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Oblive are one of the most consistent & rewarding acts to appear from the US HNW scene in the last three to four years. This new three track CDR release from this Missouri based project is it’s first full length in a few years, and I’m happy to report it’s up there with the projects normally high & brutal standards.
This 3inch CDR brings together two cult movie themed slices of harsh noise & walled noise. We have New Rochelle, New York based Ballerina in Blood offering their sonic tribute to The Wickerman, and Florida's Vasectomy Party offering their sonic tribute to the first Lethal Weapon movie.
When my first, quick scan of the inlay noted the words “rock & roll” and a photo of some long-haired wastrels in black, I’ll admit I wondered what was in store for my ears. For some reason, my first thoughts conjured up trashy, debauched rock antics; but I was quite wrong - though Rat At Rat R are nothing if not trashy and debauched, but in a bleaker, darker sense than standard glam rock theatrics.
Missouri based Pumpkin Buzzard enjoy screwing with the listeners head with their crazed & often off-kilter genre mixing. Since the early 2000’s they have released albums at a prolific rate, and each new release has seen them darted-into, or mixing together all manner of musical genres. “Sweat Angle” sees them offering another bizarre if not wholly successful dart into the of world of experimental electronic improvisation.
This recent double CD reissue brings together two of Nurse With Wounds more rare releases from the late 1980’s. We have A Sucked Orange from 1989 which was originally released as a full length vinyl release, and Scrag! which originally appeared as C30 cassette release in 1987. Both releases here are comprised of fairly short slices of sonic surrealism & audio odd-ness, so this works as a nice introduction to the distinctive sound world of this long running experimental project that really defiles any genre classification.
From late 2011, this split vinyl 12 inch brings together a side a piece from Texas noise ‘n’ sleazy merchants Black Leather Jesus, and Richard Ramirez -BLJ originator/key player & noise legend.
Taking cue from some of the works authored by controversial Palestinian writer Edward Said, there’s an interesting study to be made on the use of orientalist elements in modern industrial music. Along with the late linguist, one could argue that, however well-meaning and respectful they might be, most of the bands working within the constraints of what is an essentially European phenomenon will always by definition perpetuate a purely Occidental, and as such largely biased, view of the Eastern world. It is therefore with no small interest, I wager, that the Columbia University professor would have given ‘Tribal Zone’, Vasilisk’s first long-play in more than a decade, an authorised listen.
Ethernet is an interesting choice of name for a musical project in the 2010s when the technology itself is on the verge of obsolescence. It features a built-in oxymoron: after all, the upper regions of space are thin and intangible, so how can one catch it in a net? Perhaps this is what Tim Gray is attempting to do here, and something about the slightly dissonant, warm tone of opener “Monarch” recalls the airy shoegaze ambience that launched artists like M83 and Ulrich Schnauss. The deep and enveloping sound is kept alive by a slight pulse, and as it continues it gains a soulfulness that even hearkens back to the early new age electronics of the Future Sound of London. The delicate but not quite memorable melody strolls up and down the keyboard haphazardly, lending itself to the perfect soundtrack for sunrise laziness.
“TransMongolian” offers up six unprocessed field recording portraits of a journey along Trans Mongolian railway,which runs four thousand five hundred miles between Russian & Japan.
“Hapax (legomenon)” finds this creative & long term German/ French electro acoustic noise project offering up three long pieces of edgy improv noise, which are built around manipulated & amplified everyday objects such as electric motors or applied mechanics. The release comes in the form of a pro pressed CD, in an edition of 500 copies.
Land is a group that creates sparse, emotionally desolate post rock, a loosely structured mass of dry, rattling timbres that includes many jazz and orchestral instruments such as the clarinet, saxophone, assorted strings and piano. As with the albums of past post rock greats such as Godspeed You, Black Emperor, their album "Night Within" is quite the collaborative effort, including the contributions of more than 10 musicians. Unlike the works of Godspeed, this album is on the shorter side, 35 minutes and 7 songs, 2-6 minutes in length.
Overhang Party is one of the most renowned bands from the fertile jungle of Japanese psychedelic, weird and noisy rock. It's only logic that a label which is extremely interested in underground music from the Far East like Important Records releases a box-set dedicated to them. Comprising of the whole studio output of Overhang Party plus a previously unreleased recording session and lots of bonus tracks, "Complete Studio Recordings" is an excellent chance to explore the full body of work of this legendary band.
