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Esoion is a bubbling sonic stockpot of varied female vocalising and mood-setting-to-seared noise-scaping. It’s a decidedly volatile and shifting work, which at points feels like it’s going to boil over & engulf itself, but never does. Over the release's forty-or-so-minute runtime, it remains engaging and creative.
Here’s twenty minutes worth of crude ‘n’ nasty HNW from this South Carolina-based project. The ‘wall’ brings together thick and suffocating low end, with a steady batter, bay, and buffet
As its title may suggest Book II is the second release from The Ominous Coven- an anonymous wall noise collective, where each member is apparently unaware of each other. This release appears as either a digital or C30 release- I 'm reviewing the latter of these.
Now fully available on all formats, Nogothula's Telluric Sepsis sees the band wailing as a quartet, bringing pummeling death metal to the masses on their debut album. Growing from a duo, to a trio, then again to their current four man form in the past three years, Nogothula have come together like Voltron to bring dark, spacey, supernatural death to all those that are willing to receive. Blending both brutal and progressive elements, Telluric Sepsis is both engaging and challenging, offering up different experiences based on one's mood during each spin. Finely tuned and absolutely ripping, this certainly doesn't play like a debut, but rather that of a band with a few albums to stand upon, reaching for the next rung on the ladder.
If your child disappeared, would you intuitively recognise them ten years later? This is the heartbreaking dilemma that faces acting heavyweights Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson as they grapple with the truth surrounding the sudden return of their runaway daughter in Virginia Gilbert’s British drama Reawakening.
From Beyond is a deranged, gory ‘n’ slimy, and often decidedly kinky take on the mad-doctor genre. The mid-80s film still manages to maintain its original air of disquieting transgression, and the effects have (largely) stood the test of time. Here from 88 Films is a Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a 4k scan of the picture, and new/ archive extras.
Here’s a CD bringing together the two albums released by British-Ghanaian-Caribbean Afro-rock Osibisa band on Warner Brothers in the early 70’s. We have 1973’s Happy Children and 1974’s Osibirock- both of which highlight a band that is open to blending and blurring musical genres- taking elements of African music/rhythms, rock, funk, jazz and generally bright and buoyant focused fusion.
Yessonata is the latest album from English keyboardist/ composer Rick Wakeman. It takes in just two tracks for solo paino- the first features musical fragments from his time with the prog-rock band Yes. And the second focuses on musical themes from his 1975 solo album The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Come Home is a new horror film directed by Nicole Pursell and Caitlin Zoz which is released on UK digital platforms on 9th December courtesy of Miracle Media.
The Escapees is an early 80’s film from Jean Rollin, who is most known for his arty and fleshy vampire films. This lesser-known film has nothing to do with bloodsuckers or horror- instead what we have is a down-beat drama based on two young women who escape from a mental hospital, with light touches of action/ gore- though these largely sit towards the end of the proceedings. It features some thoughtful dialogue and moody/ arty shots- though if you're looking for normal genre fare Rollin, you’ll feel more than a little underwhelmed. Here from Powerhouse, as part of their reissue of all of the director's work is a new release of the film- coming as either a UHD or Blu-Ray disc- taking in a 4k scan of the film, a new commentary track, and a few more extras.
The Hop-Pickers (Starci Na Chmelu) is an early 60’s Czech film that blends teen drama, romance and musical. It’s set on a hop-picking work camp for teens, focusing on the developing relationship/ romance between a young man and woman- with the whole thing being rather charming, well-acted, interestingly choreographed, and at points lightly satirical-edged picture. Here from Second Run, those resurrectors of Czech/ other world film classics & undiscovered cinematic jewels is a Blu-Ray release of the film, featuring a colourful & buoyant new scan of the film, as well as a few extras.
Canonical Discourse is a four-track journey into taut, tense, and largely angular improv. It’s a release that wonderful shifts and awkwardly shambles along- through the jarring, discordant, noisy and intense.
Indicator Light is a forty-three-minute improv/ free jazz recording which moves from briefly dwelling in the unease and gloomy. Before shifting gear to the pacey and angular, through to the woozy and careering. It’s a recording from a 2023 live show- with the whole set captured in an up-close, yet crystal-clear manner
Austrian composer, Andreas Berger, has done a lot of work under his own name for theater and film in his career, but in the early 2000's, he branched out with a different project as Glim. Releasing two records Music for Field Recordings (2003) and Aerial View of Model (2006), 2024 sees his third Glim album after a long eighteen year hiatus. Utilizing cassette tapes and an old Walkman, Tape I has Glim expressing his experimentation with the manipulation of sound via the inconsistencies and subtle variations that magnetic tape provides. While nostalgia plays a big part of it for Glim, the real driving factor is the way in which the sound is shaped via this gear and giving newer work a bit of a patina that brand new pieces would not have.
