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Ritual is the second part of this projects trilogy of HNW releases, which appeared in CDR format in late summer 2015 under the banner of Body Connection. As with the other parts to this trilogy this release offers up a single slice of fixed, battering & ugly walled noise.
William Basinski is a renowned electronic ambient/avant garde minimalist whose most famous pieces have all been focused around the repetition of a single tape loop, not to mention very long (30+ minutes). His new album "The Deluge" is another of these piano based tape loop works.
Here’s a double cdr set from Altar of Waste, presented to its usual high standards: colour artwork, smartly designed, in a dvd case. The release is, as its title suggests, a reinterpretation of the Castlevania computer game - this is, for better or worse, where my knowledge ends. The album contains nine tracks.
This C40 is the second split release that has occurred between French wall noise master Vomir, and Austrian based HNW/Harsh noise project Superror.
Here’s the second release from this Florida based walled noise project that takes it’s theme & project name from 1984 family fantasy movie The Neverending Story. The release comes in the form of a double cdr set, and appeared on Minneapolis based Altar Of Waste in 2014.
Here we have a searing & horror-fed slurred doom meets noise collaboration between these two Chicago projects. On offer here is a double disc cdr set, with each disc presenting the listener with two thirty minute slices of intense/ nightmarish jam-outs that blend together blunt, sluggish & seared doom riffing, with pained shouts/ bays, and malevolent/ nasty electro noise matter.
Originally released in 1998 The Fires Of The Borderlands, is seen as an ambient classic & one of the highlights of this respected ethno-ambient/ ambient projects large discography. This 2014 double CD reissue appeared on the great ambient/ experimental label Zoharum, and presents the original album with a unreleased live recording from 1996.
New Zealand three piece, Creeping, are hard to put a label on with their brand of metal that fights its way between the black and doom metal spheres. What is easy to put one's finger on is that it's crushing and well done, and the five tracks creep (!) their tendrils directly into the listener's brain. Their third release, Revenant, is out now on LP from Iron Bonehead productions, and should satisfy any metalhead looking to have a gloomy experience.
Guitarist Andy Moor and saxophonist John Butcher's "Experiments With A Leaf" is oddly titled, containing no sounds sourced from leaves or nature, instead being a completely instrumental free jazz recording, with an intuitive, chaotic unstructured style characteristic of the genre. Focused on sound texture rather than melody or tonality, the call and response noises exchanged between the two musicians in the duo are something of a conversation, and couldn't adequately be precisely transcribed into 'notes' or traditional sheet music.
Here’s a new release from the wonderful Breaching Static label, as curated by the man behind the superb Boar project (to mention but one). It arrives in a dvd case, with murky, black and white, xeroxed artwork. Both Hooked Talons and Garbage Mask are new names to me (though the former is revealed as another Richard Ramirez project), with the first contributing a near forty-minute piece of junk noise, and the second, two much shorter tracks of squeal.
Ecco is the 60’s & 70’s grind house movie themed walled noise project of respected & prolific French walled noise artists Julien Skrobek. All of the projects releases find Julien creating very raw & sleazed walled craft, which is created with radio static as a source. This cassette release from early 2015 offers up two around twenty minute slices of HNW- the release came in an edition of 40 hand number copies, so all been well you’ll still be able to get your hands on a copy.
Here’s a humanity hating HNW split release that brings together a disc a piece worth of material from the following: highly secretive & brutally intense US walled noise project Nar, and often progressive, but always creative British wall noise artists Clive Henry (here listed as Ch)
French static noise imprint,Textural Nightmares, presents II by Oscuro. Oscuro is just one of a myriad of projects from frenchman Julien Skrobek (The Sandman Wears a Mask, Static Park, Fosse, Serpent Sex). Those familiar with wall noise, will recognize Skrobek as not being only a prolific performer, but also running a number of his own boutique micro labels, specializing in HNW, ANW, drone and related sounds. In other words, dude’s got his hands in a lot of wall related shit!
