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“Doobie Wonderland” finds this highly prolific Japanese space rock/ psychedelic band attempting to mix funk, disco & a distinctive 70’s edgy into their often wondering & spaced-out sound.
Lee Bartow is better known as Leech, the man behind Navicon Torture Technologies and Theologian. Both are well known and respected projects in the noise community. NTT, as I'm sure you already know, plays an excellent blend of power electronics and death industrial. Lee's Theologian takes a similar approach, but tends toward a more beat oriented sound. The addition of softer melodies on top of the dark industrial add to the genre bending fun and help to separate Theologian from the pack.
UK based label Cold Spring presents Evolving by Wicked King Wicker. The New York based duo of Jim Gibson and Logan Butler have been melding doom and noise since the mid/late 2000’s and Evolving represents their 7th studio album.
Glasgow based artist Richard Youngs has had a steady stream of output since the early 90's playing with a diverse array of groups and releasing many solo records. He is a multi-instrumentalist and has worked in as many styles as instruments he plays, even releasing an a cappella record. Regions of the Old School is Youngs' third release with the London based label MIE.
“Persecution” offers up a highly compelling seventy six minute track that moves from grey moroseness, through to subtly shifting brutal intensity.
Here we have a new(ish) two CDR release from this highly prolific & often brutal Serbian based HNW project. The set conists of four taut 'n' tense slices of ambient walled noise, which are all themed around an intracellular bacteria called Mycobacterium Leprae that infects the nerves, skin and mucosal cells with leprosy
Here’s a very limited tape release on Monoise Tape Project - a sub-label of the esteemed Muzikaal Kabaal label. Its limited to only ten copies, which make me feel bad for having a review copy! It is, of course, sold out at source; so at least I can give you an idea of its contents… It comes in a jewel case with simple, elegant, black and white artwork; with Natalie Portman’s possessed eyes staring out at the listener. Two long tracks, one on each side and each a buffeting piece of Harsh Noise Wall creation.
Iasos provides sublime celestial sound, drifting and peaceful as the clouds, which was some of the original soundscape music in the 70's and early 80's. "Angelic" is a good adjective, however contrived it may sound in today's new age saturated culture. His sounds are transparent and crystalline, beautifully balanced in a vibrant prismatic spectrum. This new release "Celestial Soul Portrait" is a compilation of notable previously released tracks from his most known albums (a 'best of'), in some cases presented in shortened (but still relatively lengthy) form.
Chicago trio Bones returns with Sons of Sleaze, their follow up to 2011's self-titled debut. The band name should be a clue as to what you're getting: simple, skeletal metal. The awesomely gruesome and simple cover by Putrid adds some visual atmosphere to this bare bones (ha!) metal attack. To wrap it up, just look to the members' names: Jon Necromancer, Joe Warlord, and Carcass Chris. They're not as great as the guys from Zuckuss, but they're fun nonetheless.
In the Uk during the late 80’s to the early 1990’s a musical genre grew,developed,then briefly broke into the mainstream- and that genre was Acid Jazz. The form mixed together elements of jazz, funk and hip hop, particularly looped beats. To create an often 60’s & 70’s themed sound which was groovy, buoyant & sometimes playful. One of the most recognized & respected projects to appear from the Acid Jazz genre was London based four piece Corduroy, and this four disc box set brings together most of the bands released albums, along with a host of unreleased bonus tracks.
Seven was originally composed as music for a dance performance revolving around the concept of the seven cardinal sins, in this new CD release of the work it has been re-written and re-recorded for contexts outside of the theatre. The composer, Stavros Gasparatos from Athens Greece creates music mainly for film, dance and theatre works as well as solo recordings, his work has been performed in many countries around the world and a live premier of this album will take place on December 22nd at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens.
H8-Track Stereo presents the latest offering from Rochester, NY based power electronics artist Waves Crashing Piano Chords. Entitled It Turns Me On Because it Shouldn't, this new EP offers up 3 slabs of minimalistic power electronics, in ultra limited 8 track or 12” laser disc formats, which I can certainly assume are already long gone.
