Loading
‘Bone yard’ finds the always creative & rewarding Harsh Noise maker Churner turning his attention to more horror soaked & nastily macabre caustic drone matter & grizzly, grimy, at times violent & seared noise attacks.
Piero Umiliani was an Italian soundtrack composer who scored over 200 films in his career which spanned from 1958 to the early 1980’s. He scored mainly low budget Italian cinema such as westerns, comedies, spy movies, soft-core porn movies & a few horror/ Giallo moives too. This collection offers up a selection of thirty tracks from his career between the mid 60’s & the mid 70’s.
German born sound & concrete electronic artist Marc Behrens offers up here a collection of surreal, strange & at times jarring & noisy tracks built around manipulated field recordings, computer composition & subtle electronic elements that at times brings to mind Nurse With Wounds more field recording based & unhinged work.
One of the first noise albums I ever owned was The Hanatarash’s mind-boggling fourth CD. Unbelievable, the things one guy could accomplish with nothing more than a broken tape recorder, records and tapes from the thrift store around the corner, random stuff from the radio and an apartment full of junk. I thought of it a great deal after hearing Music for Gardening, because the latter record sounded a bit like someone had heard the former and decided to try for the same territory. The sad truth is, despite the participation of Lasse Marhaug, this is sonic collage in a minor key, a footnote to the careers of both people involved.
My first glance at the liner notes for Optofonica left me nonplussed: “…a new form of art is surfacing that invites audiences to transcend the limits of habitual perception… it seeks to shift the observer’s attention from the physical objects that stimulate perception to the act of perception itself.”
Vomir has fast become one of the most recognized, respected & know names with-in the rapidly growing Harsh Noise wall scene. And the reason for this is his pure unblinking & nasty focus on making unforgiving, unmoving & unchanging walls of punishing noise. ‘Honour To Bleak Existence’ is the longest, most unrelenting & completely hopeless creation thus far by Vomir with the single track on offer here coming in just under the eighty minute mark.
This is a two way split between two new & relatively unknown Polish based HNW projects in the shape of Jake Halter(also in Kill The Liver & A.D. III KAL. OCT ) & I’m A slut(also in more know Selymes Viragszirom & Self-Inflicted Violence).
‘Orthorhombic Crystalline Phase’ finds this two piece Serbian Harsh noise & HNW project offering one of the finest & most rewarding long form pieces of Harsh Noise wall matter I’ve come across.
Ah, Thierry Jolif and Gregorio Bandini's "Kantalon"... I've been putting off reviewing this disk, because honestly, it's hard to make myself listen to the whole thing. Upon noticing it was only about 45 minutes in length, I was shocked. It feels like one of those 75 minute albums.
Does humor belong in music? So Frank Zappa, back in the 80s, put into words a question which had plagued music fans since the dawn of, well, music, though it seems that Zappa himself had already figured it out, and the question was no more than rhetorical for him. Zappa’s music, roughly classifiable as 50% avant-garde, 50% rock and 50% comedy, adding to up to a nonsensical 150% awesome, never shied away from humor. Yet the self-proclaimed serious music fan still finds the combination of music and humor risky. Sure, it’s been done, done well, too; yet this kind of combination usually runs the risk of being too cheesy, too kitschy, and even if it is musically enjoyable, the tongue-in-cheek approach seems to devalue, for the listeners, whatever musical value there is indeed to be found.
Armpit? I think these guys just broke new ground for disgusting imagery in band names. Frankly, I’ve seen too many Corpses, Cunts and Cracks to be shocked by anything like that anymore, but armpits constitute a wholly new category, sort of in the same vein as potential band names (if they have not been taken yet) as Perineum and The Intertarsals. Perhaps this is just the mysophobe in me speaking, but armpits are just the dank, hairy and unsanitary type of places on the human body I think we could well do without.
This is a cdr reissue of a 2005 album by Richard Ramirez’s An Innocent Young Throat Cutter project(which also featured Isabella K at this time). The album shows the pair in a more atmospheric, textured & at times almost ambient take on HNW & static harsh noise making. The disc also features a new track in which The Rita remixes another AIYTC album from 2008.
‘I’ is the first release from Cursed Aether; this is a sub project of Griz+zlor's Paul Dever and each release is dedicated to moon worshiping HNW, with all recordings happening during full moons.
‘Feel The Pain’ is the second self released cdr from one man Texas based HNW project Stress(aka Casey Duncan). On offer here is one long near on forty minute track that gives the you a shot of boiling & lo-fi stormed wall making.
Altres are an Scottish based synthesizer band who utilize some guitar elements to build atmospheric & filmatic electronic music which has soniic references to the likes of later day Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, less spacey elements of Ozric Tentacles and general more buoyant & dramatic 80’s sounding synthesizers music with guitar textures.
‘The Finishing Line’ is the second release from Matt Thompson of Guapo solo project Rashomon- which offers up an slowly becoming more unhinged mixture of :70’s library soundtrack music, lite prog rock, droning analogue moodscapes, sinister & slighty discordant jazz work-outs and all manner of 70’s focused soundtracking.
This untitled ep is the first real release (after a split with Torturing Nurse & a few comp tracks) by this Ukraine based perverse & sleazed noise project who violently simmer up a mixture of nasty and sinister: harsh walled noise, harsh noise & mangled/ amp-up creepy snyth attacks.
Dustin O’Halloran is a Los Angeles born composer & pianist who now resides in Berlin & ‘Vorleben’ is a new collection of emotionally rich, harmonic and at times quite complex solo piano pieces that were recorded live in Berlin’s Grunewald church.
‘Phase’ sees highly respected percussionist, improviser, electronic musician & sonic tension maker Jason Kahn joining percussionist Jon Mueller(Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, Hat Melter, Pele, Raccoons, Telecognac) to create a forty minute piece of thick & tense interlocking drone scape & precussive dwell.
In just under two and a half hours, Northern Italy’s Boring Machines presents twenty five artists from at least thirteen different countries across two disks. Surprisingly, only a couple of them are part of the label’s current roster, making Quit Having Fun less of a label showcase but more like a portal leading to a vast network of boutique labels and alliances.
‘Can You Read My Mind?’ offers up two 24 minute sides of ugly sonic uneasy & wonky, doomed & at times queasy soundscaping by long running one man English project Culver(aka Lee Stokoe) who has released 60 plus mainly tape releases since 1994.
‘Death’s Head’ is the first release from new Uk Midlands based HNW project Martial God Mask & it’s also the first release on new British label DWR(which is run by Rich who is Martial God Mask). On offer here is c30 tape with one 15 minute wall of noise on each side of tape.
”Emm dichda Ondrholz” (in the dense brush-wood) is the first album by this Alpine and Swabian woodland influenced dark folk collective. And it offers up a wonderful atmospheric sometimes tuneful mix of Germanic folk, lite folk rock touches, dark, dreamy & doomed forest ambience & all manner of woodland field recordings that are weaved through-out all of the albums 16 tracks to add atmosphere but also act as composition elements too.
Fire are a new Swedish uptight yet hypnotic and sternly psychedelic jazz and rock textured project that features the talents of Mats Gustafsson (The Thing) on saxophones and Fender Rhodes, Johan Berthling (Tape) on bass, electric guitar and Hammond organ and Andreas Werliin (Wildbirds & Peacedrums) on drums.