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Mercurial Little Jitterbug is another puzzling and oddly rewarding entry in bizarre sound world of Hoor-paar-Kraat, where little makes sense here in a conventional sense. We are present with five audio art forms, that utilizing layered found and environmental sounds, drone textures and an odd ritual air, that are somehow very appealing. Hoor-paar-Kraat mangers to paint your Listening space with a very bizarre other worldly edge.
This great split offers up two noisy mainly guitar based sound sculptures/tortures with eerier and sinister undertones. bring together the talents of prolific New Zealand noise/drone maker Birchville Cat Motel and Uk ten year old guitar noise project opaque.
Dance Enis Dance was original conceived as a piece that could be heard and felt, the idea for piece came about because it’s creator Mike Tamburo is slowly going deaf. With a mixture of Acoustic guitar, amplifier, Tibetan bowls, chromatic harmonica, hammer dulcimer, etc, Tamburo has managed to create a long form piece that’s covers a lot of territory over it’s half an hour running time. From droning autumnal like mantras, to shimmering feedback haze, to elegant folky finger picked elements and odd psychedelic/ rhythmic soundwork.
Gudrun Gut runs the excellent mainly female based German label Monika, as well as been involved heavily in the German alterative scene and an ex member of Elinstürzende Nebaunten. This is her first full length, which is a clever layered mix of various musically styles and moods. Predominately dance beat/ electronically led, but always inventive and fresh in it’s use of sampling and smart audio editing.
This is the first dark fruits of Chet Scott’s of Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis and Glass throat records metal project. It’s a inventive and surprising mix of Black metal, doom, darkly tuneful traditional metal elements, ritual air, traces of forest cinematics and dark ambience. All with Scott’s very distinctive pagan and natural led themes.
Most of western civilisation will never encounter horror or fear in the clichéd horror film surroundings. we rarely going out of our well lit cities and towns into the countryside; and we hardly ever go near creaking houses in the middle of nowhere. So our base and understanding of fear and death is now very urbanized, that’s what excellently David Kristian & Ryosuke Aoike focus on with Ghost Stories, urbane chills and very real scares.
Lisa Gerrard’s work both as part of the seminal Dead can dance and later solo work has a very distinctive feel and personality. It falls some where between world music, classical, soundtrack and rich ambient sound painting. This career spanning retrospective shows some of her most breathtaking, rich and powerful moments.
Red State is a wonderfully bedraggled and apocalyptic lo-fi take on indie rock cum folk with electrnocia elements and pop smears. I't's bleak with drugged out overtones and avant garde twists, noisy discharges, hazy barren viola cinematics.
Basic Programming comes form the excellent Warm Circuit label who brought us the great Modified toy orchestra album. Again old and modified technology is used, this time as the projects name suggests their mainly utilizing an 80's home pc favourite the ZX Spectrum.
This is the first of the second patch reissues of The Boredoms ‘off on another track’ Super roots ep’s. It finds the group investigating the rhythmic and jamming properties of their sound often in a veryapproachable manner.
Halve Maen was released in 2005 as a double LP. This double cd reissue is an exact scaled-down replica of the original package, including the gatefold sleeve. The music would fit on one cd, but that's nothing to complain about really. The cover art is an integral part of Halve Maen. It sets the scene for the weird and mysterious music enclosed in its sleeves.
The city of Bleiburg is now located in Austria, on the border with Slovenia. It is infamously known as the location where thousands of Croats were murdered by communist partisans. Horrifically, the Croats, who fled their homeland, surrendered to the British, and were told that they were going to be sent to Italy, when, in fact they were put on trains, and directly into the arms of the partisans, who had quickly taken over.
This collaboration between Cloama & Gelsomina perfectly balances muilt-layered noise craft with rich droning and melodic moments. Making noise compositions that are both engulfing & somehow haunted and mesmerizing too.
Beggar Master is a useful reissue of Aarron Dilloway’s( Ex Wolf Eyes & Hanson records main man) first solo album. Original released in a vinyl only pressing of 300 back in 2005, here it is in all it’s seething unpleasant glory for all to enjoy.
With Malleable Laminates Dave Smolen builds a sew-sawing soured and eerier musical/sound landscape. Coming off somewhere between improvised, electronicai and noise.
Contrastate were a ritualistic industrial band from Britain who formed around 1987. Handbags and DADA includes live material originally released between 1989 and 1993 by the TESCO organization, and an unreleased track, recorded in 2000, their final year as a group.
Rosy Parlane (male) is a New Zealand based musician who specialises in dense complex electro-acoustic music based around unrecognisable loops, field recordings, guitars and other instruments. Iris his previous release on Touch received considerable praise, including surprisingly from Red hot chilli peppers guitarist John Frusciante. His second release on Touch is another tour de force of contemporary drone and electro-acoustics.
Wold are a fiery mix of electro noise and black metal elements. Sledgehammer murky rhythmic pounding and electronic overloads go against overloaded demonic vocals distorted almost beyond recognition & grand and evil black guitar elements and dark harmonics try to make them selfs heard.
Immersion: two finds Steve Roach investigating a darker and stranger long form ambient sound world, than the first Immersion disk. Moulding and sculpting out some really very eerier and edgy nocturnal moodscapes, that have a mysterious harmonic charm, which seem to suck you in further and further to it’s slow moving dark world.
It’s easy to hear why 12K decided to reissue this 2000 disk from the first few moments, it’s the wonderful smooth and focused way it mixes gentle micro beats and a rich and rewarding ambient life blood. Dan Abrams (aka shuttle358) keeps ones attention though out in such a effortless and natural manner, making enjoyable and charming electroncia, making his machine weep pure melodic beauty.
Stars of the lid 8th album has been long anticipated, it’s been five years in the making to make sure every sound element is crafted to perfection. It finds the pair stretching and deepening their drone and ambient craft into more cinematic expanses, with a denser use of varied instrumental texture, and richer melodic flare.
For his new album Australian sound artist and ambient electronic sound painter Lawrence English has looked to more wintry and freezing tones for inspiration. Building six often barely there tracks of slowly moving ice bergs of melodic wonder and freezing tuneful soundworlds. It brings to mind perfectly the solitude and wonder of wintertime and endless white desert of vast ice & snow .
This is a welcome reissue of Tim Hecker's 2002 release, that’s thought by many to be one of his finest releasers and it’s easy to see why. Coming across some moments like being trapped in a TV dream, at others humming with richly warming Nostalgia. Hecker gives us a captivating, haunting and often beautiful collection of sonic worlds.
Seraphim Hallucino as it’s title suggest is more than a little puzzling coming off like a bizarre movie for the head mixing; dark ambience, weird soundtrack elements, industrial touches, avant jazz mumurs, noise, strange vocal traces and all manner of found and discovered sound.