“People For the Ethical Treatment of Abominations" finds this Minneapolis based drone/dark noise/HNW label offering up another album that defies been put under one musical genre label. The CDR’s single track mixers together elements of morphed spoken word, unsettling & dark drone matter, disorientation & psychedelic subtle noise elements, bleed-out religious music, layers of bayed/ reversed demonic voices, and all manner of dark sonic flotsam and jetsam
“Three Pieces For Lindsay” is the latest in a series female pop star themed releases from this highly prolific Minneapolis based noise & drone artists. This CDR release offers up three tracks that dip into and mix together drone, HNW, ambience- with the first two tracks been more golden & expansive, and the last more violent & brutal.
Drone, drone and drone: eight tracks of it, to be fairly precise. This cd, packaged very elegantly in a black and white digipak, offers nearly an hour of drifting tones; designed to soundtrack a theatre work adapted from Flaubert’s short story “Un Coeur Simple”. Mathieu’s set-up is quite small - autoharp/zither, portable record player, “viole de gambe tenor”, ARP 2600 and laptop; and this creates a very focussed set of recordings which start as they mean to continue.
“Troglodyte" is the first new release from this respected French HNW project in sometime, and fitting the releases title there are two half-an-hour tracks on offer that create dense & enclosing cave like HNW atmospherics.
The charmingly named Swallowing Bile is a Harsh Noise/Harsh Noise Wall/Power Electronics project from rural Upstate New York. Behind the project is one Ethan Ebeling, also of Monolith Of Shit & Pussy Bitch(which are both collaborative projects with dense & brutalizing US HNW project Wet Dream Asphyxiation), and it started at some point in 2012, and so far has released 13 releases, which take in spilt CDR releases & stand alone tapes.
"F.O.A.D" finds this German HNW act offering up half- an-hours worth of dense yet subtle layer shifting grey ‘n’ pained walled noise. The release comes in the form of a CDR release that appeared in February 2013 & was ltd to just 20 copies.
This split CDR features two slices of intense & morbidly themed walled noise, and it brings together two projects-one USA project & one Italian project, with each project offering up a twenty minutes of dense & pummelling HNW attack.
Venerated masters of extreme political music Bastard Noise and Brutal Truth have come together to create what for me is a dream release, the split "Axiom of Post Inhumanity". They've chosen to release two separate versions of the album on CD and vinyl, each containing entirely exclusive tracks. For the purposes of this review, I will be discussing the tracks found in both editions, which in total slightly exceed 90 minutes of music. Being that Bastard Noise (formerly Man in the Bastard) has roots both in harsh noise and power violence, while Brutal Truth plays a more technical death metal informed form of grind, I was curious to see where this album would fall, stylistically.
Zombi synth wizard Steve Moore is back with his second LP since last year's Light Echoes. His debut on Spectrum Spools comes in a gatefold 2xLP with artwork by Robert Beatty (Three Legged Race). Light Echoes was well reviewed on M[M] in February by a handsome and very trustworthy reviewer, so I was looking forward to his latest synthy slab. While a solid album, Pangaea Ultima, like the formation of the fantastically proposed future super-continent, needed a bit more time.
Gruenrekorder presents Terra Subfónica by Australian composer and sound artist Daniel Blinkhorn. As stated in the liner notes, his work lies at the “nexus of radiophonic art, environmental sound and electroacoustic music.” That’s a fairly accurate description of the sounds at hand on this disc.
People of the North formed in 2003, and it's an off shoot of the Brooklyn group Oneida. Their latest album "Sub Contra" was recorded at the Ocropolis in Brooklyn. I'm not familiar with Oneida or the past work of People of the North, but I can say that this new album is a total dud.
'Two By Four' is a re-issue of London-based Piano Interrupted's debut album from last year. It was originally self-released to sell at the band's live performances, in which laptop musician Franz Kirmann has been 'interrupting' soundtrack composer and pianist Tom Hodge since 2009. However, the album's title 'Two By Four' relates to the duo's more recent expansion into a quartet that now features Greg Hall on cello and Eric Young on percussion.