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UUROP VIII-XII Places In Sun & Winter, Son is the 12th live album from The Fall, and it offers up a selection of twelve tracks from this most distinctive & long lasting of post punk project. The tracks are culled from the last five years of live work, and they take in tracks from the bands last four studio releases.
Six years after the release of their last full-length, Finland’s most blasphemous war metallers are back with a new album titled The Apocalyptic Triumphator. Black/death metal has the potential to be the most uncompromising, most relentless genre out there. With the combination of black metal’s ideological extremity and death metal’s visceral brutality, it seems like a match made in heaven. So how is it that this fusion of extremity can sound so tame? Horrible production, that’s how.
Likely my all time most listened musician, synthesizer soundscape pioneer Steve Roach has released upwards of 70 full lengths since beginning in 1982. He has grown no less prolific with age, and 2015 has already brought 2 releases within its first month, a longform space ambient track titled "Invisible", and a new collaborative album with shamanic drummer Byron Metcalf.
Untitled Ritual is a C60/ digital download release, which offers up two thirty minute slices of unrelenting walled noise from this French HNW project. Behind Black Matter Phantasm is one Joseph Szymkowiak- the projects seemingly been active since late 2013, releasing digital, CDR, and tape releases.
Several years back, I was lucky enough to experience an intimate, live performance by the percussionist Z’EV. Encouraging us to relax and lie down, he played in a darkened room for perhaps twenty minutes; though the passage of time was hard to gauge. I had seen the instrumentation as I entered, but I still left bewildered somewhat by the sounds Z’EV had coaxed forth. If you had told me that he’d actually been using a laptop and some synthesizers, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to dispute it. The conjured soundscape was a dark, isolationist drone; drifting with meticulous care around the room - it sounded so convincingly electronic in origin, that it almost felt like a deliberate attempt to replicate isolationist pieces. “felt, if not seen” occupies a similar territory, with Z’EV playing alongside Bob Bellerue.
Ecco is one of the more recent projects from the 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). This project started off around late summer 2014, and sound wise it focuses in on very raw walled noise, which is apparently created by using radio static as a source. The project themes all of it releases around weird, perverse & violent grindhouse movies of the 60’s & 70’s.
This C40 split brings together two twenty minute slices of pummelling & dense HNW from these two US wall noise act’s- on the first side we have a track from the mysterious, airless & punishing Nar project. And on the second side we have a track from the searing & often industrialized tinged Maryland based project Hearsh Fetish.
Bandleader/saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Frank Lowe and his quartet recorded the music on "Out Loud" in a studio, likely sometime in 1974, precise date unknown. Released as a double LP in 2014 by Triple Point Records, this music was apparently unreleased until now. Due to the chaotic and impromptu nature of Lowe's style, any scrap out of sound from the vaults can turn out to be as precious as his more well known recordings.
Death metal is a tricky beast. What works for some doesn't work for others, and some stuff, despite lots of trying, never really works at all. Any of you unfortunate to be familiar with my reviews know that band names are pretty important to me. It's stupid, sure, but if your name is goofy, chances are good your band is, too. Though not totally goofy, for me, Ghoulgotha's songs aren't enough to get past the name and song titles. Despite solid death metal bits, loose structure and wonky riffs keep The Deathmass Cloak from reaching its goal.
Though Imago Mortis have existed in one form or another since 1994, they haven’t made much of a splash outside of their home country (if Metal Archives are to be believed) . Despite their lack of international recognition, these Italians have been quietly polluting the underground with a steady stream of material over the course of their twenty year career, managing to catch the eye of Drakkar Productions in the process. 2014 saw the release of their third full-length, titled Carnicon, which was released on CD and limited to 1000 copies.
This double CDR set brings together two noise bound/searing ambient reinterpretations or re-workings of Ennio Morricone’s eerier & chilling soundtrack for John Carpenter's 1982 gooey, gory yet highly atmospheric horror sci-fi movie The Thing.
I’ve got a couple of Stephen Cornford releases, both of which concern themselves with the sounds of audio equipment and “Music For Earbuds” obviously stands in that tradition. From the inlay: “These pieces were assembled exclusively from unprocessed acoustic recordings of the feedback between a single earbud headphone and a cassette walkman tape head.” Cornford then edited and layered these sounds into the five untitled tracks (marked by duration only) on the album.
