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Gli occhi dentro(Eyes With Out A Face) is a sonic tribute by this USA/ Italian HNW duo to the 1994 film of the same name by Italian sleazy & exploitation director Bruno Mattei.
Jono El Grande would certainly have you believe him to be some sort of mad comedic musical magician, summoning up an exciting and entertaining quirky compositional style involving rapid changes of instrumentation and musical genre, incorporating influences from a truly extensive variety of cultural influences. In other words, the musical territory occupied by such bands as Estradasphere and Mr. Bungle, and Naked City. I find there to be nothing 'dada' about it.
Based in Portland, Oregon, Brown is the work of Jeremy Long, also guitarist for local drone metal band Tecumseh. The title shared by this, his third self-released album and its final track comes from the poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ where the poet Dylan Thomas appeals to his infirm father to “rage against the dying of the light” as part of his reflections on grief and death. Brown’s cacophonic soundscapes wrought from recordings of improvised guitar, violin and DIY electronics do not so much portend the challenge of death as portray decay as a living process that thrives throughout its inevitable entropic decline.
My familiarity with Metek starts and ends with my having heard a few of his releases – all collaborations – in addition to a sort of bewildered intimacy with the eponymous threads on various noise boards dedicated to his person, filled to the brim with love, hate, anger, what-not – virtually every emotion on the spectrum.
'Channel 0-1' is the debut release from one man Texas based HNW project Stress(aka Casey Duncan). And it offers up two tracks & thirty six minutes of punishing yet enjoyable & hypnotic ‘wall’ making.
Drop a microphone down into a fault line, between rivers of bubbling earth and plates of ice grinding each other into snow, and you’d come up with something that sounds like Heated. Jana Winderen’s album for Touch, recorded live in Japan, was compiled from (according to the sleeve) a slew of sonorous location recordings in Greenland, Iceland and Norway.
In recent years, experimental electronics veteran Maurizio Bianchi has teamed up with a guy named Maor Appelbaum numerous times, & churned out a good number of CDs of which this is actually the first I’ve heard. I’m no stranger to Bianchi, having enjoyed a good deal of his works, & have felt sorry for the dude for all the liberties taken with his work, yet Appelbaum is entirely new to me. For the past few years he’s steadily been releasing music under a variety of monikers, but he’s been flying under my radar, it seems; it’s not as if, with a name like that (apple tree, roughly), I wouldn’t have caught on – if only I’d known.
With a name like Ethernet (pesud. for one California native Tim Gray) and an album title like 144 Pulsations of Light, I was expecting a disc of spastic Aphex Twin glitch-hop. I was half-right: This could be a close cousin to Aphex Twin, but more the Twin of the Selected Ambient Works periods—which just happen to be favorites of mine.
This is a split between two California based noise makers/ caustic Psychedelic mood setters in the shape of Endometrium Cuntplow & Sunken Landscapes. As the covers of comicbook picture of a Merman suggests there’s more than a little aquatic & sea bound feel to the sonics with-in this CDR.
‘Sigaw’ offers up a live recording by Mexican HNW project Tissa Mawartyassari (aka Maria Velasquez-Soto) from a show in the Tilden Gallery in Houston Texas.
‘Osorezan No Itako’ is rather manic & fucked-up ride into often rapid cut-up: harsh noise textures, bent & abused shaman music/ chants, overloaded industrial junk beats, demonic Madman vocal bays & all manner of head-screwing-up & noisy mayhem all fired at you in the two ten minute tracks that make up this 3inch cdr.
'Sandstorming' is Churner’s take on HNW; and as with anything related to this excellent US noise project Eifling adds has own distinctive & original flavour to the whole art of ‘Wall’ making.
The hieros gamos, the marriage of a god and goddess, has been symbolised in Wiccan rituals, either through physical coupling or metaphorically with knife and chalice, as a fertility rite. Originally subtitled ‘The Sacral Fornication’, Black Seas Of Infinity’s album offers recordings from a series of such rituals, apparently aspiring to unlock secrets held within those distantly related to fallen angels, or more specifically the blood line of the Grigori of Biblical apocrypha whose enthusiasm for women sired the Nephilim, a mixed race of the heavenly and the mortal.
