Loading
Here’s a CDR release from late 2014 that finds this Newcastle Upon Tyne HNW project offering up a 69 minute slice of brutally dense yet slowly morphing & blacked walled noise storm, which sometimes has a brooding drone undercurrent to it.
Denver doom trio, Primitive Man, is back with Home Is Where the Hatred Is, a limited 12" EP on Relapse Records. Black and bleak, Primitive Man mixes heavy, slow sludge and propulsive, headbanging speed with engaging results. Stretching the limits of an EP, Home Is Where the Hatred Is clocks in at over a half hour of pure metal mayhem.
Big Plastic Finger are a 4 piece psychedelic noise rock band with a freeform, improvisatory approach and frequent twangs of surf. This album "Up From Under" came out on Starry Night Records in 2014, and has two tracks, the first being 15 minutes and the second more than 30.
Ninkharsag, a relatively new horde of UK black metallers signed to Candlelight for their debut album Blood of Celestial Kings, due later this month.
This professionally assembled package, on Ektro Records, comes dressed in very stark black and white robes. The thick booklet comes with two mini-essays by the protagonists and one photo of them playing together; the rest of the pages are made up with “QR” codes - those square “barcodes”. These codes, also to be found on the front cover, reveal sections from The Epic Of Gilgamesh when scanned (or rather, I have to assume they do: the front cover reveals text and two later ones reveal Polgar and Valy’s websites - in between, I had difficulty scanning…). The album has twelve pieces, all (bar one) piano-dominated; amounting to nearly an hour.
Here’s the forth volume of Altar Of Waste's Blue Velvet themed releases- each part of this series sees a underground sound artist putting their own take on David Lynch’s cult classic. For this volume Missouri based Oblive offers up two lengthy slices of entrance & engrossingly walled noise craft.
On Minneapolis based Altar Of Waste here's the second volume of noise/drone releases that are themed around David Lynch’s 1986 movie Blue Velvet. Each part of this series sees a underground sound artist putting their own take on Lynch’s disturbing yet haunting tale of small town USA evil 'n' oddness. For this volume Springfield, Oregon based Earthenwomb offers up two nearing half an hour slices of walled noise, which mix together searing wall-craft with some slightly atmospheric & harmonic undertones.
Subtext has slowly built a reputation for bass heavy avant-garde electronic composition with releases from the likes of Roly Porter, Emptyset, and label owner Paul Jebanasam. With Eric Holm's Andøya they add another string to their already impressive bow.
Satan’s Host returns once again to deliver a duo of cd’s aptly titled Pre-Dating God Part I and II. The band have been around since 1986, creating classic metal with flourishes (depending on who is in the band at the time) of blackened death and doom metal. The lineup this time consists of long time member Patrick Evil on guitars, Leviathan Thisiren (also known as Harry Conklin of Jag Panzer) on vocals, Anthony “Evil Hobbit” Lopez on drums and Margar on bass.
Portland, Oregon duo, Teeth Engraved With the Names of the Dead, see their formal debut coming in a limited to 500, DVD case package from Malignant Records. This low, dirgy slice of death industrial is very reminiscent of Steel Hook Prostheses, and happens to be mastered by John Stillings (of SHP). Oppressive but accessible, Starving the Fires is an excellent debut and shows a strong, new group firing on all cylinders.
Robin Storey's Rapoon project has gone through many an iteration since the early 90's, generally representing the peaceful ethno-ambient side of the artist's often mysterious and primitive soundscapes. Hand drums, gentle pads and indefinite repetition are the central elements of most Rapoon recordings. This 2014 recording "Cultural Forgeries" has a direct, untreated acoustic sound at times, which contrasts classic recordings like 1993's "Vernal Crossing".
Kaon imprint presents Vaccabons Et Malfactours, a 3” CD-R by musician, composer, and soundscaper, Frédéric Nogray. This entry rounds out the 3rd season of the la reviere project, a project based on field recordings of the Taurion River captured by Cédric Peyronnet. This disc came out in 2013, however 18 other artists have tackled this same source material prior to this particular release. Some artists have heavily manipulated the material whereas other have kept it relatively close to the raw recordings. Nogray’s offering falls in the later category.
