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I reviewed a Tim Olive collaboration a while back, on 845 Audio, and Dominion Mills comes packaged in a similar manner: a cardboard wallet, sparsely printed, with a simple drawing of concentric circles and the barest of details. The cd inside contains three pieces, all towards the shorter side of things - by improv standards - and all cut from the same cloth. Here, Olive plays ‘magnetic pickups’, whilst Jacques performs with ‘rotating devices’ - if this sounds obtuse and austere, well… you’d be right.
Japanese ambient pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto has paired with art ambient soundscape artists Iluha and Taylor Deupree for something of a 12k supergroup. "Perpetual", the resulting album, is a rich and complex sound environment, containing a deeper density of sound and wider range of timbres than most 12k releases.
To most extreme music fans, the Swedes have become pretty synonymous with death and black metal. Their tell tale tones have influenced many while making a sound that is clearly their own. Growing alongside these movements was the Swedish industrial scene. Much like their metal counterparts, these acts created a sound uniquely theirs, and boldly inspirational. Stemming from legendary labels like Cold Meat Industry, this sound continues today, and is still a large part of the death industrial genre. Analfabetism's newest continues the strong Swedish industrial tradition of cold, grim, rough music.
This is a recent release from one of less frequent projects of respected, prolific & multi project linked French wall-noise maker Julien Skrobek. For this project he focuses in on old school yet moody walled noise with a homicidal theme. And for this C30 release the theme is Jess Franco’s 1976 movie Jack The Ripper, which saw respected yet often unbalanced German actor Klaus Kinsk taking on the role of the Whitechapel murder who butchered five women in Victorian London.
Here we have a double CDR release from Widow Park; which is one of the walled noise projects of Australian based noise maker Shaun Mack-also of Morte Cammina, Girl On The Bridge, and Bleak August. And runner of the great wall noise only label Needle & Knife, who put out this release.
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.