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Self-generating, autonomous, and indifferent to the vagaries of harmony and fundamentals, the drone is maybe the last of the non-domesticated musical beasts. We know that the same frequencies can be achieved with electronic or acoustic means, but their manipulation requires subtlety and attention to detail that is beyond the scope of many musicians and trained players. One, by Wave.Collapse (aka Henry Oakley) is a powerful, intense, and breathtakingly new spin on the drone genre. Divided over 21 tracks and more than 2 hours, One feels like a research manual for constructing the most discrete electronic sounds imaginable, marshalled in such a way as to feel as though they were always already there, festering and decaying on the margins of the auditory spectrum.
The Devil Rides In is a three-CD compilation looking at satanic-influenced fare from between the mid-60s and early ’70s. The selection on the discs moves from the expected proto-metal/ doom, on through more pop-focused fare, into folk, jazz, funk, and slightly more experimental/quirky fare.
Here we have two CD set bringing together the first two early 80s albums from Scotland’s The Exploited, as well as a good selection of bonus tracks. The sound shifts between raging street punk, bounding Oi!, and more speeding hardcore, with a few more broodingly mid-paced to semi-metallic moments here ‘n’ there.
Here’s a walled noise split that shifts between the murky ‘n’ brooding, to the pelting ‘n’ the wonkily winding down. It features Poland's Olion, and Cincinnati, Ohio's Whore’s Breath- the former offers up two fifteen-minute tracks, while the latter a single thirty-minute wall.
Pinniped is a German project that creates noise/ ambient themed around seals. Fixation Without Resolve mixes lightly glowing arctic ambience with textured noise & walled noise- to a moody to battering effect.
Harsh Prophecy features two extremely raw & ear roasting examples of the walled noise form from this highly prolific Californian-based project. Each track nears the thirty-six-minute mark, and each is a searing & sonic nerve flaying as the other.
Deception is just under half an hour wall from Death To Dynamics. It finds the UK project blending rapid-slightly- bucking rumble with smaller static bound skips, for an attention-fixing example of the walled noise form.
Genre stalwarts and merchants of the macabre, Deceased, are back with their eighth full-length, Children of the Morgue. Continuing their mission to bring fast-paced, grim storytelling to the masses through fun, ripping death/thrash, Deceased are as on form as ever, even nearly forty years later. While their approach has changed a bit over time, as anyone with this much longevity would be expected to do, the group still impresses with their skill, speed, and commitment to delivering a rip-roaring good time through horror and metal.
In 1977 George Lucas created a low-budget movie that would change cinema forever, of course, that movie was the original Star Wars and we all know that story, however, the popularity of Star Wars meant that the formula would be copied a number of times, most famously with the parody, Spaceballs starring Rick Moranis and John Candy, the Italian rip off, Star Crash with David Hasselhoff and Caroline Munro, and Battle Beyond the Stars, starring George Peppard and Robert Vaughn. Less well known is Hardware Wars, a 13-minute parody of Star Wars from 1978, directed by Ernie Fosselius, an actor/ director from California who is best known as the voice of the Rancor keeper in Return of the Jedi and who also worked on the sound for Spaceballs.
Holde Träume, Kehret Wieder! is a new double CD release from Stockholm-based Magnus Granberg, whose work sits between modern chamber music & gentle improvision. This release takes in two different takes on his 2021 composition Holde Träume, Kehret Wieder!( Sweet Dreams, Return!)- one version for a quartet & one for a septet. And as we’ve come to expect from Mr Granberg- both versions are wonderful sparse-yet-compellingly detailed works, which are equally lulling enchanting & decidedly haunting.
Within the wide and increasingly difficult to pigeonhole genre of experimental electronic music, finding a point of entry can be exhausting, if not downright futile. I am the first to admit that my Venn diagram feels more like an Etch A Sketch than any kind of stable map, which does actually have its advantages. Enter Alberto Boccardi, whose latest release, the archly named Apnea, is a claustrophobic masterpiece of microtonal movement with a bevvy of frustrated stops and starts. Composed over several years in his native Sicily, the air and light of the island have been completely walled off in favour of what feels like a tiny room somewhere in a basement, where ideas move without ever finding a proper home.
The Sect is an early 90’s euro cult blend of thriller, fantasy, and horror. It regards a living on her own/rabbit-loving thirty-something teacher- who after nearly knocking down an elderly man gets tied up with a strange dark cult. It was the third film helmed by Milan-born Michele Soavi, and co-written by none other than Dario Argento. Here from Severin is a double disc UHD/Blu-Ray release of the film- taking in a 4K scan, and over three hours of extras.
Misunderstood is a mid-1960s Italian melodrama regarding an emotionally distant Consul General whose wife dies- he then has to deal with the aftermath with his two young sons. The film is both heartwarming & heartbreaking- dealing with childhood mischief, emotional muting, and the understanding of grief. It’s a beautiful shot & conceived film- which really did move me, and at points had me tearing up. Here from Radiance is a new Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a 2k scan of the picture, a new visual essay, and a few archive interviews.
