Loading
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.
“The Shining:Tarriance” finds this highly prolific & often creative Minneapolis based noise/ambient artist giving his drone reinterpretation/ remould of tracks from the unused soundtrack work that Wendy Carlos did for Stanley Kubricks horror moive classic The Shining.
Italian doomy noisers OvO are back on Supernatural Cat with their follow up to 2011's Cor Cordium. Trying to put OvO into one genre is difficult, so take "doomy noisers" as descriptive instead of calling them doom or noise. Both are apt descriptions, though, and it's more than evident on their newest, Abisso. The two piece continue to slay with their drums and guitar, but have also added samples, drum machines, and synthesizers to the mix. These added instruments help to thicken the sound and make Abisso a force to be reckoned with.
So here we have a split EP from the Maryland’s Full of Hell and Poland’s Calm the Fire. Some like to exclaim that the 7” format is dead...a waste of petroleum products. However, I’ve always found the format to be the most perfect delivery system for hc/punk in all it’s guises and permutations. It’s a great format to introduce listeners to new bands who are likely purchasing the record based on a single artist. Such is the case of this split on Holy Roar Records. You had me at Full of Hell, but now I’m curious about Calm the Fire.
Catastrophe Point #9 & # 10 is the most recent release from Lethe(aka Japanese sound artists, subtle improviser and uneasy mood-setter Kuwayama Kiyoharu). And the two CD set offers up three most satisfying journeys into building based sound-making, which moves from: metal on metal texturing, onto moody & creepy drone making, through to more layered composition. But unlike some of Kiyoharu other work, this release doesn’t feature any minimalist piano elements, as its purely a building based sound composition.
Heres a duo album from a pair of very recognisable names, although its possibly the first time I’ve heard them both proper. Both Stetson and Gustafsson are associated with interesting saxophone work and they don’t disappoint on “Stones”: four duets amounting to over half an hour of spiralling notes and gruff bellows. I’ve always been drawn to the “invasive” intensity of solo recordings, but I’ll admit that duos hold a special place in my heart; they allow for some of the “hardboiled” aspects of solos, whilst also presenting the possibilities of split-second co-operation and disintegration. “Stones” is a very listenable example of this “telepathy” at work.
Experimental guitarist, improvisor and ambient musician Mike Fazio is someone I've given numerous positive reviews to in the past; across his various projects and alises (A Guide for Reason, orchestramaxfieldparrish, Aera) there is a remarkable degree of consistency and quality. The glassy, undulating drones found on most of his albums possess tastefully emotive melodic hints, and a pleasant hollow transparency. "Interiors", his latest release, is roughly 40 minutes of sparse atmospheres, organized into 3 longform pieces, all over 10 minutes in length.
Max Eilbacher is part of Baltimore's Needle Gun, and has performed with Matmos and the excellently named Horse Lords. Solo, Max has only released Mescalin Headache on cassette in 2011. Red Anxiety tracers from Spectrum Spools is his vinyl debut, and a proper testament to the experimental craft to which Max plies his trade.
Crucial Blast presents You Are Transparent by Texas-based blackened drone/dark ambient project, Husere Grav. For the uninitiated, Husere Grav is the moniker of one Todd Watson, former member of the black metal duo Homunculus. This makes sense because the overall mood is really bleak and while the album doesn’t necessarily have any definable black metal attributes soundwise, the influence nevertheless seems to permeate the mood of the pieces presented.