When not playing fast as part of thrash metallers Harpoon the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Dean Costello is brooding alone as Wastelanders. Bleak by name and bleak by nature, he describes the project as having a focus on "things which are quite distressing", such as war and poverty, to encourage "positive change".
“Sunday” is the second release from this grim ‘n’ pained Italian project whose work is built around doomed piano runs & suicidal screams. Behind the project is Lorenzo Abbà who is most known for suicidal walled-noise project Nascitari, and running the Italian walled noise label Claustrophilia Records.
Clay is the HNW project of Cacak, Serbia based Djordje Miladinovic (also of drone/ HNW project Raven), and as far as I can gather “Reign Of Bombs” is his first release with this project. The release comes in the form of a CDR which features two twenty minute slices lo-fi ‘n’ brutal walled noise.
Tompkins Square has a consistent reputation for excellent archival releases, with their recent boxset “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End TIme Music, 1923-1936” setting the standard incredibly high. This album (I’m reviewing a digital copy) reissues an “impossibly rare” LP from the early 1960s, which is the sole entry in Lena Hughes’ discography. Described by Tompkins Square as an “amateur”, Hughes was born in Missouri, in 1904. She was a regular performer at fiddler conventions and folk festivals, on the banjo, fiddle and guitar; and had a wealth of rare knowledge regarding parlour pieces and their specialised tunings. The accompanying spiel from Tompkins Square divides her repertoire roughly in half: “finger-picked numbers adapted from fiddle tunes and recast parlor guitar pieces gleaned from popular sentimental songs, hymns, and 19th century airs”.
“Processing The Wall” is a C32 tape that offers up two different takes on the same slab of unmoving & crude walled noise. Side one presents the ‘wall’ in it’s typical brutal Vomir form;while side two offers up a less conventional mix of the track that adds in subtle & buried vocal & instrumental elements.
This self titled c45 tape offers up two twentyminute plus slices of dense ‘n’ brutal walled noise. The release & the project are themed around the 1981 slasher movie The Prowler.
Mat Sweet’s new record as Boduf Songs blends the intimacy of acoustic indie music with dark psychedelic rock flourishes, some mind-bending electronic effects and industrial drones, and a hint of doom metal underneath the surface that gives the entire project an overpowering aura of menace and melancholy.
To call Celer, the now one-man project of American sound and visual artist William Thomas Long, prolific would be an understatement of sorts. At the time of writing, the discography on his extremely professional-looking webpage (www.thesingularwe.org) contained no less than fifty-five label- and thirty-three self-released items. Considering the first of those came out a meagre eight years ago, we’re talking an average of almost one release a month. It’s simple, if sheer quantity had any intrinsic value in the realm of artistic expression, the 32-year old Mississippi native would be up there with the best.
“Cultural Subordination” takes the idea of remixing a pop song to it’s ultimate end. By blurring & deconstruction a track to the point where it bares little or no resemblance to it’s originaly form, and instead creates something new & darkly/ brutally fascinating. Cory Strand is Minneapolis based sound artist who has dipped his toe in all manner of sonic fare, from grey ambience, HNW, doom metal, brutal noise drone retakes on black metal, and beyond.
"Throne of Cacophony" mixes up necro blacked metal, crushing black doom, and bent dark ambience with seared blacked noise, suffocating dark noise drone, baying dark power electronics and truly hopeless & skull battering walled noise to create a gut retching & hopeless sonic cross breed.
Necronom IV is Cory Strand's( Lethe, Solo work, ect) dark ambient project that’s mainly themed around Ridley Scott's Alien & it’s expanded mythology. “Becoming” is the last of the projects Alien suite (there have been altogether four CDR releases), and it comes in the form of a double CDR release.
Richard Chartier, minimalist composer and Line label owner, has made a welcome change for his new moniker Pinkcourtesyphone, abandoning his usual exercises in precise and sterile tone generation for brooding ambient odes to solitude, created from voice samples and heavy use of reverb. To christen the name, he released two albums in 2012, this one, "Foley Folly Folio", as well as "Elegant & Detached", similar in its desolate wind tunnel drift. Never have I heard a work from Chartier with such easily discernable, intense emotions, or respect for sonic beauty as it is conventionally understood.