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DJ Scotch Egg makes a mix of gabba game boy, happy hardcore, whizzing past colourful electronics with little hits of odd and often puzzling humour. Scotch Hausen is twenty four minute rush of happy game boy sounds, stop/start bits, Bach re-imagined in Gameboy land and general happy overloading chaos.
Not unsurprisingly with this been the work of One half of Norwegian noise terrorist's Jazkammer and released on the Pacrec label, this has very little to do with silence great or otherwise. It's a deep and textured collection of noise craft, that along the way melds in-between the sound roar and rush some quite musical traces.
Silo 11 is built around slowly evolving and dissolving drones and ambience, with a distinctive bleak mysterious air about it. Like walking along a changeless grey landscape made up of derelict industrial units and decaying metal structures & expecting strange figures to suddenly appear.
Oakland California's Brandon Nickell is AEMAE, and Maw is his second album. Not having heard his first album, The Helical World, I had no idea what to expect. The press release describes this music as "electronic/noise synthesis" and "experimental", and it's fair to say that Maw includes those elements. There also appears to be a bit of Coil and Nurse With Wound influence going on here.
This collects together tracks from the often overlooked Israeli noise/ experimental scene. Going from long dialogue sample led tracks with noise manipulation, to ethnic chanting that slowly melts into noise hazy, to seething mulit- layered sound overloads.
Communal Rust offers up a quirky mellow and often hypnotic collection of guitar and electronics landscapes. Which much like the collage cover artwork seems to whisk the listener off to strange and distant lands.
Reverberate slowly is a perfect title for this collection of late night/early mourning minimal beatscapes and slight glitchy touched ambience. Giving the feeling though out of just about falling asleep mellowness. Nothing is every rushed just softly-softly tones for late night drives and early mourning come downs.
Strangle the Wretched Heavens is the third and final CDR in a recent series of archival discs, which document recordings made between 1994 and 1996. I'm not going to go into each track, but let me just say that of the three (the other two are Emerald Message and Glowing Raw), this is the best.
Südpol( South Pole) is a wonderful rich, melodic and tone dense exploration into eletronic moodscapes. This is Reuber Forth album and follows on some of the spacey electronic tendency shown by his label mates Rafael Toral’s Space, but in a lot more approachable and accessible form.
+Dog+ make a lo-fi grimy and murky take on noise, that seems to hum and burn of cities sound discharged, All the sound elements are muddy together, runing like cold grey vomit down the audio canvas. +Dog+ formed in 1991 Osaka Japan as a solo noise project of Steve Davis, this is projects 12 full length album along with many eps,etc.
Christening Black Death With The Devourment Of The Worm is a bit of a mouthful of a project name. So what does such a name have to offer?, well they submerge the listener in 40 minutes of maggot crawling dead for a few weeks, Subterranean drones. A ghastly flesh ripping mix of black ambience, noise of soured horrific grimness, with some slight nods towards metallic tendencies.
Glowing Raw is the first in a series of three archival disks that document an aborted album for Siltbreeze Records recorded between 1995-1998. The sounds here do fit in with the sounds of Market Square and Houston, the two albums that this would have been recorded between. Not to say that the music is exactly similar to either of those albums.
This double cdr reissue of an early gone out of print disk set, now presented in a very nice arty paint splattered cardboard sleeve and musically illustrating the different sides to The starving weirdos own take on improvised/ drone music. Making up over two hours of involving soundcraft that goes from sinister/disturbing wondering towards noise, to playful more jazz tinged weird calm scapes, and all sorts audio slipstreams to get lost in-between.
An old Broom knows all the dirty Corners managers to sound both crude, odd alluring, bizarre and some how haunting in places, Which is a difficult mix to pull off with such conviction as is show here. This is one of the many released albums under the name of Mlehst a one man noise and sound project of UK based All Brentnall, who formed the project in 1992.
The Nagaraja Movements is this project first released cdr on an outside label, away from their own more art based releasers. It also offers a more conventional musically take on the projects weird ritual/ drone/ sound art music, making this an ideally entry point to the projects unequal and very odd musically world.
With a name like Fuckhead you know you’re not going to be in for an easy or laid back ride. The band are on one- hand are a genre shredding musically entity that melds together; avant rock, operatic touches, electronic overloads, jazz, and noisy oddness. On the other-hand their performance art terrorist whose live shows and video are often bewildering and disturbing, touching on taboo subjects such as insanity, male sexuality with a heavy doses of nudity and visual overload.
This new ep coming not long after Cashmore excellent solo album Sleep England, shows us a different musically side to this talented musician and composer. It finds Cashmore steping way from his guitar and onto using piano and percussion, joined by the instantly recognisable voice of Antony (of Antony and the Johnson) & David Tibet written lyrics and words, along with rich string and brass contributions from others.
This rather splendid box set brings together three albums original released between 2001 and 2003. All three of the albums offer an unique mix of Dark ambience, neo folk, neo classical, noise and looped Germanic march/ beer drinking music, and orator like speakers that drift like fiery ghost in and out of the albums atmospheric fog.
Over the past few years, MV & EE (Matt Valentine and Erika Elder) have released a slew of CDR’s and LP’s in microscopic editions, mostly on their own label, Child of Microtones. Aside from last year’s sprawling double LP/CD Mother of Thousands (Time-Lag), their recordings are not usually distributed to the general public.
Last year black metal didn’t work too well for me and my musical interests drifted off elsewhere. One of the few bands to pierce through still was Paysage d’Hiver, a Swiss band managed to combine a cruel lo-fi aesthetic with melancholy and beautiful ambience. The only member Wintherr turned out to also have another band.
Ensepulchred make grim and noisy keyboard based Black metal, but don’t let the mention of keyboards make you run to the hills as everything here is so fuzzed and distorted to hell- there’s nothing close to commercial black metal about it. It feels like a cross breed between Burzum’s more keyboard laden moments, distorted 80’s synth horror sound track work with a few noise like traces.
Maju is the duo of Tokyo's Sakana Hosomi and Masaki Narita, and this release is not surprisingly their fourth release. The inner CD tray tells us that Maju is Japanese for cocoon. The name suggests that this is ambient music which is intended to create an insular space or "cocoon" for the listener to inhabit.
Viking Metal is thematically confined to lyrics which relate to Vikings and Norse mythology. Suspension of disbelief is required for the listener to take seriously songs about sword battles, written as if they are still being fought today. That said, With Oden on Our Side is a top notch death metal album, which is musically diverse, and surprisingly fairly melodic.
Israelian busy bee Igor Krutogolov has yet another project on his hands which is in many respects the opposite of his band Kruzenshtern i Parohod. The artwork of White is very much what the title indicates: white.