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With Antichrist Akercocke have found the perfect balance between brutality,atmosphere and progressive/experimental elements to make an album that’s enjoyable and surprising from start to finish.
Perpetuum Mobile is full to its quirky, bizarre and sometimes tiring brim with kids show like looped brass tunes, strummed Hawaiian guitar waltz’s, stuck cracking piano loops and all manner of snatched easy listing audio chesse. With all manner rhythmic elements, plundetronics and surreal advert or stage show singing over the top.
The American trio Zonder (Dutch for 'without') presents a version of heavy rock that needs a few spins to grab you. The music is dense with all kinds of influences, performed with a raw energy.
I previously reviewed an EP by this Korean/Japanese project by the same name, but this is a full album called UFO. Things haven't changed much since then, but that doesn't mean this isn't worth a listen.
Rock is serious business. Well, not really, but by getting it out the sweaty clubs or screaming stadiums this so-called 'chamber rock' has acquired the more serious air of classical and contemporary composed music. Yet, while listening to Endangered you'll find a serious amount of fun as well.
Coma Berenices finds Merzbow mining father into rock like elements to make an album that takes in a droning rock like air, that’s heavy with a doomy and sleek blackness, making the simple white on black cover seem very apt indeed.
This is a collaboration between one half of the Boredoms Yoshimi and Swedish sax and noise improviser Mats Gustafsson, and it's a real treat managing to be equally haunted, alien,beautiful and jagged. It’s 45 minute play time,a trip in the best sense of the word.
Erection is a wonderful jarring, disorientating noise meets bizarre sampling escapade from this Italian sound artists. That’s alive with Perverted, humorous & macabre intentions.
Amrita The Quintsessence offers up on it's audio alter a mix of dark ritual ambience and black electroncia. It’s goes from building sacrificial air, to looped sinister, to darkly psychodelic beatscapes.
This is a wonderfully morose mix of dark electric guitar, come folk, come synth hover and downtrodden pop craft. With Nick Greys voice bringing to mind a more mournful take David Gahan of Depeche Mode dark crooning.
Haunt sinks its drone come psychedelic rock teeth into you deep- coming off like if upbeat Popol Vuh, early Pink Floyd and The Doors jamming together on some great acid. With the odd avant-garde edges and traces of modern ambient guitar harmonics throw in here and there along the way.
Imagine a talky teen drop out psychotherapy student come outside artist take on motivational spoken word recordings, then add in a lo-fi vague musical backing that hovers over a few different musical genres and you’ll have Barr’s Summary.
This CD with peculiar artwork is a presentation of the artists on the label going by the peculiar name of Record Label Records. The 'sampling' of a picture on the sleeve may well be a hint to the music herein.
Electric Dress represents a live collaboration/ improvised set between the trio recorded live into Tokyo 2006, then edited and mastered by Mr O’Rourke. All to make a Rolla coaster almost freefall 50 mintue noise ride, with a lovely analogue feel about it.
Carl T. Pace aka the Beta Cloud is a self described purveyor of "ambient/noise/doom/shoegaze" music out of New York (somewhere). It's strange to even review this release because it is limited on the level of Organum's early cassettes. The review copy that I received appears to be a part of the general release of a whopping twenty copies (mine is 13/20). There is also an even more limited edition release of ten, which includes six original photographs taken by Pace and is wrapped in black cloth. It appears as though both editions are still available at the time of this review, if the Witchhouse Records website is up to date, so act yesterday if you want a copy.
Sometimes an album comes out of nowhere that blows you away, and for me The Vulture Club's Live Young, Die Fast and Leave an Exquisite Corpse is a prime example of such a sucker punch. I haven't been able to wrench myself away from this disc since I first spun it a couple of weeks ago.
Sistereis carves out an atmosphere that evokes ill fated ocean bound trips, faded photos of long dead loved ones pulled from sea salt depths, and eerier ghost ships cutting their way across dusk purpled skies. It mixes together slow dieing beautiful piano textures, sinister jazzy touches, doomy sea salt bass rumbles and sun bleached modern classical tones. All under washed by creaking, cull call and all maner of eerier noise matter.
Umbilicus Maris whisks the listener off into a vast abounded citadel situated on the deepest ocean floors, lit by fluorescents and sea bound aurora borealis. This is fine ambient craft rippled with watery rhythmic touches & subterranean choir voices to make vast meditative and mystically soundworld to lose ones self in.
This is a reissue of the excellent Sturmpercht’s first album from 2004, never before released on cd, here it gets given a fine package treat with the cd housed in side a wooden slip. The album is wonderfully focused and full formed opening shot- Germanic tongued mixing together with quirky Apline Folk, Neo Classical, ambience, more thoughtful and emotional touched sound craft.
There are two things that set this 80’s slasher apart from the 100’s of Friday the 13th rip off’s that appeared at the time. Firstly it had effects wizard Tom Savini on board who had worked on many great horror films including the first Friday the 13th. Secondly it had a soundtrack composed and performed by prog keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman- who had weaved his distinctive classical infulnce electronics through many of Yes’s most famous moments and become a household name in his own right after releasing a string of concept album in the late 70’s.
Venomous Cumulus Cloud kicks up one hell of a dense psychedelic shifting kaleidoscope of noise. Balancing perfectly the need to be brutal and complex in its texture and use of sound. Simply put this is one hell of a ride, its prime noise on the same level as some of Merzbow's work.
Grand Mutation is a gothic tinged sound strew collaboration between Norwegian noise master Lasse Marhaug and fellow Norwegian composer Nils Henrik Asheim. The album conjures up a heady world of improvised church organ, noise and electronic treatments.
Somewhere on Sadalsuud a woman whispers the mantra: "I have found myself, away from this world". Probably somewhere near the star in the Aquarius constellation, "The luckiest of them all" from its originally Arabic meaning, after which this piece is named.
In a sense this is the antithesis to the Bexar Bexar album I reviewed earlier. That album conveyed the feeling of chilling out on an afternoon, after a burning hot day. This album is more of a chill, but equally soothing.