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Asva’s new album ‘Presences in Absences' is the bands follow up to 2008’s amazing album ‘What You Don’t Know is Frontier’. The first thing you notice from the off is the distinct lack of the overpowering abrasiveness and full on drone attacks of the latter album and replaced by a more subtle heaviosity and overwhelming melancholy, which is both reflective yet achingly bleak in a strangley uplifting way.
Hototogisu is a male/female duo known for creating psychedelic dronescapes with the guitar and other instruments. This double album original appeared on the DeStijl label back in 2004- it was originally spread out over 3 LPs in hand glued packaging, it now appears in an unlimited double CD form on Important Records. "Floating Japanese Oof! Gardens of the 21st Century", is upwards of 2 hours spent in a sleepy-eyed soup of sustain. The runny pink and blue watercolor on the cover suits it perfectly.
Beat Circus come from Boston and are fronted by their only consistent member Brian Carpenter who is also the sole songwriter and arranger of the songs on this album.
2010 brought us a new release from Canadas’ Funerary Call. Dormant for the past few years, Funerary Call (the project of H .MacFarlane, also of Sistrenatus) has been creating sinister black ambient music since 1994. A cryptic cd cover starts our excursion into the abyss.
As befitting a project of this name, “Messenger” is a very soundtrack-y album; though as far as I can tell, not an actual soundtrack. Its a melodic mix of strings, vocals, woodwind, percussion and electronic touches; all delivered in the “pretty classical music, informed by modern production” style.
This latest DVD from Störung has been released to commemorate the official opening of the Experimental Music Sound Archive housed in Spain’s Puertas De Castilla, a cultural centre based in Murcia. The Archive is made up of the large collection of CDs, records and tapes that resident sound artist Francisco López’ amassed over the course of his professional career. But instead of filling the DVD with excerpts from this encouraging Archive, López has curated a new group exhibition of sound artists from all around the world thematically linked by a brief both tight and restrictive yet loose and freeform. The artists could do anything they wanted as long as it resulted in 13 “micro-compositions” each lasting precisely two minutes each which would then be broadcast, one micro-composition a day, on radio. This strictly small duration is an unusual limit for sound artists who more often prefer the benefits of canvasses stretched larger than a regular pop song to fully explore and impose their intent, and placing their short pieces on radio would suggest an unpredictable and uncontrollable situation from which their sounds would spring forth. So, this DVD release brings the full, exhausting three hour exhibition out of the camouflage of radio to present an opportunity for immersion in digestible quantities.
“Sword and Sandals” is another very distinctive & creative mixture of: HNW, Harsh noise and harmonic/ atmospheric electro texturing from this great Peplum or Sword-and-Sandal movies influenced project that comes from São Paulo, Brazil.
“Double Standard” is 6th & mid-way point in the series of twelve monthly 3 inch CDR releases that are going to released through-out 2011 by Irelands Bored Bear Recordings. Each release in the series celebrates, pays tribute and chronicles one of the many projects of highly influential & respected Texas noise artist's Richard Ramirez.
A triple whammy of labels team up to deliver this delightful little 7” from Philadelphia’s finest, Total Fucking Destruction and on the flipside London’s digi-grind mentalists, Skat Injector.
Well here I am with the new Morbid Angel album…cause for celebration one would think, David Vincent is back on board after 15 years away from the band, it’s their first recording in eight years and, well, its Morbid Angel, for the legions of death metal fans out there, they are one of the true legends and stalwarts of the scene. More is the pity then that ‘Illud Divinum Insanus’ turns out to be such a massive disappointment.
"Kissers And Hugs” is the first full length release from this relatively new Italian HNW project. The CDR offers up a single just under forty one minute track of brutal and seared walled noise.
“So Much Darkness” finds Flesh coffin(one of the many projects of Norwegian based noise maestro Andreas Brandal) offering up his usually dark and horror filled mix of: noise, junk metal abuse, sinister and grating sound scaping, and noisy/dread filled sonic uneasy.
This C111 tape finds the Texas duo of Richard Ramirez(Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus, Fouke ect) and Robert Newsome (Black Leather Jesus, White Gimp Mask, ect) offering up two side long tracks of thick & suffocating Giallo influenced HNW.
