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Defamiliarizing one’s surroundings is one of many tasks well suited to the field recordist: paying acute attention to an environment and revealing the inherent otherness of its sonic character. This approach helps to contextualize the French composer, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, who is driven by a desire to render his most intimate milieu – the Loire valley, where he lives and works – into an experience of something altogether “exotic” (his words, not mine). Leaving aside the library-sized secondary literature on the problematics of the term “exotic”, Geoffroy constructs two long tracks out of field recordings with little or no extra sonic material or processing.
Hungarian experimental folk rock/metal group Thy Catafalque are veterans of the scene by now, iterating through many ambitious forms and styles between their black metal debut and this, their 12th full-length, released in 2023, titled Alföld.
Radiation Sickness is an eleven-track live album from New York thrashers/ crossover band Nuclear Assault. It takes in the bands Hammersmith Odeon show from 1987- when they first toured Europe, with Agent Steel, Onslaught and Atomkraft.
Black Circle aka Svart Cirkel is a 2018 Mexican/ Swedish horror movie directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano (Night of the Wolf, Here Comes the Devil and Come Play with Me). The film stars the legendary Christina Lindberg (Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Sex and Fury and Maid in Sweden), Felice Jankell (Young Sophie Bell, The Bunker Game and Tak för Senast), Inger Nilsson (Pippi Longstocking, Pippi in the South Seas and Pippi on the Run), and two new up and coming talents, who have very bright futures, the Midfjäll sisters Erica and Hanna.
Live At Plus-Etage Volume 1 is a three-CD set taking three different improv line-ups/ sets. The release appears on Belgium’s A New Wave Of Jazz label- so everything here is on the more abstract, difficult, and at times fiery end of the improv genre. Though as we’ve come to expect from the label the quality of the material is very high- with the players going off down all manner of rewarding sonic avenues- be they jarring, seared, or generally creative.
Electronic musician and producer Tom Thiel has been an active part of the Berlin scene since the 1980's, so it' s surprising that Album is only his second solo outing (with his first being Tom Thiel in 2011). Despite the small discography, Thiel's work shows his commitment to the craft and keen understanding of electronic music, arrangement, and structure. Coming at this release with both serious and playful angles, Album gives the audience much to chew on, whether song by song or following the album themes as a whole.
From the mid-1990s Vampires and Other Stereotypes is a SOV film- which is best described as low-budget Men In Black meets Evil Dead 2, with slight twists of the first Phantasm. Largely set in a few storage rooms- the film features some neat, at points fairly clever effects set-up, wacky not quite sure what will happen next logic and a fair bit of entertainment. From Visual Vengeance is a Blu-Ray release of the film- taking in a new scan of the film, and over seven hour’s worth of extras.
Theatre Of Death sits somewhere between a murder mystery & horror film- with subtle giallo undertones. The late 1960s is set around Paris’s Grand Guignol theatre- where new director Phillipe Darvas (Christopher Lee) has just started working- and a series of murders are being carried out around the city, with the bodies being drained of their blood. Here from Cheezy Movie is a DVD release of the film.
Released at the tail-end of the 1960s The Rape Of The Vampire was the first feature film from French euro-cult director Jean Rollin, who is most known for his erotic & arty horror output. The film very much comes from an art house/avant-grade place. Sure there is a gothic/ horror edge, and a fair bit of female nudity- but the structure/ unfold of the film is often confused, puzzling, and at times frankly pretentious. Here from Powerhouse is a recent release of the film- coming as either a UHD or Blu-Ray disc. Taking in a 4k scan of the film, as well as a good selection of extras.
