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Tethrippon are two chaps from Northern Hellas in Greece that have chosen to name themselves after the four-horse chariot race from the ancient Olympic Games. Their romantic aim combines a “respect to their history, their tradition and the heroic achievements of their predecessors…” with “the ancient Hellenic philosophy, poetry and culture”.
‘Apocalypse Sun’ is the second album from highly respected, often complex and darkly precise psychedelic Us black metal project Nightbringer. And what an epic, twisting and turning yet controlled epic black maelstrom of an album this is- think a more US take on Deathspell Omega, but with very much it’s own black and prime evil identity, and you’ll be near to the blacked power, detail and scope of ‘Apocalypse Sun’.
Oh, this. This. This is a roaring, screeching, droning, clanking, yammering, blabbering, yacking, rattling, thundering, droning, whooping, booming, hollering, blatting, honking thing of beauty. All two halves of it.
‘Missing Boys’ is an HNW project that often concentrates on static patterned noise making and reduced Harsh Noise Walls. The project brings together Richard Ramirez (of Werewolf Jerusalem, Black Leather Jesus ,An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Vice Wears Black Hose and many other projects) and Geoff Markoff (wasp Honeymoon, S.S. Electronics and Viking Movement). This self titled tape offers up a c90’s worth of shifting static textures, thinned wall making and some thicker nasty moments.
This double A sided c90 tape offers up a fierce, thick and churning slice of HNW matter from Dutch based project Svartvit (aka Kevin Jansen whose also in the more unmoving HNW project UN).
‘Wee Tam and the Big Huge’ was the fourth album by the highly influential and respected psychedelic folk, world music tinged and mixed musically genre project The Incredible String Band. The album originally appeared in November 1968 some seven months after the bands third album ‘The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter’ which is seen as their most important work and a prime example of 60’s hippy culture. And while ‘Wee Tam and the Big Huge’ may not be quite as revolutionary or mould-breaking as ‘The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter’ there’s a good and creative selection of songs on offer here.
‘Throat’ is a unrelenting 78 minute slice of HNW matter that’s truly nasty, macabrely fierce and often balance throwing attack on the sensers from Serbian based Dead Body Collection(aka Dr Alex who’s also in the excellent Harsh Noise & HNW two piece C. T. D .)
The place I work regularly has art exhibitions for amateur artists, of which about one per year is half-decent and pretty much all the rest half-assed – and then there’s the special ones, the type that comes by only every five years or so that is downright disturbingly awful. Right now there’s a collection of portraits which in themselves, from a distance, pretty much seem of the half-assed category, with the (oh! how John Wayne Gacy) clowns and the ten-year old twins and the pretty blonde. But one good look and you’re scared shitless. Whoever painted the abominations seems to have confused texture with burnt skin, and consequently every portrait seems of some horribly scarred burn victim – the painting of the ten-year olds, with their smiles and blindingly white teeth and their disfigurements, especially haunts my dreams.
‘Baby, Wolves Abound’, the third EP from Jason Steel, helps prove that first impressions can be deceptive. His deft fingerpicking of ukulele, banjo or hand-made acoustic guitar presents a fine line in unadorned traditional American folk balladry. Meanwhile, over the course of six out of the eight songs, the melodious sweetness in Steel’s voice is offset, like many before him, by a subtle drawl that maybe indicates an American that has chugged the occasional whisky. The combined effect reminds of contemporary fellow travellers who continue to stop by and pay respect to the roots of rock music like the sparser tracks by Will Oldham or even Mark Lanegan. So it was with some surprise to learn that Jason Steel, despite the authenticity of his Americana, is a Yorkshireman now living in London.
For over a decade now Polish experimental musician Bartek Kalinka – better known by his project’s name of XV Parówek – has been bombarding the world with sounds both strange and special, not only through his own project, but also through his label, which has seen releases from the likes of Crank Sturgeon, Richard Ramirez, Torturing Nurse and If, Bwana – among many others. There’s a special sort of intuitive, heart-felt beauty about this label. Its usually great releases most often come wrapped in art which is by no traditional sense beautiful or even pretty, but the minimal and brutally, honestly heart-felt approach combined with the romantically ugly packaging are really quite impressive, and have already converted many a non-believer to a devout Parówekian – this reviewer included.
French three piece The Arrival Of Satan make often unhinged and nearly flying off the rails black metal with a perverse, ugly and often deranged mad-man fury. ‘Vexing Verses’ is the projects second full length album, with a split with Portuguese suicidal Black project Morte Incandescent appearing in between this and their first album Darkness Dealer.
