Loading
Black Bag is the latest slice of hopelessly dense, pummelling, and total unforgiving walled noise from the French king of the scene Vomir. The release comes in around the hour mark, and takes into two tracks. It appeared late June 2015, in two editions- c60 ltd to 70 copies(which is now sold out) & a digital download- I’m reviewing the digital version of the release.
Here we have the 2013 reissue of this Italian projects first release- they mixed together doom, dark psychedelic rock, and experimental edges to create a distinctive dark ‘n’ heady brew. Detaching From Satan originally appeared back in 1984 as a four track Ep- this reissue adds in two length extra tracks expanding this release to a full length.
This album from Richard Chartier comes in the ‘standard’ Line packaging: a card wallet decorated with austere, elegant artwork. The cd features two long tracks - one thirty-six minutes long, the other twenty-five; with both featuring similar sounds and elements. Previous Chartier works I have heard, have leant towards the cold and ‘formal’; ‘Interior Field’ has a much more colourful, less ‘concentrated’ approach
Arturas Bumsteinas is a prolific composer and sound artist active since 2003. His new release "Epiloghi" is an album of noodly avant garde improvisation which is unstructured and without fixed tempo, but never ugly or jarring, often focusing on consonant plucked string tonalities from the harpsichord, as well as the tiny textural details of close mic'd percussion instruments and household objects.
Monotype Records presents KK Null + The Noiser, a collaborative CD between Japan’s KK Null and France’s The Noiser. I’ve been quite an admirer of Kazuyuki Kishino’s KK Null project for some time now, especially the way he seamlessly weaves techno, noise, and beat oriented music. Julien Ottavi’s, The Noiser, is a project I’m less familiar with. To be honest I didn’t even realize that this was a collaborative project. I thought The Noiser was the title. Turns out that Ottavi is a long-running sound artist, poet, filmmaker and one of the founding members of the sound/artist collective, Apo33.
Persona is one of the more recent projects from highly prolific & multi project linked French wall noise maker Julien Skrobek (The Killer Came From The Bronx ,Ghost, The Sandman Wears A Mask, Ruine, Butch Bag, Gasp, Ruine, etc). For this project he’s joined by his wife Charlotte, and sound wise the project is a little bit of a departure from his normal HNW/ANW setting- I guess its best described as very focused & unmoving synth texturing, which is homed down into an extremely taut & tense form. Julien himself has called it ‘either techno music or electronica for wallers’… & I guess that’s a good enough description of what we have here.
Here’s the second Whitehouse themed release from this noisy German chamber orchestra. It offers up a selection of five tracks taken from through the infamous Power electronics project career, and as with the first collaboration(2010’s Whitehouse Electroincs) Zeitkratzer have managed to create creative reinterpretations of Whitehouse’s sound.
This three CD set offers up three lengthy & slowly evolving drone based collaborations between two highly respected American minimalist & avant-garde composers. Brooklyn born Charlemagne Palestine has been creating & collaborating with a whole host of respected experimental artists since the early 1970’s, and guitarist & multi instrumentalist Rhys Chatham is most known for his ‘guitar orchestra’ compositions.
In my mid-teens, I had some friends that were using Prodigy and AOL to access the World Wide Web. Content with my Sega Genesis and playing Zork on my 486 HP, I didn't see the fascination or need to chat or game with people I never met, and presumably, didn't care about. A few months before college, my father got a new computer, and when I would go over, I found out the internet had a ton of free, nude pics and videos, and I started to see the light. That August (1998, for those that want to know more), I got my first email address, and began to search the 'net for others sharing similar interests to my own (Gary Numan, Full House, Death Metal, Noise, etc). By the time I was a senior, the available content had grown exponentially, and through Napster, FTPs, and web hosted P2P sites, I was able to access more files and music than I had ever dreamed. I was a steady fixture on the Relapse Records board at that time, and I heard a lot of buzz about a new band from Pittsburgh, Zombi. Having my cinematic horizons broadened in the years prior, I was heavily digging Italian horror and the film scores they contained. And, being a big synth fan since I was plopped in front of MTV in 1983, Zombi was a natural fit for me. I downloaded their release, and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I was myopic, and managed to only keep one track with me, "Sequence 2." The MP3 cd was eventually misplaced, and I lost my connection with, but not my memory of, Zombi. Now, nearly 14 years later, Relapse has re-released their earliest recordings, and made them available for the first time commercially.
Whenever I get something from I, Voidhanger Records I immediately check it out. There isn’t a label on earth that can match the quality of their atmospheric black metal releases. I’m sad to report that this debut album from Absconditus breaks the label’s streak of awesome albums.
This is a very simple, but smart, cdr from sincope; presented with a folded card cover, adorned with abstract, ‘formal’ imagery. I use ‘formal’ in the sense of ‘concerned with form’ - the images are collaged papers, crumpled and layered. This gives a fitting clue to the sounds to be found within, which also explore the formal nuts and bolts of ‘rock music’, in a most abstract form. Grizzly Imploded are a drums/guitar/guitar trio from Italy, and ‘Anabasi’ was recorded several years ago.
