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For "Old Punch Card", Sam Prekop delivers a gestural smorgasboard of pitched static and noise textures. It's a sort of hollow monophonic music that could only be the result of long hours of solitary tinkering with old equipment. He does not appear to fear the quiet of the room in which he works, as no well defined new sonic environment is created by this album. Reverb is used sparingly, and there is rarely more than a single instrument or idea in use at any given time. He has left the sounds alone in the quiet so that we might fully hear them. No added polish here, either; the obvious knob turns are there for all to hear.
Well this is yet another ambient release -- they seem to keep coming and coming and it's not exactly always fun to have to review. Parhelion are a bit of an exception, though. Their underlying shtick is being about arctic expanses, which obviously isn't a new idea if you remember Thomas Kõner. Needless to say this album isn't as complex as Kõner's stuff, but it isn't that bad.
“Maggotkind” represents one of the longest ever pieces of recorded and released Harsh Noise wall Sonics. The single track on offer on this audio DVDR comes in at six hours, forty five minutes and forty eight seconds of brutal and dense wall-making from this highly prolific Serbian based project.
This C20 offers up two side long tracks of atmospheric, thick, bleak and bone-chilling HNW from this Japanese based project. The tape seems to be themed around ghost or Poltergeist activity and how they can effect a sleeping female....victim.
“Death Charge” was the first release to appear from London base Hal Hutchinson's nihilistic HNW project that’s obsessed with capital punishment, human torture and Anti-humanist ideology.
“Curse Of The Baphomet” offers up two c20’s worth of satanic singed noise 'n' guitar textured matter from these two US based acts. Each project takes over a tape a-piece to summon up hellish harmonic and devilishly atmospheric drone and noise texturing.
Peripatetic is the most recent project by composer and sound artist Marinos Koutsomichalis. Here we find a field recording of the daily life in a city. The cities used were Berlin, York, Leeds, Liverpool, Amsterdam, Athens, Vienna, Brussels, London, Gent and Antwerp. All were recorded with simple means and sparse editing.
The built environment seems central to Locrian’s ‘Territories’. Track titles talk of geographical positions such as ‘Between Barrows, a ‘Ring Road’ and a ‘Columnless Arcade’, while ‘Procession of Ancestral Brutalism’ refers to the functional/industrial architectural movement of the mid-Twentieth Century. But the sound made by Chicago’s André Foisy and Terence Hannum seems to describe the decay of such structures as opposed to their construction. The monochromatic improvised interplay of Hannum’s analogue synths and organ with Foisy’s guitar feedback and fretwork has seen them aligned with the often dystopian-sided genres of noise and drone. But with ‘Territories’ they open up their sound with a selected guest list of collaborators that sees them slip in and out of their discomfort zone.
This collection brings together the complete violin/Viola and piano works of one of the great and most dramatic minimalist/modern classical composers of the 20th century, Morton Feldman. The set consists of two discs and 128 minutes worth of music that covers work from between 1945 to 1984.
Breakcore and Drill ‘n’ bass have always been hit ‘n’ miss genres in my book...the projects have either worked and blown you away with their manic, intense yet clever use of sound manipulations and beats ‘n’ bass. Or they've copied the greats in the genre like Aphex Twin, squarepusher, or Otto Von Schirach... and come off as bland impersonators with no ideas of their own. Thankfully "Nostril" is a wonderfully over the top, exhilarating and very clever mixture of: break-core, Drill ‘n’ bass, baroque, classic and church music; along with elements like chugging black ‘n’ extreme metal riffing, operatic and choral vocals, rapid and clever world music traits, and all manner of quirky yet rewarding & memorable sonic matter.
“Untitled Recordings 1942” is the second full length CDR from this Serbian bleak ‘n’ brutal HNW project who take their name from the German word for assault rifle. The projects focus/obsession is death through war; and in particular death in WWII.
“Nostalgia Ever After” is a familiar sound to those who have followed the psych folk underground within the last 5 years. This disc is a spell book of tracks that opens up with two folk rock inspired tracks invoking a late 60’s feel, but still with a very modern indie rock sound.
