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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…
Since their inception in 1994, Blut Aus Nord has consistently created ground-breaking Black Metal, they seem to be always in a state of progressing musically, atmospherically and artistically- put simply the French band have become a touchstone for creative output. Likewise is P.H.O.B.O.S. (also from France) with a heavy sound leaning towards industrial/ambient/darkwave with doom influence. The project was formed in 2000, and inspired by artists such as Voivod and Godflesh. They started as a 4 piece, but currently are manned by Frédéric Sacri. Here the two share 3 songs each on the Triunity split.
Trances & Drones is a two CD set which brings together two classic early 1980’s slices of deep ambience from the US ambient legend Robert Rich. This 2013 edition of the release is the third time this joint classic release has been reissued, and it’s easy to see why as both Trances & Drones are truly engrossing & lose-your-self-in submersion in deep ‘n’ extremely heady ambience.
Sheolic is Deadwoods final part of the Deadwood trilogy, beginning with 8 19 in 2005, followed by Ramblack in 2008. Deadwood is the one man project that began in 2002 under the name Deadwood Murder. Swedish artists Daniel Jannson is the man behind the music, he is also a member of Culted, Keplers Odd, The Ritual Inclusion of Code and past member of Blodulv.
This cd from the esteemed Chris Watson is packaged with a wealth of text and images - and so it should be, since the project comes as part of research backed by the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University. Sometimes, I think this kind of funded work can be problematic; depending on what exactly the funders wish to see for their money… But, in this case, Watson has been allowed to work his magic; though I feel he remains somewhat restricted by the task at hand.
Originally released in 1980, Family Fodder's original "Monkey Banana Kitchen" LP is presented here with the 12" "Schizophrenia Party", and the two 7"s ("Film Music" and "The Big Dig"), on this 2014 Staubgold CD re-issue. Though I was previously unfamiliar with it, the album is something of a classic of funky early 80's experimental 'freak pop', with moments reminiscent of Talking Heads, The Birthday Party, Suicide, Gary Numan and others.
The oft cloudy murk of black metal allows for many different interpretations of a well established form. Some follow the more traditional, extreme metal bent while others try to expand the genre's boundaries in subtle, but effective, ways. Gravecode Nebula, a five (?) piece out of Salt Lake City, UT (interesting!) tweaks their heavy brand of black metal with a spacey chaos. Not drifting too far from the norm, the space and synth drones are kept in check and, for the most part, in the background. Sempiternal Void was originally released digitally in November of 2013, and received a lot of praise. With the CD/cassette release in March 2014 and a double LP forthcoming, it looks like there's no excuse to check out their debut LP.
From late 2012, this release finds this highly prolific & infamous Serbian HNW project offering up a slightly moodier & more melancholic tinged take on his normally brutally battering sound.
Funeral Fog Recordings presents Schizophrenic Genius, a new cassette featuring 2 short slabs of HNW by Jurko Haltu. Jurko hails from Malmö, Sweden and is also the Funeral Fog label runner. Well aware of the Swedes being fine purveyors of black metal,I’m curious to see how their wall noise stacks up.
This two way HNW split bringstogether a European & US based project-on the first side we have a track from Denver Colorado based Novasak, and on the flip side we have a track from French HNW legend Vomir.