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Here’s another archival tome of old blues, this time from Tompkins Square; a label who’ve put out several staggering albums of similar material. I’m reviewing a download version, but the package proper has three cds and a booklet. The booklet is perhaps less lavish than other projects I’ve seen, replacing any biographical details or commentary with a piece of scripture for each track; whilst this is neat and conceptually true, I must admit that half the attraction for me are the stories these albums resurrect and save - so in that respect, the booklet is disappointing.
My previous experience with Curgenven's work was 2010's Oltre, a work that in some quarters was rather lazily described as carrying a Lynchian tone. No doubt this was due to the radical use of turntables and vinyl surface as a key constituent of the music, echoing Lynch's flirtation with the eerie material quality of that medium at various points in his career (see the opening sequences to Inland Empire for instance). But I felt that this comparison rather obscured a more interesting perspective whereby the use of the medium was designed to amplify and reflect various unique qualities of the environment in which they were recorded and played back. Such an mistake cannot be made with this recent record which explicitly locates itself in a specific set of environments, inviting us to think differently about time, place and history.
Ice Age Productions presents Bereitschaftspotential, a 3” CD-R by Australia’s Automating. I wasn’t at all familiar with this project, but when I looked through the slim information available on the insert, I saw the name Sasha Margolis. I am familiar with Margolis’s work in Constant Light, having thoroughly enjoyed their krautrock meets synth drone album Mag-Amplitude. However, Automating is an entirely different beast altogether.
British industrial drone noise juggernaut, Skullflower, is back with their full length follow up to 2012's Fucked On A Pile of Corpses.Once again on Cold Spring, Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies' newest, Draconis, comes as a 2 CD set, packaged in a 6 panel digipak with a 16 page booklet. Focusing less on crisp, layers of static, Draconis works with dizzying layers of industrial, psych, and traditional world sounds to create a thick, mesmerizing vortex of sound as only Skullflower can.
Here we have the first ever CD release from this highly prolific Serbian walled noise project. Dead Body Collection started in 2009, and has gone onto release a truly huge body of work taking in come on for a hundred twenty releases. The projects discography takes in box sets( both tape & CDR), stand lone CDRs, tapes, splits, and vinyl…but this release is the projects first ever CD release, and it appears on Germanys Geraeuschmanufaktur label.
From 2013 here’s another torturous & unrelenting slab of walled noise from one of genres most known & celebrated exponent of the form. The release comes in the form of a c40 cassette tape, with each side of tape offering up a single twenty minute of truly punishing & unchanging noise craft.
Ever since that nasty business with Inquisition being accused of being Nazis last year, the band has been trying to distance themselves from that ideology. Now on Season of Mist, the label has chosen to reissue the band’s back catalogue with all new covers done by the man who did the art for Obscure Verses for the Multiverse, Paolo Girardi. The man’s a talented artist, no doubt about that, but I can’t help but feel that these new covers for the reissues are part of an attempt to put distance between Inquisition and Antichrist Kramer, the man who did most of the band’s previous artwork. For those of you who don’t know, Kramer ran the now defunct NSBM label Satanic Skinhead Propaganda and is linked to a number of allegedly unsavory bands. So I suppose it is understandable that Inquisition wants to separate itself from this image given their recent rise to popularity, but it’s a shame to see some great artwork replaced.
Here’s the soundtrack for one of the classic body melt movies of the 1980’s Street Trash, and it’s a fairly varied & rewarding mainly synthesizer based score, which moves from sinister & moody synth craft. Onto melancholic & slurred beat industrial ebbed keyboard marches, through to cheeky drum machine, guitar & synth 80’s slightly Jazzy AOR instrumentals, and beyond. This 2014 reissue came in three versions- CD, Vinyl, and cassette- I’m reviewing the CD version
This two-cd set comes in a beautifully designed fold-out card wallet, accompanied by a small booklet of text. The wallet is adorned with ghostly photos - clearly parts of the body, but shot so that they become odd, misshapen flesh. The front cover itself, is an unsettling, humanoid figure, derived from a foot; it has a “flesh-transformed”, Silent Hill-esque quality, which is telling for the audio contents of the package. The two cds collect up ten tracks in total; culled from recent tapes and cdrs, and adding one previously unreleased piece.
