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This split release brings together two US underground acts that deal in darkly swirling & occult tinged ritual ambience, which is edged with (mostly) subtle blacked noise elements. The release comes in three different versions- a CDR & digital download (on Occult Supremacy Productions), and a C50 tape( on Worthless Recordings)- both the CDR & tape versions each come in a edition of 50 copies, and I’m reviewing the digital version of the release.
This is a nicely, diy packaged release; combining a stumptown cardboard wallet with collages and transparent sheets of text. The cdr contains eighteen tracks, forming a large collage just over an hour long. One of the transparent sheets has a long introductory text, which concerns itself with sleep, memory and “psychoacoustic techniques as a form of data delivery”; and indeed, there is a dream-like atmosphere to the recordings.
Luie Luie is a buoyant, exuberant yet slightly wonky & bizarre one-man-band lounge act from the 1970’s. Touchy was he one & only full length album from 1974(though apparently he’s released a few 45’s), and truly this is a release that has to be heard to believed!.
This 3inc CDR finds Hungarian sound artist Ákos Garai creating a rather enthralling & moodily atmospheric track built around manipulated river/water recordings, & haunting electro texturing.
Normally, extreme metal and subtlety don't go hand in hand (save for some glorious acts like Gorguts), and Kansas City's Torn the Fuck Apart is no exception. If the name didn't tip you off, these guys are a 13 year old's dream. Well, a 13 year old that hasn't heard any other death metal before, that is. TTFA's follow up to 2012's The Dissection of Christ has the quartet moving from cliche'd Christianity hating lyrics/titles to cliche'd gore/murder/cannibalism lyrics/titles. Well, at least the band name is better than Deathchain.
Bored Bear Recordings presents Elegant Domesticity, a CD-R release by Dublin-based noise act Where is This. The moniker of Mark Ward, WIT performs a caustic blend of harsh noise flirting with HNW. A few months back I had my first brush with WIT, reviewing Ward’s split with Sleep of Ages. I enjoyed the split thoroughly, so I was thrilled to go another round with Mr. Ward.
As an American, my education with regards to WWII’s eastern front has always been lacking, no doubt stemming from the fact that America’s involvement in the eastern front is negligible at best. It’s a shame, really, because Russia’s war with Germany is way, way more interesting. From the massive tank battles on the plains of Kursk to the bloody battle for Stalingrad, the eastern front was an awe inspiring theater, ultimately ending with over eleven million dead. Given that war, death, and destruction are favored themes of metal, the eastern front seems like a goldmine for metal band. Strangely enough, I can’t bring to mind a single band that has covered it extensively. Well, thankfully we have the UK’s Eastern Front to fill that gap for us.
Pyre offers up three slices of dense, suffocating and extremely heavy Ambient Walled Noise from this Kansas City based project. I’ve enjoy most of what this project has put out since it started in early 2013, but I must say this CDR is some of the best work I’ve heard the project release thus far.
Here’s an intriguing release: the album notes inform us that Rothenberg has made every attempt to “play along” with insect song - playing along live in the field, playing along with recordings (raw or processed) and creating his own insect sounds artificially. He interacts using “bass clarinet, clarinet, seljefoyte and soprano saxophone”, aided and abetted by a few other hands on other instruments. The cd arrives in a playfully packaged digipak, with album notes and text for each individual track.
Lubomyr Melnyk is a Ukranian pianist that plays a minimalist, ambient style he calls "continuous piano music", which roughly involves playing the same minor chord repeatedly, in different voices and inversions, and letting it ring for roughly one second before playing it again. It sounds exactly like one might imagine the lonely, endlessly meandering soliloquy of a hermit who has been locked in a tower or dungeon for countless years would sound. The album has 3 tracks, all of which bleed into each other and are roughly 20 minutes in length.
This Japanese walled noise project has had one of the more erratic release schedules of the normally super prolific HNW scene. The project has been releasing work since 2007/2008, but only putting out a hand-full of releases on various labels, and pretty much everything they've put out has been of a very high standard. And the same goes for Sad Premonition, which is sadly to be the last release from Female Harakiri.
Pastuhamovci is a Russian based static noise/HNW project, and AZ is a CDR release that offers up eight tracks worth of fairly varied wall-craft. The project seemingly started in 2013, and has put out around seven releases that take in digital albums, split & CDRs
Experimental musician Christian Vialard teamed up with musician/composer Fred Bigot for his latest project, Neukalm. This collaboration is brought to us in a 2xLP edition from Grautag. While abstract and experimental, Neukalm is grounded with rhythm, soft synth lines, and the comforting coldness of electronic instruments.
