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Marches of the New World starts off with a slow marching drumbeat and some droning Hammond Organ. The piece gets noisy and distorted as it goes, and it's embellished with some cool violin work. The manipulated Hammond has a deep, amped-up sound which is not often heard in drone or improv music.
Since the midnineties slowly and steadily there has been growing a strong rock- and metalscene in Turkey, which finds ways to combine their musical backgrounds with modern rock. Stadium rock and (nu) metal like Kurban, AOR like Mor ve Ötesi and my favourite metal siren Şebnem Ferah, but also a more psychedelic scene that echoes back to the glorious sixties and seventies.
The North Sea is the musical voice of Brad Rose, a busy guy who runs the Digitalis label, as well as the Foxglove CD-R label, and the Foxy Digitalis webzine. It certainly can't be argued that Mr. Rose isn't dedicated to underground music. This is his first "official" release, following a boatload of limited run CD-R's on various labels.
With a name like Krypt Axeripper you know things are going to be just a little tongue-in-cheek,& what you get with Mechanical Witch is a wonderful retro devil worshiping 80’s metal riff fest with the odd touches of horror movie synth throb & buzz. With the main evil master mind behind the project been Circle bass player Jussi.
The two long tracks on Idirmek highlight two different sides of MrPlotkin's Musical/ sound world - the first track Afyon floats in more ambient territory where as the second track Amphetamine is more noise, volatile & looped based construction.
The sleeve shows the map of Danish island Sylt. The use of a map must follow up on the way this album was conceived: travelling. Improvising their music in places like Toulouse, France while other times (re)constructing the recordings at home.
After to the melting sludge fest that was Follow this House from early on this year, Saw a halo sees this new York two piece creating a stranger more complex nightmare- built around; bent doomy harmony/chanted vocals, doomy avant industrial rhythmic work-outs, uneasy acoustic guitar or doomy organ sinister hovers and of course their trade mark buzzing & melting guitar weight.
Je Dèchire L’ongle Aux Criminels is an innovative, atmospheric and cinematic mix of melodic guitar craft, laptop manipulation, sound objects and field recordings. Falling somewhere between sound unfolds.
Samamidon Second album this year and third in all is once more an unique mix of country meets folk meets pop music, but it finds them enlarging their musical backing & sound textures making a denser & layered collection of tracks, from the often stripped down song craft of the past.
This new collaboration between sinister ambient unsettler Bj Nilsen & often percuin based drone/ noise maker Z’ev, is as the cover artwork suggest a slow winding descent into darkness or black firey mouth of Hades.
This forty minute split brings together two merchants of grinding & brutal Death doom torture with guttural vocals. Coffins are a name that I’m sure will be familiar to many & The Arm & Sword of a Bastard God make their debut here with their four tracks.
Hau is the debut of Japanese duo Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama, who call themselves Opitope. Chehei released his solo debut album last year on the Kranky label, which I have yet to hear. Hau's music was created using acoustic and electric guitars, bass, piano, vibraphone and electronics. Though the natural instruments are processed and augmented with electronics, the sound of the album is not at all pixellated. There is a naturalist approach to the album which is at once subtle and remarkably complex.
The simple but elegant artwork is little preparation for the hell that breaks loose on Gyo-Kai Elegy. The knowledge that Mikawa is the founder of brutal noiselegends Incapacitants all the more.
This is the second full length from the fabulous Efterklang & it finds them making their trademark sound denser, more epic and grand . I guess best way to try & describe the band to the newbie is a very distinctive & one off mix of ; post- rock, electronica and classical music with often very theatrical leanings and multi-layered/ dramatic banks of male & female vocals.
This is a highly enjoyable reissue of solo work from the late 1970’s by one of the main demented minds by behind noise godfathers Smegma. Mixing together weird collages of voice samples and old adverts, avant jazz wonderings, noise discharge & surprising musical moments.
Japans LSD March sixth album starts off fairly bare, stripped down & emotional with electric guitar folkly wanderings and tinkling musical box along with sad Japanese male singing, but over the five tracks the instrumental layers build up & the songs become stranger, more quirky.
This highly enjoyable and varied double disk compilation of Dark English folk and beyond is named after one of the oldest know English folk songs John Barleycorn which was first written down in 1588. The 32 tracks enclosed mix both traditional, quirky and the avant-garde song craft, using traditional themes, melodies and instruments along side more modern elements to build their own tributes to England’s dark nature and it’s distinctive seasonal changers.
The bizarrely named Wijlen Wij (Dutch/Flemish for 'us, passed away', MB) offer up an self titled debut album that's rather distinctive, often epic & atmospheric take on doom/slowed black metal craft mixing in dark monk chant’s, metal-lized medieval vibe, church organ grimness and slowed dark melodic synth swamps of sound to lose yourself in.
Submerged is Phaenon (one Szymon Tankiewicz) opening shot of deep, heavy, and expansive dark ambience that as the title suggests is akin to being submerged into an vast underground space or falling down an endless tunnel.
Kit is a noisy post-punk band from California. Broken Voyage is a spazz fest from beginning to end, which reminds me of a several other bands. The stepping off point is probably the Melt Banana because of the aggressive, overdriven music and the screamed, high pitched, distorted female vox. It's also kind of wacky, reminding me of an amped up Deerhoof. There are quirky changes in direction, mid-song, reminiscent of the latter. Kit do not share the Who-like drum fills, or the fairy tale lyrics of Deerhoof, so though indebted, they're not completely ripping off their sound. There are also songs which remind me a bit of the GO! Team, because their cheerleader chants are echoed on occasion throughout Broken Voyage. Unlike the Go! Team, Kit aren't relentlessly upbeat, which could be considered either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you ask.
Greek guitarist Socos has been working in various bands since 1989 including Fykia and Orama as well as a collaboration with art-pop artist Christos Alexopoulos. On Hyperhythmique analogue he operates alone on his acoustic guitar.
Alien Glyph Morphology takes the listener into a strange and hypnotic sound world built around looped and detailed rhythmic/drone patterns, that go from world music influenced, to tribal, to glitch electronics, to trapped electro jazz rhythms & beyond. The beat patterns woven and drifted over by electronic ambient hazes, edgy piano struck cords, eerier and aged jazzy tones and collages of chanted voices.
Asher’s The Depths, the Colours, the objects & the silence stands as one of the more stripped-down and eerier releases of the often already minimalist ambient label Mystery Sea. The three tracks here are built around edgy field recordings, slow haunted harmonic synth unfold and a real feeling of disquiet and abandonment.
Norbert Möslang is a visual artist and musician from Switzerland & Header_Change finds him creating shifting, sinister,alien atonal sound sheens from fellow Swiss video artist Silvie Defraoui stills.