On paper, Top Line sounds like a hell of a lot of 1980s euro cult fun- seemingly a mash-up between action, adventure, and sci-fi. We have Franco Nero as a booze washed-up writer in Colombian- who after being offered some local treasures discovers an alien ship in a cave- then gets chased by the C.I.A., the K.G.B., the mob, Nazis- with a dodgy-looking humanoid henchmen & body morph alien thrown into the mix. The thing is the pacing is all over the place, the dialogue is often presented in a deadpan manner, and really much of the film is fairly repetitive- meaning while there are moments, it just does work as a constantly entertaining/engaging venture.
8 Sonneurs Pour Philip Glass ( 8 Pipers For Philip Glass) brings together four 1970s pieces from American modern classical composer Philip Glass. And as the release title suggests they are all for pipes- in particular bagpipes, and Soprano/Tenor/ Baritone Bombard. All of the pieces focused on the dense looping patterns-based work in the composer's overture.
A schlitter, for those of you unaware, is a traditional contraption used by lumberjacks to transport wood from the heights of the alpine forest into the valleys. Fairly innocuous at first glance, but in the wrong hands this piece of apparatus has the scope to become a lethal slaying machine – and the perfect centrepiece for Pierre Mouchet’s terrifying new French horror Schlitter: Evil in the Woods.
Here’s an eighteen-track CD that collections together all of the tracks Kevin Tomkins( Sutcliffe Jugend, Sutcliffe No More, ex-Whitehouse) recorded utilizing autoharp in the early 2000’s. It’s a nicely varied, and creative collection which moves between the busy & off-kilter, to the layered & twitching, onto the pick ‘n’ grate psycho ambient bound, and beyond
Submerged is a single-hour long-form journey into dark ambience from Paul Taylor (Slaves No More, Sutcliffe Jugend, Sutcliffe No More, Bodychoke, and Inertia). It moves from darkly and slowly sweeping string-like, to more subtle warped/ warbling and gloomy hovering.
Get’s is the second album from the French experimental duo Geins't Naït. First released in the year 1988- it’s a seventeen-track album, which blends dense ‘n’ murky industrial electronics, with hacking beat scapes and weird/ surreal sound texturing. All making for an overwhelming, crude, odd, at points disorienting ride.
The Beast Within a werewolf-themed British horror film directed by Alexander J Farrell is being released by Signature Entertainment to streaming platforms from 19 August.
Denver, Colorado's noisy industrialist Amps Kill (Stephen Bailey) is back with his latest full-length assault, Wretched Inheritance. A bleak, post-industrial offering, this newest is a well-constructed journey into chaos, sex, death, and decay, capturing all the tenets of the genre's grim messagery while keeping the electronics fluid and engaging. Delightfully crispy on the edges, this dark, throbbing collection of songs captures the ethos and beauty of the passage of time and everything's inevitable demise. Whether structural, natural, or animal, nothing can escape this and Wretched Inheritance does a great job at showing the listener this world with a very objective and dark lens.
Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne's The Coincidence Masters is a whimsical and absurd collection of free improvisations by two guitar players, who are using their instruments for anything but their conventional sounds. The album is fifty-two minutes long, divided across eleven tracks of a variety of lengths.
To anyone with even the vaguest interest in the avant-garde, jazz, psychedelia, counterculture and dare I say prog, Soft Machine need no introduction. With music that initially helped shape late 60s underground psychedelia, by the turn of the decade the band had adopted an almost purely instrumental prog avant-jazz aesthetic courtesy of what is generally considered to be their ‘classic’ line-up of founding members Mike Ratledge on keys and Robert Wyatt on drums, plus Elton Dean on sax and Hugh Hopper on bass. It is these four musicians who appear on Høvikodden 1971, showcasing Soft Machine at their virtuosic and improvisational best as they perform across two consecutive nights at the Henie-Onstad Art Center in Oslo. While the second gig was previously released back in 2009, for this latest release we are presented with a handsomely remastered version of what might at first glance appear to be two very similar shows – the tracklisting appearing near-identical – but rest assured this is most definitely not the case.
All The Things That Happen comes in a smart gatefold card wallet, decorated with photographs of various things with contrasting textures: a wall, a window, a tree, a dandelion head, a spiked plant, and a dog - all presented in interesting, contrasting colours. It’s a neat visual representation of the album within. Bates constructed it, according to the label spiel, ‘primarily with the self-imposed limitation of a Casio SK-1’ - a crude early home sampling keyboard that I myself own and will one day sell for millions of pounds to an eager circuit-bender. The album has nine tracks, with the shortest just clearing two minutes and the longest nearing seven minutes, all are electronic and blur ambient sounds and ideas with more noisy territories.