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I first heard of Vardan back in 2010 because of their split with Australia’s Striborg. It was a decent release but nothing special, so I was curious to see how Vardan had changed in the intervening four years. I like to get a little background on bands before I dig into their releases and the first thing I noticed about Vardan was that he had released four full-lengths in less than a year’s time. Maybe it’s unfair to judge a band based on something like that, but I do wonder about the quality of a band’s material when it’s pushed out so quickly. Wouldn’t it just be better to take a bit more time and fully develop ideas?
Inquisition really is one of those bands you either love or hate. Very few people feel apathetic about their music largely due to the, well, “unique” vocals that come attached. Yes, I’ll admit that I was one of the sad, sad people who actually disliked Inquisition the first time I heard them. “Why is the vocalist ruining this otherwise fantastic black metal with his Popeye impression?” I wondered when I first listened to Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm back in 2011. After a number of listens though, I found myself enjoying Ominous Doctrines more and more, and it even ended up on my best of 2011 list. With the release of Obscure Verses for the Multiverse I was interested if they’d managed to maintain the high quality of their previous album, and for the most part they have, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
The relationship between Sunn O))) and Ulver doesn’t feel like a new one, even though ‘Terrestrials’ is their first explicitly collaborative release.
Gasp is the new horror movie themed HNW project from Frenchman Julien Skrobek( Ghost, The Sandman Wears A Mask, Ruine, Butch Bag). And “In Hiding” is the projects first release- the CDR is themed around sleazy, bloody & disturbing 1980’s US slasher Maniac, which followed the exploits of fictional New York serial killer Frank Zito.
Here’s a cassette from the dependable Andreas Brandal, which, though leaning towards the lighter, less noisy side of things, is infused throughout with eerie dread. The cover has a hand-drawn tangle of isometric cubes, in three distinct, bold colours and thats what Brandal creates for us: bold little sound-works and drones, which reveal a multitude of tangles. The tape contains eight tracks, which drift and throb by for around forty minutes.
This C20 split offers up four slices of atmospheric & fairly creatively layered walled noise from this Los Angeles based project. Each side of tape takes in two tracks, and each track takes up around half a side of time- so as HNW goes these four tracks are fairly brief submersion in walled form.
From late September 2013, this CDR offers up a forty minute slice of unrelenting & brutalizing walled noise from this Japanese HNW project. Female Harakiri is one of the more elusive & erratic HNW projects- the project started in 2007/2008, but has only released around nine releases. This is quite small number of releases compared with the normally highly prolific HNW scene, where this likes of Dead Body Collection & Vomir have put out around a 100 plus releases- this is also meant to be the projects penultimate release.
“Cradle Of Blades“ is the second release from Frenchman Julien Strobe new label Ink Runs Recordings. Between 2010/ 2012 Skrobek was behind a strew of creative & often progressive HNW releases on his label Slow Death Records, where he was connected to projects such as Ghost, The Sand Man Wears A Mask, and Bones.
This C60 cassette release offers up two sides worth of searing, brutal & horror fed walled noise themed around 1980’s slasher The Burning. This release comes from the fairly prolific & scene popular La Crosse, Wisconsin based HNW project Burial Ground
French "non-music" jam band Pas (or Pas Musique, as they labeled for this release) have returned this year with another full length of their murky sound sketches, "Abandoned Bird Egg". Sounding something like a noodly, playful garage band derivation of Zoviet France (the band thanks Robin Storey in the liner notes) and Throbbing Gristle, they possess little of the mystique of either band, but do deliver scattered moments of spontaneous amplifier grit and textural curiosity.
Death Metal comes in many forms, from super simple and brutal to very complex.and progressive. There's something for everybody (well, not really) and the trick is finding what gets your goose loose. If you're looking for simple, brutal, and fun death, Russia's Aborted Fetus is right up your alley. Private Judgement Day is Aborted Fetus' third LP (though, they all clock in at about 25 minutes, "long player" sounds like a misnomer) and second on Comatose Music.