Not being known for their prolific output, Yen Pox instead has chosen to make a career out of sparse releases that resonate deeply within the community. Between the Horizon and the Abyss marks their first full length in fifteen years, and, for the patient, the wait was well worth it. Legends in the dark ambient genre, Yen Pox's latest builds on genre standards and expands into uncharted territories in time and space.
The Cadaver Pulse I is a slowly shifting & mind altering long form slice of dark/ritual ambience, which features an often dense, darkly morphing, & ritual psychedelic soundscape built around electronics, synths, field recording, modified ritual elements, and the human voice. This is a 2014 reissue of a release that original appeared back in 2003 in an edition of just 80 copies- this reissue comes in edition of 500 copies.
Nothing Under the Sun presents A Means By Which To Break The Surface Of The Real, the new LP by NYC dark industrial purveyors: Theologian. Theologian, primarily the work of Lee M. Bartow (Theologian Prime) is joined on this recording by David Castillo (Primitive Weapons, White Widows Pact) and Daniel Suffering (Whorid), with contributions from Matt Slagle and engineer Kevin D. Reilly, Jr.. If you’re expecting some dark shit, you would be right.
Here’s a cdr from one of the more recent practitioners of wall noise: Big Hole, from Texas. The release takes the very simple, but very effective form of a blank cdr and a stark, xeroxed card insert; a highly contrasted black and white image (of piled branches) on it’s front cover and bold text on the reverse - all making a virtue of the simplicity of the packaging. ‘Kerosene’ is one long, seventy-one minute track of harsh noise wall.
Post-industrial pagan ambient magicians Coil are likely my favorite band of all time, ripping a hole in conventional expectations of music to create truly transcendent, gripping electronic sound textures that contain within them the distinctive psychoactive properties of psychedelic drugs, pushing listeners into connection with a primal and forgotten aspect of the musical brain.
It’s fair to say that God In Three Persons is one of the more serious, sonically classy, and at times troubling albums produced by the avant pop/ art project known as The Residents. The album originally appeared in 1988, and here we have a well-deserved & long overdue CD reissue of an album that had sadly been out of print for the last 15 years or so.
When one thinks of the British underground Folk scene of the late 60’s/ early 70’s names like The Incredible String Band & Fairport Convention come to mind. This recent & rather wonderful compilation adds a whole host of previously unknown names to the list, and like the best compilations it makes you keen to track down work of many of the featured artists. Yet at the same time it managers to be a highly consistent listening experience in its own right over its three discs/ sixty plus track unfold.
Finnish psych doom merchants, Dark Buddha Rising, have teamed up with Neurot Recordings for their fifth Studio album, Inversum. Consisting of two long form tracks, their newest release continues to bring the listener into their dark and twisted world. Sparse and engaging, Inversum takes a slightly different direction than their previous release, Dakhmandal.
Here we have the latest slice of hash-hazed doom/heavy psychedelic rock jamming from this British four piece project. The release offers up two lengthy sonic trips into stoned-out & mystically ribbed jam craft. And I must say this is very much of a return to form after the band’s disappointing last full length release, which came in the form of 2014’s rather bland & uneventful Stoner Rock album.
Burning Tree Records & Rotten To The Core Records presents the fifth release by Oxnard unit Stop Breathing. Available on both digital and vinyl formats, the appropriately titled V, offers 12 tracks of adrenaline pumping hardcore/punk that culls a lot from the old, while bringing in a little of the new, to craft an album that is refreshingly straightforward.
I’m reviewing a download copy of this, but I can tell you that the cover is an abstract image that suggests geological formations and flora; this is rather an apt theme, given the sounds and structures within, but wrong in one very important aspect - the image is simplistic and minimal: Joëlle Léandre and SPUNK are anything but. Léandre is a new name to me, but then so are SPUNK. The former plays double bass, whilst the latter are a quartet (Andersen, Grenager, Ratkje, and Tafjord); taking in trumpet, flutes, cello, voice, french horn and electronics. The album features six pieces, recorded live at Molde Jazz Festival, in July 2011; three collaborations, two solo Léandre performances, and one track by SPUNK alone.