Luke Younger's project Helm mines a particularly rich seam at the intersection of electro-acoustic, noise/drone and industrial music. Two years after his PAN debut with Impossible Symmetry we find him moving away from his previous flirtations with techno to further refine his art with four dense pieces.
U was the seventh album from this high influential & distinctive Scottish project that mixed together Psychedelic & progressive folk with all manner of other genres. The double album was originally released in late 1970, and it saw the band at their most, challenging, quirky, experimental, and varied. Over the years the album has sadly been in & out of print, but this 2014 Double CD release is surely the most definitive version thus far, as it features a new digital re-mastering, and new inlay booklet taking in recent extensive liner notes, pictures, artwork & full lyrics for all the albums songs.
There’s little doubt that Dead Kennedys 1980 debut Fresh Fruit For Rotten Vegetable is one of the great, distinct & fully formed of punk debuts of all time. It’s up there with the likes of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and Crass’s The Feeding of the 5000. This 2014 book tells the story of this classic albums making, the bands formation, and the time before & just after the records release.
David Cronenberg has been inspiring the world for the past forty years, so it's not surprising to see a tribute to his work come about at this stage in his career. Interestingly, this tribute comes not in the form of film, but rather as a jazz/noise hybrid. Combining the talents of Rutger Zuydervelt, Gareth Davis, and Leo Fabriek, Shivers offers up a different interpretation of Cronenberg's work. Using elements of jazz, noise, and electronica, this European trio builds an intriguing sonic atmosphere that not only represents Dave "Deprave" and his oeuvre quite well, but does so in an unexpected manner.
Monotype Records presents Verstörung, the debut full-length by We Will Fail. We Will Fail is the project of Aleksandra Grünholz, based out of Warsaw, Poland. A graphic designer and visual artist, Grünholz created We Will Fail as a further extension of her artistics proclivities. According to Grünholz, Verstörung is the result of many years of collecting sounds (field recordings, samples from old audio tapes, those created with audio equipment, etc.) and wanting to finally collect them into a cohesive album.
After listening to Wolvserpent’s fairly unassuming Perigaea Antahkarana I never bothered to check out Wolvhammer because I got the two bands confused. It’s a damn shame I did, because Wolvhammer have a lot more going for them than Wolvserpent!. Wolvhammer’s third full-length album Clawing into Black Sun was released back in 2014 by Profound Lore after being teased with the Wolvhammer /Krieg split 7” just a month before.
Supersilent's "12" is something of a throwback to the days of early Tangerine Dream, in which ambient music still felt dangerous, fresh and alien. It's not unlike the industrial precursor LP "Biomechanoid" by Joël Van Droogenbroeck, sketching an unwelcoming dim landscape with the unruly neon soundshapes emanated from analog synthesizers.
Pianist Riko Goto and his trio play gentle, nostalgic and patient lounge jazz. Delicately glass-like, fragile piano-tones are the most prominent element, backed by tastefully brushed drums and stand-up bass.
This cdr comes in the standard Altar Of Waste packaging: a dvd case and a smart, professional looking inlay. Part of the black metal-esque design, involves an inside cover that’s a tad hard to read - either that or my eyesight is failing dismally. “At The Throne Ov Kyne” has eight tracks, divided into two halves: “Mundus” and “Anima”; with the release dedicated by Crown Of Ashes to “Nature” and “Mother Kyne”. (Kyne might be a deity from the Elder Scrolls video game, its really very unclear.)
Song From The Forest is the soundtrack from Michael Obert’s fascinating documentary about the Bayaka Pygmies of the Central African rainforest, & their relationship with American Louis Sarno who has lived with the tribe for some 25 years.
800 Saints In A Day is a wonderfully brain frying mixture of psychedelic ‘n’ quirky singer song writer fare, out-there & surreal beats capes, and weird 'n' melting jam-outs which dip in all manner of musical fare - all this creates the very real feeling that anything can & will happen.
Imber, Wiltshire is mix of brooding & ominous dronescaping, & taut electro-acoustic's. The release takes its title, and theme from the abounded British town of the same name, which was to evacuated back in 1943, when the UK government decided to use Imber for army training- in the end the site was never used for training, though it's residents never returned.