Mare Di Dirac are a bone chilling Italian collective who summon up a lo-fi, morbid, and sometimes ritual based sound. The project started in 2011 as a two piece, but for this release there are three key members, as well as two guest members. Tupilaq is the projects first full length CD release, after a mini CDR & a full length CDR.
Dead Neanderthals are a Dutch duo that play high an amazingly intense and relentless form of sound that blurs the boundary between harsh noise and free jazz (which they refer to as "heavy jazz"). Their new LP "Prime" came out on Gaffer Records in 2014.
Frank Sidebottom was one of great, original & often bizarre British comedy/ variety acts of the 1980’s/ early 1990’s. To Brits of a certain age( i.e. mid 30’s onwards) Frank is instantly recognizable due to his TV appearance in the 1980’s- with his large spherical fake head, & 1950s-style sharp suites. His brand of quirky humour & reinterpretations of popular pop & rock songs, was both very English & bizarrely unequal. This box set offers up four CD's worth of material, as well as a DVD- the set takes in two full length Lp’s, a selection of 12”’ & 10”, bonus tracks, and a live DVD.
The music world is full of unknown and unheralded masters, so it's no surprise learning of one in the (relatively new) synthesizer sphere. Synth pioneer David Borden has quite a history.
Gruen Digital presents From the Cistern, a new digital album by Bryan Eubanks. Eubanks is a musician composer from the Pacific Northwest in the U.S., but currently based in Berlin.
Blakk Old Blood is a new black metal outfit from Switzerland. Although the band originally intended to release just a single demo and then split up, they decided to stick together to complete a series of releases based on the seven deadly sins. Their second release, an EP called Wrath was released independently on tape and CD late last year.
Legendary jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons, whose recordings date back to 1963, has injected his oeuvre with a fresh shot of powerful vitality with an intense spiritual album of Middle Eastern and jazz flavored psychedelic jam rock called "Nomadic". This album exists at a true crossroads between musical worlds, to the point that a listener uninformed as to the band's history would likely have difficulty discerning which culture it originated from.
This data DVD comes in LINE’s usual house styling: formal, clean and with an air of academia. Pretty much all of the releases I have heard from the label have carried that academic “potential”, without it ruining the simple pleasure of the works as sound. “Liquified Sky” ups the ante in this regard, with knotty texts explaining some of the science behind the four pieces presented. I say “explain”, but to be honest the vast bulk of it went right over my head; so I concentrated on the works themselves. Each “track” combines “abstract” visuals with befitting sounds, or vice versa if you’d rather.
Island is a four disc CDR set from this highly secretive walled noise project. And offered up here is some of the most punishing, extreme, and truly hopeless HNW recorded by this project (or any other project) ever.
California artist Jim Haynes has made a career out of "rust[ing] things." His continued decay of sculpture, photography, and sound has seen his work exhibited internationally. With a solid discography built over the past sixteen years, Jim sees his latest release, Scarlet, coming to us from The Helen Scarsdale Agency on cassette. Crackle, crunch, and a bit of pulse make up the basis of a very enjoyable album.
Baskura imprint presents Music from the SYNTHI, a full length CD by Yoshio Machida. Machida is a long-running multi-media artist from Tokyo who works with themes of “light, echo and possibility.”
Here’s a reissue of one of the off-shoots from long running British prog band Yes. This self title debut appeared in 1989, and really it was a Yes album in all but name, as it featured 90% of the bands classic line-up, but due to issues with the name at the time, the band had to go for one of the most lengthy( and ego fed) names of all time. But don’t let that put you off as this stands as some of the best work recorded by(members of) Yes in the 80’s & 90’s.
An air of adventure is difficult to cultivate in a genre focused blasphemy, brutality, and perversion. And although that tradition dates back to Bathory’s first Viking metal albums, very few bands are able to touch on that adventurous pride pioneered back in the late 80s. Macabre omen are of these few bands.
For a label more well known for their forward looking aesthetic and uncompromising adherence to the new this is something of a surprise. Exhumed from the vaults of mid-90s dubwise experimentation comes this re-issue of Brooklyn hip-hop outlaw Spectre's 1998 mixtape Ruff Cutz featuring contributions from the likes of Bill Laswell and Kevin "The Bug" Martin along with a host of less well known acts.
Raiz Iberica is a 2014 release of various artists from Spain and Portugal. Each of the bands here has deep connections with their roots and history. It’s sort of an introduction to Iberian folk music. Together they have initiated us to the history, myths and legends of the Iberian Peninsula.