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Pork Chop Hill is a late 1950s war film that focuses on the futility of conflict. The black and white captured affair is a gritty, sweaty & dusty affair- with the cast led up by Gregory Peck as Lt, who is sent to capture an area that either side is interested in. It’s a stark, and often hopeless film- which highlights how on-the-ground troops are purely disposable pawns in the game of war. Here from Australia’s Imprint Films is a Blu-ray release of the film- taking a new scan of the picture, a new commentary track, and an archive doc.
The first volume in a series of acoustic pieces, Olivier Alary's Apparitions (Vol. 1) sees the composer utilizing acoustic compositions to touch on the subject of memory, specifically the ephemeral, ghost-like nature of it. Alary's three tracks were written and developed with each group of musicians, each piece split over different instruments (violas, vibraphone & marimba, and bassoons) and specially worked to express these unique qualities. This leads to the work having a near classical feeling, but also shifting the focus into a new and exciting realm of sound and composition.
Released in the late 1990s Two Orphan Vampires was the forty-third film directed by France’s Jean Rollin. The film feels very much like a summing up of the key/ celebrated themes & tropes from his forty-plus-year career- so we have female vamps, fleeting nudity & traces of blood, and debates about endless life. There are graveyards, crypts, and arty dwelling in sombreness & melancholia. Here from Powerhouse Films is a reissue of the film- coming either as a UHD or Blu-Ray release. It features a 4k scan of the picture, a new commentary track, and a fair selection of both new & archive extras- which is all topped off with an eighty-page book.
Enys Men is a folk horror film set in the early 1970s on an isolated island just off the Cornish coast. The 2022 film sits somewhere between arthouse & post-horror, and I think it’s fair to say it’s a picture that needs a fair bit of patience. Yes, it certainly reproduces the feeling of light dread touched 1970s, and at points is decidedly chilling & even unnerving. But to begin with, it has a very repetitively structured, and takes just a little too long to get to its horror point. Here from the BFI is a Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a commentary track, and some worthy/ interesting extras.
Released in the year 1986, Battle of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator) found the infamous & often highly creative reggae producer/artist offering up an eleven-track album. It blended together dense, instrumental detailed and entrancing production, with playful genre-blending- all topped with wacky at times stream-of-consciousness focused lyrics. Here from Doctor Bird- Cherry Red’s reggae sub-label, is a very much-deserved double CD reissue of the album- featuring a selection of fourteen bonus tracks, many never been released before on CD.
Bond Girl servers up two dense and relentlessly pummelling examples of the walled noise form- from this ultra prolific/long-running California-based project. Each track comes in at dead on the forty-two-minute mark, and each is as unforgiving as the other.
Hailing from the Netherlands, Roel Meelkop is a prolific sound artist, whose musical venture began in the 80s with THU20, a project in the realms of electronic/experimental music. Moreover, he has worked with artists like Kapotte Muziek, Frans de Waard, Howard Stelzer, Detlev Hjuler & Andrea Göthling (Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau), Wieman and Pierdrie among others.
That Space Somewhere is the 8th full-length album from UK ambient/ drone venture Lull. The project has been active since 1992 and is all the work of Mick Harris (ex-Napalm Death, Scorn, etc). The CD album is Lull’s first release in fourteen years, and it appears on Cold Spring Records. Featured are four lengthy tracks that will send the listener slowly but surely into its expanding & shifting sonic terrains, which are as vast, as they are bone-chilling/ darkly hued.
Here’s a recent two-CD set from BGO Records bringing together three 1980s albums from African American guitarist Earl Klugh. He plays a light ‘n’ easy blend of Jazz fusion and smooth jazz, with touches of other genres blended into the mix here & there. The three albums featured are Dream Come True (1980), Crazy For You( 1981), and Low Ride( 1981)
Organ Donor’s brand of improvisation extends from compositional spontaneity to genre-hopping, which is something that might be new to some listeners (at least it was to me).
Originally released in 2001 GO is the fifth feature film from Japanese director Isao Yukisada. It’s a coming-of-age tale about Korean-Japanese student Sugihara (Yōsuke Kubozuka) as he enrols in a Japanese high school to escape the oppressive systems of his life in North Korean education. During his time he becomes close friends with the son of a Yakuza boss, a fellow student from his North Korean school, and mostly importantly Sakurai Tsubaki (Ko Shibasaki). The pair hit it off but Sugihara decides to hide his true nationality from Sakurai, fearful of the xenophobia he could fall victim to.
Accion Mutante (aka Mutant Action) is a 1993 dystopian sci-fi/comedy from Spanish director, Alex De La Iglesias (The Day of the Beast, Perdita Durango and Witching and Bitching). Heavily influenced by comic book creator like Marvel’s Stan Lee and Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond, De La Iglesia brings a hyper-violent comic book style to his movies and Accion Mutante sits alongside Peter Jackon’s Bad Taste and Brain Dead or Frank Hennelotter’s Basket Case and Brain Damage as one of the finest exponents of the art of bringing comic book violence to our screens. Starring Antonio Resines (Cell 211, Lucky Star and Los Serrano), Álex Angulo (Pan’s Labyrinth, Day of the Beast and Live Flesh), and Frédérique Feder (Three Colours Red, Steven and Swept from the Sea).