As the solo project of the mastermind behind last year’s unexpectedly brilliant Ego Dominus Tuus, I must admit that I had rather high expectations for this album. While Naas Alcameth had Akhlys remain hidden in the shadowy realm of dark ambient for its first release, Supplication, The Dreaming I sees the ravening madman joined by a mysterious Ain on drums to bring about the unholy unification of black metal and dark ambient in an effort inspired by Alcameth’s otherworldly dreams.
Swarm Intelligence are a Berlin based project who conjure up a dark, dense & nasty brew of ultra low bass bound electronicia, slurred industrial texturing, grimy & hard hitting beats, brooding synth scaping & menacing electro noise undertones. After five eps, and one full length, Faction is the projects second full length release.
Here’s a recent release on Tzadik, home of the iconoclast John Zorn. I have only the physical disc to review, so the artwork and packaging must remain unknown. Hypercolor are a guitar/bass/drums trio, with ten colourful tracks on the release; occupying a middle ground essentially between rock and jazz, with traces of funk, electronics, and something I’ll have to rudely call “african music” - the influence is there to be heard, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to define a genre or locality…
Southern Lord recently re-issued As Heaven Turns To Ash, the long out of print release by Warhorse. It’s amazing how many bands, for whatever reasons, go under the radar; Warhorse is one of them. Now defunct, the band formed in Massachusetts in 1996, releasing a full-length and Eps before calling it a day. This re-issue features the full album As Heaven Turns To Ash along with the bands last Ep, the aptly named I Am Dying.
Pin Eyes is a French bedroom psychedelic folk and ambient collage project whose recordings possess a surprising degree of tonal and melodic sophistication, and thick woodsy atmosphere. "Lover of the Void" is a short EP released for free by the artist via Bandcamp in 2013.
Seattle (by way of Oakland by way of Reno) artist Jon Kortland, known best for being one half of powerviolence act Iron Lung, is back with his second solo release as Pig Heart Transplant. Song length and aggression are all that PHT shares with Iron Lung, though, as synths and other distorted sources are the main attacking force on For Mass Consumption. However, with 28 songs running at 44 seconds each, does Kortland allow himself enough time for his songs to take hold?
Norwegian sound artist, Andreas Brandal, offers a thrifty 3”CD-R under his Avmakt moniker. This mini-release, entitled Vardøger, came out last year on the Deblia imprint. I’ve written lovingly on Brandal’s work in the past, most notably his Turning Point cassette, which still finds constant rotation on my cassette deck. His penchant for blending eerie synth sounds, junk metal manipulation and degraded loops is what attracts me to much of his output. While I’m familiar with some of his harsher recordings under his Flesh Coffin guise, Avmakt was an unknown to me.
I have never enjoyed the music of Morton Feldman. His insistence on total emptiness and dissociated non-structures has never compelled me to attempt to find the meaning some would insist exists in his work. This recording of pianist Lenio Liatsou playing one of Feldman's particularly obscure later works, "For Bunita Marcus", is the first music of Feldman's I have put the time in to carefully examine.
Here we have a 2014 reissue of two soundtracks from those mysterious sonic eccentrics & quirky genre mixers The Residents. The release takes in two OST from 1984, and they come in the form of Whatever Happened To Vilness Fats? (an edited version of the bands sprawling & never fully released film), and The Census Taker (a low grade black comedy/crime caper).
This is CD reissue of one of the early, primal, and murky releases from Austrian industrial innovators Allerseelen. Here the bands sound at it’s most sparse, stripped, and grim- mixing together just a few elements: Violin, Kettle drum, sampled raven sounds, minimal bass guitar, and some minimal synth/ sampled elements.
Glaciation might be known to a few of you due to having one of France’s best known metal musicians – Neige. Probably best known for leading Alcest and Amesoeurs, Neige also did a stint with Peste Noir and a handful of other bands. Since Alcest has seemingly drifted away from its black metal roots it’s nice to see him pulling vocal duties in a black metal band because he can do amazing shrieks. Glaciation is supposedly a band that’s totally against playing modern black metal – their debut was titled 1994 - but on their second album, the band has moved slightly away from the genre’s roots.
Here’s a three disc collaborative HNW release between Belarus based Disgorged Faeces & Russian based HN/HNW project Light Collapse (aka Vitaliy Maklakov).Over the three discs we have a selection of both shorter & longer ‘walls’, with most of these nicely balancing between entrancing brutality & searingly rewarding wall-craft.