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This on first few plays through seems like nine four minute tracks of searing, brain melting wall noise but the more you play it the more elements, detail and texture surface and flit over the contistent walls of noise.
Grouper sound sits between echoed and dreamy guitar pop of the 80’s, folk/rock and ambience. At the centre of the project is Liz Harris who seemingly plays everything and producers the felt, misty and haunting vocals that float, shimmer and soak through all of Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill.
This is an one man black metal project from san Francisco first album that was originally put out in 2005 and now gets a very desevered reissue. So what sets this apart from the mountains of other one-man black metal projects? well it’s the distinctive and atmospheric mix of ambient/electronica elements with varied and often quite prog touched black metal and goth rock elements all to create a epic, distinctive and dark sound.
Wood and concrete as it’s titles suggests is a mix of organic and non-organic mater- The organic textures in the form of various manipulated field recordings and non organic elements in the form of guitar, laptop textures and manipulated rhythmic and cut blocks of sound. With Edmonds building dense and detailed yet often calming and harmonic sonic pictures from these two elements, I guess best described as active and dense ambience meets musique concrete.
Painting Petals on the planet ghost is the third release by this off shoot of My Cat is An Alien featuring Maurizio & Roberto Opalio and Ramona Ponzini who last joined them for the Black magic Disco project. But unlike the dense often hectic sonic waters of Black magic Disco this is deeply tranquil, beautiful and hypnotic.
This does exactly as the title suggests- it finds electronics and sample wiz Coh Aka Ivan Pavlov taking the voice /singing tones of Cosey Fanni Tutti and cutting, reshuffling and layering them up into rhythmic, atmospheric and musically form.
Le Temps des Moissons(The Time of the Harvests)is a prog, drone and jazz cross breed original released in 1975 with hand drawn covers due to the pressing and production cost. Here Beta-lactam Ring bring it back to wonderfully hypotonic & tripped out life in a rather nice hard back book mini gatefold, with two extra tracks from the same time not found on the original release.
Though born from the Neo Folk scene there’s something very other and strange about Death in Junes sound and sonic presence, at the base of all of songs on The Rule of Thirds is acoustic guitar but there’s lots of things making this a bizarre, intriguing, quirky and at times sinister playing experience.
The nightvision is this two pieces debut album with having only one cassette release before and it’s a highly effective and eerier shot of drone craft, dingy sometimes aggravated electronics and guitar scapes bringing to mind the same sort of dread filled and doomed soaked grim looping and building atmospherics of the like of Skull Defekts and Wolf Eyes at their more claustrophobic and grim soundtrack like.
Gebirgshohenstille finds one man German black metal/ ambient project Vinterriket focusing more on the atmospheric ambient keyboard side of his sound to create 6 sonic hymns to the loneliness and beauty of the mountain scapes, with only two tracks having blacked guitar and vocal tones on them.
This split release, available only on LP and download, presents a couple of unique performers who are quite dissimilar to one another in approach. Barge Recordings are touting this as the first in a series of unlikely pairings, and they're off to a good start.
My relationship or should I say obsession with this spoken word/ sound scaping album goes back to when it was original released back in 1993, at the time I'd read a review about it saying that this was one the most appalling and gut wrenching things your likely to hear. So I spent the ensuing years looking through record shop rails across the world trying to find a copy of this depraved fruit, but I never could, but it always stayed in the back of my mind taunting me—so I was very excited when I saw it was to be reissued.
In Remembrance of me is a dense, swampy and often atmospherically licked sonic stew of noise and drone textures built with only the use of vinyl and tapes, the pair of Jay Sullivan and Howard Stelzer building up a rich, strange and haunted sonic world.
Borbetomagus are a boiling pot of jazz, noise, avant-rock, electroincs and improv. This is a reissue of one of their most loved and respected albums, original recorded live on Halloween 1986, here the original issued 32 minute set is joined by an extra equal manic 21 minute set.
Guitarist Jeff Gburek says the title Red Rose For The Sinking Ship takes arcane essence. It's a sonic essay about Mao Zedong's leadership of the Chinese revolution.
Bitter Sweet is sound and ambient artist Sawako forth album and it finds her pulling and morphing organic instrumental colours into beautiful, atmospheric and detailed sonic sheens and lush drone expanse. Though electronic processing is used through out it never feels synthetic or cold, it’s always feels very real, natural and organic as if growing from out of your play back system filling your listening and head space with an often warming sonic glow.
This three way split was original released as a give away for everyone who attended the recent Merzbow, Sutcliffe Jügend and Satori London show now it’s available to everyone else until the pressing of a 1000 runs out. And it’s a nice handy primmer to hear where all of the projects sounds were on the night with these exclusive tracks- with the Merzbow track been a monster size track near 15 minutes.
Recordcompanies complain a lot about dwindling sales, pointing fingers to everybody but themselves, yet on the other end of the spectrum you'll find more releases than ever before.
The Danish trio Svartbag was founded in 2002 by A.REX and Niels Ladefoged. With Peter Kyed they eventually became a trio, occasionally augmented by Dureforsog drummer Andreas Hauer-Jensen.
Miss Autopsy make bitter, murderous, bad feeling and often awkward sounding mix of unwell pop music, droning organs, jagged/sparse indie and wondering punked folk music. I guess the best comparison would be a more barren/ bittered and awkward cousin of the Paper Chase.
This fiery and unforgiving split between Italian noise pervert Fecalove and Hong Kong based power electronics violators Morbid Behaviour is the first release on H.I.E production a new noise label from Hong Kong.
I’ll have to admit I’d been rather underwelmed by the recent live come back album by uk dark ‘n’ surreal electronics/ folk/ what every collective Contrastate, But A Live Coal under the ashes is a whole different kettle of dark ‘n’ heady fish. It's really up their with some of coils best work and one of the finest examples of dark and psychodelic sound scaping your likely to find. The album was original released in from 1992 here it’s reissued with an extra track from the same time.
Broult is a startling, virtuoso and above all entertaining album that shines light on the possibilities of what a rock band can create and do just using bass, guitar and drums. The album sits between been improvised and composed, seesawing and mixing between jazz, fired up rock, world music traits, the blues, funk and more experimental textural rock/ improvised expansive sound.
The Massacre of the egos is the bringing together of five of Australia’s most respected and versatile jazz musicians for a collection of highly rewarding and varied improvised tracks that go from angular and dense, to playful and pretty, to striped down, barren and a little odd- all weaved in and out with melodic edges and atmospheric bite.