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“Treatise” is the new & rather epic release from this Canadian based project who mixers up a creative & atmospheric take on HNW, with elements of plan harsh noise & all of manner creative yet brutal sonic fair. This new release comes in the form of a four C62 box set-so there’s over four hours worth of clever, well thought-out & battering noise on offer here that tends more towards the Walled noise side of the noise spectrum.
Olekranon, the obscure and lo-fi one man industrial/noise project of American Ryan Huber, has finally gotten a real CD release with "Bilal", his 5th full length and 7th overall release since 2007. It's immediately obvious the man has a head full of dramatic, bombastic musical ideas, but how do these come across on the actual recording? Read on, and I'll attempt to put it into words.
A very simply packaged cdr here, from Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its another good example of effective presentation, without massive expense or intricate efforts: a stark, black and white folded insert with just name, title and recording details, and the same picture of a low, wide house on either side. Or is it the same picture? After a week of having the cd sleeve next to me, I suddenly noticed that the house on the rear had a different window layout; but, more importantly, there was also a white, shadowed figure in one of these windows. Its a nice, simple touch.
Skullflower is one of the most known names to come out of the 80s English power electronics scene, but over the years they turned their sound more towards noisy rock and psychedelic guitar noise. And with-in each chosen sonic style they’ve usually obtaining excellent results, unfortunately "Fucked On A Pile Of Corpses" sounds like a cheap lo-fi dictaphone recording of a Skullflower gig, so what good (if any) the CD format does is completely lost.
“The Marshall Suite” originally appeared back in 1999, and it showed this distinctive & cult band mixing together elements of garage rock & rockabilly with subtle yet dramatic electroinca & techno-influenced beat structures. This new reissue offers up the original long out of print album, a disc worth of remixes and Peel session tracks, and a 3rd disc taking in a full live show from around the albums original release.
Keiichi Sugimoto, founder of the Cubic Music label, delivers another slice of intricate and precise solo output under the pseudonym Fourcolor. This release is Fourcolor’s fifth studio album to date, drenched in spaced out vibes, blissed out melodies and glitch heavy sample skipping, ‘As Pleat’ shows a depth to music which is intentionally stripped back to the bone, small snapshots of time and space with intricate sub sections dancing amongst the peripheries.
“Glaciating 1” is a truly punishing, lengthy & complete unforgiving lesson in pitch black & cold sounded HNW. This release comes in the form a c95 chrome tape, with a single side long track per side of tape.
Fallen finds us at Orcrist fifth full length release. The Italian black metal band has been churning out demos and full lengths since 1999. Together the three members Grav, Goblin and Mane create black metal somewhat akin to early Bathory. Lyrically the band embraces the themes of death, darkness and isolation.
“What Space Is Made For” is the latest slice of space bound improvisation, star ribbed ambience & planetary sound scaping from Italian brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio. This new release comes in the form of a three CD set box set, and it finds the pair in a mainly more ghostly, stripped & often quite organic sounding sonic mood.
This great c30 tape brings together a side a piece from two creative yet very distictive sounding Canadian & USA based HNW projects. Side ones taken up by relatively new walled noise meets ambient HNW of Sleep from Winnipeg, Canada. And side twos taken up the BBW obsessed HNW project Gluttoness who are from Fairfax USA.
This new untitled CDR from Texas based White Gimp Mask offers up two half an hour slices of moorish, persistent & unrelenting walled noise that are sure to brutalize & hypnotize the listener in equal measures.
Originally released in 1995 on cassette tape, Surface of the Earth's self titled album has finally gotten a reissue this year on experimental label Utech Records, who have released several gems in the last few years including albums by Locrian, Daniel Menche and Jazkamer. The album, one of only two full lengths from this obscure trio, is primarily guitar amp feedback drones, dirty and bass heavy, that crackle and quake with unstable volcanic imperfections. Recorded long before the modern boom of doom metal bands, there's no actual guitar playing or chord structures to be found here, rather it's more of a noise album, with the only structure created by the sonic consistency each track keeps throughout its running time.
