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Scott Tinkler is one of Australia's finest and most respected trumpet players- winner of numerous awards and accolades for his main incarnations as ensemble player. Backwards finds him step out of his usual collaborative and safer state into an improvised solo album.
This Russian collective who are named after the main river that runs through Russia, attempt to mix traditional Russian instruments,vocals and song elements with electronic textures and slamming techno/ electronia beat craft,plus the odd avant-garde nod.
Division One is the debut album from this Canadian noise/ dark ambient project. Delivering a shifting dark stew of sounds touching down in:dark ambience, sample driven dread be it ; voices, water drip, door slamings, metallic death machines chatter. With deathly rhythmic work-outs, all manner of metallic clunking and some more fiery noise moments though for the most part this stays fairly atmospheric more than anything, never really letting the noise run riot.
Follow This House feels like it's driping and oozing of cooling tar into your very being, the sound feels like it’s slowly winding down, but never fully reaching a stop- it feels like going round a round an every descending slide but never hitting bottom. One can define guitar elements, electronics and erratic percussion, but it’s melted together to make this heavy and limb weigh down stew of sound.
This is a very welcome reissue, remaster, etc of this classic progressive thrash album from 1989, that’s up there with the likes of Voïvod’s Dimension Hatröss in its distinctive sound and personality. Mixing together folk and dark fantasy elements, with break-neck complex riffing and rapid-fire mad hermit rant to more traditional metallic vocal fare.
Burning Rome is a live recording of Holy Mcgrails support show for Julian Copes Hammersmith Lyric show in 2003. The near on 50 minute is a good quality live recording touching down in all facets of Mr Mcgrails work from his solo drone/ ambient & the more rock traces of his solo album to the woodland drone project of slomo with Howard Marsden.
Topophonic Models offers up six track of drone craft based around modern cites & architectural space, from one of the old masters of the genre, who’s beign creating sound works since the mid 1980’s.
This is a soundtrack for little know 1979 sci-fi Fantasy tropical island adventure L'isola degli uomini pesce( The Island of the Fishmen) by one of the lesser know Italian film composers Luciano Michelini's. Mixing together romantic, dramatic and adventure led string themes, with jungle drum rock-outs and funked out grooves, to more mysterious and dark water bound string struggles.
Alessandro Stefana’s debut album Poste E Telegrafi offers up seven mainly guitar based cinematic and panoramic moodscapes, with surprising & creative avant-garde touches. Mixing together traces of the blues, ambience, flimatic themes- with gamelan percussion, quirky electronic elements and an array of other instrumental desert colours with some help from the likes of Mark Ribot & Leo Abrahams.
Groundfloor noiz offers up an ear smarting chaotic 45 minutes mix of guitar feedback fires, overloaded vocals, whistling like distortion, piles of roaring and overloaded sound samples taking in; media samples, deflowered advertising jingles, raped J pop and easy Listening traces.
Weeler is Machinefabriek second non cdr/ ltd release, growing on the promise of last year debut album Marijn, also on Lampse lable. This double disk set shows more depth ,variation and understanding of his growing sound universe which touches down in: electronica, classical air, noise and droning soundtrack elements.
SKKULL is the first sour/ brutal disenchanted sound fruit of this Göteborg noise/ bitter drone collective. It's an album thats built for ultimate discomfort and torture, never really becoming too seething or overloading, this concentrates on being jarring and ill-at-easy.
This is a reissue of Sissy Spacek second album with an extra track with the same line-up as the original album tagged on. It finds the project mining the more rhythmic and hazed edges of their overloaded soundworld, coming across more almost of improvised, jazzy take on their work, but don’t get me wrong this is still flesh striping, brutal and intense.
The Hafler trio who is mainly one Andrew M. McKenzie, have made a career out of making some of the most puzzling, confusing and down right odd & hidden agenda art since the mid 1980's. Both with their strange and often jarring soundworlds which fall some were between; noise, ambient/drone,Musique concrete and their often very complexe and arty packaging.
Diagnose: Lebensgefahr invite sthe listener into the demented and padded cell world of the mental disturbed. Coming off sometimes vaguely disturbing and often unintentional funny with it’s mixed of ; stale sanatorium ambience, industrial surgical throb, overdulgent theatrical deep and often affected vocal rant and rave. Also later touching down in neo-classical rhythmic marching flare and the odd almost doom dips in sound.
The Trinity of the non being offers us a trip into dark/murky ocultic and left-hand-path pitch black ambience. Mixing in ritual percussion and black industrlized traces, as the title suggest we're led on our trip by three diffent and dark musical entity’s.
Hibernaculum stands as an enjoyable stop gap before Earth’s next proper full length album. Bringing together over half-an-hour of old tracks re-done in the more country/rock drone format of thier last album Hex. With a second disk documentary of their European tour that lasts near on an hour.
Retkikertomuksia presents us with a collection of eerier, barren and often awarkward avant folk, come improvised sawing and sour droning tracks. That wails and moans of dead winter husks and bitterly cold melancholy cloud-ness nights.
Hidden Ascension lowers you in to a cryptal like throbbing doom state and bleak metallic fuzz of tones. It concentrates more on the grim uncurling texture of the sound above any recognizable or pleasant riffing craft. Feeling like the soundtrack to some ill-fated and ultimately life losing quest into dark subterranean regions. There’s no hope ,light, or anything approachable easy about the grim 40 minutes of sound on offer here.
Fertile finds Japanese audio explorer KK Null tightening up and reign-in his often sprawling sci-fi sound worlds into more atmospheric, shorter and more earth based collection of tracks. That also highlight the more straight forward cinematic tendencies of his work.
Shortwavemusic offer us up 5 tracks of loop based/ drone wonder, Instead of his often longer pieces, we have a few tracks under the ten minute mark. Which are no less atmospheric and mood altering as his longer pieces. All making this an exceptional collection of soundart we’ve come to expect from Mr Basinski.
The name a band chooses sometimes intimates certain pre-conceptions as to the sounds that one expects to hear on their recordings. Knives Ov Resistance surely conjures thoughts of a Genesis P-Orridge fixation, but don’t expect to hear a bit of old school industrial music on Prisca Sapientia.
Super Roots 7 is one of the more approachable and ‘easy’ experiments of the Super roots reissue thus far, but don’t let that put you off, its still damn fine. All the three tracks are based around tuneful/playful melodies linked to rocking percussive matter.
Procer Veneficus rebirth Black metal into a folk format, but not in the discordant jagged form someone like Dark Raven choir has done. This has a timeless lovecaft quality of soothing blackness about it. The eerier fog enshrouded picked and strummed guitars are hovered underneath by distant growling carried on a dead autumns wind.The tracks are also often underplayed by subtle and grim dark ambient/drone touches.