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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.
Suddenly Seymour is one of the more recent project of respected & innovative UK walled noise artists James Killick(of projects Love Katy, Small Hours, Pooh, Carrie, and runner of both Sweet Solitude & Vagary Records labels). This new project takes it’s name & theme from cult 80’s horror musical movie The Little shop Of Horrors.
Right on cue Messrs Abrahams, Buck and Swanton are back with their follow up to 2011’s startling Mindset. And if you found that album a surprisingly dense and noisy affair you will be relieved to hear that Open returns to the more spacious, slowly developing, and more...well..open type of music we’re used to from them.
Here’s another historical re-issue which some people have got very excited about. Basically, this is the complete set of Robert Wyatt's solo recordings made in the US in late 1968; it would more than likely have been the basis for Wyatt’s first solo album, had Soft Machine (with whom Wyatt sang and drummed) not reformed soon after. It was recorded after a tour with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, at their rented house in California; and, to add further interest, features the great man himself, playing bass on one of the tracks.
Free jazz multi instrumentalist Giuseppi Logan's otherworldly debut "More" originally came out in 1965, and has now been remastered from the original master tapes and reissued by ESP Disk for its 50th anniversary. The album has 4 lengthy tracks, the first two from a concert on May 1st at Town Hall in 1965, and the second two at a studio slightly later in the month.
I first became aware of this Northern California based psychedelic/ space rock project last year when they put out the excellent “Photos of Photos”- that release really seemed to offer-up a very rewarding(if not wholly original) selection of hypnotic tripped-out/ spaced- out rock grooves. This new LP & CD release(I’m reviewing the CD version), sees the band offering up another selection of fairly similar sonic fare to their last release, but I’m afraid to say this release sadly rather lacked the impact or entrancement of “Photos Of Photo”.
“Summertime Tragedia” is the third & most sonically varied release from this Italian project- which now sits somewhere between morose & doomed piano playing, grim lo-fi synth texturing, and suicidal 'n' pained ambience that’s all top off with seriously pained & disturbing vocal shrieks, cries & bays.
“Harrodian Event #1” charts the rather loose & jam like sonic meeting between a group of prog musicians in the early 1970’s. The release mixers together elements of jazz/rock fusion, & loose experimental jamming that mixers together avant classical & mainly un-structured improv. This CD release is on Cherry Reds prog/jazz-rock, ect label Esoteric Recordings, and it's the first ever release of this session.
Russian experimental label Monochrome Vision presents Hierophany | Èåðîôàíèÿ by Belgium sound artist Yannick Frank. Released in the waning days of 2012, Heriography offers listeners 3 continuous suites of dark, ambient drone inspired by Russian orthodox culture.