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On offer here is 60 minutes worth of violent & at times darkly atmospheric HWN collaboration between Werewolf Jerusalem(Richard Ramirez's most know & prolific project) & Remlap(the harsh wall noise project of Canadian Jake Vida who also runs Pointless Blank records).
There’s been so much experimental, digital, post-this and post-that stuff entering my ears lately that a disc of music as it might be performed live (gasp) by real people (double gasp) is as refreshing as a hike in the country after years of city asphalt. Such music is far from dead, but I fear it’s been shoved so far into the margins that it has become as much of a niche as, oh, Merzbow.
Æra's "To the Last Man / Index of Dreaming" is a 2 album foray into a distinct, although quite conventionally 'space ambient', soundworld. The closest touchstone I can think of is the always surreal but ultimately playful and warm French group Lightwave, though Æra has a greater emphasis on thick pads, relaxed zen pacing and lots of nice, thick swells of low-mid frequencies. Like Lightwave, Æra evokes the subterranean bathed in the colorful, comforting light of bioluminescence. He also finds much in common with Steve Roach's synthesizer driven works.
"Original Warmth" feels like a "for completists only" live bootleg release designed for fans of an established group. Unfortunately, as an introduction to the work of Warmth, its a bit underwhelming, although enjoyable in the right moods and in small doses.
The five lengthy pieces on ‘Oltre’ are thick with tarry dread & pour soaking doom; sound artist & uneasy mood setter Robert Curgenven users a mixture of :Resonating dubplate, Turntables, field recordings, guitar feed back & ventilation/ fan sounds to create these thick oppressive & doomed slow moving sonic places.
Riot are a old school heavy metal band who later turned into more a speed/ power metal band. The band originally formed in New York back in 1976 & are still active today, through they’ve had many line-up changers over the years with Guitarist Mark Reale been the only original member in the now present line-up. This double disc reissue offers up two of the bands most popular & respected albums from the late 80’s & early 90’s; when they had become more of a speed/power metal band with some old school metal edger’s.
Asmus Tietchens barely needs an introduction, I’d dare say: since the late 70s, this veteran of electronic music has been producing increasingly more experimental and captivating sounds. Starting out with a fairly accessible or at least fairly more traditional sound, encounters and collaborations with personae such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) and Dirk Serries (Fear Falls Burning, Vidna Obmana) saw him drift towards the more sonically abstract and challenging.
The term supergroup fills me with a sort of indefinable fear and apprehension; it evokes – at least to me – images of sweaty 70s men with 70s haircuts and 70s outfits, and it seems to say guitar wankery, gorilla drumming and general instrumental chest beating; what’s more, the common supergroup seems defined only by its super-ness.
‘Big Ripper’ is a punch drunk, rugged, feed-back buzzed & on the edge of a nervous break down rock record. With each track being like a staggering, lumbering big & beer heavy man tottering from one foot to another trying to do a rock ‘n’ roll dance
Multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos is most likely to be found playing as part of his psychedelic rock quartet Grails, or as the newest percussive half of Om, and yet his solo project, Holy Sons, precedes these by well over a decade.
This is quite an usually, unexpected but ultimately highly enjoyble split. On the first side of this c44 tape we have Oklahoma based Persistence In Mourning who boil up a mixture of: tribal led noise electronics, Doomed wondering psychedelic rock scapes & all manner of interesting stuff. Then on the flip side we have Koufar who make Middle Eastern atmospheric tinged Power electronics.
Foul is the new blackly boiling & near unchanging HWN project of West Virginia based J. Cadle, who in the past went under the name of White Torture & is still in ...Massacre(with Sam Stoxen of Baculum & runner of Phage Tapes) & Oasis Of Fear(with Richard Ramirez).
The strangely entitled ‘S6r8r’ finds Swiss sound artists Gilles Aubry building slow-mo industrial mood scapes & rewarding textural work-outs purely with the use of manipulated field recordings taken from inside Stralau 68 (a former venue for experimental music that's now empty)which is situated in Berlin.
The sound of Slowcream’s ‘And’ is all about the morphing & shifting of dramatic & sometimes darkly lush classical string tones & cinematic textures with a very slight underlay of electroinca elements.
'Migdal Bavel' is the second full length album from Maurice De Jong’s (of Gnaw Their Tongues)often rapid & avant grade black metal project De Magia Veterum. And it certainly shows that De Jong still has the knack of writing complex, twisting & damned music after the rather lacklustre & 'tread the same water' of the last few Gnaw Their Tongues releases.
Yes, Sir(Filth Play) is a sleazy, perverse & often fast moving meeting of extreme noise, Fierce, old school & grimy industrial touches & all out wall noise attacks. All to make a very searing, crusty & depraved sonic attack on the senses.
Valediction is somewhat of a comeback album from this uk based original early 1980’s noise, noise rock & power electronics project- as this is their first full length album since the 1997 album Boeing .
Language often fails ‘music’ and none more so than those releases labelled post-industrial noise, power electronics or HNW. The perceived varieties of sound involved can seem relatively narrow, as can the often outlined historical context (from dada through musique concrète to industrial) all of which constricts attempts at elucidation in words.
I try to avoid forming any sort of prejudice as the Voice of Eye CD slides out of the envelope that came in minutes earlier, but it’s hard, so hard.
Noma's "Domesticism" is a deeply experimental record. Yes, one of those that few will ever be able to stomach or listen to in its entirety, something to keep in mind when reading the rest of this review.
This Swedish based HNW act have two things that are decidedly un-extreme & unexpected about them; firstly the projects name skönhet means beauty in English. And secondly the project is obsessed with the much loved English & Hollywood actress from the 1950’s & 60’s Audrey Hepburn, with this release featuring samples from her films as well as pictures of the actress herself. Harsh noise & Hollywood beauty odd bedfellows indeed, but some how it works.
Solitary Nail is the first of 12 bi monthly full length albums that will be released through-out 2010 by the highly creative & respected noise/general experimental Norwegian based project Jazkamer.
Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack for the original Alien film will be recognizable to many horror & Sci-fi fans worldwide; but this wonderful two disc deluxe set tells the often untold story of the score(or the two scores) & the battle it caused between Goldsmith and the films director Ridley Scott- with the score ending up been one of the most tampered with in cinematic history.
I heard this album without any prior knowledge of the band or its members. It immediately intrigued me with its inexplicably ghoulish album packaging and the delicious imagery of track titles like "The Taste and Stink of Old Coins". They seemed to suggest darkness of an intelligent and unnerving creative variety - the kind that can actually get under my skin.