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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.
This untitled c70 split brings together two of the most adventurous and creative projects working in today’s world-wide HNW scene. Both parties released two of the most impressive releases of 2010; A View From Nihil put out the tar black bass lined nihilism of "Triumph Of The Broken Will", and TFT(with Insurgent) put out “The Shape of Static To Come” which showcased a stripped often futuristic sounding and minimalistic take on the genre.
“Winter Light” offers up a single lengthy shot of dense, swirling and darkly atmospheric walled noise matter from Andreas Brandal’s (Flesh Coffin, Drevne Bolesti, Avmakt, Museums of Sleep) HNW project Hour of the wolf.
“Bound” creates an bleak and gloomy, yet playful and edgy selection of tracks that sit somewhere between: creepy yet taut improv, unsettling sparse ‘n’ rhythmic clusters of field recordings, souring and wavering lo-fi classical swoons, doom metal, slightly quirky ritual precision, atmopsric junk metal elements and the very odd bleack simmer of noise texture
Here we have a Utech release by RST called The Sunset Limited. Rich drones that don't lack substance. Eight of them on one CD, in fact, so unfortunately, I really don't think RST gives each track enough time to reach it's full potential. The drone genre is so overloaded with boring crap, and RST's material sticks out amongst the crowd with it's tasteful layering and ability to be eerie as hell without being too melancholy. I just wish that, for meditative and "zoning-out" purposes, each composition lasted longer. This would give the listener more of a chance to really take in everything RST is doing.
Algernon is an up and coming group from Chicago, and this is their third record, their debut on Cuneiform Records. It does sound very much like the usual left-field prog rock you'd expect from a label that has issued much rare material from Soft Machine and related projects of such...
Brian McBride, inside and outside of his main project, Stars of the Lid, has long been a master of the deceptively passive soundscape. This particular album "The Effective Disconnect" differs from past works in that it is a compilation of music composed for a documentary entitled "Vanishing of the Bees", but sonically and creatively little has changed. The slow pacing, wet orchestral timbres and massive scope of his work in Stars of the Lid are undoubtedly intact. If you're one of those who has begun to tire of this unique yet often repetitious group's sound, well... you probably just haven't listened enough. Admittedly, Stars' work seemed like little more than relaxing background sound to me for years after I first heard it, but time has revealed their genius to me. Here as in the past, this Texas based musician truly stands apart from the pack through the sheer depth of his work, which is clearly through-composed in the classical sense, rather than created by improvisation, looping, or any other typical technique used by ambient musicians.
Missouri based one man project Jute Gyte (aka Adam Kalmbach who runs Jeshimoth Entertainment and is in numerous other projects on the label) has tattled quite a few different sonic genres and sounds since the projects inception in 2006.
“Robitussatan” is the second album from this mysterious state side project, and it’s very much a game of two half’s. The first eight tracks are often overloaded and manic collusions between muffled drum ‘n’ bass runs, gone wrong Casio core electronics, grinding metallic riffing and guttural 'choke-up-your-guts' vocals. The second half of the album is taken up by a fifty four minute track of noisy guitar texturing with doom and industrial undertones.
Deus Otiosus (Latin for Idle God) is the first full length release from Australia’s Nekros Manteia. The band consists of Poltergeist (ex-session drummer and vocalist from Drowning the Light) and various musicians. A some-what complex work to categorize, lots of influences are included from Bethlehem to Virus to Emperor with a few surprises thrown in to keep the listener guessing.
“A Call to Arms” is probably one of the most epic, controversial and thought-provoking releases to appear from the Harsh noise wall/ static texture genre thus far. The release conists of three ninety minute tapes that mix together often detailed static texturing and minimalistic HNW with all manner of samples connected to and about the Islamic fundamentalist world- both pro and negative in their message and point of view.
This c60 offers up two highly nasty, bass brooding and lengthy slices of extreme walled noise from this Louisiana based project that has links with other Violent Revolution International based projects such as Slaughter-Fetus & Peiste.
Lasse-Marc Riek’s “Habitats” released under the 3Leaves imprint is an electro acoustic collection of field recordings recorded in 2007 while in Finland. Accompanying this disc is a supplementary business card shaped cd-r containing images from the natural locations recorded in this album taken by Anne-Berit Riek. The disc containing audio begins with a narrated introduction and moves into the collected audio works described in the packaging’s linear notes.
Chrome peeler records along with Hospital productions have re-released here an early 90's demo from American Power Electronics group Final Solution entitled "All new power".
Through his work with Univers Zero since 1974, drummer and percussionist Daniel Denis has certainly disguised the fact that he is a self-taught musician. After a short-lived role with another drummer-led, European prog rock band, Magma, Denis formed Univers Zero out of those willing to follow him in concocting a rare blend of musical paradigms, particularly involving jazz fusion and modern chamber music, arguably among the most academic of styles. The result could sound a bit like Soft Machine or Focus even, but maybe more that of their darker cousin whose deliciously dystopian sound was not shy of adding discordant periods portending the industrial/dark ambience that wasn’t to be commonplace for another decade or so.