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Descension is Aluk Todolo debut full length after a highly praised 7 inch and what a debut this is. For 37 minutes you tumbled through, get hypnotised and brutalised by this nightmarish, lo-fi , head-ripping and psychedelic black mind fuck.
High Tension Wires are a band made up of members of other bands, but they are not necessarily a "side project". The band consists of three members of punkers the Marked Men and one guy from the more rootsy Riverboat Gamblers. Their first album, Send A Message, released a couple of years ago, presented ten spiky punk and garage rock tunes in 19 minutes.
Sounds is frightening and exhilarating journey into jagged & awkward noisy guitar craft, thundering percussion, sinister & ill sounding ambient guitar uneasy, xylophone and percussion freackouts/playfulness with red hot splatters of electronic melt down and pulsing synth.
I first become aware of The Owl services’ very English take on folk rock from the excellent dark folk compilation John Barleycorn Reborn, instantly falling for their track North country Maid (which appears here too) with it’s intricate & memorable mix of banjo, guitar both acoustic and electric & all topped off with the beautiful sweet yet slightly melancholy vocals of Pamela Wyn- Shannon.
Canon Blue is a one man project by Daniel James, based out of Nashville, Tennessee, the Country Music Capital. James' music is not in keeping with his surroundings. Instead, he's chosen to create electronic pop, accompanied by real instrumentation.
Something’s just stick in your mind is an often charming sometimes twee & overblown collection of this English folk singers singles and demos work from between 1964 & 1967- going from bigger sounding stabs at more string led folk pop to more striped down acoustic guitar and voice tracks.
This new ep from dark electrionca duo Formication really shows them making thier sound denser, deepen and more unnerving. It also finds them removing a lot of the clichéd & straight forward beat patterns that littered their last full length & replace them with more complex and deviant ones.
The bizarrely named and mysterious Borful Tang offers up a double disk of strange audio treats falling between the cracks of ambient, noise, lo-fi electrionca & sound art to make a dusty psychedelic world all of it’s own.
Continuum is the dark joining of Steve Willson, guitarist with modern prog rock band Porcupine Tree & Belgium-born ambient artist Dirk Serries. The projects specializes in stretched out Sunn0))) like doom, drone, horror filled soudscaping and dark ambience.
Demons debut album is an ugly, sinister, nasty throbbing and droning collection analog synth basied tracks. Bringing to mind soundtrack music for either a very demented & sadistic sci-fi or horror movie or ones own bent drug addled nightmares.
De – tour is a jittering, dense, disorientating and often terrifying album with moments of drifting alien and looped beauty. Falling some where between improvising, jazz, electronica, modern classical, noise, drone textures, oily cinematics- this is a complex and head rushing experience.
Teniscoats debut is a charming quirky & sometimes hazily sad mix of tinkling pianos, warming & bobbing analogue electronics, light jazzy tones, folk, indie guitar chug and often cute Japanese female vocals. All making a buoyant & melodic album that also drifts into to more poignant, sad waters.
The wind of Orion Pyramids of war is a very one off mix of grim lo-fi black metal, chaotic guitar heroics, over the top sometimes disturbing vocals and sounds, all manner of sounds effects, with the odd stumble into haphazard industrial beat bound-ness, acoustic guitar element,grim cinematic & synth elements.The album feels like a melting pot (or witches caldron) where the Rev seemly throws in elements as he fancies & bizarrely mangers to pull it off for most of the albums running time.
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.