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The Man Who Had Power Over Women is an early 70’s drama set in the morally corrupted world of music management. It focuses on a middle-aged agent, who breaks up with his wife & has a midlife crisis. The film's drama is lightly touched with elements of humour & female flesh- though equally there are some dark/ more cynical edges too. Here from Powerhouse is a recent Blu-Ray of the film- taking in a 4k scan, a new interview with the film's screenwriter, and a few archive extras including a lengthy interview with the director, and a few of his early shorts.
Café OTO is a double CD set that brings together two fifty-minute sets from Japan’s master of noise Merzbow. The recordings date back to 2016- when the japanoise artist played at London’s Café OTO.
The Woods is a recent nine-track album from Satøri aka UK’s Dave Kirby. It mixes moody & foreboding synth scaping, with searing ‘n’ fizzing harsh noise & ambient industrial- all topped with moments of shouty to atmospheric vocals. Making for an album that often shifts from the uneasy/ shadowy to the intense/ roasting.
The Insignificance Of Human Life is a German noise split- bringing together Power electronics project Scatmother, and noise/ PE project Chaos Cascade. With the CD taking in seven tracks, and around thirty-five minutes of noise.
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra is a heady, at times strangely haunting mix of creature feature, body horror, and urbane set fantasy. The early 2020 South Korean film regards a mattress that grows a strange mold-bound creature in its springy depths- which feeds/ grows from removing Vertebra from its human prey. So it’s a film that brings true horror to a place where you should be feeling comfy & relaxed. Here from Indiepix Film is a region-free DVD of the film.
The harmonium is a thing of beauty: simple, hand (or foot) operated, coaxing pure lamentation out of the reeds of its pre-electronic guts. Left-field, microtonal pioneer and theorist, Alois Hába (1892–1973) thought to create a version of this plaintive unit based on a sixth-tone scale, which probably requires some explanation, but that is well beyond my area of competence. Suffice it to say that the sixth-tone is a fraction of a fraction of something otherwise understood to be whole. In other words, it’s a microtonalist’s dream. Fast forward to the year 2021 when new pieces were written for this idiosyncratic instrument and we get two works written by Ian Mikyska & Fredrik Rasten respectively, performed and collected here on Music for Sixth-tone Harmonium.
Here’s a pro release from Rural Isolation Project featuring two tracks, amounting to just over half an hour, from Boredom Knife. The digipak is decorated with abstract images suggesting rust and deterioration, and features the barest of information - as in, next to nothing. Epidermis Sessions I straddles several noise genres, mashing them up to create something that’s pleasingly old-fashioned to my ears.
Vipassi's Lightless has a rather primitivist presentation, ritualistic-sounding titles and a cover featuring a circle of naked women dancing around a fire in the dark. I am hitherto unfamiliar with the band; they released one prior album in 2016 Śūnyatā, also released on Season of Mist. Based on the presentation, I expected some kind of tribal soundscape or esoteric doom metal. And what I got is indeed metal, with a kind of nocturnal, esoteric air, but it’s significantly more progressive and melodic than I was expected.
Punch is a UK slasher film set in a rundown seaside town. It mixes sweary drama, with moody shots of both the sea & the town's decline, a neat killer, a few effective gory kills, and rewarding moments of uneasiness/ creepiness. Here from Miracle Media is a digital release of this 2023 film.
Making music out of an inaudible source sounds like something out of The Onion, but Point of Memory has managed to make this possible on their their latest, Void Pusher. By sending inaudible bass frequencies through a room filled with acoustic instruments, they were able to capture the bass frequencies' interaction with the instruments and record the resulting vibrations and reactions. And when even this was inaudible, they ran the recorded results through amplifiers and discovered the hidden sounds within. Mixing and editing this source material with the audible results led to a fantastic and intriguing album in Void Pusher. Much like the infinite series of numbers between each and every number, this approach to composition serves to remind us that silence doesn't really exist, outside of locally. What is perceived as silence is full of frequencies outside of the range of the listener and this is realized due to the work of artists like Point of Memory. It is interesting to think of how this approach would revitalize works like "4'33," as the subtle vibrations from the pianist, the room, the crowd, etc, would cause some movement of the strings or get captured inside the piano body itself. To amplify this in such a way as Void Pusher would reveal an entirely hidden world.
First released in the year 1986 Nova Akropola was the second studio album from Slovenian/ Yugoslav avant-garde music collective Laibach. It saw the project offering up a sinisterly jarring, often disconcerting, at points downright demonic blend of martial beats, fascist-like chants, sampled orchestration/ horn work, unnerving samples, and deep guttural vocals. It’s a record that still sounds urgent, unpredictable and surprisingly undated. Here from Cherry Red is a recent three-CD reissue of the album- with the original album being presented alongside two discs worth of live performances of album tracks from over the years.
