Loading
‘Triumph Of The Broken Will’ is the first nihilistic & nasty sonic fruits from the new Irish label Order Of The HNW. The album offers up three splendid, bleak & caustic tracks that mix together punk & doom hinted bass drones with seared & hope melting walls of noise.
Dead Body Collection is a Serbian based one man HNW project that specializes in thick, crusty & suffocating ‘walls’ of noise. The project has only been in existence for under a year & ‘Post-Mortem Examination’ is their third release…though Dr Alex(who is Dead Body Collection) is also in power electronics meets weird noise duo [C. T. D.] who’s work goes back to 2008.
Don’t be fooled by the cute oriental bunny girl on the front cover of ‘Pet Therapy’- there’s nothing cute, cuddle or nice about this slice of sonic nastiness. On offer here are two lengthy slices of thick & brain boiling, to fairly minimalistic & ear scrubbing HNW matter.
It must be pretty hard being Alec Empire. I don’t mean to suggest the guy’s life went down the drain somewhere over the last ten years, or that he’s, emotionally, privately, down in the dumps or something alike, but it seems tough shit to have been at the forefront of the scene specializing in that blend of hardcore, experimental electronics and punk rock dubbed digital hardcore for half of the 90s, and then to’ve sort of been chucked out of it, or rather, to have the whole scene chucked out with you. Fact of the matter is, digital hardcore, at least by today’s standards, is a dated, awful sort of thing, suitable mainly, if not only, for reminiscing (“Oh, friends, remember listening to this and thinking the world of it?”) and brushing aside.
With ‘It Is All That Is Made’ Jozef Van Wissem has created a solitary, contemplative moody piece of timeless folk music. Performing on the historic Renaissance lute (an instrument I was hitherto unfamiliar with) and absorbing influences from all throughout history, Wissem somehow synthesizes it all into this incredibly simple yet remarkably deep music that seems simultaneously of our modern age and hundreds of years old.
‘Audio For Lovers’ finds highly respected Italian mood setter Fabio Orsi offering up two disc & two hours worth of emotional & nostalgic rich ambient music. The album sees Orsi utilizing his usual mixture of stuck & poignant gitar scape, sad, melodic & creaking piano dwells, aged analogue synth matter & a sprinkling of emotive & hazy field recordings.
‘Zen Automata Volume One: V’ is all about very repetitive & looped machine like drones. It’s certainly not a easy listening by any means & I can see that a lot of people will not get on with this, but if like me you enjoy very repetitive sonic torture like HNW matter or stuck caustic drone music this could well be for you.
Slaughter-Fetus are a industrially caustic Harsh Noise wall project from Louisiana. This nasty & violent 3” CDR is the projects tribute to Takashi Miike’s film Addition & films notorious, nasty & sadistic Needle torture scene.
'Heavy Masonry' is all about creating a very thick & constant black jittering wall of evil sounding & murky static tone. Inside the black spray paint of black plastic case Griz+zlor offers up just over twenty minutes of grim, nihilistic yet rewarding ‘wall’ making.
Like many noise activists within the experimental doom/dark ambient/sludge scenes, Indiana’s Kyle Willey and Adam Cooley have been hyperactive, producing around fifty releases over the past five years under various guises on CDr, cassette or MP3. Most of these are available to download free-of-charge with torrents seeded by the artists themselves.
Here is one of those compilations that seems like it’s going to be all fusty theoretical mummery but instead boots open a door to uncharted sonic lands. Most people will probably think the target audience for this disc is music students, but I’d wager most anyone reading a site like Musique Machine would find this fascinating. I know I did. It’s a little like the aural equivalent of a literary anthology from a language never previously translated into English: Wow, where has this stuff been all this time?
‘Chainsaw Majini’ is my first taster of this Japanese HNW act & this 3” cdr is one hell of a brutal, unforgiving & brain grinding attack; like the sonic equivalent of being attacked by a chainsaw that's fully revered up & ready to split flesh ‘n’ bone.
‘Temporal Death’ is all about accelerating dread that turns very nasty indeed as the album swings from it’s dark ambient beginnings up to seared, shifting, sadistically juddered Harsh Noise & Harsh Noise Wall matter.
Simon Scott’s debut full-length Navigare comes to us courtesy of the fittingly-named Miasmah label, since “miasma” is an appropriate description for this record. Imagine the sonic version of greasy smoke rolling through the room you’re sitting in—but smoke with a whole congeries of subtle scents and maybe even flavours mixed in with it. It’s an atmosphere that suffocates and blinds as much as it soothes and uplifts. But if you assume this stuff always has to be uplifting and soothing, then you’re probably reading the wrong reviews.
Robin Crutchfield started his musical life back in the mid 1970’s when he formed & played keyboards in the seminal & respected no-wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori. His new album 'The Hidden Folk' is million miles away from no-waves jerking & often discordant sonic world; this offer up collection nineteen short tracks of earthy, haunted sometimes cute, sometimes eerier folk, music box unfolds & woodland bound moodsetting
'Musica Non Grata' is the second album of 12 full length albums that will be released through-out 2010 by the highly creative & respected noise/general experimental project Jazkamer.This three track album focus in on seared & teeth grinding guitar scapes, & feed-back based caustic drone work-outs.
'Karasu' is the forth album in the series of thirteen Japanese Bird releases on Important records by the long running & highly prolific noise project Merzbow. This release follows the pattern of the other releases in the series thus far with a very predominate use of live improvised drums through-out most of the tracks on offer here.
Bobby Bradford, Tom Heasley and Ken Rosser have a created a lengthy record of subdued, most free jazz styled nocturnal improvisations with "Varistar", using only their respective instruments, the trumpet, the tuba and the guitar.
By day, Spain’s Alonso Urbanos is a graphic designer creating complex, photoshopped sleeves and flyers for metal and post-industrial scenes, but by night he has been translating the dystopian visions he’s shared with many of his clients into harsh electronics. His latest release, Deranged Prototype, neatly presents two such tracks of just over ten minutes each.
Number 6 of this noise labels Portrait Series offers up a short(by HNW standards) sharp, nasty & thick slice of wall making from the French master of Harsh Noise wall scene Vomir.
Epidemia Mortalis are a relatively unknown (hell they don’t even have an Encyclopaedia Metallum page!) French Black metal band who have a very necro early 90’s Scandinavian feel about them. This disc brings together the bands first two promos & offers up fifty minutes of enjoyable mid-pace black metal craft with some quite interesting twist ‘n’ turns along the way.
Grain Belt's self titled full length album is a searing brutal & clamouring attack on your sonic sensers that utilizers brutal metal & junk abuse together with very fierce harsh noise attacks.
I’ve enjoyed what little Josh Lay stuff I’ve heard in the past & appreciated his quite distinctive mix of: noise matter, unhinged ambience, black metal bays & unhinged gruff/ demonic voclising. But I’ve never felt fully satisfied with any full release as they've often felt a bit hit ‘n’ miss from track to track & the intensity/ insanity of the sound often seemed to waver somewhat. But with ‘Serotonin Haze’ he seems to have got everything near perfect in it’s attack, consistency of atmosphere & general grim displeasure.
This 90 minute split tape offers up two sides noise, over layered soundtrack samples, dialogue, sexual moans & voodoo drums that is meant to be a tribute to the great & prolific Spanish horror/ sex director Jess Franco & frankly both sides of tape are very sloppy, messy & thrown together both sonically & artwork wise too.