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'Musica Non Grata' is the second album of 12 full length albums that will be released through-out 2010 by the highly creative & respected noise/general experimental project Jazkamer.This three track album focus in on seared & teeth grinding guitar scapes, & feed-back based caustic drone work-outs.
'Karasu' is the forth album in the series of thirteen Japanese Bird releases on Important records by the long running & highly prolific noise project Merzbow. This release follows the pattern of the other releases in the series thus far with a very predominate use of live improvised drums through-out most of the tracks on offer here.
Bobby Bradford, Tom Heasley and Ken Rosser have a created a lengthy record of subdued, most free jazz styled nocturnal improvisations with "Varistar", using only their respective instruments, the trumpet, the tuba and the guitar.
By day, Spain’s Alonso Urbanos is a graphic designer creating complex, photoshopped sleeves and flyers for metal and post-industrial scenes, but by night he has been translating the dystopian visions he’s shared with many of his clients into harsh electronics. His latest release, Deranged Prototype, neatly presents two such tracks of just over ten minutes each.
Number 6 of this noise labels Portrait Series offers up a short(by HNW standards) sharp, nasty & thick slice of wall making from the French master of Harsh Noise wall scene Vomir.
Epidemia Mortalis are a relatively unknown (hell they don’t even have an Encyclopaedia Metallum page!) French Black metal band who have a very necro early 90’s Scandinavian feel about them. This disc brings together the bands first two promos & offers up fifty minutes of enjoyable mid-pace black metal craft with some quite interesting twist ‘n’ turns along the way.
Grain Belt's self titled full length album is a searing brutal & clamouring attack on your sonic sensers that utilizers brutal metal & junk abuse together with very fierce harsh noise attacks.
I’ve enjoyed what little Josh Lay stuff I’ve heard in the past & appreciated his quite distinctive mix of: noise matter, unhinged ambience, black metal bays & unhinged gruff/ demonic voclising. But I’ve never felt fully satisfied with any full release as they've often felt a bit hit ‘n’ miss from track to track & the intensity/ insanity of the sound often seemed to waver somewhat. But with ‘Serotonin Haze’ he seems to have got everything near perfect in it’s attack, consistency of atmosphere & general grim displeasure.
This 90 minute split tape offers up two sides noise, over layered soundtrack samples, dialogue, sexual moans & voodoo drums that is meant to be a tribute to the great & prolific Spanish horror/ sex director Jess Franco & frankly both sides of tape are very sloppy, messy & thrown together both sonically & artwork wise too.
Hal Hutchinson is a London based noise artist & with 'Catacombs' he offers a grim, muffled & nasty slice of Hash noise making that has ‘Wall’ & thick subterranean industrial tendencies.
'Próximas Víctimas' is an edgy, offten active & brutal Giallo influenced HNW collaboration between Richard Ramirez's most know solo project Werewolf Jerusalem & Wasp Honeymoon which features Geoff Markoff(S.S. Electronics, Viking Movement,) & Alison Rowe(Nurse Unit, Rinne).
Baktruppen are a puzzling, sometimes challenging, but always rewarding performance art theatre group & experimental music collective from Norway. The project has been active since 1986 with quite a few shifts & changes in their line-up over the years; but they’ve always stayed truly weird, challenging, but ultimately very worthwhile in their sonic & visual outlook.
Rack is the HNW project of New Yorker Jon Paris & Water is his first release which offers up two lengthy, rewarding & searing slices of thick nautical roared wall making.
It’s like, how much more black could this latest release from Netherlands’ Maurice De Jong (or Mories) be? and the answer is none. None more black. For Gnaw Their Tongues, Mories has set himself the task of taking what is commonly understood to represent the most romantically sublime, terrifying and apocalyptic in music and sound – doom metal’s grinding drum and bass sludge, the panicked screaming of vulnerable souls in flight, cinematic serialist strings of Bernard Hermann or Leonard Rosenman, and choral requiems of the 19th century – and blending it all in a cacophonous mass that goes one louder, or rather one darker, than anything that has gone before.