‘North Korea’ is a seared ‘n’ soured Harsh Noise Wall project with often buried vocals- it's a collaboration between Canadian based Ryan O'Neill( who’s also in the Harsh wall meet Spazz noise project Earhate) and the depression blow extreme noise of Washington based Cracked Dome.
‘Concrete Vamp’ finds this Danish HNW project offering up three tracks and fifty minutes worth dense and seared 'wall' matter that’s both ear carnal melting and often quite moorish.
‘In O To Infinity’ finds the always rewarding Acid Mother Temple homing their sound into a more repetition and loop based proposition with each of the four near on twenty minute tracks staying in the same chosen key through-out their lengths. It all creates a deeply hypnotic, trance inducing and triped-out jams that stand as some of the projects best work thus far, with each track offering it's own distinctive tripped & spaced-out vibe.
Originally released in 1995, Hatesville subverts the beatnik poetry album Beatsville (released by Rod McKuen, an associate of Kerouac and Ginsberg, in 1959) into a series of predictably hate-filled spoken word pieces from Boyd Rice and fellow provocateurs Adam Parfrey (writer and boss of the brave, wayward Feral House publishing company), The Partridge in the Pear Tree (née Shaun Partridge, founder of quasi-religion The Partridge Family Temple) and Jim Goad (writer made famous by his infamous Answer Me! magazine of the early nineties). Soleilmoon‘s cheesily named sub-label, Caciocavallo, have lovingly remastered this series of spiteful sermons for both CD and vinyl, this time with three new tracks (two from Partridge, one from Rice).
It’s part of the lifespan of any genre to be expanded radically, to find itself crossbred and mutated and ultimately become not a container but a starting point. It happened with jazz, it happened with pretty much every form of popular music, and it has most definitely happened with anything that gets nominally filed as “electronic”. What started with the smooth burble of Human League and Yaz has turned into the glitch-stutter-and-stretch of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and—yep—Kouhei Matsunaga.
Hong Kong based ‘Hatred In Eyes’ may have quite a clichéd Power Electronics name, but this ep is an rewarding and at times quite original sounding mixture creativity seared PE with some sombre, muffled & unexpectedly emotional string loops.
Anthrax's fourth album 1987 ‘Among The Living’ was the bands defining and most consistent moment of their 20 plus year career. It just seemed to have everything in perfect and considered shape to make the best refinement of their often melody and mosh rich brand of trash so rewarding & distinctive.
If there’s one distinct advantage that imaginary soundtracks have over the regular type, it’s that a godawful movie cannot stand in the way of enjoyment of the music written for it. What’s more, a good imaginary soundtrack sets loose your imagination and creates, before your mind’s eye, a galore of visual imagery that can be as awe-inspiring, as unsettling, or as heart-breaking as your own gray matter can manage. I guess that all music, in a sense, has that quality – that it may conjure up imagery, stories – but it is especially the brand of evocative instrumental music, adorned with enigmatic and/or generic titles, that drowns us in cinematic scenes that exist only in our mind.
Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper were a husband and wife duo who in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s earned a name for themselves with their often righteous and god fearing mix of country, bluegrass and gospel music. This compilation brings together some of their best, offten quirky & morose songcraft in a highly enjoyable twenty five track collection.
‘Maniac’ is Vomir’s Harsh Noise wall tribute to the ultra sleazy and violent 1980’s US slasher of the same name which followed the exploits of fictional new York serial killer Frank Zito. This CDR consists of a single forty six minute 'wall' of crude, crass and nasty HNW matter that fits perfectly the nihilistic and sleazy feel of the film.
This collaboration brings together Canadian based noise project The Rita, whose one of the orignators of the HNW sound. And Italian harsh noise/HNW artist Alo Girl,whose one of the more recent innovators of the HNW form. On offer here are two sides of 12 inch vinyl which each offer up a fourteen minute long track of thick, deep and impenetrable ‘wall’ of noise.
‘The Dark Bleeding Gods’ is the second collection of rare & out of print tracks from the now defunct avant grade, darkly nasty and deranged Uk Black metal project Emit which morphed into the safer sounding,Mediaeval soaked, discordant guitar and organ high project Hammemit.
This wonderfully named project is an Giallo obsessed HNW collaboration between Richard Ramirez (Black Leather Jesus, Werewolf Jerusalem, Vice Wears Black Hose, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, ect) and Thomas Mortigan(RU-486, Black Leather Jesus, black metal band Octagon and onwer/runner of Destructive Industries label). Night Prowl Anthems is the projects third release, and it features four mainly short(by HNW standards) and moorish Harsh Noise Wall and static textured tracks.