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“kÖök” brings together Stian Larsen & Jørn Erik Ahlsen- two Oslo based improviser's who play a mixture of guitar & electronics. The album finds the pair offering up a active & sometimes quite dense mixture improvising that mangers to stay both edgy & moody.
Here’s something you don’t see too often: a DVD release. Rather than being a soundtrack or an extended music video, Mark Fell gives us interacting sounds and images - though I assume that the audio is manipulating the visual. The disc, presented in a lush DVD digi-pack, contains three pieces; varying dramatically in length. To some extent, describing this work is all wasted breath really; like Fell’s “Multistability” (Raster Noton), this is something that really needs to be experienced first hand. All I can do is provide a sense of what Fell does, so I’ll just briefly describe each track in the broadest terms.
En are a duo of Maxwell August Croy and James Devane from San Francisco and Already Gone is their second album in three years. Their first, The Absent Coast, was released in 2010 on Root Strata, the label Croy runs with the polymathic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Although both albums help to establish the pair's proficiency at coaxing drones out of a pool of acoustic instrumentation, Already Gone is a little more eventful and playful than the frozen textures and suspended atmospheres of their debut.
Minneapolis based Cory Strand is one of the more interesting, creative & sonically varied artists to appear in the HNW/Drone scene in the last year or so. He’s connected to various projects such as Lethe where he releases a mixture of hopeless drone, HNW, & death ambience, he also runs the excellent Altar Of Waste Record label too. Under his own name he release reinterpretations/ often radical manipulations of some of his favourite movie soundtracks, and this CDR he takes on the classic & iconic Wendy Carlos soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s The Shining.
“The Majesty of the Lidless Eye" is the second dose of black metal inspired noise drone, dark ambience & fantasy sound tracking from this mysterious US project. The release is apparently themed around H.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, with the front cover featuring a picture of one of books/films dark characters- A Nazgûl or Dark Rider in black robes holding a sword in woodland.
“Eins bis Sechzehn” (English translation “One to Sixteen Doors”) is a audio/ visual collaboration between German sound artist Ephraim Wegner & German photographer Julia Weinmann. The release is themed around adorned hotels, with Wegner offering up a series of manipulated field recordings from various sites, and Weinmann supplying a collection of photographs from each site.
As with the other entries in the Latitudes series, Yntra showcases a band operating within the outer limits of heavy guitar music that has descended upon the Southern Records studio to perform and produce a limited edition record. Meant to be a snapshot of whatever the band is doing at the time, these records also tend to showcase great playing from artists who are renowned for their live capabilities.
Fontanelle's latest "Vitamin F" is an LP of Bitches Brew-esque dissonant space jazz fusion, with a more melodic and structured approach than Miles utilized, evidenced by repetitious harmonized legato lines that are almost substantial enough to be called 'head' melodies. Shuffling jam rock rhythms serve as a reference point for honks, skronks and noodlings from the trumpet, saxophone and electric piano.
Besides finding it a great monicker, I had the pleasure to listen to some Reptilian Sexual Predator excerpts on Bandcamp before, but this "Hymns: The Birth Years" is the first tangible release I own by this American power electronics act.
This CDR is a reissue of a long out of print 2005 release from this textured noise/ HNW project, which is one of the more known projects of multi project linked Texas noise legend Richard Ramirez.
This black CDR in black cover is the first release from this rather mysterious & information-less HNW project. Seemingly the project started in October 2012, when this disc was released, and really that’s all that can be found out about the project….there’s no indication on the net who the project is made up of, or what country they originate from.
"Event Horizon” is a split CDR that brings together two tracks of brutal HNW, with one track of slightly calmer walled noise. The two projects involved with the split are Disgorged Faeces from Belarus, and Segment Aura from Russia.
A pro-pressed cd with pro-printed inlays, on Mind Flare Media. The artwork is notably garish, with echoes of album artwork from the Boredoms. I’ve seen Kylie Minoise play a couple of times, with each being a wall of skree, electronic squealing and screamed vocals.
