Loading
“The Unutterable” original appeared in 2000 and it showed the Fall with a lot more denser synth and electroinca laced sound, it’s also one of the more consistent and replayble Fall albums from the 90’s & 00’s. This 2008 reissue features the original album along with a second disc of an alternative mixed version of the album that has a more sparse & ragged feel to it, which gives a nice contrast to the orginals meaty sounding release.
“Renonce” is the first major indie label release from brutal and unrelenting French HNW act Vomir, and thankful there’s no sell-out or harmonic respite here. The fifty minute track on offer here is classic and pure sonic nihilism of the highest order- it’s the audio equivalent of head-butting a wall of pure hopelessness, dispair and darkness, over and over again.
This is a one-man-band avant-metal project featuring Davide Tiso from the group Ephel Duath. The liner notes mention his interest in Black Metal but in the photos he's not in corpse paint. Eraldo Bernocchi from Italian esoteric outfit Sigillum S is in the producer's chair as well. The music is largely instrumental, but unlike many bands of this sort it's a bit more captivating.
For the record, I've never been much for bands named after cars. Of course one time in my life I did drive a Pontiac, certainly not one of my favorite kind of vehicles. I wouldn't mind a band called Studebaker though... (Now THAT car had some class!)
By the name alone, I was expecting some thuggish white-rap band like Insane Clown Posse. Mugstar are actually one of those bands on the more experimental and instrumental side of alternative rock.
Esoteric are fairly new on the block. A subdivision of Cherry Red they’ve concentrated on reissuing some long lost classics of the 70s and early 80s. They’ve put back into print some great albums, mid period Hawkwind, The Deviants, Daevid Allen, Mick Farren, all great, long out of print wonderful albums that deserved to be reissued to enthral and excite another generation. So I came to this album hoping to find something new from that era that would excite me as much as some of those other releases have.
It’s been a while since anyone was lucky enough to go on a Cyclobe cruise, affording the deep listener a journey along transcendental tramways that stretch from the dark corners of the psyche to the wide, open reaches of astral bodies. The last opportunity was in April 2007 when they opened the Donau Festival with their first ever live performance (despite recording since 1998) - their only sighting since the release of their truly terrifying third album, Paraparaparallelogrammatica, at the end of 2004. So there has been a perceivable gap, a dry period, in which those who developed a taste for their brand of delirious, electro-acoustic theatre have been left wanting, bereft of their potent intensities, in need of a very real lift from corporeality.
Muslimgauze was the musical project of Bryn Jones, who unfortunately passed away in 1999. Uzi Mahmood is the 2010 re-release from SolielMoon records. Originally it was released as a 4 song 12” EP back in 1998. An interesting fact behind this is while only 4 songs were contained on the EP; in reality Jones had recorded a whole cd worth of material. Now in 2010 we find the cd released in its entirety.
The gruesomely entitled “Choking on Your Own Blood and Spit” finds Four Flies, which is another project of the hugely prolific and muilt-project linked Richard Ramirez- the project started off as a four piece but is now thinned down to a two piece and features Ramirez & Robert Newsome (White Gimp Mask). The tape offers up two 15 minute slices of intense and bombarding walled matter with a bloody & sadistic Giallo theme running through them.
Regarding Us Sadly is a new, tense and detailed static texturing/ static based HNW project that brings together J Cadle (from Foul, ...Massacre & Oasis Of Fear) and the perverse mind behind Static texturing based project I Am Slut. This self titled c20 is the first release from this project.
Fecalove's "Forever Young" is an album of sputtering, violent harsh noise with no boundaries and a deranged, sex crazed feeling. This album is about as coherent and thoughtful as a depression fueled binge drinking session that ends in a blackout. It is the submissive who bids their dominant beat them to the brink of death. It an explosion of feeling, unhinged and cathartic, ultimately too intense for most listening situations. And yet for all that, there is formidable craft behind it all.