The always reliable experimental label Editions Mego presents Journey from Anywhere by Compound Eye. For those unfamiliar, Compound Eye is the project of Drew McDowall of Coil fame and Tres Warren from Psychic Ills and Messages. This double LP in the second full length from this act, recorded in New York City during various sessions between 2010 to 2012. The press release said this album inspires travel. That’s all fine and dandy, but will we enjoy where Compound Eye wants to takes us?
This two disc reissue brings together two albums from Accept- the German heavy metal band, who are often quoted as influence on devolvement of speed/trash metal.On offer here we have the bands most commercial successful album 1983’s Balls To The Wall, and 1990’s Staying A Life(which features a live Japanese recording from 1985).
“Tokyo, the Monochrome City” is a dense, moody, often bleakly hazed yet mainly highly compelling & deeply atmospheric mix of repetitive electro fed mood scapes, bleak to busy city based field recordings, with the occasional dart of thin /locked down beatscapes.
Here’s yet another impeccably delivered dose of minimalist speaker abuse, on the Line label. The simple card slipcase gives the release an elegance and also a clean, “academic” feel; intensified further by the front cover - a close-up detail of a pencil “scribble”. (I use “scribble” as the most effective description - not as a value judgement on the artist’s work!) This scribble contains some of the ideas of “Recurrence”: layers, subtle differences in shade, clean singularity and entanglement, and lines (straight and bending). Chartier gives us two long tracks, one just over twenty minutes and the second just over fifty.
With 3 years since the "Carbon Based Anatomy" EP, and a full 6 years since the last full length "Traced In Air", Cynic has returned in 2014 with a new ethereal progressive jazz rock opus titled "Kindly Bent to Free Us". Stating that he prefers concise, dense concentrations of art, his releases are infrequent, short and compact, with even the full lengths "Traced In Air" and "Focus" being less than 40 minutes. This newest album is actually their longest ever at 41 minutes.
From 1988 - 1996, German trio Maeror Tri released some of the most complex, textured, almost living ambient around. The instruments and effects were thick, well placed, and evocative. When Helge Siehl left the group, Stephan Knappe and Martin Git continued to make their mark on the experimental and ambient worlds with Troum. Syzygie is a collection of rare/deleted tracks recorded between 1999-2002. Troum has a new studio album due out on Cold Spring to be released in 2014.
This rather lengthily titled release offers up a searing & swampy mix of sludge bound black metal crawl, waves of guttural vocals, galloping yet mix buried drums, blacked noise trails, and a rather fucked-up yet foreboding vibe.
Now entering its mid-teens, Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra has once again reemerged from hibernation in Quebec to remind us of the importance of preparing a fairer world for our children. 'Fuck Off...', their seventh full-length release, is perhaps their most punk in both stance and sound, despite previous attempts to emphasise anarchic leanings, especially with their overtly titled third album "This is our Punk Rock".
“Cellule Africaine” presents the listener with a single thirty minute slice of raw ‘n’ lo-fi analogue HNW. This release is the second release from twenty four year old Pierre N, and his label African Audio Documents.
This cd comes in the unusual form of a digipak in a slipcase; but despite all this potential space, it really carries only the barest of details. The album contains ten tracks, composed by de Raymondi using clarinet improvisations by Oguz Buyukberber as source material. These improvisations were “recorded in a 10 seconds reverberation room” and whilst this might suggest an album of hearty drone to you, de Raymondi comes up with something quite different.
Zoviet France is one of the oldest groups practicing a form of esoteric ambience that gets by on its ambiguity and mysteriousness, a form of music which could as easily be a college student's bedroom experiment as a field recording of a cult ritual. Modern genre classifications such as 'ritual ambient' owe nearly everything to Zoviet France.
This is a three way split CDR that offers up three twenty minute slices of quite active walled noise. The release brings together three fairly new & unknown HNW projects- so it works a great taster for new acts work.
This split CDR releases brings together two pitch blackly atmospheric & blood cuddling extreme projects from the American psycho-ambient/ blacked noise underground. The release features three tracks from each project, and each projects tracks are equally harrowing & sonically disturbing as each others.