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Those of you even only distantly familiar with Japanese culture will know about the tea ceremony, a work of ritual art that revolves around something so prosaic that most of us do it without even opening our eyes all the way. This compilation’s a love letter—fifteen different love letters, actually—to the very idea of tea, in all of its different incarnations: as a beverage, as a way to create a moment of downtime and reflection in the day, as a touchstone of one’s life, and so on.
Sturmgeschütz(which in german means assault rifle) is a new Serbian based HNW project that specializes in crude, stark and unrelenting 'walled matter' with a war and death obsession running through it.
“Beauty Without Mercy” finds Norwegian noise-head Lasse Marhaug in a less noisy and more atmospheric mood, as he offers up here a single twenty one minute track that's best described as a doomed ritual drone matter
Jazkammer has been very prolific these days, planning on putting out an album a month (and how anyone's going to catch up with them, heaven knows...) This particular release features Lasse Marhaug (who of course is all over many noise releases in Europe) and is housed in a very professionally designed digipack, which doesn't give you a clue as to what's on this CD.
Annular Cancer is the latest in a steady stream of releases from Antihuman. Antihuman began life in 2003 in Wroclaw Poland and is the working name of Jacek Lechwar.
Prolific Fredrik Klingwall has many projects in different musical genres- but all of his work focuses in on fantasy and horror based themes. This solo album, one of three solo albums he has released, is self described “as dark and haunting neo classical music album that composes horrific music as a soundtrack for your nightmares”.
Robin Piso (Organ/Vocals), Luka van de Poel (Drums) and Pablo van de Poel (Guitars/Vocals ) are the energetic trio called Dewolff. You can immediately catch onto the musical area of influence for this band by looking by the album's psychedelic inspired cover art. Dewolff sound is very deep in the psychedelic rock of the sixties and seventies, mixed with other genres that grew up in that era.
This is the third full length release from this hard hitting yet creative Iowa based HNW project. And the album offers up three tracks of brooding, tense and hypnotic wall-making.
Like those who imported food or perfume from exotic places, synthesiser pioneer Robert Rich appears to have an ambition to repurpose the earthiness of eastern ethnic lore with western technologies. He evolved from building his own analog tone generators in 1976 through to creating preset sound libraries for major music technology manufacturers, and Ylang is the latest in a steady stream of his self-released albums.
“Two Lakes” is an poignant yet soothing album that mixers and blends togeather tuneful yet melancholic and atmospheric electric/acoustic guitar textures, subtle elctroincs and drones with field recordings taken from two coastal lake ecosystems off the coast of New South Wales in Australia.
This weekend saw the first ever European HNW fest 'Staring At wall' take place in Venice. This rather wonderful compilation celebrates this fact, and offers up a track a piece of exclusive and new material from all the eleven acts that took part in the festival- making this sort of like your own mini fest I guess.
Concerning the name and the hand drawn cover, I was expecting some silly grindcore band. But it's nothing really that terrible, just an instrumental thrash-metal band from Iowa.
I don't exactly know why I was sent this sprawling archival double-disc of a rather mainstream rock act. It seems more tailored for review in Record Collector than here.
Ambient musician Daniel Lopatin's latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never, titled "Returnal", tells a story that takes place in the stratosphere, in the crisp, thin air and pure sunlight. It is an occasionally awkward marriage of the intent, clarity and innocence of the original 70's synth music and the lo-fi charm of modern effects pedal driven experimental garage bands.
“Stockings Bloody Stockings” finds the highly prolific and sonically barbaric Dead Body Collection offer up two near on forty minute tracks of urgent, bass heavy and extremely nasty Harsh Noise Wall matter.
“Buio Omega” is a plush yet grim two C40 HNW tribute to the uncomfortable and nasty 1984 Joe D'Amato movie of the same name that told the story of a young man and his necrophilic love for his dead and stuffed girlfriend. Taking part here we have: Italian Alo Girl( aka Cristiano Renzoni who is also in An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter with Richard Ramirez and runs the excellent Urashima label), American White Plague which features Sam Stoxen(of Baculum, ...Massacre. Grain Belt and of courses runner of the great Phage tapes) and his girlfriend Angie Ridgeway. Harsh Noise and HNW US act Churner and Blacked US wall maker Foul.
“The Mark of M” is a c80 tape which offers up two forty minute slices of brutal & mostly unmoving HNW that’s themed around black and white horror movies of the 1940’s, 50’s & 60’s. The Blackmoor Strangler is one of the less prolific projects that texas Noise supremo Richard Ramirez is involved with( a few of the projects he’s connected with are: Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus, Fouke, Vice Wears Black Hose, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter). Also in the project is Geoff Markoff(S.S. Electronics, Viking Movement, Wasp Honeymoon) and Rachel Rasmussen.
The poems of Edgar Allen Poe lie at the very foundations of the dark romanticism underlying today’s death metal and neo-classical thematic choices: from his fantasies of voices from beyond the grave through proto-existential considerations on the futility of life to a more tragic introspection on loneliness and failed relationships. So it is with no surprise that Swedish composer and keyboardist Fredrik Klingwall has chosen nine Poe poems as the basis for this short album as he has been confidently straddling both metal and classical styles in his solo work and as part of Anima Morte and Loch Vostok for the past decade.
Avmakt is the latest’s project from one of the prolific and quality bound artists in working in the European noise scene today; Andreas Brandal whose also in Flesh coffin, Hour Of the Wolf, Drevne Bolesti, and Museums of Sleep. This new project is a quite atmospheric lined take on HNW with some subtle junk metal textures & dramatic/ dark noise moments.
“Santiago” is the second release from Santiago based noise project A.R.GH, and the 3inch mini cd offers up two twelve minute tracks of very dense and muilti-layered noise recordings that take in :the sounds of the city, junk metal textures, crowd noise, and even some harmonic/ musically elements too.
“Are We Experimental?” finds AMT offering up a collection of shorter, more unhinged and unbalancing freak-outs; compared with their normal, more lengthy jam based psychedelic space rock work-outs. And to answer the question posed by the albums title; yes they are, and very brain melting/tripped-out too this time around.
What is Black Metal? Other than the subject must pertain to Satanism in some respect, what exactly are the criteria for giving oneself the Black Metal moniker? Back when the world was new, it meant that you were diametrically opposed to anything Christian, that you were a loner and an elitist and that you expressed yourself to those only that you deemed worthy. Musically, it needed to be raw and unmixed, no clean production or name producer. It had to sound as unrestrained as the subject.
The pieces are all here; how come they didn’t come together? I couldn’t tell you. I listened to db9 twice, then three times, and each time I found myself simply unengaged by it. It’s the sort of experimental / ambient / noise-based music that one can find by the cartload now—technically well-presented, and with more than a little craft and awareness of composition … but somehow, just … bleah.
I'm not often impressed by shock tactics, in music or elsewhere, and the idea of maximum violence, hate and gore in musical form does not particularly appeal to me. When I first saw the cover of Fire in the Head's latest, "Confessions of a Narcissist", which shows a woman or child in bridal white and veil, mutilated... missing most of her face, the hole filled in collage style with images of chunks of anonymous bloody meat for the purposes of the picture... I expected I would dislike the album quite strongly. What a pleasant surprise to find that noise musician Michael Page is a perfectionist with a flair for tastefully mixing noise with strangely polished gothic atmospherics, and quite fluent in various methods of achieving intensity in noise music other than pushing the volume up.