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Aurora Borealis unleash this stoically uncompromising slab of avant metal, raging against a tide of trite, gimic led black and doom metal, while steering a path away from ambient wash out to plunge headlong into the void.
I am A Slut may sound like a Power Electronics project, but instead there an polish based project who deal in very rewarding & often quite stripped jitter ‘n’ judder bound HNW.
“Barriers” offers up five tracks worth of thick and stern wall-making from this Müllheim, Germany based one-man HNW project. Taking in splits & comps the project has racked up a impressive twenty seven releases since it’s start back in summer of 2009.
“Remains” is a split CDR album that sees theses two Baltic state based Hash Noise Wall projects boiling up each a twenty minute plus slice of their own distinct form of Wall-making.
Static Mantra are a Czech Republic based Harsh Noise wall project whose focus/ obsession is Hinduism & Buddhism. “Om Shri Mahakala Hung Phet” offers-up a single hour long brutal mantra in locked wall-making.
“Odium” is collaboration and a split tape set between two active Harsh Noise wall acts in the form of: Chicago based Bachir Gemayel(aka Mac Chami who also in the excellent minimalistic HNW project Insurgent & the creative yet violent Power electronics middle eastern tinged project Koufar) and Italian based Terminal Erection(aka Nicola Vinciguerra whose also in the creative yet perverse Power electronics project Fecalove & often more surreal/ horror filled noise collective of Splinter vs. Stalin). The two C40 tape set features a side long track a piece from each artists, then two side long collaborative pieces.
Stasis:001 is a wonderful new compilation that brings together 13 tracks from some of the worlds most respected Harsh Noise Wall acts. It’s also the first release from new the HNW only label Stasis, which has been set up by Cole Peters whose of course is also in the great & creative Canadian walled noise project Gomeisa.
Dan E, also known as Krimson, has released a large number of mostly noise oriented releases as Churner. "Static Beauty" is the best selling album on Churner's own Violent Noise Atrocity label, and it's not hard to see why. The sound is meaty, rough, physical and often improvisational as many forms of noise are... yet absolutely possessed of a sense of beauty (as indicated by the album title), drama and even melody, in several indisputable cases.
Adjectives begin to come immediately to mind whenever I put on the first track of any album. In the case of Winterlands, the adjective is “intimate”. It feels like I’m right in the room with the musicians, thanks to the engineering and recording.
Though labelled at a collaboration, this CDR is also somewhat of a split, featuring noisy solo tracks from Reaching and Wolverine Carcass, as well as the two working together. At least for the purposes of this particular disk, Reaching is closer to avant garde sound sculpture and research, while Wolverine Carcass is pure power electronics.
This C90 tape offers up two side long tracks of unrelenting and hope battering Harsh Noise Wall matter from this sadly now defunct Texas based project.
“Crawling In Chaos” finds the highly talented & prolific Norwegian noise-head Andreas Brandal (Flesh coffin, Hour Of the Wolf, Drevne Bolesti, solo work, ect) creating a texturally varied and horror atmosphere rich mixture of detailed junk metal composition & seared yet brooding noise matter.
Thirdsex is quickly becoming one of the more interesting new labels in harsh noise and experimental electronics in general; their catalogue contains such excellent releases as the thrilling Vomir/Graham Young split and a wonderful re-issue of a 1989 disc by Richard Ramirez’ Flesh Puppets project, Medusa. Among the releases we also find Redglaer’s Petals & Scars, a project admittedly entirely new to me, but which, judging from the label’s output, should certainly be worth a couple of spins.
Sil Muir is a guitar-based ambient/drone collaborative project of Andrea Ferraris and Andrea Marutti. Ferraris is responsible for the guitars and Marutti responsible for the processing of the sounds.
‘Lenticular Thoughts’ is just one of 12 CD-Rs by Glasgow resident John Cromar AKA Noma that has been released by Kovorox Sound. Being on Kylie Minoise’s record label and sporting perplexing titles such as ‘Puffin Stance Posit 3 – Ancient Parchment’ and placing a instructional illustration demonstrating the best way to handle a rabbit on its cover, the uninitiated could be forgiven for expecting a noise-based irreverence. So it is somewhat of a surprise, and all the more curious for it, that the first time listener is confronted with classical orchestrations.
Somewhere between the maximal minimalism of Loop and Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s slow crawl into the furnace, you might find Horseback. This short album (just under forty minutes) makes the most from the least: the standard drums/bass/guitar/vocals of popular music are used as the starting point for the stuff of entrancement. It goes in circles, but that doesn’t mean it goes nowhere.
Some artists have the strangest but most wonderful talent for coming up with nonsensical yet highly intriguing titles. Masami Akita is probably the uncrowned king of this; completely enigmatic – yet captivating – track and album titles abound in his huge discography, culled variously from foreign languages, medical encyclopedias and baby talk corpora, so it seems, or combinations thereof. Gozlor Gozlor, the tape currently in my tape player, has a similarly mystifying title. It alternately reminds me of harsh noise artist Griz+Zlor and the word guzzler, making me expect this tape to be the illegitimate child of filthy musical terrorism and a night of heavy boozing.
Here Be Dragons is the second full length release from the Netherlands The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. Comprised of varied musicians and electronic artists, the band began back in 2000, starting as an audiovisual project composing music for existing silent films. In the years since their first compositions they have grown into a collective of various musicians intertwining different genres of music.
Anyone who is into Neo Folk music will appreciate the idea behind this three way split. "South European Folk Compendium", is released by the wonderful Ahnstern label, and it brings together three musical acts who concentrate on the three different folklores of their music. The beautiful booklet tells us about the participants of this project, and they are Défilé des âmes, who comes from the "Hellenic Axis", Svarrogh, who brings the spirit of "Balkan Axis" and Arnica the "Catalan Axis".
Cementimental is not especially aggressive or violent noise, nor is it particularly structured or intellectual... I would describe it as 'curious' noise that does not quite become 'playful'. Texturally, it remains mostly within the confines of typical harsh noise. The "Molecramp" minidisk contains three easily distinguishable pieces:
Looking up Jesus of Nazareth's "The Shame of Being a Child", I found it oddly classified as grindcore. I suppose some of the music has a disposition in common with such freaked out 'cyber grind' bands as Agoraphobic Nosebleed, but here guitars (usually the focus of the genre) are completely absent, replaced with excess distortion on the monkey-simple drum programming and numerous forboding samples and electronic sounds which come at the listener in a rapid fire barrage, one after another, to quite jarring effect.
The SK-1 was pretty much one of the last keyboards manufactured by Casio that was cool. Along with its more sophisticated cousin, the SK-5, the SK-1 made sampling technology affordable back in the mid-80s. I still have mine from way-back-when which I bought at the K-Mart I was the cleaning person for. Still works like a charm... Of course the one other cool thing about the SK-1 was it's tone-building engine which I don't think any other synth had...
AUN is a husband and wife duo from Canada very heavily inspired by SunnO))). In spite of the confusing title this is actually their ninth record. Named after an ancient Swedish king, with very mystical cover art, this has been described as "ambient metal" but to these ears this is more like "shoegaze metal" which isn't a bad thing...
Listening to Jeez Clusters Joys is to spend 45 minutes in a garden of violence that reveals the instincts and whims of its micro-habitat, as greedy life cycles randomly clash to illustrate the survival of the fittest on macro and micro scales. For the most part, this is achieved through the relentless improvised interplay of Ilan Manouach’s alto saxophone and Gilles Mortiaux’s electric guitar.