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Schnauser are a British rock band with a traditionally British sound, influenced heavily by Stereolab and Pink Floyd, most noticably. "Protein for Everyone" is their 5th album, and it's now been 10 years since their first self released album in 2005.
Hogg is a post-punk industrial act from Chicago, brought to us by Andy Ortmann's Nihilist Recordings. From what I can gather, this is the first release by this female two piece that likes kitties and showing off their butts. Hogg has been touring a lot this summer, and are getting a pretty positive response on their Facebook page. So, what does this act do with guitar, bass, drums and electronics? Um, well...read on!
23five Incorporated presents I’m Lost, a full-length CD by TARAB. TARAB is the moniker of one Eamon Sprod, an Australian sound artist whose career spans nearly 15 years. As stated in the liner notes, all the sounds on this album were found, collected, (along with being begged and borrowed) and ultimately arranged by Sprod’s hands during the years 2007-2011. There isn’t much information beyond that, but from what I can glean from the recordings, Sprod deftly captures the environment around him and presents it as five sound collages.
Avantgarde Music is certainly a label that lives up to its name. From the man’s own darkwave band Monumentum to the massively influential Darkspace, the label has a clear dedication to music that pushes the envelope. Sometimes that unearths veritable gems, but there are times when this search for interesting sounds fails. And yet other times, Avantgarde manages to unveil something I can’t quite decide if it’s good or bad. This is one of those times.
Poino are a dark, noisy British rock band whose primary influences are Jesus Lizard and the uglier, punkier side of Nirvana. "Bon Ick Voyeur" is their 2nd album, 4 years after their first, "Moan Loose" in 2010. It's a brief 37 minutes, but doesn't waste a second, exploring an impressive range of ideas within 8 songs.
This vinyl album is lavishly presented on Gruenrekorder, with nice artwork and photographs; it recounts the story of a box of records. This box, full of old 78s, was inherited by the artist’s grandmother and then passed down across many years and miles; with DinahBird then deciding to retrace its steps, and return to Salt Spring Island with them. She then toured the island, playing the records and recording herself doing this; as well as talking to islanders and her late Great Uncle: ’This piece is about rekindling lost, and perhaps forgotten, sounds. Are they so very different to those my grandmother heard? It is a personal response to the people and places of Salt Spring Island.’ Its also tedious as hell.
Azoth presents the listener with eight fairly short slices of HNW, ANW & harsh drone- these move from searing & intense fixed ‘walls’, onto more atmospheric & moody yet still brutal wall craft.
Monochrome Vision presents Rotterdam 54:21, the first collaborative work from international sound-sculptors: Roel Meelkop and Mecha/Orga. Released in 2012, this full-length CD offers 3 tracks of manipulated field recordings mixed with analogue synthesizers. For those unfamiliar, Roel Meelkop is a Netherlands-based multi-media artist who started creating music in the early 80’s with the band THU20. Since then, he has created an extensive body of work including many releases, sound art installations, and performance pieces. Mecha/Orga, the moniker of Yiorgis Sakellariou, primarily works with manipulation of field recordings and as a PhD student at Coventry University is exploring electroacoustic music and sound in rituals. Apparently, he also only performs in darkness to create deeply subversive sonic experiences.
Patience is a virtue in the music world. Six years since their last release, Karjalan Sissit is back with their newest, grim slab of rough industrial, ...Want You Dead. Not missing a beat, Karjalan Sissit continue to punish the audience with low, heavy atmospheres, hypnotic, pounding percussion, and harsh, angry vocals. ...Want You Dead may not be far from the truth, either, as the music is unrelenting in its brutality. 74th Cycle/Cyclic Law treats this album well, too, releasing it on CD, ltd LP (w/ Tesco Organization), and ltd cassette (w/ Total Black).
Dread is a self released CDR from Denton Texas based walled noise project Big Hole, and it offers up a single just over forty minute track of thick & unrelenting walled noise.
This c42 cassette offers up two twenty one minute slices of nihilistic, unmoving, and intensely hopeless walled noise. On side A we have the French black bag wearing king of HWN Vomir, and on side B we have scene new comer Cherry Blossoms at Night who hails from the north of the Uk
Slashed Pretty Girls is a three piece walled noise project from Huston Texas- it brings together noise legend & HNW originator Richard Ramirez, Sean E. Matzus(theNIGHTproduct, Thewhitehorse, Last Rape, and Black Leather Jesus), and Tanner Garza( solo work, Priest In Shit, and Black Leather Jesus). The project focus in on sleazy & crude HNW, which is themed around violence against women & cult movies- this particular release is themed around Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, a trashy US Black magic themed movie from the 1973.
It’s a good time to be a Blasphemy fan. After almost a decade of being out of print, Fallen Angel of Doom was finally re-released this year by NWN! and Ross Bay Cult as a CD with vinyl to follow. And (almost) just as thrilling, RBC has been putting out Blasphemy gear like there’s no tomorrow: patches, shirts, and killer flags. Needless to say I have a massive Blasphemy flag decorating my room.
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.