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Veteran composers of deep listening, avant garde and ambient music Richard Chartier and William Basinski have joined forces again for this LP, "Divertissement", their 3rd collaborative album, the series starting with "Untitled 1-3" in 2004. I thoroughly enjoyed "Untitled 1-3", finding it a refreshing change from the style and sound palette of each artist.
Here we have the welcome return of Nightmare Castle- the Louisiana based horror themed walled noise project of Clint Coker. The project was meant to end for good a year or so back, so it’s great to see Coker deciding to resurrected it, as it’s always stood as one of my favourite US walled noise projects.
Guerrilla offers up four slices of spiteful, roasting, & caustic walled noise from this rural Upstate New York project. The tracks run between ten to seventeen minutes a piece, with the whole release been themed around terrorism & violent resistance.
3 Leaves presents The Path Described, a 3 track CD by South Australian sound artist Tristan Louth-Robins. Over the years I’ve heard a number of field recording albums documenting the natural word. Most recordings are expertly captured, but it’s a genre many find easy to discount. There is certainly no lack of recordings documenting the sounds of crickets, waterfalls, birds, wildlife, traffic, wind, etc. However, if the only thing that draws me to a recording is the pure sonic experience, then I might find dismay in “another” field recording disc to review. However, what grabs me in are the stories that led the artist to record the sounds. In that sense these albums are as much about personal biography and the emotional imprint the artist leaves on the final product. The Path Described embodies that ideal of field recordings being not only a document, but a personal statement of the artist’s life.
Unfortunately relegated to the shadows of the Swedish and Norwegian scenes, the Finnish death metal scene had some champions in their own right. While bands like Abhorrence, Xysma, and Mordicus rose to prominence, scene players like Festerday struggled to get their output recorded and released to the masses. With demos gaining attention of well known labels like Peaceville, Wild Rags, and Drowned, it seemed like Festerday's time was sure to come. But, to quote Vordul Mega, "Life's ill." Festerday faded away, but fortunately, they were not forgotten. 25 years later, the newly reformed band started to rehearse their old material. Svart records showed interest, and we're now presented with a double CD of all Festerday's studio output, live and rehearsal tracks, as well as new renditions of nine old songs.
Oblivion Adorned finds this highly prolific, Minneapolis based noise/drone artists offering up two lengthy slices of guitar based drone matter. The two here tracks move from taut & airless industrial tinged ambience, onto more harmonic & rising drone simmers, through to more surprising drum based turns.
Luke Younger's last release as Helm - 2014's The Hollow Organ - made it onto the Wire's records of the year list. Its refined yet uncompromising take on machine rhythms, industrial atmospheres and submerged techno was a concise enough statement to suggest a lot more to come in the same vein from the London based artist. As it turns out Olympic Mess is quite a considerable step both sideways and forward for his sound and contains more than a few surprises.
Finland is possibly home my favorite black metal scene as of late. There are so many excellent bands and more sprout up each year. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers make it difficult for a band, no matter how decent, to stand out. Abyssion belongs to this group of bands that, while perfectly capable and enjoyable in their own right, don’t quite have what it takes to elevate themselves from the crowded Finnish scene.
As half of industrial duo K.N.O, Kristoffer Oustad is no stranger to Malignant Records. Filth Haven, however, sees Malignant releasing Kris' debut solo outing. The dark, brooding synths, guitars, and field recordings on display evoke a haunting, cinematic atmosphere. While each track stands on its own, they manage to work together to make a full, coherent album. A dark and drifting voyage, Filth Haven draws the listener in, tucks him under its wing, and flies him through this dark world.
French imprint Nahàsh Atrym Productions presents Obsession by Logical Fiend & Black Matter Phantasm. This limited edition c90 cassette was released in the early days of 2014 and features a couple of frenchmen who have been pretty active in the wall noise genre over the last couple of years.
Here’s a cd on Dragons Eye Recordings, with a very stark, elegant design: just black, grey and white simplicity. The track it contains is also disarmingly simple: an hour-long drift through frequencies and textures.
With titles like “Übermensch”, “Will to Power”, and “The Death of God”, I was hoping this latest release from Örök would have some heavy Hate Forest influence. Sadly, it seems that this Portuguese outfit takes influence from the more commonly delved, depressive and atmospheric sides of black metal, with influence from bands like Burzum and Xasthur. Übermensch is the second release from Örök, following a full-length debut in 2013, and released in April by Signal Rex on CD, and by Bisnaga Records on tape.
