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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.
It’s incredibly interesting to see what diverse ranges of sounds very minimal set-ups can yield. That goes for both traditional instruments and electronics or other non-musical sound sources, I’d say. Consider, for instance, Aube works such as Pages from the Book or the Millennium series, for which single sound sources were used to create hugely diverse sound scapes. Or, at the more musical end of the spectrum, jazz saxophone player Evan Parker, whose solo sax works such as The Snake Decides sound like anything but works that were conceived either solo or with only a sax.
'A Walk In The Park’ offers up a nice unhinged,atmospheric & at times quite doomy & creepy improv mixture of electric & acoustic guitar elements, electronics, some noise textures & the odd splattering of doomed piano matter. This release brings together highly respected & versatile noise/experimental artist Norwegian born Andreas Brandal(Flesh Coffin,Hour Of the Wolf, Drevne Bolesti, solo work, ect) & fellow Norwegian guitarist Hans Kristian Senneseth( Lupus Golem, Nullpluss).
‘The Shape Of Static To Come’ is a highly rewarding, involving & brutal emersion in static rich HNW & minimalistic HNW making taking in a thirty five minute track a piece from Chicago based Insurgent & Italian based TFT.
‘La Rossa Dalla Pelle Che Scotta’ takes it’s name and inspiration from 1971 Italian/Turkish Giallo movie of the same name (it’s US title was The Red-Headed Corpse) which tells the story of a penniless artists who given an mannequin in a park which he takes home & it turns seemingly into a fiery femme fatale who takes over his life and starts a killing spree.
‘Another Merzbow Records’ (no, it’s not my bad grammar that is the title) is a three disc collection that brings together compilation tracks, split release tracks & various odds & ends from the long standing king of Japanese noise Merzbow.
‘The Black Mausoleum’ is the first release from this Dutch based project and their atmospheric to caustic guitar drone based sound. On offer here is a single twenty five minute track that goes from chilling & harmonically revolving to screaming & darkly seared.
‘A Banishing Ritual’ is album number three from Chet Scott’s (of Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis and Glass throat records) metallic & folk/rock project Blood of the Black Owl. And it sees him offering up a single track in four 'movements', which offers up 40 minutes worth of ritual, primal & experimental sonic matter that mixers together elements of : doom, black metal, industrial, drone & brooding ambience, folk, rock & tribal music into a very distinctive & original sonic vision.
I love being proven wrong sometimes. On unwrapping this disc, I thought I was in for yet another example that punk is dead, a victim of its own redundancy. But “Wrath of God”—this Peruvian band’s name in English—were more than happy to prove me wrong within the first few bars of the opening cut. “Punk” this is, but roots punk: the Music Machine, the Stooges, ? and the Mysterians and even The Stranglers—the punk before punk was punk, the stuff I throw into mixtapes and -discs rattle my friends’ virgin ears and eyeteeth. Take all those bands, double the tempo, keep their fire and color, and you’re about where this record starts.
‘Orgasm’ offers up a twenty minute live track from male & female caustic drone & harsh noise duo Peiste which features Joseph Gates(Slaughter-Fetus, Vargrwulf & RSP) & Vanessa.
‘Concrete Death’ offers up two sides of c45 tape worth of thick, roaring & ugly Harsh Noise wall matter from this Croatian project that appeared on the scene mid-last year & has since put out five releases taking-in splits & compilation tracks.
Blossoming Flesh’ sees Canadian based Gomeisa pushing thier sound more towards focused, thick & tar black Harsh Noise Wall making. Cutting out of the dark ambient & Harsh noise touches that appeared on the projects last few releases.
‘Golem’ is the first & only release so far by one man based Connecticut HNW project Deep Throat Choir & on offer here is a single 38 minute ‘wall’ which shows some interesting promise, but sadly the whole thing is rather let down by one rather glaring fault.
HB straddles the globe with two new works of sound art from Spain’s Francisco López and Australia’s Lawrence English, each providing both an original solo recording and a “mutation” of the other’s contribution. This illuminates hidden layers, giving us an insight into how they perceive the other’s work, both of which focus on environmental recordings with minimal editing and treatment.
In 2007, Washington Project for the Arts invited renowned sound artist Richard Chartier to curate a program of contemporary audio visual work celebrating the Color Field movement. Evolved out of abstract expressionism, this East Coast scene of the mid-Twentieth century deliberately avoided symbolism; instead it enveloped the senses with limited yet psychologically powerful tools of pure colour and texture. Colorfield Variations collects six works commissioned for the event on DVD, forging clear links between the birth of minimalism and today’s digital installations.
This two disc compilation was put together to fund & celebrate Heavy Focus III- the noise/ extreme experimental music festival that’s going on over this coming weekend(23rd & 24th of April) in Minneapolis. The two discs offer-up mainly excusive tracks from 22 of the artists performing at fest and there’s a lot of sonic & noise bound ground covered here we go from: Harsh Noise Wall, to Junk metal noise, through to churning psychedelic power electronics, onto aggressive & jarring electro beat scapes, through to sour & blacked dark drone matter, onto seared & ear burning harsh noise making & beyond.