Loading
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.
“Bottom Heavy” is the 3" debut release from this Fairfax USA project that boils up an effective and flesh heavy brew of HNW with some slight Power Electronics & plan Harsh Noise touches.
"Sun Broken” took me by surprise. The cover art suggested, at least to me, that something very abstract or harsh is waiting for me inside. But instead, what I discovered is a refreshing mixture of music that immediately brought to mind Tangerine Dream and Ozric tentacles-like psychedelic/space rock. Their sound also has tinges of seventies rock, along with a dirty distortion edge that brought to mind more modern noise rock.
Lugano Fell is James Taylor (no, not that James Taylor) who for twelve years has been a member of Swayzak a UK tech house band, After all this time working in the dance field Taylor decided to do something completely different and came up with Lugano Fell.
Lasse Marhaug is apparently a noise veteran with many important releases under his belt, but "The Quiet North" is the first I've heard from him. This release is a single track, 29 minutes of heady harsh noise that sometimes displays the minimalism of HNW but is very clearly being actively performed by Lasse Marhaug.
“The Process” fires into your listening space an unrelenting, thick, nasty and hope battering slice of HNW matter that hammers and rages against you for nearly 80 minutes of unbreakable sickly & caustic sonic mayhem.
Pinche Madre is the 2008 creation from Remoteband, released by Russian label Abgurd in a limited edition CDR. To say any more, or try to give further information would be futile. Mainly because there is not much to find, even by scouring the internet there’s no webpage, MySpace or Facebook. Hard to believe in this technological age, but Remoteband has appeared to go off the grid by not even being there in the first place.
“Vol VI” offers up two very different sides of sonic work from this prolific, extreme noise and experimental Minneapolis based project. Side one offers up a very tight and rewarding slice of thick jitter bound wall making, and Side two an building & layered slice of experimental sound- scaping.
Eyeless Face are a two piece male and female project from Pittsburgh who summon up a atmospheric soaked & brooding mixture of:flapping and doomed bass guitar textures, sinister to spacey electronics & guitar noise texturing. Along with elements of junk metal manipulation, slurred electronics and jack-knife yet sleazed percussive industrial beat work-outs that appear here and there along the way.
The Incredible String Bands first self titled album original appeared back in 1966, and it showed a lot more stripped down and acoustic guitar based sound from the often muilt-layered and genre mixing psychedelic folk sound they became know and loved for.
The front cover of this new untitled album from Vomir features a simple picture of a cracked speaker which is extremely fitting- as for the near on forty minutes Vomir lays down a crushing and caustic slice of HNW that awaits for you when you slip this disk into your chosen playing slot.
Marinos Koutsomichalis claims his music is about texture and qualities of sound, not expression. Certainly, his textures are often as subtle and perfectly processed as the work of Aube or z'ev, high praise coming from me. There is only very loose structure to the pieces, an important distinction from the often mathematical, precise compositional work of the aforementioned artists. He admits this. It sometimes leads to an awkward and discontinuous listening experience; your time is apparently not important to the artist, who also happens to be an incredibly patient, meticulous man. To some, I suppose this merely means he is uncompromising.
A fair number of us, I think, give some token credence to the concept of the earth as a living thing. This album—the latest since Winderen’s amazing Heated: Live in Japan—brings that notion to life in a way that’s as immediate and physical as the previous album. Like that record, I didn’t just want to listen to this music; I wanted to make a meal out of it.
My first listening to the this album by Ulv left me feeling like there was almost no sound on the disk, but I later found that "Stille Storm" is not actually quite as minimal as first impression may convince one it is.
Ah, good ol’ harsh noise. What would we do without it? Sure, we’ve got our power electronics, and our harsh noise walls, and all our various derivatives and sub- and super-genres, and we can probably manage pretty well with just the crunching filth of HNW and/or the misogynist mania of PE, but every once in a while, still, we experience a craving for relentless screeching and white noise and ear-splitting feedback, and it’s at those times that we pull out As Loud As Possible or Love & Noise and fall in love all over again. Vestigial Limb’s Ray Shinn never lost harsh noise out of sight, though, and his project is the best expression of his love for the genre one could wish for.
What’s the best way to kill a throbbing headache? Aspirine’s probably the most conventional solution. Personally, however, I find the best way to get rid of it is by knocking it up another notch. Nothing makes a searing headache feel better than blasting some particularly painful harsh noise at full volume. Some of my most ecstatic and hallucinatory listening I’ve experienced while high on throbbing migraines. Driving home from work and enjoying a massive headache just the other day, I pop in the ruckus that is the White Dog/Gomeisa split. And immediately feel better.
Obskuria is a very large neo-psychedelic group from Germany, and this is their second album. It's a very good mix of retro-late 60s/early 70s psychedelia, acid and doom-metal with a futuristic Hawkwind feel.
The two groups on this split, Ur and Iron Molar, compliment each other well; they are the same kind of music, the same balance of subgenres. They rest neatly between dark ambient, drone and noise. Unfortunately, both groups' tracks sometimes drag on without becoming truly immersive or building momentum, and display an occasional lack of textural creativity.