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‘Winter Assault’ is an extremely apt title for this c40 from Germany based HNW project Namazu Dantai (aka Sascha Mandler who’s also in the excellent, but unhinged & brain screwing noise meets shaman music/ world music project Izanami’s Labour Pains). As Mandler offers up two sides/two 'walls' of punishing storm torn & ripped HNW matter which really does make you feel like your staggering through a battering & wind tearing winter hurricane or violent storm.
This disc brings together two soundtracks from the late 60’s by Stefano Torossi- an Italian film composer who scored a fairly meagre 20 plus films between 1963 up to 1999; through he also wrote for & collaborated with 60’s pop/rock bands such as the Italian beat/pop group Chameleons.
‘Black Shabbis’ finds the usually jazz & Dub focused Jamie Saft making a devil loving & often ritual hued Jewish heavy metal record that goes from mean ‘n’ moody, up to doomed metallic’s, though to speeding yet controlled trash-outs, onto more tuneful metallic lined matter and beyond. It all makes for a very varied, enjoyable and at times quite tongue in cheek, yet intelligent & knowing metal ride that mangers nicely to blanced riff dramatics, brooding organ tones & lots of creativity.
Last Winter We Didn’t Sing presents eight takes on the winter months, most choosing the guitar to distil an ambient Americana with hints of folk and country established by labels like Chicago’s Kranky and Thrill Jockey. Here, it is stripped down to the barest essentials leaving a sombre, resonant soundtrack that could be employed to accompany sympathetic scenes of rural traditions threatened by industrialisation or harsh weather.
The title of this double-disc set is of course a nod to Benjamin Britten’s landmark work, but has about as much in common with that staple of middle-school music classes as your average RZA album does. I’m not sure I classify as “young” anymore (I hit 40 next year), but this still served as my guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, a New York-based composer of ethereal, slow-moving but ever-changing and ultimately lovely music.
‘Touch Strings’ a two disc cd set that brings together over two hours worth of Phill Niblock’s distinctive & often sonical vast take on the drone genre. This great collection shows once more why he’s one of the most respected & celebrated practitioners' of the drone form.
In the brief poem in the booklet that accompanies Hisegawa-Shizuo’s Lift, we are introduced to an anonymous narrator who attempts to capture early sunrise in a hat – or so I interpret it - and finds himself successful – “perfect”, he mutters, before the poem unwinds into outright, abstract strangeness. As much as this surrealistic scene presents an all-out impossibility paired with downright absurdity, its surreal, imaginative grasp is certainly intriguing and strangely befitting of the musical work itself.
The ‘Brainkiller’ boxset brings together four c100 tapes worth of often thick & unchanging Harsh Noise wall matter, with the four acts involved offer up two fifty minute ‘walls’ a piece. The acts taking part here are Sarajevo based Smrznik, Croatian based Placenta Lyposuction, Italian based Fukte and last, but hardly least we have French based Vomir.
Hash’s self titled debut album offers up one lengthy hour long track of tense, meshing & juddering Harsh Noise Wall matter, which keeps you nicely pined down & in-tranced through-out it's running time.
This single sided 80 minute tape offers up two lengthy dwells in hope drenching, nasty & grim wall making from Norwegian based Hour of the Wolf- which is of course the HWN project of the highly prolific Andreas Brandal who is also in Flesh Coffin, Drevne Bolesti and many other projects.
This 12 inch vinyl split offers up a side a piece of thick ‘n’ nasty HNW from the French Wall master Vomir & the relatively new, but highly prolific German based HNW project Ptomain who first appeared last year & since has put out seventeen releases thus far.
Morgvir are a one-man finish based black metal project who offer up mid-pace, ambient, lo-grade & horror licked synth Black mettlics. ‘Towards The Black Horizon’ is the projects forth released CDR album.
For those whose roots are firmly planted behind a laptop in the studio, live albums may at first seem at odds with the assumed activity of constant refinement through engineering. However, the use of live improvisation is not only a more productive route to laying down tracks unshackled by the hesitation and fussiness encouraged by computer-based sequencing, but it also generates results both unpredictable and unachievable through any other means. These results are also more likely to produce organic and metaphysical qualities that are often lacking in the subjugated sterility of purely digital composition.
