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Indicator Light is a forty-three-minute improv/ free jazz recording which moves from briefly dwelling in the unease and gloomy. Before shifting gear to the pacey and angular, through to the woozy and careering. It’s a recording from a 2023 live show- with the whole set captured in an up-close, yet crystal-clear manner
Austrian composer, Andreas Berger, has done a lot of work under his own name for theater and film in his career, but in the early 2000's, he branched out with a different project as Glim. Releasing two records Music for Field Recordings (2003) and Aerial View of Model (2006), 2024 sees his third Glim album after a long eighteen year hiatus. Utilizing cassette tapes and an old Walkman, Tape I has Glim expressing his experimentation with the manipulation of sound via the inconsistencies and subtle variations that magnetic tape provides. While nostalgia plays a big part of it for Glim, the real driving factor is the way in which the sound is shaped via this gear and giving newer work a bit of a patina that brand new pieces would not have.
Don’t Change Hands aka Change Pas De Main is an erotically charged thriller/ comedy from 1975 directed by Paul Vecchiali (Drugstore Romance, Once More and At The Top Of The Stairs). The film stars Myriam Mézières (The Diary of Lady M, Fleurs De Sang and A Flame in My Heart), Francoise Giret (The Great Spy Chase, The Hunt and The Good Life), Hélène Surgère (Salo, Drugstore Romance and The Strangler), Howard Vernon (A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and She Killed in Ecstasy) and Michel Delahaye (Holy Motors, Le Frisson De Vampire and La Vampire Nue).
The Mummy And The Curse Of The Jackals is a late 1960s slice of bad movie pie, featuring a lumbering/ bulging-eyed mummy, a bad-toothed & wonky-snouted wolfman, and an ageless/ devious Egyptian princess. The film features highly stilted acting, cheap transformation footage, light hints of crude gore, and lo-fi psychedelic light effects. Here from Severin is a Blu-Ray release of this lesser-seen/ known of the 1960s US exploitation cinema- taking in two hours of extras, including a bonus sexploitation film & a commentary track for it.
Set in the year 8000, there’s not much left of the planet as we know it. However, within this post-apocalyptic landscape only the mutants, scum and robot-people remain. Humanity has been wiped from the face of the earth and even Santa Claus must fight to survive. Welcome to the setting of Infinite Santa 8000! Originally directed as a multi-part web series by Michael Neel (Drive-in Horror Show, H.P. Lovecraft's Celephaïs and It’s Me, Ma) in 2010, Infinite Santa 8000 was recut, re-edited and re-imagined, into what is now, a full length animated directors cut, Neel also added new scenes, and reanimated and retouched some shots to create something akin to his original vision for the movie.
Three artistic talents from Berlin - Manuel Klotz, Karla Wenzel and Tobias Vethake - all currently circumnavigating the musical avant-garde driven by the thrill of no boundaries, improvisation and freeform creation. Klotz is nominally a sound designer focussed on free jazz and noise, while Wenzel is a songwriter and sound scapist and Vethake a composer for film and performance art, and the three artists have now united to produce a work of jazz-minded music inspired by the likes of pioneers Ornette Coleman, Caspar Brotzmann and Cecil Taylor, but which deviates from the both the means and structures of those particular masters. A wonderfully inventive and deeply engaging piece of work, Burst stands totally alone in its uniqueness.
Catching Fire is a live recording of a collaboration between two Norwegian greats- fusion/ prog trio Elephant9, and legendary jazz guitarist/ composer Terje Rypdal. It’s very much in the mode of live albums of the 1970s from key prog/ fusion bands- with it offering up wonderfully shifting, varied and at points decidedly fired-up selection of tracks.
There are some ambient, abstract works of electronic music that are so hermetic – claustrophobic, even – that the worlds they created leave little room for an outside even as their source material depends on it. This is neither good nor bad; it is simply a way of categorizing certain albums as they appear in a landscape populated by a host of other endeavors, be they groups, performances, or listener-driven works. Ümlaut (aka Jeff Düngfelder) is unapologetically hermetic, and his latest release, Un Étre Humain Ordinaire, is a tribute to the expansive and yet cloyingly interiorized space of ambient production. Nestled in the outer reaches of rural Connecticut, Ümlaut pieced 12 compositions for this release, totaling over an hour, in which the idea of capture – both literally in the recording process and as an arrested individual – is visited over and over again, like an ethnographer's sketchbook of the self.