Don’t Change Hands aka Change Pas De Main is an erotically charged thriller/ comedy from 1975 directed by Paul Vecchiali (Drugstore Romance, Once More and At The Top Of The Stairs). The film stars Myriam Mézières (The Diary of Lady M, Fleurs De Sang and A Flame in My Heart), Francoise Giret (The Great Spy Chase, The Hunt and The Good Life), Hélène Surgère (Salo, Drugstore Romance and The Strangler), Howard Vernon (A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and She Killed in Ecstasy) and Michel Delahaye (Holy Motors, Le Frisson De Vampire and La Vampire Nue).
The Mummy And The Curse Of The Jackals is a late 1960s slice of bad movie pie, featuring a lumbering/ bulging-eyed mummy, a bad-toothed & wonky-snouted wolfman, and an ageless/ devious Egyptian princess. The film features highly stilted acting, cheap transformation footage, light hints of crude gore, and lo-fi psychedelic light effects. Here from Severin is a Blu-Ray release of this lesser-seen/ known of the 1960s US exploitation cinema- taking in two hours of extras, including a bonus sexploitation film & a commentary track for it.
Set in the year 8000, there’s not much left of the planet as we know it. However, within this post-apocalyptic landscape only the mutants, scum and robot-people remain. Humanity has been wiped from the face of the earth and even Santa Claus must fight to survive. Welcome to the setting of Infinite Santa 8000! Originally directed as a multi-part web series by Michael Neel (Drive-in Horror Show, H.P. Lovecraft's Celephaïs and It’s Me, Ma) in 2010, Infinite Santa 8000 was recut, re-edited and re-imagined, into what is now, a full length animated directors cut, Neel also added new scenes, and reanimated and retouched some shots to create something akin to his original vision for the movie.
Three artistic talents from Berlin - Manuel Klotz, Karla Wenzel and Tobias Vethake - all currently circumnavigating the musical avant-garde driven by the thrill of no boundaries, improvisation and freeform creation. Klotz is nominally a sound designer focussed on free jazz and noise, while Wenzel is a songwriter and sound scapist and Vethake a composer for film and performance art, and the three artists have now united to produce a work of jazz-minded music inspired by the likes of pioneers Ornette Coleman, Caspar Brotzmann and Cecil Taylor, but which deviates from the both the means and structures of those particular masters. A wonderfully inventive and deeply engaging piece of work, Burst stands totally alone in its uniqueness.
Catching Fire is a live recording of a collaboration between two Norwegian greats- fusion/ prog trio Elephant9, and legendary jazz guitarist/ composer Terje Rypdal. It’s very much in the mode of live albums of the 1970s from key prog/ fusion bands- with it offering up wonderfully shifting, varied and at points decidedly fired-up selection of tracks.
There are some ambient, abstract works of electronic music that are so hermetic – claustrophobic, even – that the worlds they created leave little room for an outside even as their source material depends on it. This is neither good nor bad; it is simply a way of categorizing certain albums as they appear in a landscape populated by a host of other endeavors, be they groups, performances, or listener-driven works. Ümlaut (aka Jeff Düngfelder) is unapologetically hermetic, and his latest release, Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, is a tribute to the expansive and yet cloyingly interiorized space of ambient production. Nestled in the outer reaches of rural Connecticut, Ümlaut pieced 12 compositions for this release, totaling over an hour, in which the idea of capture – both literally in the recording process and as an arrested individual – is visited over and over again, like an ethnographer's sketchbook of the self.
The rather strangely entitled Woods Are Wet ( aka Onna Jigoku: Mori Wa Nureta) is a darkly heady mix of disquiet-led mystery, low-key horror, and S&M-focused Roman Porno/ Pink film. The early 1970s Japanese film effectively shifts from uneasy and dread-filled, to sinister and kinkily deranged. Here from 88 Films is a new Blu-Ray release of the picture-taking in a new scan of the film, a commentary track, and a few other extras.
Dariuss is a low-budget slice of experimental/ arty horror from the UK. The 2023 film features no formal dialogue and is a jarring/ rapid cut affair- which moves between lightly unsettling, puzzling, and at points fairly disturbing- with moments of deranged sexualized violence. Here from SRS Cinema is a DVD release of the film.
Dated 11 is a two-track/3-inch CDR from US noise project Fail. The tracks move between textured noise, jarring noise flows, and muffled ambient drifts.
R4 (aka Ohio-based Barry D. Scheffel ) is a project that sits somewhere between ambient, noise, and subtle field recording manipulation. Rainmaker is a three-track/three-inch CDR, which moves between brooding/ droning uneasy, and pared-back ambient/ field recording scaping.