Here’s a tome from Feral House with a title that promises… well, it promises a whole lot, and unsurprisingly can’t fully deliver; however, a flick through the contents pages shows a wide range of topics with numerous items of interest to noise and experimental music fans - though the exact question of who the book is precisely aimed at is perhaps the key issue here. Anyway, with nearly 400 pages of material, you - whoever is reading this - will find something of interest. That’s the positive overview, onto the nit-picking…
Here from the fine folks at SRS Cinema is a region-free DVD release of Streets Of Darkness- a mid-90s SOV mafia crime film. And it’s fair to say we’re in entertaining, at points, cringe-inducing bad-film territory here- as we follow tank-topped T-wearing, and at points oiled up, and hair-gelled Carlo(Vincent LaRusso- who also wrote the film) just out of prison, going back into Miami’s criminal underground. The film features a host of macho-at-times nonsensical dialogue, a selection of older vaguely looking Italian men hamming it up as crime bosses, bumbled line delivery, slow-mo/ bloodless action scenes, general messy editing, and mawkish romances/ bromances. The DVD takes in a commentary track, a few interviews, and a short pre-sequel- also with commentary.
The Killing Box (aka Grey Knight, Ghost Brigade, Lost Brigade ) is a civil war-based drama-come-thriller, with some slight supernatural/ horror undertones. The early 1990s film features good to passable acting, moments of wartime tension, attempts at eerier atmospherics, and the odd dash of gore. From Scorpion Releasing/ Roni Flix is a bare-bones region A release of the film.
The Street Fighter Trilogy is a Blu-Ray Boxset bringing together the three Street Fighter films from the early 70s, which very much pushed the levels of bloody & brutal violence within martial art cinema. This three-disc boxset from Arrow Video, features new scans for each film, new commentary tracks for the first two films, and a few other archive extras.
Italian musician/sound designer Holy Similaun hits Kohihaas with his latest, Radicor al flort, espert on'ill il erb, aor Raetia. With some help from Archipel (vocals) and Urška Preis (Harp), the two drifting, sprawling electronic tracks work to make the listener question what is real and what is perceived. The mixing of softness with harsh, crispy static brings about a dreamlike state somewhere between pleasure and nightmare. But this dichotomy isn't just about dreams nor imagination, as one must see that this is the state of existence, and the opposing pairings of good/evil, darkness/light, beauty/ugliness are ever present. Radicor al flort, espert on'ill il erb, aor Raetia shows that everything we perceive isn't black and white, but rather on a continuum, which will shift and slide with each viewer/listener and each view/listen.
Here’s a decidedly perverse focused walled noise split. Bringing together Russian-based zexx-ee, and Portland’s Hana Haruna. Each project serves up a ‘wall’ a piece- with each being as grimly sleazed as the other.
Original released in the year 1983 From The Cradle To The Grave was the second full-length album from British Anarcho-punk/ hardcore punk band Subhumans. It’s a ten-track album that saw the four-piece tightening up and expanding their sound- with the album's original first side featuring a selection of short/ mid-range songs, and on the second side there's a single/ epic punk-meets-prog track. Here from Pirates Press Records- as either a Vinyl LP, or CD reissue of the album. For this review, I’m covering the CD version.
Formed in 2012 Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere are an eight-piece Sheffield collective, whose work blurs ‘n’ blends elements of prog-bound jazz-rock, jam band music, textured improv, and dreamy-to-spacy world to folk music tropes. As its title suggests θ6 (Theta Six) is the band's sixth studio album, and it appears as CD on Uk’s Discus Label.
A Small Fortune is the second feature film from director Adam Perry and follows desperate father-to-be Kevin (Stephen Oates) as he discovers a bag of cash floating off the coast of Prince Edward Island. Keeping the stash secret, even from his wife Sam (Liane Balaban), he decides to start setting his life back on the right path. However, when people start turning up asking for the money to be returned, Kevin becomes the heart of an island-wide manhunt. With his child and his life on the line, Kevin must protect his family at all costs.
Teapot Ess is an hour-plus slab of dense ‘n’ punishing walled noise. The release takes its title and theme from the series of fourteen nuclear explosions carried out by the American government in the first half of 1955 in the Nevada desert near Los Vegas. This is the first release I’ve heard from this Hungary-based project in maybe four or so years, and I must say it’s most certainly on an overwhelming attack on the sonic senses- which manages to present to window shattering power & searing roast on a nuclear attack.
Perhaps it’s a bit too simple to draw comparisons between the loss of ownership that is the fate of all humans on their way to death and the larger political horizon of coming to terms with the legacy of colonialism, but there it is. Knowing that Mouth Wound hails from one of those Norther European nations where such things are debated – and rarely repaired – made me think of such questions when listening to Nothing Will Belong to Us.
Junya Sato’s cult disaster thriller from 1975, The Bullet Train has been released in the UK by Eureka Classics in a deluxe Blu-ray edition with all the bells ‘n’ whistles.