 here we have the first release from The Girl On The Bridge- a new project from up & coming Australian wall noise artists Shaun Mack(also of Morte Cammina, Widow Park, and runner of the excellent HNW only label Needle & Knife). The release comes in the form of a C52 tape, and came in an edition of just ten copies.
Steve Moore seems to be everywhere these days. If it's not a Zombi release or tour, it's solo. His latest comes to us in the form of a motion picture soundtrack. Considering Zombi's roots and influences, this makes perfect sense, and is a bit surprising it took this long to happen. The aforementioned film, Cub, is a Belgian horror flick about a deranged poacher that decides to switch his focus to poaching young kids. I have not caught the flick yet, but if Steve's score is any indication, it'll be cold, grim, and unsettling.
Current 93's previous album I am the Last of All the Field That Fell: A Channel was a watershed in more ways than one. Critically it drew a line under the project of publishing David Tibet's mass of prose poetry which finally appeared that year in a collection titled Sing Omega. With that line drawn and his entire written corpus condensed into a single volume one might be forgiven for wondering whether the great mystagog of the East Sussex coast was about to retire to his books and study of ancient languages. Thankfully Current 93 have returned with this splendidly packaged oddity that revives the horror inspired spirit that produced late 90s records like In a Foreign Town in a Foreign Land and I have a Special Plan for This World.
Brutal Penetration severs up forty one minutes worth of scuzzy, raw, lose yet thick walled noise. Please Kill Me is a HNW project from Seattle, Washington, and seemingly all of their work is themed around female prostitute & violence/ murder of women.
Here’s another brutal & straight-for-the-throat slice of ranging walled noise from this French project. The release comes in the form of a CDR, and offers up single track worth of crude ‘n’ battering wall-craft.
Salt Lake City noiser, Jeff Shell, and his noise project, AODL, are back with a fun new C22 from Forever Escaping Boredom. With two comforting tracks of static and pulses, Grandview Manifesto tickles the ear without overdoing it. Not minimal by any stretch, but steering clear of Incapacitants-esque levels of sonic decimation, AODL finds a nice, noisy balance somewhere in the middle, like Cheez-Its for the soul.
Here we have a much deserved re-issue of the one classic Merzbow noise works. Originally released on ZSF Produkt(Merzbows' own label) in 1987- this reissue appears in the form of a CD & double vinyl set on respected Italian noise/ industrial/ experimental Menstrual Recordings in a edition of just 250 copies.
It's been eight long years since the former Coil and Spiritualised member, and formerly prolific Thighpaulsandra last put out a record. So long in fact that one would be forgiven for wondering whether he had in solidarity followed his erstwhile colleagues in Coil by falling into silence. Thankfully the hiatus has ended and indeed The Golden Communion represents something of a culmination, not just of that eight year gap but of the artist's entire output to date.
Basil Athanasiadis is a Greek pianist and composer of modern classical music. His use of silence, stripped down instrumentation and nightmarish tension is similar to 20th century atonalists like Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Boulez. This disk "Stray Cat's Dream" contains a number of his pieces, many of which have several sections, resulting in 17 total tracks.
Ákos Garai’s 3 Leaves imprint presents Things That Were Missed in the Clamour for Calm by Mark Vernon. 3 Leaves is a label that is synonymous with expertly crafted, field recording-based releases. This full-length CD is no exception.
Chilean death metal trio, Nar Mattaru, are back with their second full length, Ancient Atomic Warfare. Reviving slow, dirgy, old school death, this album churns with a melodic grimness often passed by these days in an effort to maximize speed. The six tracks of tremmed out guitar ritual will bring the listener to an ancient time to watch a battle for universal supremacy.
Here’s a truly huge, multi faceted, yet always fascinating & intriguing set from highly respected US label Dust To Digital (in collaboration with University Of Wisconsin Press). The release takes in a 456 page book, 5 CDs, and a DVD.
Eleganza is a CDR release from September 2015, and it offers up two 15 minute slices of layer active & progressive walled noise from this Italian project.
'Terra Prosodia’ comes in a shiny digipak, with liner notes from Vowinckel and Christina Kubisch. The album has eight tracks, all to the shorter side of things: the longest, nearly eight minutes; the least, just over two minutes. The pieces have all been constructed from short recordings that Vowinckel has collected, of disappearing European dialects.
Here’s the second in the series of reissues of early releases from Austrian industrial innovators Allerseelen. Requiem originally appeared in cassette form back in 1989, and it showed the band in a very primal, murky yet highly atmospheric sonic setting.
GTR were a short lived AOR/ pop prog project that brought together two of the key figures in British prog rock- Steve Howe(guitarist from Yes) and Steve Hackett( the Genesis guitarist between 1970 & 77). Here we have a 2015 reissue of the bands one & only self titled release- which comes in the form of a double CD set, that takes in alternative versions of album tracks along with full live set from 1986.
This split 62 cassette tape offers up two side long slices of dense & unrelenting walled noise that is themed around Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle- a series of three novels that follow the adventures of one Toru Okada who loses his job, cat & wife, then goes on a often surreal journey to find his wife( and cat) meeting along the way a series of bizarre characters.
Voicehandler's "Song Cycle" is an immediate entrancing and intense album of Gamelan-esque percussion and chant-like singing, repetitions of small, simplistic sequences of notes which gradually build to higher and more intense positions on the scale. There is a sense of ritualistic, powerfully sharp mental focus throughout the album. Quiet as it sometimes is, a formidable tension permeates the entirety. It's not an album you can sleep to, or one that will bore you. Voicehandler approach this performance with warrior ferocity.
Møster!, with an exclamation point, is a 4 piece instrumental band formed by the group's namesake, Norwegian saxophonist Kjetil Møster. This album, "Inner Earth", adheres to a subterranean theme with the stalactite formations pictured on its cover and titles like "Descending Into this Crater", the 4 movement piece that makes up most of the album. It's come out on Hubro, an often fantastic label which specializes in exploratory Norwegian instrumental music.
No Brain Productions presents a 4-way split CD-R of harsh noise and wall noise courtesy of: 886VG, Carrion Black Pit, Zero Gravity Funeral, and Nitts. Other than Carrion Black Pit, I confess to not being familiar with any of the artists on board. I also admit that I have received enough unmarked CD-Rs in simple fold-over covers through the years to not be overly enthused to give this a spin. I can’t knock the DIY spirit that inspires such releases, but more often than naught, they tend to be rather lackluster, both in quality control and sounds presented. I admit it’s my bias, but there is such an oversaturation of noise releases, that it takes a little extra effort to grab my attention. With that said, does this humble 4-way split confirm my bias or leave me with egg on my face?
British Power Electronics powerhouse Iron Fist of the Sun returned in 2015 with We Can Yield Our Own Footsteps from Cold Spring. His latest offering of cold PE and stark death industrial may have been released in Spring, but it's definitely all Winter. These seven tracks of electronic misery will definitely make you reconsider the type of day you're having.