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Twine brings together two Us based purveyors of electro-acoustic ambience. The seven track CD is a journey into instrumental loop based ambience & sonic mood setting, which is alive with micro tonal detail & pleasing yet subtle noise elements.
This album arrives in a cardboard wallet, with a very nicely painted front cover; I can’t really do it justice, but it combines fiddly detail with a more abstract, formal approach, to make something incredibly eye-catching. Interestingly, the back cover played a bit of a trick on me: basically, it’s designed so that ‘Philippe Petit’, ‘Multicoloured’, and ‘Shadows’ are spelled out in capitals down the sleeve, with one track title/description under each word. This had the effect of convincing me that it was a three way split between these three capitalised projects… However, it turns out to be all Petit’s work: three tracks, with the last being divided into parts 1 and 2.
Cold Spring Records presents Outstretch Your Hand For The Impress Of Truth, the new full-length CD by Colossloth. Colossloth is the one-man project of Wooly Woolaston based out of Leicester, UK.
Here we have a C30 release from this English walled noise project, who themes all of its release around us pop singer Katy Perry. The tape takes in two 15 minute tracks, and these are both themed around "Birthday"- which was a 2013 single from Ms Perry.
Coloured Walls Part 2 is a CDR release from this prolific Russian walled noise project, and it appeared in January 2015. The disc takes in four creative & fairly varied sounding examples of wall craft, and each runs between seven & nineteen minutes.
Feral House is well known as a publisher of esoteric and fringe subjects, probably best recognised in musical circles as the name behind theLords of Chaos book on black metal. Here, it presents the words of Robert Forbes and Eddie Stampton, on an equally maligned area of rock music: ‘nationalist skinhead rock’. I realise that’s a very weak definition, but it essentially encompasses the vast majority of the bands within: some are nationalist without being ‘Nazi’, and musical styles range from oi to hard rock, with some folk and electronics around the edges - the skinhead part is pretty spot on, though: there’s not a lot of hair to be seen in the many photos! This is a serious tome: over six hundred pages, listing hundreds (thousands?) of gigs, and probably hundreds of bands; illustrated throughout with grainy black and white photos, and crumpled flyers.
Here on Minotauro records we have another welcome reissue from the back catalogue of cult Italian musician Paul Chain. Ash is a just under thirty minute Ep that originally appeared back in 1988, and here it’s expanded to a full length with the addition of two extra tracks. Sound wise the material here moves away from the more doom & psychedelic rock feel of much of Mr Chains work, going for a more trash/ speed metal tinged feel- though it still has that distinctive & creatively unhinged Paul Chain flare about it, that helps it stand apart from common garden examples of the genre.
Haudattujen Valvoja is the tenth full length release from this Finish dark ritual & ambient collective. It finds the bands sound at it’s most sparse & experimental- focus in on pared back blends of un-harmonic ritual horn bays, thin chugging mats of doom focused experimental guitar textures, very subdued drone drifts, and highly skeletal ritual elements.
Crónica presents Everything Emanating from the Sun, a single track CD by Yiorgis Sakellariou. Sakellariou is a long-running experimental composer and musician based out of Athens, Greece. On this outing, he receives some additional sounds courtesy of Simon Whetham and John Grzinich. This release marks the first in a series called Corollaries, compiling works produced during the Active Crossover: Mooste, a cross-cultural collaborative residency curated by Simon Whetham during April/May 2015.
The Operating Theatre is the first book of poetry from New Jersey based Christopher Ropes. Mr Ropes will be most known to long time M[m] readers as the mind behind Nighttime In The Abyss, which blends together disturbing spoken word, blacked noise, power electronics, black metal, and dark ambience into a distinctive & highly troubling sonic strew.
Ohio death metal band Embalmer is pretty well known, despite the dearth of output over its long career. Numerous breaks haven't kept the band down, and their follow up to 2006's 13 Faces of Death shows the band's return to their brutal roots. Closer in tone to their 1995 Relapse debut There Was Blood Everywhere, Emanations From the Crypt is a thick, dark slice of death that should please your ears and dampen your spirits.
"An Evolutionary Music" is a collection of recordings made in the years 1972-1979 by Parisian born musician Ariel Kalma. Most of them are circular, repetitive melodic loop pieces made primarily out of organ (and other instruments) and analog delays. As a result, they sound inevitably similar to Terry Riley's similarly constructed "A Rainbow in Curved Air".
