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‘Gauze of Blackened Veils’ finds this Canadian based noise project summoning up a violent dose of blacked backwoods & psychotic sleazed Harsh noise or more active HNW attack.
This self titled album is Fearthainne debut album & it offers up two disc & over two hours worth of earthy, primal & emotional raw forest folk. The four piece project features two members of Ambient/ folk Black Metal project Fauna; & though Fearthainne are purely acoustic based project this does sometimes have the barren & angered spirit of black metal raising in it’s veins.
‘Floods’ is the last in a series of albums on the Utech label that are adorned with the dark, surreal artwork of Stephen Kasner, sleeve artist of choice for many of today’s so-called avant-metal musicians. But, unlike all other releases in the series (that includes work by Skullflower, Justin Broadrick and Runhild Gammelsæter) the sound here has also been recorded and mixed by the artist alongside a handful of select associates with the aim of translating paintings into musical concepts.
After to been rather taken by this Italian based HNW projects ‘Untitled’ Second album & it’s clean, digital take on the genre. I was egger to hear their début album, but sadly while this has it’s moments for the most part it sounds like a rather run of the mill excise in wall making.
'The Voyage Of The Decima MAS' sees The Rita return to the Troniks/Pacrec label which released such landmark & genre classic Rita/HNW recordings as: 'Thousands Of Dead Gods' , 'Bodies Bear Traces Of Carnal Violence' & 'Total Slitting Of Throats'- but this is far from simply another HNW record or a retread of The Rita’s past work.
On offer here is 60 minutes worth of violent & at times darkly atmospheric HWN collaboration between Werewolf Jerusalem(Richard Ramirez's most know & prolific project) & Remlap(the harsh wall noise project of Canadian Jake Vida who also runs Pointless Blank records).
There’s been so much experimental, digital, post-this and post-that stuff entering my ears lately that a disc of music as it might be performed live (gasp) by real people (double gasp) is as refreshing as a hike in the country after years of city asphalt. Such music is far from dead, but I fear it’s been shoved so far into the margins that it has become as much of a niche as, oh, Merzbow.
Æra's "To the Last Man / Index of Dreaming" is a 2 album foray into a distinct, although quite conventionally 'space ambient', soundworld. The closest touchstone I can think of is the always surreal but ultimately playful and warm French group Lightwave, though Æra has a greater emphasis on thick pads, relaxed zen pacing and lots of nice, thick swells of low-mid frequencies. Like Lightwave, Æra evokes the subterranean bathed in the colorful, comforting light of bioluminescence. He also finds much in common with Steve Roach's synthesizer driven works.
"Original Warmth" feels like a "for completists only" live bootleg release designed for fans of an established group. Unfortunately, as an introduction to the work of Warmth, its a bit underwhelming, although enjoyable in the right moods and in small doses.
The five lengthy pieces on ‘Oltre’ are thick with tarry dread & pour soaking doom; sound artist & uneasy mood setter Robert Curgenven users a mixture of :Resonating dubplate, Turntables, field recordings, guitar feed back & ventilation/ fan sounds to create these thick oppressive & doomed slow moving sonic places.
Riot are a old school heavy metal band who later turned into more a speed/ power metal band. The band originally formed in New York back in 1976 & are still active today, through they’ve had many line-up changers over the years with Guitarist Mark Reale been the only original member in the now present line-up. This double disc reissue offers up two of the bands most popular & respected albums from the late 80’s & early 90’s; when they had become more of a speed/power metal band with some old school metal edger’s.
Asmus Tietchens barely needs an introduction, I’d dare say: since the late 70s, this veteran of electronic music has been producing increasingly more experimental and captivating sounds. Starting out with a fairly accessible or at least fairly more traditional sound, encounters and collaborations with personae such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) and Dirk Serries (Fear Falls Burning, Vidna Obmana) saw him drift towards the more sonically abstract and challenging.
The term supergroup fills me with a sort of indefinable fear and apprehension; it evokes – at least to me – images of sweaty 70s men with 70s haircuts and 70s outfits, and it seems to say guitar wankery, gorilla drumming and general instrumental chest beating; what’s more, the common supergroup seems defined only by its super-ness.
‘Big Ripper’ is a punch drunk, rugged, feed-back buzzed & on the edge of a nervous break down rock record. With each track being like a staggering, lumbering big & beer heavy man tottering from one foot to another trying to do a rock ‘n’ roll dance
Multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos is most likely to be found playing as part of his psychedelic rock quartet Grails, or as the newest percussive half of Om, and yet his solo project, Holy Sons, precedes these by well over a decade.
This is quite an usually, unexpected but ultimately highly enjoyble split. On the first side of this c44 tape we have Oklahoma based Persistence In Mourning who boil up a mixture of: tribal led noise electronics, Doomed wondering psychedelic rock scapes & all manner of interesting stuff. Then on the flip side we have Koufar who make Middle Eastern atmospheric tinged Power electronics.
Foul is the new blackly boiling & near unchanging HWN project of West Virginia based J. Cadle, who in the past went under the name of White Torture & is still in ...Massacre(with Sam Stoxen of Baculum & runner of Phage Tapes) & Oasis Of Fear(with Richard Ramirez).
The strangely entitled ‘S6r8r’ finds Swiss sound artists Gilles Aubry building slow-mo industrial mood scapes & rewarding textural work-outs purely with the use of manipulated field recordings taken from inside Stralau 68 (a former venue for experimental music that's now empty)which is situated in Berlin.
The sound of Slowcream’s ‘And’ is all about the morphing & shifting of dramatic & sometimes darkly lush classical string tones & cinematic textures with a very slight underlay of electroinca elements.
'Migdal Bavel' is the second full length album from Maurice De Jong’s (of Gnaw Their Tongues)often rapid & avant grade black metal project De Magia Veterum. And it certainly shows that De Jong still has the knack of writing complex, twisting & damned music after the rather lacklustre & 'tread the same water' of the last few Gnaw Their Tongues releases.
Yes, Sir(Filth Play) is a sleazy, perverse & often fast moving meeting of extreme noise, Fierce, old school & grimy industrial touches & all out wall noise attacks. All to make a very searing, crusty & depraved sonic attack on the senses.
Valediction is somewhat of a comeback album from this uk based original early 1980’s noise, noise rock & power electronics project- as this is their first full length album since the 1997 album Boeing .
Language often fails ‘music’ and none more so than those releases labelled post-industrial noise, power electronics or HNW. The perceived varieties of sound involved can seem relatively narrow, as can the often outlined historical context (from dada through musique concrète to industrial) all of which constricts attempts at elucidation in words.
I try to avoid forming any sort of prejudice as the Voice of Eye CD slides out of the envelope that came in minutes earlier, but it’s hard, so hard.