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This three disc CDR set is the next in the series of John Carpenter movie soundtrack reinterpretations by Minneapolis based HNW/ stark ambient artist Cory Strand. For his re-take on this classic & iconic horror soundtrack Strand has decided to go completely ambient highlighting the brooding dread of the first Halloween movie.
“Light The Fires!” is the 4th full length album from Chet Scott’s (of Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis and Glass throat records) metallic & folk/rock project Blood of the Black Owl. And it finds him offering up another earthy ‘n’ woodland spirit bound release that mixers in elements of 1970’s prog rock, country tinged folk rock & flute bound shamanistic tribal influences with more metallic fair.
"Ultrealith" is a very lengthy album of field recordings, featuring pleasing color-coded artwork featuring an orange and black winged insect contrasting with a peculiar arrangement of sewing buttons in primary colors. Artificial Memory Trace apparently have a vast back catalogue of releases, dating back to 1994, but I have never heard, nor heard of any of their recordings prior to now. Over the years, their productivity has, if anything, increased: this album is one of at least 8 releases they have put out in 2012.
Zone Tripper is an American harsh noise band, featuring members of other nicely named projects like Vasectomy Party or Rectal Hygienics.
“Hellraiser: A Tribute” is a c85 tribute to the first two Hellraiser films in HNW form. This collaborative release brings together La Crosse Wisconsin based Burial Ground- who often offers up a dense yet detailed take on the HNW sound. And Indianan based Crown Of Bone- who often go for a more blacked metal/ blacked noise tinged take on HNW.
This C60 split tape offers up two brutal & wall noise based celebrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm”. On side one we have a track from São Paulo, Brazil based Carrion Black Pit, and on side two a track from Italian based Nascitari.
Oranur III "The Third Report" originally appeared back in 1995, and has since been heralded as one of the key dark ambient albums. This reissue on the always dependable & quality bound Cold Spring records sees the album getting a slight re-worked & re-mixed, and also adds in a few new bonus tracks too.
Alex Zhang Hungtai (b. September 4, 1980, Taipei), known by his stage name Dirty Beaches, is a Taiwanese-born Canadian musician based in Montreal, Quebec who started off as a one-man band in 2005. His previous releases include music ranging from drone instrumentals to film scores, and mutated American music like blues, rockabilly, soul, R&B and hip hop, often changed to a point of unrecognizability.
Serbia has become quite a force in the international noise scene, producing such acts as Raven, Dead Body Collection, and Srdjan Eftimovski’s, harsh noise project Nundata. I became a convert of Nundata’s work after hearing his 2010 album Carousel, so I was quite excited to see this release appear in my review queue. Released on James Killick’s (Love Katy, Small Hours) now defunct Sweet Solitude label and advertised as HNW made with walnuts; I was even further intrigued. Walnuts are known as one of nature’s most potent sources of omega 3 fatty acids, but are they also nature’s most potent sound source for harsh noise?
Hair Police return for their first proper full-length since 2008’s “Certainty of Swarms”. The trio of Mike Connelly (aka Failing Lights), Robert Beatty (aka Three Legged Race) and Trevor Tremaine have been crafting punishing industrial noise for over a decade now. While many of their contemporaries have abandoned ship for dance club beats, Hair Police pride themselves on keeping things grimey.
This exquisitely packaged, pro-pressed cd comes in a book-like digipak; with laboured over artwork that reminds me very much of a certain artist - but I forget which one (!). The digipak is adorned with pictures that suggest a story to the release: some kind of friendship or relationship between a schoolgirl and an alien being; and whilst Twinsistermoon certainly deal in psychedelia; the sounds on the album aren’t of a sci-fi bent.
Frédéric Nogray is a French self-taught musician, composer and sound artist who has being producing work since the late 1990’s. BUITI BINAFIN (déambulation à la lisière du monde) is fifty five minute sound diary of his trip to the north coast of Honduras in May 2012.