This is a very odd 3" CDr by Toronto sound artist and print company head Alex Durlak. This is supposedly his first recording after a long hiatus from "the tail end of a bleak winter" and it does sound quite dark and foreboding.
Horchata is Michael Palace, an electronics artist who usually does dance music (from what I can tell from his label's website.) This is supposed to be a "Dark Ambient" work but this release strikes me as merely Ambient to the point of being New Age.
Bektop is the 4th release by French electronic/glitch project Kabutogani. It’s released on CD by the influential German label Mille Plateau, and in digtal file format through Electroton. The album features click & cut-esque patterns of glitch work combined with both tantalizing & industrial style atmospheres over a span of 12 tracks.
Phase II are a late 70’s to early 80’s American based progressive-folk band who have recently reformed. This rather wonderful collection brings together a selection of old and new work from this distinctive and creative project, that sadly never got their the recognition they clearly deserved when they where around the first time around.
It’s all about the flow. 100 Jahre Einsamkeit (the German translation of “100 Years of Solitude”) has been culled from various tracks found throughout the Staubgold catalog, and assembled into a single, near-continuous mix. It’s only until we get to track 7 that there’s an actual silence between tracks, and by then we’re already so hip-deep into the groove we barely notice.
"Pipe smoking on a Balloon" by Fhievel is another fine release from the AFE label, which has many great releases in its growing arsenal. Fhievel is the Italian project of one Luca Bergero, who, as he describes, is “looking for the balance between opposite sound sources in his music, bringing together computer based sounds and music concrete”. Fhievel's album, like many of AFE's releases, comes in a very nice professionally printed paper envelope and is limited to one hundred copies.
This projects name and album title is somewhat misleading, they both suggest a retired bluegrass singer trying to jump back on the wagon. But instead stands a trio that is most likely to make anyone buying this album for some real country music, very dazed and confused. Though the albums cover, a Robert Wyatt sort of combination between naïve child's drawing and a demented alien scribble, does reveal in fact there will be no country music here.
“Ursula” is a compilation of Giallo themed HNW tracks, and it’s put out by Richard Ramirez's H Series label. The collection takes it’s name from 1978 giallo sleaze-fest The Sister of Ursula(La sorella di Ursula) which follows the killing spree of a black gloved killer who only preys on promiscuous women.
This split double disc release offers up an album a piece of thick and dense static worship from these two unrelenting and extreme Serbian based HNW acts.
“Om Namah Shivaya”(which is a very powerful Hindu mantra) offers up a single nineteen minute track of fixed and highly hypnotic wall-making from this Hindu/Buddhist obsessed wall-maker from the Czech Republic.
Impulsy Stetoskopu delivers us three projects of harsh noise on one cd. Bipolar Joe, The Sleep Sessions and Vilgoc are all featured (in addition to the last track which features The Sleep Sessions and Vilgoc together playing live in 2008). Each project brings their own abrasive touch to the festivities.
Timo Reuber, a writer of screen plays for television as well as a solo recording artist for Staubgold, has known the label’s founder, Markus Detmer, for over 18 years, all but four of which have seen them collaborate across occasional recordings and hundreds of live performances as Klangwart. Sommer seeks to celebrate the tenure of their musical relationship by compiling pieces new and old, all thematically underpinned by the light and heat of summer.
Cindytalk's new album, "Up Here in the Clouds" delivers several well-blended flavors of warm, whitewash ambience, consistently pleasantly noisy and stubbornly analog. The unique, lightly distorted timbral characteristics of guitar amplifiers are all over the album, but the clearly discernable sound of a guitar is nowhere to be found. Still, it's no surprise to learn that the band used to (and still occasionally does?) operate in less experimental arenas, and sport a rock band style line up with keyboards, drums, bass, guitar, and vocals. The liner notes of the album say only that these recordings were made by Gordon Sharp, the man listed as vocalist of the group, suggesting that this album was likely a solo endeavor.