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‘Face the Sea of Darkness’ is this Swedish four piece’s debut album. And with it the band lovingly recreate the vibe, spirit and sonic character of the likes of Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and Riz Ortolani, and the late 70’s and early 1980’s soundtracks they composed for various classic Italian gore movies.
The best comparison I can make for this disc is that it's a very good Dissecting Table album, except that Dissecting Table had nothing to do with it. Instead, we have three folks -- one I'm familiar with, two I'm not -- turning in 15-20 minute knob-twisting workouts that do a remarkable job of emulating Mr. Ichiro Tsuji's nerve-battering assaults of noise and percussion. It's no ripoff, more of an "okay, here's my take on this" approach, and that's part of why I ended up pleasantly surprised.
Noma's "Mara" towers, majestically, It represents that of the beyond which has the power to call me. The drone musick of the spheres herein is heavenly pure. This record proves again that the purest of energy always takes the most simplistic shape. The structures of this album are transparent and perfect. The warm, buzzing music bubbles with youthful immediacy and energy, glows with a strange alluring light that sometimes becomes deceptively friendly.
‘Zone Sensible 2 / Dundee 2’ brings together two lengthy, rewarding and creative pieces of sound art and electro texturing from Frenchman Éric La Casa- who’s become one of most respected figures in modern Musique Concréte and sound art composition.
Diable Amoreux are a mysterious one man(or woman) project from Tasmania who make difficult to define and at times highly unhinged music. ‘Within The Circle’ finds the projects create this dense and spiralling twenty minute track that takes in elements of droning psychedelic guitars, lo-grade synths and organs. Overlapping and wavering orchestration, discordant piano tinkles, seemingly random field recordings, weird and sinister alien chatter, and all manner of weird sonic flotsam and jetsam they fancy throwing in a long the way. And in general the album has quite a dark gothic, yet unhinged feel to it in.
Hatchet For The Honeymoon are a Texas based male & female duo who make rewardingly detailed and textural moving HNW matter. The two piece project consists of: Ella Einsmire(E.E.E., Femme Under Plastic, S.S. Electronics, Viking Movement, Watch Me When I Kill) and Jonas Teunissen (RapeCity & Massacre In Dinosaur Valley).
Bloodcraving is the pummelling, unforgiving, spatter and gore movie influenced HNW project of Ron Cannibalo- who’s most know project is the 70’s and 80’s Italian cannibal film obsessed Cannibal Ritual, through he's is also in And You'll Live In Terror & Evelyn, as well as running the Disturbing Scenarios of Dying label too.
This $67 box set contains 2 CDs and a large, colorful, nearly 100 page book, all documenting the installation work of Mika Vainio, an artist most known for being half of the Finnish ambient electronic duo Pan Sonic. This package is by all appearances up to the usual high quality standards of the Raster Noton label, although I cannot say for sure as I have no physical copy of the set. It's important to note that, in total, there's only 2 disks of music here, some of which is reissued material, so you're mostly paying for the book when you buy this.
‘Vampyr: Light Of The Beast’ is the new slice of deeply horrifying, uneasy and dread filled death industrial, blacked ambience and general unsettling horror cinematics from Columbus Us based project Luasa Raelon which is the deformed and creepy sonic baby of one David Reed.
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).