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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.
“The Awakening” is a six disc cd box set that brings' together a mixture of soundtrack albums, and studio albums from the Italian prog/ electronic rock group Goblin. The band are most known for their soundtrack work, and in particular their work on Dario Argento moives, through they have also worked with other directors too. This set brings together four full soundtracks, and two early studio albums.
Three Legged Race is the solo project of Hair Police's Robert Beatty. While I do enjoy the name Hair Police, I have never listened to them. Prejudice comes easy, and I always assumed they were one of the "hip" noise bands like Wolf Eyes. Luckily, I found out about Bobby B's involvement in hipness after my initial listen, and I was able to be impartial. So, with a decent band name and a terrible album title, what wonders await me?
Chris Watson is a familiar name in field recordings, if not the most familiar name. Despite crossing paths with his work on several occasions, this is the first full album I’ve actually heard - and it doesn’t disappoint. Its packaged in a smart digi-pack, with vintage photographs of its subject matter: trains and their journeys from Los Mochis to Veracruz, in Mexico. The ten tracks within “document” this journey, using sounds recorded on that journey.
“Hissi” is the next in the series of reissues from this hypnotic riff based genre shifting Finish project. This is the bands 3rd album, and it originally appeared back in 1996 on Metamorphos records. It showed the bands locked riff sound shaped into a electronica tinged rock type styling, with darts into more carnival themed sound tracking too.
Increasingly musicians are incorporating field recordings into their compositions, where the more traditional, instrument-based rules can be eschewed in favour of exploring the musical properties of the world's rich, natural timbres and irregular rhythms. So it's interesting to find artists coming from the opposite direction to this trend.
Albin Julius Martinek. Reverend Sunlight. Alvin. Herr Fruitcake. The man’s many names and incarnations testify to his now iconic status in the post-industrial world. And a well-deserved status at that, if you think the 45-year old Austrian almost single-handedly spawned two entire sub-genres of underground music in his previous life. Hell, he could fart on a piece of wax or offer an ultra-limited one-sided seven inch for sale at insane prices for a quick Euro and be guaranteed it sells like pretzels. One of which, at least, he has been known to do.
“Kingdom Hearts” is a four C20 box set that appeared back in early summer 2012. It finds Small Hours ( aka Uk walled noise artists James Killick) paying his HNW/ ANW tribute to Kingdom Hearts; which is a series of roll playing console games that mix together traditional Japanese RPG characters & elements with various Disney settings.