Whether you consider them a necessary evil that seldom brings anything of value to the artistic table or a quick, cheap and easy way to renew your repertoire in any given genre of music, compilation records tend to hit the shelves with alarming regularity these days and separating the wheat from the chaff in what has almost become a niche market in its own mercantile right can sometimes prove tricky.
Henry Vega, the New York born electroacoustic composer currently residing in The Hague, deals in a convoluted concept with Wormsongs. Inspired by the 'social futurist' Max More, he takes a selection of texts extolling the utopian belief that technological advances will eventually make us all immortal and sets about creating a song cycle using just a single voice and a laptop.
It’s been near on six years since we last heard from this genre defying, moody & often dread filed project. Hwyl Nofio is a British project that’s centred around muilt- instrumentalist Steve Parry, whose previously worked with the likes of with Matt Johnson of The The and Colin Potter of Nurse with Wound.
"Hearse Sessions” is a c120 tape that offers up two hour long sides of dense, brutal yet entrancing walled noise from this Oregon based project. And as the title suggests both tracks with-in where created with just using a hearse ( a 1985 Buick funeral coach to be precise) as sound source, though of course both tracks really retain none of the field recordings originally origins, as WDA works them into huge walls of sound.
The third Ehnahre album, Old Earth, again pits the world not only against how they perceive traditional metal, but music in general. Ricardo Donoso (Semata Productions, Perispirit), John Carchia, and Ryan McGuire (both ex-Kayo Dot) continue to challenge listeners with their avant-garde metal revelry. In a scene where people love to classify and put genre tags all over everything, Ehnahre delights in the freedom of being impossible to pin down from one moment to the next.
Let’s put things in perspective: this new album by the inimitable Lee M. Bartow (of late Navicon Torture Technologies fame), his tenth at least under the Theologian moniker in only four years and the first for Texan label Handmade Birds, is one damn impressive slab of rhythmic electronica that should prove as fitting a remedy as any to cleanse your ears and bring your saccharine levels back into green after the mandatory end-of-year festivities and assorted merriments.
I remember releasing a very short track by Jute Gyte on a compilation ages ago, but after that I lost track of his work. I’ve heard good things about his noisy black metal output from quite a few friends, so I was very happy to have the chance to listen to this "Andreyev's Lazarus" CDr.
If you wondered what made the juddering behemoth of an engine sound that opened Frank Bretschneider's last album, Komet, before it was nimbly deconstructed into the kind of pointillist teutonic techno you'd expect from the Raster-Noton label co-founder, then that's the Subharchord synthesiser. It was developed in East Berlin at the start of the 1960s influenced by Oskar Sala's Mixturtrautonium that gave Hitchcock's birds their threatening and malevolent air by dealing in electronic tones whose timbre could be changed through subharmonics - blends of synthetic 'undertones' as opposed to naturally-occurring overtones. But, despite an enhanced interface that afforded greater opportunities for unnaturally manipulating sounds, only eight were made before the increasing pace of progress confined it to history's cabinet of musical curiosities.
“Shifting Walls Reveal The Four Guards” is the 4th release from this US HNW project that themes all of its releases around the classic 80’s Jim Henson family fantasy puppet/ live action movie The Labyrinth.
Uk’s James Killick often likes to take his many HNW projects down a quirky & often surprisingly bright/ fun route. With his Love Katy project he’s celebrated the works of US poster Katy Perry in HNW form, and with his other projects he's put out HNW tributes to the likes of : The Muppets( in particular Kermit the Frog & his cousin Robin), Pooh bear, Kenny G & Russ Meyer. This release from late summer 2012 sees him take on the classic British 1970’s stop animation kids TV show The Clangers.
Guitarist Suzuki Junzo creates intense, abstract and unstructured freeform kraut rock or noise rock that is essentially similar to groups like Acid Mothers Temple, sounding a bit like the "Feedback" movement of Grateful Dead's "Live/Dead" stretched to album length, discarding all the conventional rock elements except an aching blues tonality.