‘The Talking Book’ is a new project from Bill Gould of Faith No More and fellow Bay Area sound artist, Jared Blum, that focuses on the sound of deterioration and the way it can affect memories before they’re inevitably condemned to the forgotten. Such a bleak concept is delivered through a small collection of instruments, mainly guitar, bass, piano and synth, all eroded to varying degrees by the omnipresent crackle of a warped, antique magnetic tape.
There’s quite a tradition of subversive rock bands operating secretly, in the communist pasts of some countries - the most well-known example being Plastic People Of The Universe in the old Czechoslovakia. From the same conditions, but now in the Czech Republic, come Uz Jsme Doma.
Charalambides are an two piece male & female American psychedelic, experimental folk band thats been active since the early nineties, with releases on well known labels like the infamous Kranky. "Exile", is available in both CD and double LP versions, and the album offers roughly 75 minutes of highly lysergic music, diluted in eight -sometimes very lengthy- tracks.
“Giallo Duro Muro Rumore E Sadomasochismo Elettronica”(or Giallo Harsh Noise & Sadomasochist Electronics) is a two tape compilation that brings together two HNW acts & one death ambient/ harsh noise act to sonically celebrate Italian Giallo films, and there kinky & depraved black gloved killers. The first tapes a c60 & the second a c30…..so there’s over 80 minutes worth of sonic murder & depravity on offer here.
“Illusionen eines verlorenen Lebens” (Illusions of a Lost Life) is 8th full length album from Ukraine one man depressive black metal/ dark ambient project Moloch. And as with most things put out by this hellishly prolific, dark quirky & creative project there’s much to like and enjoy here.
“Domine Rex Inferum” is the fourth in the series of five reissue of classic MZ.412 albums by Cold Spring Records. This album original appeared back in 2001, and it offers up an sleek more cinematic take on the projects black industrial sound which here mixers together: blacked soundtrack elements, often subtle ritual & occult tinged Industrial elements, dark ambience, dark & noise lined electronica, and subdued/ moody black metal & noise traces.
Petrychor is the new one man sonic project from Tad Piecka (Carbonscape/Beware of Safety)…presented on this double disc album from the Khrysanthoney stable, is the debut album bundled together with the projects demo release ‘Dryad’. The release is a bit of a difficult beast to get to grips with, drawing in equal amounts from a variety of styles, but mainly focusing on Black Metal influences combined with deeply rich elements of folk and neo-classical music. That is the easiest way to ‘pigeonhole’ this record, for the purposes of a brief overview, but the overall content goes way deeper, challenging your preconceptions at every turn.
This rather lengthily entitled release is the first sonic fruits from this decidedly retro sounding synth project that boil up a mixture of wonky, noisy ebbed and lo-if instrumental synth tracks that come across as a either lo-fi horror synth sound tracking from the late 70’s or early 80’s, or wound down, basic and noise fed electronica with some subtle old school industrial edges
“Chromosomal Abnormality” presents the listener with tow near on forty minute slabs of brutal, totally unrelenting & ultra thick Walled Noise from this hugely prolific Serbian project. The project themes it's releases around either ghoulish medical procedures/ diseases, or female rape, torture & murder. This release is in the medical themed bracket, and is seemingly about defects with in a foetus.
Despite the mysterious triangle at the end of this album’s title, the shape most synonymous with the sounds found within is a circle as Bologne’s Marcella Riccardi debuts her solo song psycles formed of loops of guitar, bass and vocals supported by minimal hand percussion and maximal flange and delay.
With his new album "Life (...It Eats You Up)", avant electronic veteran Mika Vainio leaves behind even the loose structures of his monochromatic minimal beat workouts in Pan Sonic, and records an album of even darker and sparser music than ever before. Surprisingly, it falls comfortably into the category of macabre ambient doom metal along the lines of Sunn 0))), and I suspect with this album we are witnessing the result of a longtime appreciation of the genre. While the music retains the unforgiving, vertiginous coldness that has consistently characterized Vainio's output, sterile digital electronic elements are kept to a minimum.
It’s strange to think that Balam Acab's See Birds Ep released in August last year was Tri Angle records first ever release. Since then the sort of post-dubstep, synth and psychedelic pop influenced music showcased by that release has become the hallmark of the label which has amassed a consistently impressive string of Eps not to mention the full length from How To Dress Well. So it’s safe to say that expectations were high for this record.