A luminary of the industrial music scene that includes Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound, Diana Rogerson has been making groundbreaking music for the best part of forty years. Recording under alias Chrystal Belle Scrodd, Rogerson released her debut The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record in 1985 on the United Diaries’ experimental label, followed by Belle de Jour a year later. Since then, she has spent a sizeable chunk of time working with NWW’s Steve Stapleton (her partner for a time) both with the band and solo; and as one half of Fistfuck – the all-female duo famed for their noise and BDSM aesthetic. Her last solo outing was 2007’s The Lights Are on but No-One’s Home and now following a hiatus of nearly two decades, Rogerson has released Bluebottle In A Jam Jar – an intriguing musical take on the life of a trapped insect.
His Haunted Humming is a new wall noise project from the mind behind Poland’s Sado Rituals. And Scriptures is its fourth release- offering up two around twenty-minute tracks, which are created by utilizing just one chain of pedals.
Preservation is a two-track affair from this Cincinnati, Ohio-based wall-making project. Both tracks here have a decidedly rushing grainy ‘n’ gritty tone, and each slides in at the around fifteen-minute mark.
Along with Crass and Conflict, Subhumans is one of the key/influential bands of the late ’70s/ early 80’s Anarcho-punk movement. The band’s sound blended anger and punchiness, with touches of subtle humour- their song craft offered up moments of both rapidity, melody, and darts of moodiness- all wrapped up in a haphazard charm. Silence Is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans is a truly huge six hundred-plus page tome- beginning before the band formed, charting their first/initial break-up in 1985, their brief reunions in the ’90s, and the band fully getting back together in early 2004.
Andreas Lutz’s Abstract Language Model is merely the auditory component to a much larger work of the same name, encompassing visual as well as aural modes of representation. With that information in mind, there might be an expectation that the album version of this material could be lacking, or missing parts, or whatever, unable otherwise to stand on its own. Nothing could be further from the truth, though, and this is a credit to the degree of control (or lack thereof) that Lutz asserts on his machine-learning neural network (read: computational) model, trained in the fine art of Unicode: a quasi-universal characterset, incorporating nearly all forms of written communication. Such heady experiments often fall flat in their execution, failing to deliver the sonic goods with their performative conceits, but not here.
From director Taylor Wong (Buddha’s Palm, Behind the Yellow Line) comes a crime epic duology inspired by the likes of Coppola’s Godfather and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. In Rich and Famous (1987) we meet close friends Yung (Alex Man) and Kwok (Andy Lau) who have run up a gambling debt they could never dream of paying off, but the charismatic gangster Lee Ah-Chai (Chow Yun-Fat) bails them out on the condition that they work for him. But it’s not too long till Yung and Kwok rise through the ranks, and Yung has eyes on the top spot. Tragic Hero (1987) picks up the ongoing war between Yung and Lee, as their aggression towards each other reaches new heights of revenge and vengeance. This path of violence has its end in sight, and one of these former friends isn’t going to make it out alive.
Here’s an expansive release from Farpoint Recordings: a C80 cassette, in a nice printed card wallet, with some little inserts - and another 80 minutes of music included as a download… So, it’s not a short listen. We have eight tracks in total, titled ‘Tape 1’, ‘Tape 2’, ‘Tape 3’, and so on, with each track lasting around 20 minutes. The Quiet Club is a duo of Danny McCarthy and Mick O’Shea, here playing (very much) assorted instruments and objects in extended (blind) improvs that echo those territories explored by David Toop, Hugh Davies, and Morphogenesis, for example. I’ll quote from the label spiel: ‘Unable to listen to each other perform during the Covid-19 lockdowns the duo resorted to Telepathic Listening. Uninterested in Zoom, Facetime etc. the duo decided to each perform in their own separate studio’s 20km apart at a given time on appointed days for 20 minutes at a time. Nine tapes were recorded between 4th and 29th June 2020 using reference points including Joyce and Cage. Some of this material became an installation in Lismore Castle and Tape 9 was released on Café Oto's TakuRoku label during December 2020.’