This HNW Split offers up two twenty five minutes tracks of unforgiving, ear-drum melting noise & sadistic static jitter attacks. With a track a piece from scene new comer Croatia Placenta Lyposuction & Norway’s Hour Of the Wolf which is Andreas Brandal(Flesh Coffin, Drevne Bolesti, solo work, ect) more static wall like noise project.
Gastric Female Reflex's "Zulus In Shit Angle" falls into the 'intentionally amateurish anti-music' subset of 'noise'. By noise standards, this sound has plenty of dynamic range and space to breathe, yet is actually completely composed of chaotic, lightly distorted and muffled midrange pots-and-pans style clamour, recorded in the absolute lowest fidelity possible. This is 'built-in laptop microphone' quality recording, here... and the creator of the album seems to be in love with the bassy ruffling sound a microphone makes when rubbed against a piece of carpet or clothing.
‘Mrs Wardh’ finds this two piece Italian & USA giallo influenced HNW project doing their sonic tribute to Sergio Martino's 1970’s classic giallo film ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ (Lo Strano Vizio Della Signora Wardh). An Innocent Young Throat Cutter are Richard Ramirez(Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus, ect) & Cristiano Renzoni (Alo Girl & runner of the Urashima label),
Named after a now extinct Hawaiian bird ‘O'o’ finds John Zorn offering up another laid-back, memorable & easy listening focused collection of tracks that take in elements of: exotica ,surf, light melodic jazz, mellow soundtracks & all manner of laid-back, tuneful & sometimes lightly dramatic music.
This double disc set brings together the two volumes of the Houston Noise compilations which were complied by one of scenes originators: Richard Ramirez (Werewolf Jerusalem, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Vice Wears Black Hose & many other projects)back in the mid 90’s. It’s a fiery, quite varied & grim collection through-out that offer up a great snapshot of what was sonically going on in one of America's most prolific & searing noise scenes in the mid 90's
Anthony Pateras’s Chromatophore comes waving all kinds of good pedigrees. The disc itself comes courtesy of John Zorn’s excellent Tzadik label; the composer himself has all kinds of accolades and credits to show off on the inner sleeve. It’s a shame the music itself isn’t more compelling, which forces me to say this sort of disc will appeal to two kinds of people: existing fans of Mr. Pateras, and folks who feel Jocelyn Pook is too melodic.
Sur Fond Blanc’s eleven monosyllabically-named tracks segue into each other describing a journey through modern city life. All arrangements are sparsely constructed using minimal materials: recordings of the urban environment, from footsteps in a stairwell to the creaking of a door, place the listener in a voyeuristic position, while a cold, Rhodes piano-like pad wanders almost constantly throughout the disc providing versatile glue as melody, drone or percussion, balanced by a warm bass tone.
Arecibo was Brian Williams (of pioneering Dark ambient project Lustmord) space bound ambient project that also mixed in hints of techno & electroncia too. 'Trans Plutonian Transmissions' was the projects one & only release from 1994 & here it gets a much needed reissue after been out of print for many years.
‘Demons in The Mist’ presents a c40 tape with two twenty minutes sides worth of black storm ripping, diabolic crunching & thick Harsh Noise Wall with slight sludgy industrial undercurrents from Flesh Coffin- which is one the projects of ultra busy Norwegian based Andreas Brandal(Hour of the Wolf, Drevne Bolesti, solo work, ect).
HiM(not to be confused with the finish dark metal pop band of the same name) make a vibrate, colourful & often buoyant mixture of: bright Afro Beat textures, tight & complex yet harmonic post rock & jazz rock. Pretty & ornate oriental music, dub elements & all manner of other bright yet genre mixed & world music traits. I know this sounds like it could be a mess, but HiM really pull it all off with an sunny, harmonic yet virtuoso flair through-out all of‚ñ.
Madlove is Trevor Dunn’s(Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, many Zorn related projects & solo)stab at a guitar pop rock band; but as with anything connected with Mr Dunn this is far from a straight take on the pop rock as he throws in instresting often suprsining twisted & off-kilter edgers into the mix