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The place I work regularly has art exhibitions for amateur artists, of which about one per year is half-decent and pretty much all the rest half-assed – and then there’s the special ones, the type that comes by only every five years or so that is downright disturbingly awful. Right now there’s a collection of portraits which in themselves, from a distance, pretty much seem of the half-assed category, with the (oh! how John Wayne Gacy) clowns and the ten-year old twins and the pretty blonde. But one good look and you’re scared shitless. Whoever painted the abominations seems to have confused texture with burnt skin, and consequently every portrait seems of some horribly scarred burn victim – the painting of the ten-year olds, with their smiles and blindingly white teeth and their disfigurements, especially haunts my dreams.
‘Baby, Wolves Abound’, the third EP from Jason Steel, helps prove that first impressions can be deceptive. His deft fingerpicking of ukulele, banjo or hand-made acoustic guitar presents a fine line in unadorned traditional American folk balladry. Meanwhile, over the course of six out of the eight songs, the melodious sweetness in Steel’s voice is offset, like many before him, by a subtle drawl that maybe indicates an American that has chugged the occasional whisky. The combined effect reminds of contemporary fellow travellers who continue to stop by and pay respect to the roots of rock music like the sparser tracks by Will Oldham or even Mark Lanegan. So it was with some surprise to learn that Jason Steel, despite the authenticity of his Americana, is a Yorkshireman now living in London.
For over a decade now Polish experimental musician Bartek Kalinka – better known by his project’s name of XV Parówek – has been bombarding the world with sounds both strange and special, not only through his own project, but also through his label, which has seen releases from the likes of Crank Sturgeon, Richard Ramirez, Torturing Nurse and If, Bwana – among many others. There’s a special sort of intuitive, heart-felt beauty about this label. Its usually great releases most often come wrapped in art which is by no traditional sense beautiful or even pretty, but the minimal and brutally, honestly heart-felt approach combined with the romantically ugly packaging are really quite impressive, and have already converted many a non-believer to a devout Parówekian – this reviewer included.
French three piece The Arrival Of Satan make often unhinged and nearly flying off the rails black metal with a perverse, ugly and often deranged mad-man fury. ‘Vexing Verses’ is the projects second full length album, with a split with Portuguese suicidal Black project Morte Incandescent appearing in between this and their first album Darkness Dealer.
‘North Korea’ is a seared ‘n’ soured Harsh Noise Wall project with often buried vocals- it's a collaboration between Canadian based Ryan O'Neill( who’s also in the Harsh wall meet Spazz noise project Earhate) and the depression blow extreme noise of Washington based Cracked Dome.
‘Concrete Vamp’ finds this Danish HNW project offering up three tracks and fifty minutes worth dense and seared 'wall' matter that’s both ear carnal melting and often quite moorish.
‘In O To Infinity’ finds the always rewarding Acid Mother Temple homing their sound into a more repetition and loop based proposition with each of the four near on twenty minute tracks staying in the same chosen key through-out their lengths. It all creates a deeply hypnotic, trance inducing and triped-out jams that stand as some of the projects best work thus far, with each track offering it's own distinctive tripped & spaced-out vibe.
Originally released in 1995, Hatesville subverts the beatnik poetry album Beatsville (released by Rod McKuen, an associate of Kerouac and Ginsberg, in 1959) into a series of predictably hate-filled spoken word pieces from Boyd Rice and fellow provocateurs Adam Parfrey (writer and boss of the brave, wayward Feral House publishing company), The Partridge in the Pear Tree (née Shaun Partridge, founder of quasi-religion The Partridge Family Temple) and Jim Goad (writer made famous by his infamous Answer Me! magazine of the early nineties). Soleilmoon‘s cheesily named sub-label, Caciocavallo, have lovingly remastered this series of spiteful sermons for both CD and vinyl, this time with three new tracks (two from Partridge, one from Rice).
It’s part of the lifespan of any genre to be expanded radically, to find itself crossbred and mutated and ultimately become not a container but a starting point. It happened with jazz, it happened with pretty much every form of popular music, and it has most definitely happened with anything that gets nominally filed as “electronic”. What started with the smooth burble of Human League and Yaz has turned into the glitch-stutter-and-stretch of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and—yep—Kouhei Matsunaga.
Hong Kong based ‘Hatred In Eyes’ may have quite a clichéd Power Electronics name, but this ep is an rewarding and at times quite original sounding mixture creativity seared PE with some sombre, muffled & unexpectedly emotional string loops.
Anthrax's fourth album 1987 ‘Among The Living’ was the bands defining and most consistent moment of their 20 plus year career. It just seemed to have everything in perfect and considered shape to make the best refinement of their often melody and mosh rich brand of trash so rewarding & distinctive.
If there’s one distinct advantage that imaginary soundtracks have over the regular type, it’s that a godawful movie cannot stand in the way of enjoyment of the music written for it. What’s more, a good imaginary soundtrack sets loose your imagination and creates, before your mind’s eye, a galore of visual imagery that can be as awe-inspiring, as unsettling, or as heart-breaking as your own gray matter can manage. I guess that all music, in a sense, has that quality – that it may conjure up imagery, stories – but it is especially the brand of evocative instrumental music, adorned with enigmatic and/or generic titles, that drowns us in cinematic scenes that exist only in our mind.
Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper were a husband and wife duo who in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s earned a name for themselves with their often righteous and god fearing mix of country, bluegrass and gospel music. This compilation brings together some of their best, offten quirky & morose songcraft in a highly enjoyable twenty five track collection.
‘Maniac’ is Vomir’s Harsh Noise wall tribute to the ultra sleazy and violent 1980’s US slasher of the same name which followed the exploits of fictional new York serial killer Frank Zito. This CDR consists of a single forty six minute 'wall' of crude, crass and nasty HNW matter that fits perfectly the nihilistic and sleazy feel of the film.
This collaboration brings together Canadian based noise project The Rita, whose one of the orignators of the HNW sound. And Italian harsh noise/HNW artist Alo Girl,whose one of the more recent innovators of the HNW form. On offer here are two sides of 12 inch vinyl which each offer up a fourteen minute long track of thick, deep and impenetrable ‘wall’ of noise.
‘The Dark Bleeding Gods’ is the second collection of rare & out of print tracks from the now defunct avant grade, darkly nasty and deranged Uk Black metal project Emit which morphed into the safer sounding,Mediaeval soaked, discordant guitar and organ high project Hammemit.
This wonderfully named project is an Giallo obsessed HNW collaboration between Richard Ramirez (Black Leather Jesus, Werewolf Jerusalem, Vice Wears Black Hose, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, ect) and Thomas Mortigan(RU-486, Black Leather Jesus, black metal band Octagon and onwer/runner of Destructive Industries label). Night Prowl Anthems is the projects third release, and it features four mainly short(by HNW standards) and moorish Harsh Noise Wall and static textured tracks.
“My frustration is that there are no frustrations,” remarks Efterklang’s Casper Clausen on the ‘behind the scenes’ documentary accompanying this live CD and DVD of the group performing their critically-acclaimed 2007 album, ‘Parades’, in collaboration with The Danish National Chamber Orchestra. This comment neatly summarises the main issue with the music on both the original album and this new version: by lacking in frustration, it also lacks degrees of contrast in tension and release, the type that can incite drama and stimulate through counterpointing conformity with deviance, cleanliness with dirt or the intellect with the visceral. The compositions on ‘Parades’ have plenty of the former but too little of the latter, and being originally written for orchestral accompaniment, its rearrangement is no different.
‘Wallwhores’ is a three 90 minute tape box set which brings together six sides of tape(though in reality there’s only three lots of forty five minute tracks here- as all the tapes are double A-Sides) from three artists who focus in on the more stripped, thinner and mainly unchanging HNW matter. Participating here are Chicago based Insurgent( aka Mack Chami who’s also in the creative yet violent Power electronics middle eastern tinged project Koufar & thicker more bombarding HNW project Bachir Gemayel ) , Dutch based UN( aka Kevin Jansen whose more know project is Svartvit) and Swedish based Missing Girls(aka Karl T who’s also of course in Audrey Hepburn obsessed HNW project Skönhet, along with other HNW project Självhat, he also runs HarshFuckedForLife label which put out this set).
German HNW project Namazu Dantai (aka Sascha Mandler) really seems to be focusing in on the seasons of late- first we had ‘Winter Assault’ on the excellent Phage tape label and now we have ‘Constant Inner Autumn’ on Bane records. And as with all of Namazu Dantai work, and for that matter all of Mr Mandlers work in general (Izanami's Labour Pains & Mazakon Tactics) this is an often complex brutal and very rewarding ride.
The word interesting can be a deadly insult in the wrong hands—most specifically, when used as a dismissive catch-all description for someone else’s creative endeavor. I came this close to typing the I-word when writing my first draft of this review, and I think I know why. I was stuck in that odd halfway-house of critical curiosity that stands between liking something for its ingredients and being unimpressed with the execution of the whole. It was “interesting”, without ever actually being good.
I guess it’s just pure coincidence, but the disc I randomly pick to review after having worked my way through September Collective’s Always Breathing Monster, a religious album in every sense but the traditional one – maybe we should settle for spiritual, then – is Brown’s Bathing a Leper, a record dedicated to Meher Baba. I’m not sure what the extent of his fame was, but for anyone whose knowledge of Hinduism and claims to manifestations of its deities is just a bit rusty, Meher Baba was an Indian guru whose claim to fame was his 1954 declaration of Avatarhood – that he was indeed a manifestation of a deity on earth. Among other things, he also remained completely silent for the largest part of his life, starting out in 1925 and not uttering a word until his death in 1969 – though the communicating via alphabet boards and hand gestures seems like cheating things a bit, but hey, what do I know?
Shining Sex is another HNW project from the highly prolific and multiple project connected Richard Ramirez(of Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus ,An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Vice Wears Black Hose and many other projects). 'Tender Flesh' is the third release from this project and it is influenced by Spanish sleazy and horror director Jess Franco 1998 film of the same name which tells of a couple who are invited to an island to play sex games, but end up been hunted down and killed.
This thick ‘n’ nasty sonic themed C42 tape brings together a side long track a piece from French HNW master Vomir and Spanish Harsh noise/HNW project Mixturizer.