As a kid, my most-read book was a peculiar little volume called, roughly translated, the Horror Handbook. In a dozen or so chapters, it set out the basics of horror: what kind of creatures you might encounter in horror stories, essential horror movies, essential reading, and so on. The chapters were accompanied by black-and-white, charcoal illustrations of the creatures and situations described: a head sprouting legs, a creepy shaman, the emaciated undead, etcetera. Most intriguing was the chapter on ghosts. Not only did it describe (and depict, most creepily) your typical pale dead persons walking through walls and stirring things up a bit, it also delved into ghosts of an inanimate nature: ghost carriages, ghost cars, and many other ghost possessed items.
I’ve always felt that dark ambient had something to offer me. There’s an undeniable attraction in the dark and gloomy sound scapes, the raw, gritty and dirt stretch of unpleasant sound. And then there’s the darkness in the imagery – to anyone even remotely interested in experimental music of the dirtier kind, there’s definite appeal there. It's all about what lies in the shadows, what harrowing visions appear at the edge of my vision as I’m drenched in eternal blackness – this obscurity, this understated-ness is ever intriguing, and, though we are drenched in darkness, we are eager to find our way through it, or to get lost in it, and then to disappear completely.
This double disc CDR release offers up two Walls of near unchanging Harsh noise matter that fall between just short of an hour & just over an hour a piece. The first disc is taken up by Minneapolis based White Plague who is Sam Stoxen(which runs Phage tapes & is also in Baculum, ...Massacre & junk noise collective Grain Belt) & Angie Ridgeway. And the second disc features Nordrhein-Westfalen Germany based HNW act Wallkeeper.
‘The Autoerotic Odyssey’ offers up two five minute sides of tape of creative & crunching HNW matter from the excellent & always rewarding Alo Girl project which is Italian based Cristiano Renzoni; who also the other half of Richard An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter & runner of the great Urashima label. The only down side about the whole thing is it’s over far too quickly!.
‘Harsh Purification’ is a four way split release that offers up a full length album a piece from each four actsinvolved. We have on the first two discs great prime HNW matter from An Innocent Young Throat Cutter & Vomir. Then on the other two discs we have volatile, but inspired psychedelic harsh noise from :Government Alpha & Torturing Nurse….really it’s a noise fans wet dream come true…
There’s no doubt about it during the mid to late 2000’s The Yellow Swans were the most exciting, creative & each release anticipated act with-in the worldwide noise scene. With their distinctive & one off mixture of noise, boiling psychedelic drone matter, caustic yet at times haunting & harmonic guitar scaping, and seared ambience- Sadly in early 2008 the band decided to call it a day. 'Live During War Crimes 3' is the final volume in the series of the excellent live collections which shows this inventive & inspired two piece at the height of their powers in the live arena.
‘SATOR’ sits between thick & mysterious ritual whisper lined mood scapes, and macabre to discordant Fender Rhodes slightly guitar barbed freak-outs. It sits in a strange sonic place between smooth yet puzzling ritualistic airs & churning lite psychedelic rock work-outs. Like a strange ritual that’s organised, sleek & sensual; yet debauchery lined, primal & off-kilter at the next turn.
Shield Your Eyes are three stalwarts of southern England’s post-hardcore scene that grew in response to developments that spread across the States throughout the late eighties and early nineties from Washington DC’s Dischord Records (Rites of Spring, Nation of Ulysses) to Texas’ At The Drive-In. A principled scene that took old school hardcore’s socio-political dogmatism and cast it internally, bringing about a more intense, introspective range of sentiments reflected by punk’s maturing musicianship.
Toby Dammit's "Kriminal" is the loudest Harsh Noise release I've heard all year, and is mastered just about as loud as is actually possible. If you're looking for sheer sonic violence, here it is. But is there any depth to it? I believe so. It's difficult for an album like this to distinguish itself among the countless releases available today, but "Kriminal" succeeds in doing so, and crushes you in the process.
‘Schattenlieder’ sees Sturmpercht return with their 4th album of Alpine Folk- the genre they invented that mixers together elements neo folk, more traditional Austrian / south Bavarian folk, with experimental & creative edger’s. The album as a whole shows a darker, denser more atmospheric side to the band, sure there still the drinking & buoyant accordion ribbed songs of the past here. But on the whole the album more thoughtful, dense & darker; almost like the band have gone into deeper, darker Austrian forests for their influence & vibe.