Mr Mick was the fifth album from UK’s Stackridge. Released in 1976 it found the band offering up a mix of light prog rock, 70's pop rock, mellow jazz-rock, and whimsical/ spoken words soundtracking elements. Just under half of it took in standalone songs, and the other just over half is a concept album regarding a retired man. And it’s fair to say it’s a classic example of a decidedly mixed affair, though there is worth/ promise here- but you can certainly see why the band wound up in its original form shortly after its release. As part of the Esoteric Records series of reissues of the band's back catalogue- here we have a two-CD release of the album- bringing together a remastered version of the album, and an unreleased version of the album.
Out of print for nearly ten years, Drawn and Quartered's debut, To Kill Is Human, is coming back to destroy eardrums via a limited CD this month. Through Moribund Records, this legendary 2000 release reminds fans of why this brutal slab has stood the test of time and marked Drawn and Quartered as one of the heaviest hitters in the game. Shining like a blood soaked beacon in the Pacific NW scene, the band is represented very well through this first offering, with mastering and cover art by some scene greats. In addition to this rerelease, Moribund is hammering streaming and radio, ensuring that To Kill Is Human will be bashed into metalheads' minds and they will have perfectly fitting death metal for the season.
The Guard From The Underground is an early 90’s Japanese film- which puts slasher tropes in a quirky mystery comedy-come-satirical setting. It’s a decidedly tonally unbalancing affair, which switches between the quirky & playfully camp, and the brutal & unnerving – with a few moments of the downright creepiness. Here's a Blu-Ray Ray from Third Widow Films- as part of their Director's Company Collection, which focuses on the legendary 1980s Japanese production company. It features a digitally remastered print, a commentary track from Japanese film expert Tom Mes, and a few other extras.
From Imprint here we have a five-film set celebrating the 1970’s work of Canadian-born journeyman director Sidney J. Furie. He's a genre versatile, highly skilled, and generally very talented filmmaker- who until now has not been given the praise & due he very much deserves. The five-disc Blu-ray set features HD scans for each film, as well as an impressive selection of new & in-depth extras.
Burial Hex is a band I discovered with the release of 2011's Book of Delusions, it so impressed me I was immediately led me down a rabbit hole of discovery- finding it was one of a number of different aliases of Clay Ruby. Burial Hex is a dark electronics project that recalls the power of extreme metal without the heavy artillery of guitar, drums and bass, eschewing such instrumentation in exchange for a simple setup of one man and a bank of synthesizers. Since the 2007 debut, Wall of Zombies, Ruby has released a whopping thirty-five albums under the Burial Hex moniker as well as singles and EPs. He's also released hundreds of others under a plethora of other names/collaborations including Journey to Ixtlan, Rose Croix, Wormsblood, The Zodiacs, Wooden Wand, Totem and as a member of psychedelic doom legends Jex Thoth.
As early as, well, forever, music, like language, has been subjected to the will of the forces of narration, regardless of the specific context or media-determined instruments employed to see it through. Narrating, it would seem, comes easily to music – like film and language – its form ineluctably geared toward duration, time elapsing in the process of listening, recording, mixing, or just plain making. You cannot “hear” a piece of music without it playing, over time, more than you can see a film without seeing it unfold, frame by frame, shot by shot. Or can you? I have no idea whether Simon Kirby feels the paranoia of narration the way other composers of electronic music did and still do, but his first solo album, which follows many years of sound production, installation, and related endeavors, moves within the orbit of the narratable. There is a journey, movement through space punctuated by time, and the ex-machinations of field-recorded voices, putting us in either the imagined community of common speakers, or somewhere else.
Originally released in 1982 Maraccaba was the second album from Germany's Klaus Wiese- whose work sat between ambient, minimalism, and pared-back/drone-focused world music. Here from Kray Records is no thrills/no inlay booklet release of the two-track album.
Stabbed In The Face is an early 2000’s low-budget slasher that’s high with gore, sleaze, and soundtracked with wonky ‘n’ crude punk rock music. Here from Wild Eye’s Raw and Extreme series is a DVD release of film.