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This CD, like every other Line CD I’ve seen, comes inserted into a stylish, sombrely designed card wallet. It has six tracks and a somewhat stellar line-up of guests. Each track, bar one, contains significant material from one of these guests; this means contributions from: William Basinski, AGF, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kid Congo Powers, and Evelina Domnitch. These contributions all take the form of vocals - though Basinski is credited with ‘voicemail’ - with some guests adding other elements too.
Terrorizing the Power Electronics scene for just over a decade, Milwaukee's Climax Denial has seen releases across numerous labels. Finding a home on Malignant Records, his second full length CD, 2015's Dehumanizing Environments, shows more restraint than previous releases. This seems to be an interesting trend in extreme electronics, with artists reining it in a bit and making it super dense and supremely claustrophobic. Whether or not this is an actual thing or just my imagination, I'm definitely digging this fun, frightening direction.
Since completing his "life's work" the vertiginous Babel project -released as a 5CD set in 1999 - Roger Doyle has not rested on his laurels. The themes and techniques explored during those years composing Babel have since been further refined into a number of different but interconnected projects. The three volume Passades series explored duration, utilising the creative possibilities of software to sculpt music as a series of near freeze frames, moving backwards and forwards over small pieces of instrumental or vocal sound. Two narrative works, building upon the theatrical legacy of his earlier group Operating Theatre, which the composer calls "cinema for the ear" were produced in the form of Adolf Gébler, Clarinettist and the chilling The Room in the Tower. And in recent years memory and time have become increasing central to Doyle's work as reflected in the imaginary world music of The Thousand Year Old Boy and most clearly in the series of pieces composed around old telephone answering machine messages grouped together on the Time Machines record. With the premier of his first opera Heresy: The Death By Fire of Giordano Bruno due in November this year the release of Frail Things in Eternal Places appears as something of a companion piece bringing together all the key elements of the previous fifteen or so years and linking back to aspects of Babel.
Chöd is latest audio ritual from Phurpa- the Russian collective who creating dark unearthly, trance inducing, and at times terrifying sonic fare with a mix of throat singing & traditional/ non-traditional Tibetan ritual instruments. This new work is their most epic yet, with the two part piece spread over two CDS, and coming in at around the 90 minutes mark.
Agaric Fly in the new doom drone project from New York based experimental artists /maker-noise Robert Meldrum. Over the years I’ve enjoy many of Robert’s releases over his few project, in particular his grim walled noise project Unearthered, or his horror-fed harsh noise meets wall-noise project Corpse Candle. So when I saw this was out, and Robert was trying something a little different I was very keen to hear it
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies is a huge (nearing 500 pages), often fascinating & varied collection of non-fiction writings based around Folk horror, and related subjects
Column One's "Cindy, Loraine & Hank" is a sprawling double album of patient, vintage feeling musique concrete and freeform noise texturing, with a sound palette ranging from the dusty heated circuits of analog synthesizers to field recordings of clattering, shuffling and fragments of speech.
Vilgoæ is a Polish wall noise project who has sporadically(by scene standards), putting out releases since 2007. This CD on Germans L-White, offers up a single slice of dense & brutalizing wall-craft.
Here’s another 2016 release from Shurayuki-hime, which is seemingly now the main sonic focus of Newcastle Upon Tyne HNW artists Liam M( of D.S.W.A.C.V, Tarot, and runner of Tera-AntiQu label). This release comes in the form of a C30, which takes in a ‘wall’ per side of tape.
Monolithic Interference is a recent HNW four way split. It brings together two C30 tapes, and features a 'wall' per side of tape. The release features three seasoned & respected wall noise acts, and one more recent addition to the scene.
German ambient project, Vortex, is back with its fourth release, and third on Cyclic Law. Moloch is a sonic tale of a city (NYC, to be specific) absorbing a bystander with its size, power, and inhabitants. Working with Carsten Bergemann, Mars & The Trail, Christopher Wirth, and Patrick Kilian, Marcus Stiglegger composed a menacing soundtrack that captures the power of a staggering metropolis.
Originally released in 1994 Gingerbread Man was The Residents first foray into blending their distinctively quirky music with Computer graphics. With the original issues of the album featuring animations to play on ones PC, connecting into the tracks themes. This 2016 reissue sadly just comes with the audio elements of the album, so it does feel like something is missing- yet as it stands it’s one of The Residents more wordy & moody of their more theatrical albums.
