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Some artists have the strangest but most wonderful talent for coming up with nonsensical yet highly intriguing titles. Masami Akita is probably the uncrowned king of this; completely enigmatic – yet captivating – track and album titles abound in his huge discography, culled variously from foreign languages, medical encyclopedias and baby talk corpora, so it seems, or combinations thereof. Gozlor Gozlor, the tape currently in my tape player, has a similarly mystifying title. It alternately reminds me of harsh noise artist Griz+Zlor and the word guzzler, making me expect this tape to be the illegitimate child of filthy musical terrorism and a night of heavy boozing.
Here Be Dragons is the second full length release from the Netherlands The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. Comprised of varied musicians and electronic artists, the band began back in 2000, starting as an audiovisual project composing music for existing silent films. In the years since their first compositions they have grown into a collective of various musicians intertwining different genres of music.
Anyone who is into Neo Folk music will appreciate the idea behind this three way split. "South European Folk Compendium", is released by the wonderful Ahnstern label, and it brings together three musical acts who concentrate on the three different folklores of their music. The beautiful booklet tells us about the participants of this project, and they are Défilé des âmes, who comes from the "Hellenic Axis", Svarrogh, who brings the spirit of "Balkan Axis" and Arnica the "Catalan Axis".
Cementimental is not especially aggressive or violent noise, nor is it particularly structured or intellectual... I would describe it as 'curious' noise that does not quite become 'playful'. Texturally, it remains mostly within the confines of typical harsh noise. The "Molecramp" minidisk contains three easily distinguishable pieces:
Looking up Jesus of Nazareth's "The Shame of Being a Child", I found it oddly classified as grindcore. I suppose some of the music has a disposition in common with such freaked out 'cyber grind' bands as Agoraphobic Nosebleed, but here guitars (usually the focus of the genre) are completely absent, replaced with excess distortion on the monkey-simple drum programming and numerous forboding samples and electronic sounds which come at the listener in a rapid fire barrage, one after another, to quite jarring effect.
The SK-1 was pretty much one of the last keyboards manufactured by Casio that was cool. Along with its more sophisticated cousin, the SK-5, the SK-1 made sampling technology affordable back in the mid-80s. I still have mine from way-back-when which I bought at the K-Mart I was the cleaning person for. Still works like a charm... Of course the one other cool thing about the SK-1 was it's tone-building engine which I don't think any other synth had...
AUN is a husband and wife duo from Canada very heavily inspired by SunnO))). In spite of the confusing title this is actually their ninth record. Named after an ancient Swedish king, with very mystical cover art, this has been described as "ambient metal" but to these ears this is more like "shoegaze metal" which isn't a bad thing...
Listening to Jeez Clusters Joys is to spend 45 minutes in a garden of violence that reveals the instincts and whims of its micro-habitat, as greedy life cycles randomly clash to illustrate the survival of the fittest on macro and micro scales. For the most part, this is achieved through the relentless improvised interplay of Ilan Manouach’s alto saxophone and Gilles Mortiaux’s electric guitar.
Zelphabet is releasing an album for each letter of the alphabet, compiling heavily experimental works by artists whose names begin with the letter specific to the volume. Here we are at volume "J". As a whole, this is a slow paced disk of sparsely arrhythmic, chunky static textures that remain satisfyingly full, fairly unaggressive and mostly within the realm of avant garde sound sculpture rather than violent, full on "harsh noise".
This 3” CD-R, with handmade artwork in a limited edition of 60, sports two tracks that are mildly successful at inspiring curiosity at what full albums from the artists in question would sound like. By themselves, though, they’re only marginal.
Holding the cover of Stratvm Terrors This Is My Own Hell one can feel a bit of apprehension. The long awaited release is bathed in the artwork of Mia Makila, in what seems to be an ode to Hieronymus Bosch, and quite a good one at that. Released in 2008 in limited copies; eight songs drown the listener in a world of hopeless, dark atmospheres. Peter Andersson (of Raison D’etre, Necrophous and Atomine Electrine) and Tobias Larrson (of Ocean Chief) deftly create sounds that plunge us into sound scapes found in our nightmares.