Veteran composers of deep listening, avant garde and ambient music Richard Chartier and William Basinski have joined forces again for this LP, "Divertissement", their 3rd collaborative album, the series starting with "Untitled 1-3" in 2004. I thoroughly enjoyed "Untitled 1-3", finding it a refreshing change from the style and sound palette of each artist.
Here we have the welcome return of Nightmare Castle- the Louisiana based horror themed walled noise project of Clint Coker. The project was meant to end for good a year or so back, so it’s great to see Coker deciding to resurrected it, as it’s always stood as one of my favourite US walled noise projects.
Guerrilla offers up four slices of spiteful, roasting, & caustic walled noise from this rural Upstate New York project. The tracks run between ten to seventeen minutes a piece, with the whole release been themed around terrorism & violent resistance.
3 Leaves presents The Path Described, a 3 track CD by South Australian sound artist Tristan Louth-Robins. Over the years I’ve heard a number of field recording albums documenting the natural word. Most recordings are expertly captured, but it’s a genre many find easy to discount. There is certainly no lack of recordings documenting the sounds of crickets, waterfalls, birds, wildlife, traffic, wind, etc. However, if the only thing that draws me to a recording is the pure sonic experience, then I might find dismay in “another” field recording disc to review. However, what grabs me in are the stories that led the artist to record the sounds. In that sense these albums are as much about personal biography and the emotional imprint the artist leaves on the final product. The Path Described embodies that ideal of field recordings being not only a document, but a personal statement of the artist’s life.
Unfortunately relegated to the shadows of the Swedish and Norwegian scenes, the Finnish death metal scene had some champions in their own right. While bands like Abhorrence, Xysma, and Mordicus rose to prominence, scene players like Festerday struggled to get their output recorded and released to the masses. With demos gaining attention of well known labels like Peaceville, Wild Rags, and Drowned, it seemed like Festerday's time was sure to come. But, to quote Vordul Mega, "Life's ill." Festerday faded away, but fortunately, they were not forgotten. 25 years later, the newly reformed band started to rehearse their old material. Svart records showed interest, and we're now presented with a double CD of all Festerday's studio output, live and rehearsal tracks, as well as new renditions of nine old songs.
Oblivion Adorned finds this highly prolific, Minneapolis based noise/drone artists offering up two lengthy slices of guitar based drone matter. The two here tracks move from taut & airless industrial tinged ambience, onto more harmonic & rising drone simmers, through to more surprising drum based turns.
Luke Younger's last release as Helm - 2014's The Hollow Organ - made it onto the Wire's records of the year list. Its refined yet uncompromising take on machine rhythms, industrial atmospheres and submerged techno was a concise enough statement to suggest a lot more to come in the same vein from the London based artist. As it turns out Olympic Mess is quite a considerable step both sideways and forward for his sound and contains more than a few surprises.
Finland is possibly home my favorite black metal scene as of late. There are so many excellent bands and more sprout up each year. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers make it difficult for a band, no matter how decent, to stand out. Abyssion belongs to this group of bands that, while perfectly capable and enjoyable in their own right, don’t quite have what it takes to elevate themselves from the crowded Finnish scene.
As half of industrial duo K.N.O, Kristoffer Oustad is no stranger to Malignant Records. Filth Haven, however, sees Malignant releasing Kris' debut solo outing. The dark, brooding synths, guitars, and field recordings on display evoke a haunting, cinematic atmosphere. While each track stands on its own, they manage to work together to make a full, coherent album. A dark and drifting voyage, Filth Haven draws the listener in, tucks him under its wing, and flies him through this dark world.
French imprint Nahàsh Atrym Productions presents Obsession by Logical Fiend & Black Matter Phantasm. This limited edition c90 cassette was released in the early days of 2014 and features a couple of frenchmen who have been pretty active in the wall noise genre over the last couple of years.
Here’s a cd on Dragons Eye Recordings, with a very stark, elegant design: just black, grey and white simplicity. The track it contains is also disarmingly simple: an hour-long drift through frequencies and textures.
With titles like “Übermensch”, “Will to Power”, and “The Death of God”, I was hoping this latest release from Örök would have some heavy Hate Forest influence. Sadly, it seems that this Portuguese outfit takes influence from the more commonly delved, depressive and atmospheric sides of black metal, with influence from bands like Burzum and Xasthur. Übermensch is the second release from Örök, following a full-length debut in 2013, and released in April by Signal Rex on CD, and by Bisnaga Records on tape.
For his new album "Skeleton Keys", ambient veteran Steve Roach brings us a richly analog piece of unadulterated synthesizer worship in the tradition of "Life Sequence", "Empetus" and "Proof Positive". As with the 3 albums just listed, a sequenced, grid-locked sound dominates the album, a more stable 4/4 than many of Roach's drifting sound currents, the compositions developing through permutations of spiralling arps. The melodic aspects of the music are more boldly stated than is typical in Roach's often sparse and completely gaseous sound forms.