The rather strangely entitled Woods Are Wet ( aka Onna Jigoku: Mori Wa Nureta) is a darkly heady mix of disquiet-led mystery, low-key horror, and S&M-focused Roman Porno/ Pink film. The early 1970s Japanese film effectively shifts from uneasy and dread-filled, to sinister and kinkily deranged. Here from 88 Films is a new Blu-Ray release of the picture-taking in a new scan of the film, a commentary track, and a few other extras.
Dariuss is a low-budget slice of experimental/ arty horror from the UK. The 2023 film features no formal dialogue and is a jarring/ rapid cut affair- which moves between lightly unsettling, puzzling, and at points fairly disturbing- with moments of deranged sexualized violence. Here from SRS Cinema is a DVD release of the film.
Dated 11 is a two-track/3-inch CDR from US noise project Fail. The tracks move between textured noise, jarring noise flows, and muffled ambient drifts.
R4 (aka Ohio-based Barry D. Scheffel ) is a project that sits somewhere between ambient, noise, and subtle field recording manipulation. Rainmaker is a three-track/three-inch CDR, which moves between brooding/ droning uneasy, and pared-back ambient/ field recording scaping.
Reading the artist/ label write-up for Escaping The Seventh Circle, we find out it’s a journey through The Deep Bleed’s struggle with mental health. It’s a single nearing twenty-minute track- which swirls, drifts, and moves through ambience, subtle noise tones, and other hazed/ distant sonic flotsam ‘n’ jettison.
Speak No Evil is a Dutch/Danish thriller from 2022- which builds from social awkwardness, onto taut uneasiness, through to deeply troubling and soul-searing bleakness. The film got a remake earlier this year, and while there are similarities between the two- I’d say the original is far more harrowing/heart-wrenching. Here from Shudder/ Acon Media International is a bare-bones DVD release of the film.
From Powerhouse here’s a Blu-Ray boxset bringing together two Mexican vampire films from the 1950’s- both films blend mist swirling ‘n’ coffin creaking gothic, suave male and more mysterious female vamps, and a fair bit of action. The set features new 4k scans of both films, a selection of both new/ old extras, and an eighty-page booklet.
A Real Pain In My Neck is a wonderful example of layer-shifting/ darting textured walled noise. The twenty-two-minute wall from this Cincinnati project, most certainly keeps you on your toes, with one's mind getting a workout as you try to keep -up with/ follow the textural layers/ threads.
Crusade is a single thirty-five-minute ride into constantly rolling, baying, and churning walled noise from this UK project.
Witch Burning features two thickly brutalising ‘n’ rapidly battering examples of the HNW form from this long-running California project. Both tracks come in at dead on the half-an-hour mark, and both are as intense as each other.
Giallo Movie Posters Vol 1 is a wonderfully glossy and brightly colourful celebration of the early years of the most stylish of all horror/ thriller genres. The just over two-hundred-page book focuses on the years between 1961 and 1968, with often multiple different posters for films both notable and more obscure.
As mysterious as what's beyond the cosmos, Abschwörzunge unleashed their debut EP, Whorl, on I, Voidhanger this November. Four tracks of bleak and punishing death metal blast forth heralding the coming of a new force in cold, cosmic extremity, make extra dark with flourishes of black metal. While the band's members, provenance, or history are unknown, one thing is for certain; this EP makes desolation and emptiness sound fantastic.
Howl is the first-ever proper sonic pairing between two of Britain’s key experimental moody setters. The album features two lengthy tracks, which nicely move through a fair bit of rewarding sonic territory- shifting well between the abstract and the atmospheric- making this one of the great instrumental albums of 2024.
Cello player Oliver Coates is an experienced touring musician who released his debut solo recording in 2013. Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time is his latest work, released this year in 2024 on Rvng Intl.
The Shape of Night (1964) is a limited edition Blu-ray release from Radiance, and, as I’ve said in a few reviews now, I only have a promo disc but am happy to guarantee that the release proper will look great: Radiance really are one of the best in the game now. So, the full release comes adorned with stylish packaging, accompanied by a booklet featuring new writing by Chuck Stephens.
During the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the sword and sorcery film genre was hugely popular. As with any popular genre it was split into sub-genres- there were even blends of action and fantasy, more horror-fed or erotic takes, or films that focused more on one facet of the genre. The Sword And The Sorcerer very much sits in the last category, as it focuses squarely on the action-bound/ swashbuckling side of the genre. The 1982 film was helmed by infamous low-budget/direct-to-video action director Albert Pyun- it’s a pacey & pulpy ride of a film, with sword fights a-plenty, a dastardly villain or two, a wise-cracking ‘n’ stubby hero, a maiden in distress, with a light sprinkling of sorcery/fantasy.