This project is a collaboration between Enrico Coniglio, musician and composer, and deep space ambient explorer Oophoi. Their début album 'Cloudlands', is an impressive work, lasting a little over one hour and projecting an almost frozen environment, drawn together from a mix of glitch, chilly ambient sounds and neo-classical music.
What is it about the smoky, after midnight cabaret of small, dark, jazz and blues clubs that attracts the maturing post-punk reveller? From Kurt Weill’s theatrical chansons through the raw emotions of Nina Simone to Tom Waits hobo vaudeville, the tradition is now being faithfully continued by a new generation. But no one would have expected this most established of styles to be upheld by musicians with roots in the anti-establishment.
“Welcome to the Standard Nightmare” finds this Sarajevo based project offer up a mind chilling, but highly effective C60’s worth of cold, locked & controlled glitch bound Harsh Noise Wall matter
“After Party Massacre” brings together a C47 and mini business card CDR worth of highly rewarding static texture bound HNW from this US project that features: j. cadle(whose also in Foul and Oasis Of Fear, as well as runs the excellent Bane records) and Sam Stoxen(whose also in Baculum, Grain Belt, White Plague and runs the excellent Phage tapes label)
John Cromar of Noma is becoming something of a regular here at MusiqueMachine HQ. In the last couple of months, three of his releases were already scrutinized by the MM crew, and the fourth review is just now arriving on your digital doorstep. Not only, however, have we come to know John – though only through his music – we’ve also come to appreciate him rather a lot – though opinions vary (myself: 3 out of 5, once; Josh: 5 out of 5, twice). If anything the new album stirs a definite curiosity in me: I honestly can’t wait to see what Cromar has cooked up this time.
This C50 tape brings together two just over twenty minute slices of HNW matter from American and Spanish projects. On the first side we have a track from Release Helen Rytka which features Richard Ramirez( whose in Black Leather Jesus, Werewolf Jerusalem, Vice Wears Black Hose, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter..and many more) and Nicole Dirge(whose in Adult Crash Unit, Battery Suspects, Death Carries A Cane, Massacre In Dinosaur Valley). And on the second side is a track by Transductor which is just Manuel M. Cubas(whose in Mixturizer Cadaverizer Noise, Mac-nolo)
This C90 is the first self titled release from Swedish HNW project that features members of industrial/noise project Crest218. The tape features two side long tracks of active yet very thick ‘walled’ matter.
Knurl is Alan Bloor. A Canadian experimental composer and sculptor based in Toronto and he has been performing and recording as Knurl since 1994.
This is a furious, bleak and sometimes grimly experimental black metal and pitch black ambience split that features two projects by experimental and creative Tasmania based black metal entity know as Sin Nanna. Firstly we have seven tracks from his more know project Striborg that speclizers in a very distinct brand of lo-fi black metal, then we have six tracks from his more dark ambient and creepy experimental project Veil of Darkness. The split runing time totals an hour and twenty one minutes, so really you have two full lengths here
Soft Illusions apparently represents the eighth release so far to be edited solely from a single recording session from back in September 2007 when Sindre Bjerga, Jan M Iverson and Steffan de Turck tucked themselves away in a wooden cabin in the mountains of Hovden, Norway for just one weekend to, as they put it, “fill up a pile of tapes”.
I only have a few records by Aube in my collection, but every one of them is an object of singular mesmerism. I mean “singular” in a very specific way: all of his recordings revolve around the sounds generated by a single object—a glow lamp, a heart monitor, a Buddhist prayer bell, a Bible. Each thing becomes a gateway to a tiny private world.
Minamo is a well regarded post-rock oriented band from Japan who mostly use guitar or piano as the lead instrument alongside various electronic sounds, including the use of (from what I've heard) a Nintendo console. This is a quartet that doesn't have a rhythm section, which is particularly unusual in post-rock, but seems more oriented for ambient music.
Boston’s Benjamin Rossignol has been releasing his experiments with the properties of electronic sound since 2006, often accompanying his releases with objects such as small plastic bags filled with spice, sand or jigsaw pieces to form what he refers to as a “concrete poem”. Here though the object is the cassette itself as the two drones explore the effects that magnetic tape can have on extended tones.