Close To The Noise Floor is a rather splendid four CD/ book set that celebrates & chronicles early British electronica between the mid 1970’s & the mid 1980’s. The compilation is certainly a varied & highly consistent ride- stopping off in DIY techno, proto-synth pop, more noise bound/ experimental tinged terrority, bright ‘n’ buoyant futuristic electronica, electro- ambience, and beyond.
This is the third release from Germany's Gruenrekorder label that I have reviewed this year after Christina Kubisch and Eckehard Guther's Unter Grund and the startling collection of pieces collected under the Landscapes of Fear project. Despite the bar having already be set high this weighty release presenting what is in effect the doctoral project of Hein Schoer easily surpasses those other two releases in complexity, depth and intellectual rigour. The basic question that Hein poses and which provides the orientation and occasion for the recordings, book and multi-media features that are included in the Box of Treasures is stated at the outset of the text: "How do I make a good cultural soundscape composition for museum-didactic purposes". The culture that he chose to document were the Namgis/Kwakwaka'wakw, a North American first people based around Alert Bay British Colombia.
This CD of four Torvund compositions comes wrapped in a garish, cardboard, gatefold wallet. The garishness is provided by the pictures on each of the four panels of the wallet: each a brightly coloured cartoon, and each representing one of the tracks. The pieces are performed by Asamisimasa, an ensemble well-versed in avant-garde music, and their main tools, here, include: clarinet, guitar, keyboard, cello, and percussion. However, these are joined by sampler, whistling, electric drill and ‘toy laser gun’ (to mention a few), to give you a sense of the incredibly colourful palette they utilise.
Here we have another example of head-drilling & totally unrelenting walled noise from this highly prolific Serbian project. The release comes in the form of a C40 cassette, featuring one side long track per side of tape, and really this is HNW at it’s most crushing ‘n’ overloaded.
Here’s a tape that seems to have fallen through the cracks. This self-released cassette, features a pair of Russian noisers, Paraplegic Twister and Segment Aura. Released in 2014, this is hardly a new release. However, with my unfamiliarity of both artists, it’s certainly new to my ears. What we have here is 60 minutes of noise, with each artist providing distinctly different styles.
British power electronics legends Sutcliffe Jugend have been busy as of late, with three releases (so far!) in 2016. Returning to Cold Spring again, the duo have released Offal, a churning, pulsing, looping swarm of electronic fury. Consisting of four long tracks spanning 55 minutes, this release shows how Sutcliffe Jugend continues to change their sound and challenge listeners the world over.
Cradle Of Filth will need little or no introduction to anyone who's even a little familiar with the metal genre in general. Since the early 1990’s the British band have offered up a distinctively melodramatic(at a times muddled) blend of Black metal, Goth metal, horror film soundtracking, with darts into trash, more traditional metal, and death metal. The release we’re covering now is not a new release, but a different version of one of their cornerstone release’s- Dusk…And Her Embrace, which originally came out in 1996 and really fired the band into the big time.
It’s been a few years since we’ve had a new full length/non-collaborative release from Black Leather Jesus-the US harsh Noise collective set up by Richard Ramirez in the late 80’s. So it’s great to have this new double CD release on Germanys L-white( who are known most for their PE releases).
Here we have the 2014 reissue of the synth based soundtrack for The Boogey Man- a 1980 horror film that blended together elements of slasher & supernatural horror, to create a often muddled though no-less entertaining B-movie.
Elephant9 is a Norweigen instrumental progressive rock band formed in 2006, who have 5 albums as of now, their newest a collaboration with fellow Norwegian Reine Friske titled "Silver Mountain". "Silver Mountain" is a massive and ambitious project containing both sections of dense complexity and tranced out improvisation.
Here we have the first volume of George Crumb works from Bridge Records. Crumb is a highly respected & versatile American avant-grade composer, who has been working since the late 1940’s, and today is one of the most played modern composer. This compilation release comes from 1991, and features three pieces that nicely highlights the scope, creativity, often inventive sonic flare of Crumb.
After weeks of digesting wall noise and sounds residing on the harsher side of the experimental spectrum, I was due for a respite. And what better way to cleanse the palette than to escape into the naked sounds of the natural world as provided by Gruenrekorder and friends. The German-based field recording label (arguably, one of the most prolific in the field recording arena) teams up with Tentacles of Perception Recordings to present MMABOLELA, a 2 x CD by David Michael and Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace).