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The wonderfully entitled ‘Dental Butchery (Endodontics Madness)’ finds Serbian based Dead Body Collection(aka Dr Alex who’s also in the excellent Harsh Noise & HNW two piece C. T. D .) offering up two lengthy twenty five minute slices of thick and rewarding HNW matter with a distinctive clinical yet sadistic air to them; like the sonic equivalent of psychotic dentist calmly and methodically removing your teeth at random as your mouth over fills with blood, stringing gum flesh and severed nerve endings.
This self titled album is the first release from London based Unearthed( aka Robert Meldrum who’s also in corpse Candle & Ghoul). The album offers up six slices of very rewarding, ultra grim, sinister and very nasty sounding HNW matter thats reek of a love of all things horror bound and ghoulish.
‘The Monroe Doctrine’ is the third album of twelve full length albums that will be released through-out 2010 by the highly creative & respected noise/general experimental project Jazkamer. This album is taken up by one long thirty minute track, which I guess is best described as pounding and careering rock & slightly hardcore jam with some shifting noise textures…think one of the more rewarding and fun tracks off Merzbow’s 13 Japanese Birds albums, but with a bit more of a rock/ hardcore jam feel and you’ll be close.
What is power electronics without the radicalism? Nothing, really, I guess. As a musical genre, noise has developed from something nearly wholly subversive to something that encapsulates so much more – besides the subversive, radical strands that embrace extremist themes and imagery on top of the musical ultra violence, more subdued, academic and even accessibly styles have also come forth. As such, noise has become a kaleidoscopic, accomplished entity, wholly mature.
The words classic and masterpiece are too often over used by critics about albums which in time fade from ones memories into a vague mishmash of elements, and at the same time lose their potency, their element of surprise and initial freshness. But one of the few albums that does justifiable deserver to be called a classic and a genre defining moment is the dark ambient master work that is Yen Pox's first album 1995’s Blood Music- this has yet to surpassed in it’s dank, grim, organic and ‘get under your skin take’ on black atmospherics by anyone else even Yen Pox themselves.
This c40 HNW split brings together the often horror film obsessed thick wall noise tactics of West Virginia based Foul & scene new comer California based XSXCXEXBX. The tape finds Foul offering up one long ‘wall’ and XSXCXEXBX offering up four smaller ‘walls’.
‘Sniper/Knives’ is a nasty and violent two way HNW split between 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 Serbian based Dead Body Collection(aka Dr Alex who’s also in the excellent Harsh Noise & HNW two piece C. T. D .)
‘Winter Assault’ is an extremely apt title for this c40 from Germany based HNW project Namazu Dantai (aka Sascha Mandler who’s also in the excellent, but unhinged & brain screwing noise meets shaman music/ world music project Izanami’s Labour Pains). As Mandler offers up two sides/two 'walls' of punishing storm torn & ripped HNW matter which really does make you feel like your staggering through a battering & wind tearing winter hurricane or violent storm.
This disc brings together two soundtracks from the late 60’s by Stefano Torossi- an Italian film composer who scored a fairly meagre 20 plus films between 1963 up to 1999; through he also wrote for & collaborated with 60’s pop/rock bands such as the Italian beat/pop group Chameleons.
‘Black Shabbis’ finds the usually jazz & Dub focused Jamie Saft making a devil loving & often ritual hued Jewish heavy metal record that goes from mean ‘n’ moody, up to doomed metallic’s, though to speeding yet controlled trash-outs, onto more tuneful metallic lined matter and beyond. It all makes for a very varied, enjoyable and at times quite tongue in cheek, yet intelligent & knowing metal ride that mangers nicely to blanced riff dramatics, brooding organ tones & lots of creativity.
Last Winter We Didn’t Sing presents eight takes on the winter months, most choosing the guitar to distil an ambient Americana with hints of folk and country established by labels like Chicago’s Kranky and Thrill Jockey. Here, it is stripped down to the barest essentials leaving a sombre, resonant soundtrack that could be employed to accompany sympathetic scenes of rural traditions threatened by industrialisation or harsh weather.
The title of this double-disc set is of course a nod to Benjamin Britten’s landmark work, but has about as much in common with that staple of middle-school music classes as your average RZA album does. I’m not sure I classify as “young” anymore (I hit 40 next year), but this still served as my guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, a New York-based composer of ethereal, slow-moving but ever-changing and ultimately lovely music.
‘Touch Strings’ a two disc cd set that brings together over two hours worth of Phill Niblock’s distinctive & often sonical vast take on the drone genre. This great collection shows once more why he’s one of the most respected & celebrated practitioners' of the drone form.
In the brief poem in the booklet that accompanies Hisegawa-Shizuo’s Lift, we are introduced to an anonymous narrator who attempts to capture early sunrise in a hat – or so I interpret it - and finds himself successful – “perfect”, he mutters, before the poem unwinds into outright, abstract strangeness. As much as this surrealistic scene presents an all-out impossibility paired with downright absurdity, its surreal, imaginative grasp is certainly intriguing and strangely befitting of the musical work itself.
The ‘Brainkiller’ boxset brings together four c100 tapes worth of often thick & unchanging Harsh Noise wall matter, with the four acts involved offer up two fifty minute ‘walls’ a piece. The acts taking part here are Sarajevo based Smrznik, Croatian based Placenta Lyposuction, Italian based Fukte and last, but hardly least we have French based Vomir.
Hash’s self titled debut album offers up one lengthy hour long track of tense, meshing & juddering Harsh Noise Wall matter, which keeps you nicely pined down & in-tranced through-out it's running time.
This single sided 80 minute tape offers up two lengthy dwells in hope drenching, nasty & grim wall making from Norwegian based Hour of the Wolf- which is of course the HWN project of the highly prolific Andreas Brandal who is also in Flesh Coffin, Drevne Bolesti and many other projects.
This 12 inch vinyl split offers up a side a piece of thick ‘n’ nasty HNW from the French Wall master Vomir & the relatively new, but highly prolific German based HNW project Ptomain who first appeared last year & since has put out seventeen releases thus far.
Morgvir are a one-man finish based black metal project who offer up mid-pace, ambient, lo-grade & horror licked synth Black mettlics. ‘Towards The Black Horizon’ is the projects forth released CDR album.
For those whose roots are firmly planted behind a laptop in the studio, live albums may at first seem at odds with the assumed activity of constant refinement through engineering. However, the use of live improvisation is not only a more productive route to laying down tracks unshackled by the hesitation and fussiness encouraged by computer-based sequencing, but it also generates results both unpredictable and unachievable through any other means. These results are also more likely to produce organic and metaphysical qualities that are often lacking in the subjugated sterility of purely digital composition.
The almost all-black cover art and Chinese characters on the cover, as well as the guitar glittering in the gloom on the back of the sleeve, led me to believe I was about to be sucked into Keiji Haino / Fushitsusha territory. Wonderful! — Well, that’s not where I ended up, although I can’t complain about the trip I did go on.
Remember trip-hop? Yes, this was the hip blend of hip-hop, electronics and, often, depressed female singers that was hugely popular halfway through the 90s. Portishead, Massive Attack, Morcheeba – each unleashed their own brand of heart-breakingly melancholy music on the world, and fall for it we did. Yet revisiting an album like Portishead’s Dummy now, fifteen years after the fact, doesn’t work as well as it should. If anything did not age well it’s trip-hop. Out-dated beats, 90s aesthetics, artificial grainy vinyl crackle – there’s so much to take offence to. Yet though trip-hop, in its 90s form, has sort of kicked the bucket, much more interesting and timeless derivatives (if such a term is even fitting) have sprung up in its wake. Heck, even Portishead made a glorious return to the music scene – their 2008 release Third is one of the most harrowingly beautiful things you’ll ever hear.
Be Maledetto Now! are an Italian duo who make wonderfully hypnotic, often eerily & haunted harmonic space bound analogue snyth scapes. This twelve inch is part one of their first full lenght debut album with part two coming in the form of a cd.
Hunyadi Páncélgránátos Hadosztály are a Transylvania based Power electronics project & with this their first release they brutal rape & regurgitate old Hungarian military songs from WW2 in quite a rewarding & nasty manner.