'Medicated' takes a shifting approach to wall making with long lasting textures executed in single dynamic shifts, and mostly exists in blasting static form spread out over the course of forty three minutes.
"Clonazepam" possesses certain qualities describable as progressive elements that constitute an alternative approach to wall making while complying with the genre's philosophy.
Julia Kent is one of those figures in either popular or classical music you don't really hear about. A cello player mostly known for being employed in Antony and the Johnsons, Kent, like Lisa Germano has decided to go solo on this release. This is certainly not rock or pop, though. Every track here is done in a neo-classical baroque style, very much like soundtrack music for any melodramatic movie you could name.
I listened to much of this recording without realizing Phil Manley was a founding member of the band Trans Am, who I missed out on way back when. This is good since my view of this album won't be colored by any assumptions of post-rock or what it's about.
“Riding Geisha” is the second of twelve 3inch CDR releases to be released by Irelands Bored Bear recordings that celebrate and pay tribute to the many projects of highly influential & respected Texas noise artist's Richard Ramirez.
This three way split finds three UK based noise projects trying their hands at Harsh Noise wall- to mixed but sometimes rewarding results. This also seems to be the first HNW releases on uk based Jerky Oats Records who usually offer up on their releases a mixture of noise, ambience, more noise bound electroncia, and other experimental and noisy based sonics.
“Save Your Dependence” is the second release from this Ukraine based project who boil up a brutal yet often grimly to piercingly atmospheric mixture of :Harsh noise, HNW texturing, and the old bit of old school industrial churn.
Captain Beefheart meets Tom Waits in a bar. They get drunk have a sing off and what you end up with is Third One Rises. When you think about it neither Beefheart nor Waits really have anyone that sounds like them or tries to emulate them so what Andrew Plummer and World Sanguine Report have created here is fairly unique. Like the two artists I’ve mentioned there are obvious influences. Big Band, Swing, Blues and Jazz are present here to a lesser or greater extent but the resulting album is more than just an amalgam of those sounds.
“His Master’s Voice” is the second offering from Phaenon, Szymon Tankiewicz’s dark ambient/electronic project. Here we find stark ambient combined with lush atmospheric effects. The project was influenced by writer Stanis³aw Lem and his 1968 science fiction novel “His Master’s Voice”. The novels’ plot involves an extraterrestrial transmission and the efforts of scientists to decode and understand the other worldly communication.
Despite having spent the late fifties at the epicentre of musique concrète (studying under Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry) and then furthering her understanding of electro acoustic techniques as Henry’s assistant in the late sixties, Parisian Eliane Radigue was exploring a more American, minimal approach to sound art by the time this installation was presented in 1970. Like much of her work at the time, ‘Vice Versa, etc....’ was based on recordings of microphone feedback alone. For the exhibition, such a recording was looped simultaneously on several reel to reel tape recorders and played in both normal and reversed modes at varying speeds. With this release, Important have attempted to reproduce the original release (which was limited to 10 magnetic tapes to accompany the original exhibition) for the digital age. It includes the recording at four different speeds with forward and backward versions on a CD each, so those equipped with two CD players and corresponding amps and speakers get the means to recreate the feel of this installation in their homes.
‘Detrimental Dialogue’ is the first collaboration between Northern Italy’s Andrea Marutti and Fausto Balbo, who exploit a wide range of sound synthesis techniques as they worked together both in tandem and isolation across a period of three years. This has resulted in an album that merges the cosmic hedonism of Tangerine Dream’s analogue experiments with the even more abstract glitch of digital synths, to form an array of auditory science fiction motifs and modulations pitched light years away from any pre-sets.
“Giallo a Venezia” finds Italian Harsh noise and HNW artist's Fukte paying his HNW tribute to the notorious sleazy, bloody and downbeat 1979 Giallo film of the same name directed by Mario Landi. The film was based in Venice; it featured a scissor welding killer, and lots of sex ’n’ violence.