Lord of Misrule is a new British folk horror tale from director William Brent Bell (Orphan: First Kill, The Boy). New priest Rebecca (Tuppence Middleton) is more than happy to get involved with her village’s folk traditions, in fact she and her family are entranced by the showmanship of the annual harvest festival. But when her daughter (Evie Templeton) vanishes, Rebecca is drawn into a dark history which leads back to a threat beyond human comprehension.
The Lost is a teen serial killer film set in small-town USA. The early 2000’s film mixes drama, and cop investigation, with moments of brutal violence and female nudity. It features an impressively moody-to-darkly intense lead, as well as a fair bit of darting/ shifting editing and soundtracking. Here from Ronin Flix is a recent Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a new 2k scan, and a good selection of new & archive extras.
From the early 1970 Mean Streets was the third feature film from Martin Scorsese. It’s largely an episodic fly-on-the-wall drama set in the streets & clubs of New York City's Little Italy- with light touches of crime thriller mixed into its make-up. The film is the first collaboration between director and actor Robert De Niro- who have gone on to work together many times over the years since. Here from Second Sight Films is a new box set release of the film- taking in a UHD & Blu Ray, a new 4k scan, a good selection of new/ archive extras, a one hundred and seventy-eight-page book, and eight art cards- all packaged in a ridged slipcase with new artwork.
Paris is a nearing forty-minute slab of searing meets atmospherically droning walled noise. Utterblight is a relatively new project from the UK, and this is its fourth release.
III takes in a twenty-minute example of rough, raw, and bone rolling wall craft from this Pirot, Serbia-based project. It comes in the form of a digital release- with the cover artwork featuring a moody monochrome picture of a three-towered rock outcrop.
Propagation Of Uncertainty is a two-CD set bringing together a selection of pieces from Estonia-based modern classical composer Arash Yazdani. His work mixes acoustic and psycho-acoustic elements- to create an often very wonky, highly disorientating, and at points downright unbalancing work.
Composed in the early 1970’s Femenine is a seventy-one-minute minimalism composition- which blends in light touches of jazz, ethnic percussion and climbing soulfulness. It’s one of the better-known pieces by New York's Julius Eastman- a gay African American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer. He sadly passed in the year 1990 at the age of forty-nine, before his work could get the full attention/ respect it deserves.
First released in the year 1993 Prospectus I is a key and important record for several reasons. It defined the project's distinctive take on dark ambient, as well as helped create/ form that genre. It helped put the then up-and-coming Swedish label Cold Meat Industry on the map. And it’s gone on to not only deeply influence the underground ambient genres, but it’s made a sizable impact on wider ambient & atmospheric music. Here is the 30th-anniversary edition of the album- which appears as a joint release from Cyclic Law & Yantra Atmospheres- been presented as a four-CD boxset.
Build’s latest release, Orienting Points, is a collection of radically different moods and techniques, which do not always mesh well with one another.
Mausoleum is schlocky, campy, and at points nonsensically OTT shot of 1980’s horror. It blends glowing-eyed demonic possession, gore-bound telekinesis, and hammed-up/mist-flowing gothicness. Here from the relatively new cult/exploitation boutique label Treasured Films is a new UK release of the film. With the Blu-Ray featuring a 4k scan, a new commentary track, and a good selection of both new & archive extras.
Ten years since their formation in Santa Cruz, Dipygus release their third album, Dipygus. It's not often a non-debut album gets the eponymous treatment, but maybe it's a statement from the band that they're starting fresh, strong, and true to themselves. Blasting across ten tracks in forty-one minutes, this self-titled rager, these death dealers tackle evolution, cryptids, and various hominids with disgusting aplomb. Delightfully vile and dark, Dipygus is a worthy follow-up to 2021's Bushmeat, and an excellent look at what the future holds for the band.
Nowadays, no-one is just a musician, musical artists span multiple disciplines giving their work added complexity, interest, and nuance. And Christopher Bissonnette is no exception. The Canadian artist straddles the worlds of music, sound art and graphic design; spending his days exploring visual and audio art formats while performing and presenting his work at art galleries and music venues alike.
Here’s the fifth in Imprint's excellent Essential Film Noir box sets. The Blu-ray boxset takes in four films dating from between the early 1940’s and early 1960’s. Once again we get a nice selection of different takes on the noir genre- going from an undercover agent meets slavery noir/ thriller. Onto an anti-communist noir, through to burglary come character study noir. Finishing off with a crime thriller meets early vigilante example of the genre.