Iris Light presents Substructural Penetration, a digital reissue (originally released as a 2xCD in 1997) from legendary Japanese noise artist Aube. This particular collection contains rare and out-of-print recordings spanning the years 1991-1995. Aube, the moniker of Nakajima Akifumi, sadly passed away last year, but not without leaving behind a sizeable discography. Unique to the Aube experience was his insistence on sticking to a single sound source per recording. The tracks that make up this collection are culled from the early part of Aube’s career, which is much more abrasive than some his later recordings. Truth be told, of all the Japanese masters of noise, Aube is the artist I’m least familiar with. In particular, I’m a little more familiar with his later works, so it is with much interest that I delve into these earlier recordings.
Provocator is Hellscream’s (vocalist and front man of Slovenian black metal band Bleeding Fist) side project. A year after the release of his first EP as Provocator, Hellscream comes back to present us with the band’s first full-length, Antikristus.
Composer and improviser Jeremiah Cymerman's "Sky Burial" is a state of prolonged dissonance, blatantly ugly and atonal free jazz improvisation with generous amounts of electronic reverb and panning to conjure a three dimensional, primordial landscape. With the eschewing of melody and structure, an animalistic feeling reigns.
The first two installments of Steven Stapleton's collaboration with Graham Bowers left me rather cold. Both Parade and its predecessor Rupture seemed hastily composed, lacking coherence and relying on an irritating overuse of synthesized or otherwise artificial sounding instrumentation. Stapleton's characteristic use of space and tension has over the last few years appeared less and less at the heart of Nurse With Wound's work. Whether this is down to the influence of his collaborators or whether the doyen of audio Dada is just losing his touch is not clear. The result has been to render NWW's output rather indistinct, particularly so considering the never ending conveyor belt of re-issues, alternative versions, live performances and outtake compilations. So perhaps it's with some degree of surprise that I can report that Excitotoxicity is a really good record.
“I Don’t Care” offers up a thick, suffocating, constricting & truly impenetrable slice of HNW from this mysterious US walled noise project. The release comes in the form of a CDR on cult Australian harsh noise label Smell The Stench, and features a single twenty three minute track.
This smartly packaged tape comes in a jewel case, with a simply designed inlay - essentially four strong images, with no apparent link between them. They might correspond to the four improvisations contained in the cassette, but there’s no indication that they do. (Though the internet tells me that a tetramorphe is “a symbolic arrangement of four differing elements, or the combination of four disparate elements in one unit”, which would certainly suggest the images correlate to tracks…) Either way, “Tetramorphe” adds up to nearly an hour of dark improvisations by a duo referred to as “F. & J.”.
Well respected but horribly underheard noise artist Pain Jerk (Kohei Gomi) has his first release on Turgid Animal Records with Pachinko Blast Anarchy. He's not alone on this release, and is joined by Anla Courtis (whose appearance is his first on Turgid Animal as well). With two different styles, how will a harsh Japanese master work with an Argentinian guitar wizard?
The rather strangley monikered Eela Craig were a eight piece Austrian progressive rock band, who existed between 1971 & 1988. The projects sound was a fairly varied, shifting & synth/organ heavy mixture of prog, symphonic Rock, fusion, and dips into all out funk. One Niter is the bands second album from 1976-this is a 2010 reissue of the album, that has just been recently repressed on Esoteric Recordings (the prog/ 70-80’s electronica sub-label of Cherry Red Records).
“As the ancient Norse used their natural world and surroundings to create myths, Ifing use these same ideas to convey Viking anthems of creation, the end, life and death, the afterlife, and the dichotomy of opposing forces on our world and beyond.”
On and All, Together, for Home released by Season of Mist in May 2014, is a collection of various artists assembled together by Drudkh member Roman Sayenko. 17 songs are here, graciously supplied by an international roster of metal artists. Don’t let that fact throw you, each band represents a different region of Europe (Ireland, France, Netherlands, Portugal, England, Ukraine, Finland and Norway) and more to the point, represent their roots in traditional songs and folklore.
It’s often interesting to revisit music, art, or film that impressed one as a child/ young adult, and see how it effects you now. Take for example Poltergeist- the 1982 mainstream supernatural/ light horror movie that brought together famous Hollywood director/writer Steven Spielberg & more cult director Tobe Hooper, to tell the story of an ‘ordinary’ American family been harassed by spirits from the beyond. As a pre-teen/ early teen, I was both scared & impressed by this movie, and it’s fair safe to say it had a really impact on me….now fast forward to a year or so back, and I re-watched the movie again after not seeing it for many years, and put frankly I didn’t enjoy it at-all, I found it a bland, polished, & un-scary 1980’s Hollywood movie….added to this I felt it had a over produced, clichéd, fairly safe sounding & mostly bland orchestrated soundtrack by veteran film score composer Jerry Goldsmith, and this brings us to the item in hand now…