The Body As I Left It is the 2010 release from Kansas Citys’ Christopher McFall. To those not familiar with McFalls work, it is an intriguing mix of analog and digital sounds. To be more precise McFall uses analog field recordings, old phonographs and various instruments and then rerecords these sounds through digital programs. While it’s not a practice that hasn’t been done before, here it is executed effortlessly.
This foreboding, uncompromisingly violent and harsh disk, the second by Justin Broadrick's new noise project, White Static Demon, is well titled. Cosmic, cryptic, oppressive, and obsidian black as space, "Apparitions" erodes your hearing unforgivingly as tumultuous waves bashing away at a rocky shore. Removed from the familiarity of the guitar, Broadrick's musical persona changes focus from riffs to complex abstract orchestrations. The chronic melancholy of his music no longer seems to emanate from a relatable human spirit but from a vast hungry void of senseless destruction.
Here’s a sparky little split tape from Horsing and Zebra Mu, presented in garish blues tones. A blue cassette, and a blue cover with some kind of “battle montage” of various varieties of Godzilla: a mini-Godzilla, a standard Godzilla, a robot Godzilla and a cosmic-uber-Godzilla. What this has to do with the sounds within is unclear; though the Horsing side is dedicated to Yukiko Okada, who the internet tells me was a teen pop star in Japan - but I can’t find any links to Godzilla. (Okada was so revered, that her suicide in 1986 - slashing her wrists and then, two hours later, jumping off a seven-storey building - led to a wave of copycat deaths.)
Steve Roach has been releasing music for over 30 years now (originally as a member of a group called Moebius) and puts out albums at a rate that whilst not quite up there with Masami Akita in terms of numbers is still nonetheless fairly impressive.
In many ways it's not easy to pin down the music, from both of these artists, as any one genre or label - there are a multitude of styles and manifestations, and it's all the better for it. This limited edition cassette is a split between White Dog and Pregnant Spore, and they are very closely mirrored in terms of musical DNA, sometimes almost cloning each other to produce a very odd whole of other-worldly atmospheres and dreams.
“High Definition Ghost” this Irish based project second stab at an all out HNW release. Where is This usually concentrate on a quirky yet creative mixture of: harsh noise, industrial textures, wonky easy listening trails, high wire yet tacky synth textures, and some HNW textures.
“Spiral Right / Spiral Left” is the long promised and dreamed of collaboration between two of the worlds most know & respected experimental/noise artists- Japans Merzbow has been creating and defining the noise genre since the late 1970’s. And American sound artist and percussionist extraordinaire Z’ev is one of the industrial scenes pioneers, and is now a highly respected soundscaper.
“Polititiestaat” sees this Netherlands based HNW project offering up a selection of different lengthy yet brutal ‘walls’ of sound. In all there are six tracks here and they last between just over the eight minute mark to just over the twenty minute a piece.
“The Robot Who Looked Like Me” finds this Sarajevo based project simmering up a highly rewarding slice of sci-fi influenced HNW. On offer here is a single just under thirty two minute track that offers up a moorishly, sonically chilling and detailed ‘wall’ of noise, which shows once again why this project is one of the most original and distinctive projects in today’s worldwide HNW scene.
The Infinity series is a open ended and identical artwork based collection of releases put out by Uk based Sweet Soiltide. Each volume sees a different world wide HNW acts attempting ambient and experimental forms of walled noise. Part Four of this excellent series sees north/eastern France based Å offering up their own take on ambient or texturally drifting HNW.
Fortress Longing, the fourth album from Human Greed, sees the duo of Michael Begg and Deryk Thomas stride even further into the no-man’s land found bordering ambient electronica, musique concrète and minimalist classical composition, an area glimpsed on their previous album, Black Hill. Before then their immersive, funereal sound had been untempered by formal instrumentation, but Begg’s increasing involvement as part of Fovea Hex acted as a catalyst in introducing traditional instruments such as piano and cello into Human Greed’s digital pooling of drowned drones and crystalline synths. As a result, Fortress Longing has the confidence and construct of a single orchestral symphony, albeit with field recordings and feedback woven into portentous pulsations and sonorous swells.