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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.
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.