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Earache presents us with the definitive version of this death metal classic, by adding on a 44 minute live show from 1989 tour on DVD, making it a must buy for those who don’t already own it and to those who do own it, well worth buying again.
Touch 25 is an audio and visual celebration of the touch label's 25 years in existence. They are one of the most respected and quality consistent labels in the sound work, ambient, electronics fields.
Live at camp blood is a head melting kaleidoscopic noise trip, clocking in at near the twenty minutes mark. It rarely lets up and you'll leave your initially listening sessions slightly shaken. But like the best noise, over time it develops its own sense of chaotic satisfaction.
Monotheist stands as one of the most devastating, darkly poetic and mournful comebacks ever. It’s staggering how a band that most people wrote off as a lost, near on 17 years ago with the release of Cold Lake, have managed to create such a twisted heavy beast of an album, that still trickles with a eye for dark experimentations. It towers above the listeners like a sinister black monolith, which you must walk the corridors of again and again.
Susumu Yokota is a Japanese electronic musician who’s Sakura and Grinning Cat albums are considered classics of modern ambient composition. Here he collaborates with the UKs Rothko who as with their last release A Place Between enlist the vocal and flute playing talents of Caroline Ross.
Bryter Tystnaden was recorded in abandoned manor house in the Swedish countryside, as a result the sounds of the house have bleed into the recording. Spinform uses the house sounds as rthymic backing and atmospheric haze, for this dusty mix of electronica, haunted piano strains and muffled guitar strumming.
Sinkhole is a creepy half way house between field recording sound work and dark ambiences. The sound elements were recorded at II Pozzo Del Merro near Rome; it’s the world’s deepest Sink hole at a depth of a recorded -392 meters, but it’s believed to be deeper. The resulting album is a captivating highbred, alive with eerier echoes and sound calls from off in the darkness.
Death is no fun. Especially when there's torture involved: maiming, mutilation, rape, horror. And of course blood. And pus. And assorted fluids from genital areas. Preferably it has been rotting so that it got smelly. Or maybe it comes fresh, dripping from the gaping wounds.
My cat is an alien are purveyors of fine space music, utilizing guitar, percussion and space toys (what ever they may be). They managed to create without a synthesizer base, something akin to a more droney early Tangerine dream. Let's say if you enjoyed Tangerine Dream's three early albums, you’ll lap this up. This is wonderful heady, long form space music.
The Once and Future Herds is another Jewelled Antler Collective entity, featuring Donovan Quinn, Loren Chasse and the prolific Glenn Donaldson. For those who have been unaware of the Jewelled Antler ‘phenomenon’ up until now, it is a loose affiliation of artists with a flair for the experimental, centered around Chasse and Donaldson. These hard working cats also run the well-faring Jewelled Antler label, which has released music by the likes of Hala Strana, Uton and Dead Raven Choir.
This great double disk compilation, really highlights, the high quality of material released by uk label cold spring , in the areas of dark ambient, Neo-classical,Neo-folk, industrial, noise and experimental music. One can easily say, from what’s on offer here, that they are one of the top labels,in these musical areas.
Tor Lundvall is an artist living in America who’s output primarily consists of beautiful oil painting depicting lonely scenes of figures in open landscapes. His paintings are incredibly atmospheric and remind me very much of LS Lowry, albeit with a far more desolate and ambient feel to them.Lundvall has also released several albums of electronic music over the last ten years. He began with more pop orientated songs but his recent output has been in a looser more ambient style. Empty city continues in this vein.
With Moonchild ,John Zorn is again invocating the occult and devilry into musical form. But instead of using classical instruments as he has in recent pieces. He’s using Rock instruments to make a suite of songs, which bends and breaks the shackles of rockstructure. It summons up wonderfully intense and sinisterly brooding atmospheres, to revel in again and again.
About two years ago a friend of mine introduced me to the wonderful world of the Finnish experimental scene. Crowded with artists who playfully explore colorful psychedelia, kraut-influenced rock and weird folk in particular, Finland has often been referred to as 'Europe's Japan'.
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.