For his new album "Skeleton Keys", ambient veteran Steve Roach brings us a richly analog piece of unadulterated synthesizer worship in the tradition of "Life Sequence", "Empetus" and "Proof Positive". As with the 3 albums just listed, a sequenced, grid-locked sound dominates the album, a more stable 4/4 than many of Roach's drifting sound currents, the compositions developing through permutations of spiralling arps. The melodic aspects of the music are more boldly stated than is typical in Roach's often sparse and completely gaseous sound forms.
Ranger are a Finish metal band who mix together old school trash, NWOBHM, and 80’s fist pumping metal. Skull Splitting Metal offers up a selection of rare & out print tracks from the bands early days- and simply put it’s a great fist punching, beer spilling, and head- banging ride.
Here we have a pro CDR reissue of Enbilulugugal’s 2013 full length- the project creates an overloaded, messy & mangled mixture of black metal & noise. And this album offers up just of an hour of grim yet slightly tongue-in-cheek blacked & noisy chaos.
The Sultans are a two piece finish project who create a raw, repetitive & stark brand of boogie rock ‘n’ blues. This 2014 on Ektro( home of loop riff based genre mixing Finish masters Circle), is a twenty three track compilation which brings together a selection of tracks from the bands career- the tracks here date from between 1995(when the band started) & 2009.
Eclectic Norweigen musician Erik Honoré has been active for a long time now, beginning in the early 90's as part of a band called Velvet Belly. In the past 15 years, he's released a number of recordings that blur the line between experimental jazz, modern classical and art ambient music.
As a general rule of thumb, I try to avoid reading label spiels and press releases - I like to see and hear what the actual release, the artefact itself, has to say to me. So, having read the information on the God site, my opinions on this album changed quite a bit.
Originally released in 1992 on Tatra Productions, When's The Black Death is a sonic recreation of the plague that swept through Norway in 1349, taking two-thirds of of the country with it. Based on the series of drawings featured in Theodor Kittelsen's Svartedauen, Lars Pedersen takes the listener on a structured, rollicking journey through a dark time in Norway's history.Historic instruments add an air of credibility to the recording, but unfortunately, some instruments and loops push most moments toward the goofy side.
Gruenrekorder presents 52°46’ North and 13°29’ East - Music for Wax Cylinders by Merzouga. The duo of Eva Poplin and Janko Hanushevsky offer a single track CD utilizing historic wax-cylinders from the Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem in Berlin. Gruenrekorder, an imprint with a penchant for field-recordings, always seems to have an interesting story behind the making of each of their releases. This disc is no exception.
Along with the rest of Inquisition’s back catalogue, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm is getting a facelift courtesy of Season of Mist. I speculated that the change of cover art was an attempt to distance themselves from Kramer and NS accusations, but perhaps this is to unify all of Inquisition’s releases with similar artwork. The reissue of Ominous Doctrines is another of Paolo Girardi’s, one that looks an awful lot like Chalice of Blood’s Helig, Helig, Helig. Again, he’s immensely talented, but his covers often look very similar due to reoccurring themes and a limited color palette, and so I prefer the original, especially on the full, folded out version as seen on vinyl and the A5 digipak. There’s something about that massive, trippy skull that fits the music so much better.
Here’s a collaboration between to between two respected, troubling, and uneasy drone projects. Culver is the Tyneside based project of Lee Stokoe, and has been active since 1995. And La Mancha Del Pecado is all the work of Ciudad Juarez, México based Miguel Perez, has been active since 2009- both projects are fairly prolific( as solo artists & collaborators), and as this releases title suggests this is the 5th time the pair have collaborated together.
Richard Glover's ascetic chamber music opus "Logical Harmonies" is well titled, a selection of process pieces clearly dictated at least in part by mathematical processes that result in curious symmetries. However, unlike the deeply uncomfortable dissonance and alien quality of math derived music like Schoenberg's serialism, Glover's music has a rounded, mesmerizing smoothness, a consistent hypnotic cadence.
Returning with their first full length in almost eight years, New York's Skinless are back with their newest slab of heavy, brutal death. Their third release from Relapse Records sees the quintet returning to their classic, late 90's line-up. Skinless shows that despite trends and fads in the death metal world, brutal, crushing grooves never fail to get the blood flowing. Only the Ruthless Remain is seven tracks of pure, unadulterated, death fury that'll get any metalhead stomping, screaming, and air guitaring around his kitchen.