Loading
Zinc Room is another creative slab of lo-grade industrial beat craft,creepy & apocalyptic soundtrack elements, chugging guitar hits and avant edger’s from this mysterious project whom I can seemingly find little or no info about on the net.
Veleno De Texixo is this Portuguese collectives second full length release for the Austrian Ahnstern lable. It delivers an often bombastic, epic and strange mix of traditional Portuguese music, folk-rock, prog, field recordings and the avant garde.
Having been aware of Robert Ashley as a major influence on the likes of Nurse with Wound and many other sound/ surreal artist it’s nice to finally hear some of his own work. Tap Dancing in the Sand is a selection of pieces of musically avant grade repetition offten text linked pieces with the Dutch Ensemble MAE.
Wild Flowers under the sofa is an emotive, often very touching, beautiful and haunting collection of sound worlds, which move between ambient, folk, emotional/ stretched out guitar scapes and deeply felt cimatics.
Glass Forest is Daniel Menche 67th release since his beginnings in soundart/ noise scene in the mid 90’s, it’s also apparently his last cd release as in future he plans to focus just on Vinyl and DVD releashers. This sits in the more ambient & percussive side of his material staying mostly away from the noise tendency of some of his work.
This collaboration between wall noise specialist The Rita and dark ambient/sinister guitar drone project Wilt does what every great collaboration should do, it takes elements from each parties sound to make something new,different and on this occasion very frightening.
Altars of science is a very messing with your head experience, it’s built around a collection of accelerating, stretched, droning and bent electronic tones which Marcus Schmickler has put together in often jarring, breathless, alarming and at time almost suffocating sound collages.
The splendidly named Wounded Knee is an Edinburgh based project who make organic sounding & repetitive electronic music, Show some Humility! Is a near on twenty five minute offering.
To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie is a duo who's name sounds like it would make a great title for a Crass or Flux of Pink Indians reunion album. The band's website, rather than serving as a typical band site, is a humorous if dry social critique on consumerism, corporate culture and blind conformance. In concept, it's not unlike Radiohead's commentary on the subject, in that it provides the information in the form of the first person view of the hypnotized consumer. It's an increasingly valid point, in this age of widespread public indifference. It's hard not to approach the subject without some measure of anger and resignation, and To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie do so with a good measure of both.
Serpents In The Dawn is an rather elegant and tuneful collection of string swooned tragic/ romantic melancholy pop & neo-folk songs from Russian, with all the tracks sang in English tongue except for a few.
Plain ride is a band including Janne Westerlund, a member of Musique Machine faves Circle, as well as Pharoah Overlord, Chainsmoker and Sweetheart. Like Circle, they take off in different genre trajectories. Yet where Circle go everywhere from prog-rock to Kraut rock, drone and even a bit of metal edge, Plain Ride add more prominent late sixties 60's to mid seventies American rock and folk influences.
With a name like Various you kind of hope they came upon the notion as a way to piss off people with I-pods, in which case I raise a glass in appreciation of their revolution against post-modern musical zapping. Not only that but they in The World is Gone have produced a searingly cutting edge fusion of dubstep and moody folk to while away the nights of urban (perhaps urbane?) isolation.
Underwater Passage is built around sounds recorded from an abandoned telephone cable some 10km under the sea south of Livorno Italy. This may suggest we’d be in either dark ambient or field recording territory, but this is surprisingly is fairly varied both in sonic emotion and sound movement.
This new double disk set from Japanese psychedelic rock/ folk/ out-there group shows them offering up one sprawling, crawling, jammed- out and ominous psychedelic rock cd long track. And 8 smaller tracks that dip into psychedelic ritual music, improvised music, lo-fi dada electronics,avant- jazz and all manner of fun & chaos.
As its title suggest this is made up purely of field recordings taken from various jungle areas in and around Thailand, over a four year period. The field recordings are left as recorded and tamper free, and I have to say this is one of the most replayble, strange, haunting and rewarding field recordings disk I’ve come across.
Though his career as sound artists spans over 30 years with collaborations with the likes of Michael Nyman, Colin Potter and Keith Rowe along the way, amazingly this is Phil Mouldycliff’s first solo album of sound works. The six tracks on offer here fall somewhere between ambient, drone and haunting and sometimes a little quirky sound art.
After the release of their superb second album and one the ambient highlights of last year Deep Frieze, it seems only fitting that Cold Spring should revisit & reissue the projects first album from 2001 here presented with enhanced artwork and extra track.
Here english Ambient/ slowed post-rock guitar and synth duo return with their second releases on Important after the simply stunning rural tinged 'Honey Rose' ep from last year. This double disk set brings together a disk of live recordings of new material and an remix/ re-contextualized versions of the live tracks by the likes of Robert Horton, Keith Berry, Gregg Kowalsky, Astral Social Club.
Furnace is collaboration between two finish sound artists; No Xivic who’s know for his dark electro-acoustic soundscapes and Gelsomina who’s an prolific and inventive noise artist. Furnace offers up one long collaborative track and one each solo track- as a whole the album shows some surprising moments both structurally and sonically.
Para Pacem- Para Bellum is a curious, original and cinematic rich mix of requiem masses, intricate piano beauty & discord, doomy organ unfold, industrial beat flavoured 80’s synth sound tracking, electro acoustic bounding & funeral ambience.
Each of the four tracks presented here are named after letters Kafka wrote to his Father, his sister Ottla and two women in his life, Felice and Milena. I will not pretend to be a kafka scholar, as I've only read some of his letters to his father, along with his other classics, the Metamorphosis (and other stories) and the Castle. I don't intend to expound greatly upon my impressions of his literature, mostly because I don't feel that I'm necessarily qualified, as I'm no critic or expert on the written word. I'm simply a casual, sometimes avid reader. But it would be negligent of me not to at least attempt to tie together the work of Kafka to the music presented on this album.
Joanne Robertson makes lo-fi, mostly acoustic/or stripped down electric gitar mix of folk, punk, grunge that’s often very haphazard and discordant, though it's not with-out it’s own awkward and pained charm. The lighter is her debut album
This is a highly welcome reissue of Circle's first album from 1994, which I’m sure many won’t have heard before. It has all the familiar Circle elements in place i.e. locked rocking grooves, musically genre pick ‘n’ mix and general adventurous, playful vibe. But with a more indie/ post- rock feel to the tracks, also the songs are in a smaller bite size than their later sprawling work- filling here 70 minutes with 15 tracks.
This is a superb, varied and near faultless double disk compilation from the German/ Austrian Percht/ Ahnstern label, which I’m sure long term MM readers will have heard me rave about before. This is an ideal primer for the uninitiated and a welcome back to old friends alike as it a mixes together already released material and with exclusive material for this compilation.