The almost all-black cover art and Chinese characters on the cover, as well as the guitar glittering in the gloom on the back of the sleeve, led me to believe I was about to be sucked into Keiji Haino / Fushitsusha territory. Wonderful! — Well, that’s not where I ended up, although I can’t complain about the trip I did go on.
Remember trip-hop? Yes, this was the hip blend of hip-hop, electronics and, often, depressed female singers that was hugely popular halfway through the 90s. Portishead, Massive Attack, Morcheeba – each unleashed their own brand of heart-breakingly melancholy music on the world, and fall for it we did. Yet revisiting an album like Portishead’s Dummy now, fifteen years after the fact, doesn’t work as well as it should. If anything did not age well it’s trip-hop. Out-dated beats, 90s aesthetics, artificial grainy vinyl crackle – there’s so much to take offence to. Yet though trip-hop, in its 90s form, has sort of kicked the bucket, much more interesting and timeless derivatives (if such a term is even fitting) have sprung up in its wake. Heck, even Portishead made a glorious return to the music scene – their 2008 release Third is one of the most harrowingly beautiful things you’ll ever hear.
Be Maledetto Now! are an Italian duo who make wonderfully hypnotic, often eerily & haunted harmonic space bound analogue snyth scapes. This twelve inch is part one of their first full lenght debut album with part two coming in the form of a cd.
Hunyadi Páncélgránátos Hadosztály are a Transylvania based Power electronics project & with this their first release they brutal rape & regurgitate old Hungarian military songs from WW2 in quite a rewarding & nasty manner.
It’s incredibly interesting to see what diverse ranges of sounds very minimal set-ups can yield. That goes for both traditional instruments and electronics or other non-musical sound sources, I’d say. Consider, for instance, Aube works such as Pages from the Book or the Millennium series, for which single sound sources were used to create hugely diverse sound scapes. Or, at the more musical end of the spectrum, jazz saxophone player Evan Parker, whose solo sax works such as The Snake Decides sound like anything but works that were conceived either solo or with only a sax.
'A Walk In The Park’ offers up a nice unhinged,atmospheric & at times quite doomy & creepy improv mixture of electric & acoustic guitar elements, electronics, some noise textures & the odd splattering of doomed piano matter. This release brings together highly respected & versatile noise/experimental artist Norwegian born Andreas Brandal(Flesh Coffin,Hour Of the Wolf, Drevne Bolesti, solo work, ect) & fellow Norwegian guitarist Hans Kristian Senneseth( Lupus Golem, Nullpluss).
‘The Shape Of Static To Come’ is a highly rewarding, involving & brutal emersion in static rich HNW & minimalistic HNW making taking in a thirty five minute track a piece from Chicago based Insurgent & Italian based TFT.
‘La Rossa Dalla Pelle Che Scotta’ takes it’s name and inspiration from 1971 Italian/Turkish Giallo movie of the same name (it’s US title was The Red-Headed Corpse) which tells the story of a penniless artists who given an mannequin in a park which he takes home & it turns seemingly into a fiery femme fatale who takes over his life and starts a killing spree.
‘Another Merzbow Records’ (no, it’s not my bad grammar that is the title) is a three disc collection that brings together compilation tracks, split release tracks & various odds & ends from the long standing king of Japanese noise Merzbow.
‘The Black Mausoleum’ is the first release from this Dutch based project and their atmospheric to caustic guitar drone based sound. On offer here is a single twenty five minute track that goes from chilling & harmonically revolving to screaming & darkly seared.
‘A Banishing Ritual’ is album number three from Chet Scott’s (of Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis and Glass throat records) metallic & folk/rock project Blood of the Black Owl. And it sees him offering up a single track in four 'movements', which offers up 40 minutes worth of ritual, primal & experimental sonic matter that mixers together elements of : doom, black metal, industrial, drone & brooding ambience, folk, rock & tribal music into a very distinctive & original sonic vision.