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Collecting Earthquakes is the solo album of one half of the organic-horror drone project Slomo. Holy McGrail has some help from some friends too, Julian Cope and Stephen O’Malley (Sunn0))), Khanate guest on a track a piece. Though it touches down briefly into Slomo’s eerier creeping ambience, it goes to lots of other musical places, across its three long tracks.
You would probably expect the music from a group that includes Nurse with wounds Steven Stapleton, Matt Waldron from Irr.App.(Ext) and object rusting avant-gardist Jim Haynes to be something of a mass of surrealist, drone, ambient, sound collage lunacy. Well you would be right.
The Legendary pink dots new album is a glorious cocktail of pretty piano flourishers, folksy guitars, dub beats, jazzy intrusions, nods towards British guitar/ synthesizer pop and lots more besides. Making an album, that is full of both memorable and experimental challenging songs. It also mixes in poignant; often strangle funny, clever and thought provoking, lyrically content.
As a child growing up in the late 70’s to early 80’s, the nuclear fear was very clear in my mind. I often wondered too, what it would feel like to walk into a place that had high radiation: would you smell, hear or sense anything different?. I often wondered too, what it would be like to walk through the areas left mainly peopeless by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in 1986. There was something very strange and deeply sad about the pictures, I had seen of the rural town's and city scapes overgrown by vegetation, there once busy thoroughfares eerily quiet.
Band of pain are one of the few dark ambient projects, that truly have the ability to bring up goosebumps, or have you looking behind your self to see if your been watched or followed. This career spanning two disks set takes in some of their best moments and offers up some rare and unreleased treats.
Osaka Bridge is a pleasing haphazard take on Jazz, mixing in soundtrack and vocal elements. To create an album that awkwardly drifts past the ears. It seems to murmur of lost images of the seventies and sixties, all teethy smiles and too bright soft drinks.
Touch three offers up three disk's of vast panoramic canvas of sound, each track seems to invite you into a different world,time or place. You’ll find your self lost within the depths of the drone and that’s all that seem to exist. It’s almost like a religious experience, deeply meditative, but at the same time wide awake.
Goatvargr conjure up some great evil and brutal atmospheres, mixing noise, ritualistic rhythmic patterns and dark ambient sounds capes, along with touches of black metal. All of this makes a great varied album, heavy with satanic air.
Now, Diabolical mangers an amazing feat, it brings black metal towards a more commercial sound, but still keeping the original grimness and evil riffing. No keyboards or female vocals here, this is true black metal touched by dark rock elements.
Orbit service come off like a mix of Pink Floyd, American indie, post rock, some electronics and sprinkle of pop too. Songs Of Eta Carinae is their second album and it’s an enjoyable enough ride into outer space, which I can see been huge, in certain circles.
Teenage Hallucinations collects together the early work of US noise master John Wiese. The most amazing thing is that some of this work dates back to the age of fourteen. Even these tracks have a devastating and rewiring-of-the-brain tendency to them, while most fourteen-year-olds were thinking about first dates and how to get booze, Wiese was creating these amazing body jolting noise structures.
Something’s are worth the wait, the eleven years wait for The Drift, was worth the wait. From the outset it’s clear this can only be a Scott Walker album. It’s strange alien beauty ringing from every note, this is music to puzzle, to amaze, to get lost in. Like all great albums it will take many listeners to get proper handle on it. To understand all the reference points, even then it will still be unknown.
Son Memorise is Luc Ferrari’s first post-humous release. This the second in a trilogy of Ferrari Cds to be released by Sub Rosa contains three works spanning a period of twenty-five years.
Silva is the first proper release from Norwegian label Miasmah, and it’s a wonderfully treat for the ears. The compilation has a richly dark air throughout, all of the artists to some extent or another mix organic instruments with electronics. Surprisingly enough for compilation there’s not one duff track here and it seems to flow as a whole, making a wonderfully lush atmospheric journey, from begining to end.
‘Colourful’ would be the wrong term to describe the career of Japanese psychedelic bard Keiji Haino. Everything the man does, as diverse as it is, comes from very dark spaces. These two liverecordings on this double CD, its full title being Reveal’d to none as yet - an expedience to utterly vanish conscienceness while still alive, are no exception.
The Refusenicks, a trio around percussionist John Hollenbeck, had an inside joke going on about a fan named Claudia who they met at their first show. Her name kept lingering among the members of the band resulting in some sort of collective fantasy. The band fell apart and Hollenbeck went on to form a quintet. Searching for a name Hollenback wanted to tribute his old band (among other reasons) and named it the Claudia Quintet.
Ergosphere is a serpentlike beast of an album that twists and turns through complex beatscapes, noise eruptions, machine-chilled melodies and later on hazy ambient flourishes. But beware: like all serpents, it has fangs and will often ripping into you brain with caustic gusto.
The Creep slides out of your speakers and ripples under your skin. It’s eerier bass tones and sinister ambience, leaving bruise like hand prints on your mind, long after it’s finished. Also your listening space seems so much smaller, and your eyes home in on shadowy details of your surroundings.
Classic Erasmus Fusion is a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic and surreal masterpiece. It’s rich with dada humour, sinister implications, and general twisted oddness. Sounding quite unlike anyone else, but touching down musically and sound wise in lots of different places.
Honestly, I'm not one to romanticise the eighties. In many ways it sucked big time, but you can't discard an entire era and I have the proof right here. People may claim it was a horrible time for music but here I like to inform about a band that made their best material in the period.
Helios second album Eingya offers up eleven heart warming and mellow slices of electronica, met by lush organic instrumentation. Nice enough to take home to meet you mum. The melodies soothing and calming, the beats nicely head nodding.
Feu Thérèse debut album mixes experimental rock with elements of musique concrete, noise and sound art in an interesting and enjoyable manner.
Night of the Bloody tapes invites you through serrated flesh flaps, into a chocking and distorted world. Where the skies are black, cracked by crimson scars, and there’s just endless twisting and turning of sound molecules in the air, shadowy figures seem appear and disappear into skeletal forest that weeps, down into the strangely maggot flesh coloured earth.
The hurdygurdy is not much used in contemporary music, although it could be more logical than than one could suspect. It’s a common instrument in western European folkmusic where part of the current rocksound (the folkmusic of today) originates from as well. So for a French band to pick it up isn’t as strange as it may seem.