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‘Zen Automata Volume One: V’ is all about very repetitive & looped machine like drones. It’s certainly not a easy listening by any means & I can see that a lot of people will not get on with this, but if like me you enjoy very repetitive sonic torture like HNW matter or stuck caustic drone music this could well be for you.
Slaughter-Fetus are a industrially caustic Harsh Noise wall project from Louisiana. This nasty & violent 3” CDR is the projects tribute to Takashi Miike’s film Addition & films notorious, nasty & sadistic Needle torture scene.
'Heavy Masonry' is all about creating a very thick & constant black jittering wall of evil sounding & murky static tone. Inside the black spray paint of black plastic case Griz+zlor offers up just over twenty minutes of grim, nihilistic yet rewarding ‘wall’ making.
Like many noise activists within the experimental doom/dark ambient/sludge scenes, Indiana’s Kyle Willey and Adam Cooley have been hyperactive, producing around fifty releases over the past five years under various guises on CDr, cassette or MP3. Most of these are available to download free-of-charge with torrents seeded by the artists themselves.
Here is one of those compilations that seems like it’s going to be all fusty theoretical mummery but instead boots open a door to uncharted sonic lands. Most people will probably think the target audience for this disc is music students, but I’d wager most anyone reading a site like Musique Machine would find this fascinating. I know I did. It’s a little like the aural equivalent of a literary anthology from a language never previously translated into English: Wow, where has this stuff been all this time?
‘Chainsaw Majini’ is my first taster of this Japanese HNW act & this 3” cdr is one hell of a brutal, unforgiving & brain grinding attack; like the sonic equivalent of being attacked by a chainsaw that's fully revered up & ready to split flesh ‘n’ bone.
‘Temporal Death’ is all about accelerating dread that turns very nasty indeed as the album swings from it’s dark ambient beginnings up to seared, shifting, sadistically juddered Harsh Noise & Harsh Noise Wall matter.
Simon Scott’s debut full-length Navigare comes to us courtesy of the fittingly-named Miasmah label, since “miasma” is an appropriate description for this record. Imagine the sonic version of greasy smoke rolling through the room you’re sitting in—but smoke with a whole congeries of subtle scents and maybe even flavours mixed in with it. It’s an atmosphere that suffocates and blinds as much as it soothes and uplifts. But if you assume this stuff always has to be uplifting and soothing, then you’re probably reading the wrong reviews.
Robin Crutchfield started his musical life back in the mid 1970’s when he formed & played keyboards in the seminal & respected no-wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori. His new album 'The Hidden Folk' is million miles away from no-waves jerking & often discordant sonic world; this offer up collection nineteen short tracks of earthy, haunted sometimes cute, sometimes eerier folk, music box unfolds & woodland bound moodsetting
'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.