Here’s another release from the prolific Altar Of Waste, presented, as ever, with laboured over artwork and packaging. I say ‘another release’, but this is actually rather old: it’s catalogued as AOW 154, and the latest release is AOW 378… Anyway, ‘Epidermal Nevi, Neoplasms, & Cysts’ arrives across three discs; all decorated, like the inlay and booklet, with pinkish, medical imagery of cells - very striking and deceptively simple. The thirty-three tracks are all named with medical terms, to a level that Carcass would be proud of. Particular favourites include: ‘Lichen Planus’, ‘Marjolin’s Ulcer’, ‘Giant Solitary Trichoepithelioma’, ‘Squamous Cell Carcinoma’, and, tied for first place, ‘Ciliated Cyst Of The Vulva’ and ‘Epidermolytic Acanthoma Of The Scrotum’. The release straddles the worlds of Harsh Noise and Harsh Noise Wall, sometimes falling into an unrewarding spot between the two.
Regler returns for their latest installment Regel #4; a full-length CD released by co-conspirators: At War With False Noise, Rapid Moment, Pilgrim Talk and Decimation Sociale. For the uninitiated, Regler is collaborative project featuring Mattin (Basque experimental musician known for his collaborations with Phillip Best, Junko, Bryan Eubanks, and others) and Anders Bryngelsson of Brainbombs fame. The concept of the project according to Mattin, is to “set up rules and try to do different genres of music with rock instruments.” In Regel #4, the duo set out to tackle Harsh Noise Wall.
Here we have a split walled noise release on French label Required Rate of Return, and it features a track a piece from two of the longer severing & respected members of the worldwide HNW scene. The release features intense & humanity hating Quebec based project Bleak Existence, and often suicidal themed Italian project Nascitari- each party offers up a twenty six to thirty minute ‘wall’.
Italian noiser Venta Protesix sees a 20 track compilation from AD AAD AT in Anni Di Masturbazione. Armed with only a laptop and a bombastic mission statement, VP aims to take the noise world by storm. Whether he completes this mission or not is definitely up to the individual listener, but the career spanning tracks contained on Anni Di Masturbazione should give a good indication of Venta's output.
Austin Texas Clint Coker is a guitarist and noise experimentalist, but with-in the walled noise scene he’s most known for his old horror movie focused HNW project Nightmare Castle. Fragments, as it titles suggests is a collection of sonic-off- cuts, experiments, and blends of guitar work & experimental texturing from Mr Cokers various projects.
Diyu is a c90 release from French husband & wife wall noise duo Absurde(Charlotte and Julien Skrobek), which appeared in 2015 on the pairs own label. And it offers up two side long slices of dense & fairly fixed yet rewarding wall-craft.
Niton's "Tiresias" is a collection of dramatic instrumental soundscapes with anticipatory march-like rhythms, vintage 70's synthesizer wails and verb washed cello. The group's 3 members are all credited with 'electronics', and two with 'strings' as well.
Here's a 2015 release from Finnish dark ambient label Aural Hypnox. It's a combined re-issue of two of Aeoga's out of print early releases, the CDr "Triangle of Nebula-Devourers" and cassette "Palace for Vultunales", both originally released in 2005 in the label's characteristic highly limited editions. I was excited to hear this re-issue, as Aeoga's other early works such as "COAV" and "Zenith Beyond the Helix Locus" are among the most vividly intense visionary tools of their kind.
Well, here’s a two cd set from a name quite unknown to me, which is surprising, given the life that he has led… I’ll be lazy, and quote at length from the press spiel:
Here’s a six disc CDR set that offers up six hours worth of dense, punishing yet often texturally detailed walled noise from this Greeley Colorado project. As with pretty much everything put out by this project the set is themed around works of literature, and this time the focus is 1Q84- which is a series of three interconnecting novels written by highly respected Japanese Magic realism/ modern surrealist author Haruki Murakami.
Eolian Empire presents Black Haze, the new vinyl LP by Tiny Knives. The Portland punk trio of Ursula Morton, Jamey Anderson, and Jai Milx have been kicking for 6 years
Between new albums, collaborations, and re-releases, the past few years have been great for Troum fans. The legendary German drone duo is back on Cold Spring with their latest, Acouasme. Taking a drastically different approach from the close of the "Power Romantic" trilogy closer, 2013's Mare Morphosis, Acouasme works its way into the listener's brain with darkness and misery. And, since you're reading this on m[m], you realize that's a good thing.