It’s always difficult/sad when one of your favourite projects or bands announces their giving up making music or sound, but it’s even worse if said band or project just seems to stop putting out stuff, and your none the wiser if they’ve given up or not…and you’re just left hanging. Such a thing happen with Akercocke- the English progressive blacked/ death metal band. In 2007 they put out one of the best albums of their five album career “Antichrist”, which perfectly mixed together the bands brutal/atmospheric side with their more progressive/experimental side. But since then all there has been is rumours, and no real confirmation one way or another if the band is no more or not….and this is where Voices come in.
Jeff Gburek's "The Watermark" is an album of sparse, loosely structured ethereal 'neofolk' guitar playing, backed by an organic carpet of bioluminescent improvisatory ambient electronics. He has been around since 2005, but this is my first exposure to his work.
Deathchain. Deathchain. Deathchain. Deathchain. This name makes no sense, and it's not due to the semantic saturation I just subjected myself to. I guess having "death" in your name is to death metal what "goat" is to black metal. Just do it and watch the kids drink it up. This is Deathchain's (haha) sixth full length release in ten years, and first on the diverse Svart label. So, without mentioning the band name again, let's check out what these Finnish metalheads have put out, eh?
This split C30 tape brings together a track a piece from two US based HNW project. Side one features a track from Richmond, Virginia based Ritual Stance. And Side two features a track from Oregon based Wet Dream Asphyxiation.
“Paura” is a C30 tape that collects together two 15 minute slices of decidedly brutal & unrelenting walled noise from this highly prolific Serbian project.
Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) is an American-born sound, performance, and radio artist currently based in Europe. Since 1996, he has travelled the European countryside armed with recording equipment to collect found sounds that are then amalgamated and manipulated into musical pieces.
As soon as I saw the cover of "In Durins Halls (Return To The Mines Of Moria)" I knew I was in for a fun listening experience: the extremely cheesy artwork with badly photoshopped mountains and a chain-mailed guy in transparence plus the Lord Of The Rings thematics create a potentially dangerous mix, but what I found definitely exceeded my expectations.
The final track on this CD, KTL's first release in four years, could be said to return to their source. It sees Editions Mego boss and electronic composer Peter Rehberg poised alongside polymathic metalhead Stephen O'Malley to once more produce an evocatively bleak soundtrack to the transgressive theatre of Gisèle Vienne and DennisCooper.
The fact is worthy of mention in a predominantly male-dominated scene, Lamia Vox (Lamia being the name of a child-eating, serpent-tailed creature of the Greek mythology immortalized by John Keats in a poem of the same name written around 1820) is the pseudonym of a young Saint-Petersburg-based Rose McDowall-lookalike – or at least a younger and lighter version of her – whose ritualistic take on the dark ambient canon brought to the attention of Russia’s premium dark experimental label Der Angriff, responsible for the release of her first full-length album, the suitably-titled ‘…Introductio’, in 2010. She has now traded the vast, frozen Russian expanses for… the vast, frozen Canadian expanses that are home to Frédéric Arbour’s Cyclic Law, without a doubt the most respected industrial imprint north of the Niagara Falls.
"Kad Te Moja Čakija Ubode” comes in a box, sealed with a sticker; containing a tape and an A6 booklet inside. The booklet tells us that the compilation celebrates a documentary by Bosnian director Krsto Papiè, and gets its name from the same source. This short film is a gritty exploration of murders carried out in villages, with drunkenness and knives featuring heavily. There’s a mundanity to the murders, that makes the documentary all the more horrifying. The tape contributors are split geographically, the first side belonging to Balkan noise projects, and the second to Lithuanian projects.
“Huutoja Hiljaisesta Huoneesta”(Screams from a Silent Room) offers up a selection of rather mellow, atmospheric, and often memorable slices of song craft that mixes together elements of 1970’s classic rock, moody retro pop rock, low- key 80’s tinged euro pop, pared down mellow prog rock tendencies, euro folk rock, and a few sprinkle ‘n’ shakes of other genres too.
After nearly 2 decades of kicking it, post-punk trio Dial return for their fourth full-length entitled “Western Front.” Dial comes from a respectable experimental rock lineage featuring members who have done time in such outfits as: God, Ut, Furious Pig and Het. Being a self-described band of nomads, spending time in the United States, France and Great Britain over the years they seemed to have picked up a variety sounds and genres to pull from.