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Written and directed by Kevin Ignatius (My Best Friend’s Famous, Hook Man and King Bachelor’s Pad), and Nick Psinakis (J, King Bachelor’s Pad and Ganz Girls) 2022s Long Dark Trail is an eerily unsettling movie about two brothers (Carter O’Donnel as Henry and Brady O’Donnel as Jacob) attempting to escape a life of physical abuse with their father in exchange for a chance to be reunited with their estranged mother, who ran out on the family when the boys were younger. The brothers head off into a dark and dangerous forest in North-western Pennsylvania in search of the reunion they hope will provide them with the security often associated with family, however things turn out differently, their mother has been indoctrinated into a violent and sadistic cult.
During the 1970’s French director, Jean Rollin carved out his own distinctive niche within the euro-horror genre, adding in elements of erotica, arty edges, and keenly ghoulish atmospherics. Released in the year 1971, The Shiver of The Vampires (aka Le Frisson Des Vampires ) is often seen as one of his most successful creations- due to it having slightly more plot depth, more subtle use of nudity, and a somewhat more sensical /flowing structure. Here from Powerhouse is a much-deserved reissue of the film- coming either as a UHD or Blu-Ray release- and featuring an excellent & well defined 4k scan of the film, new & archive audio commentaries, and a good selection of new & archive extras.
Ordem Satânica is a Portuguese black metal act with members belonging to the clandestine Aldebaran Circle along with projects such as Degredo, Espírito Aldebaran, Ginnungagap, Lycanthropic Winter Moon, Mallitiae, Nox Insultum, Occelensbrigg, Stagnat, Trono Além Morte and Voëmmr. Their first demo Ataque Satânico appeared back in 2014, followed by 2015 Carrascos da Humanidade and so on, amassing a total of three demos, five split releases, one EP and four full-lengths; quite prolific!. Perpetuum Satanas was originally released in 2022 via Signal Rex on cassette and now it is re-released on vinyl, again via Signal Rex.
Bill Seaman and Stephen Vitiello are both veteran musicians in the deep listening soundscape field, and this release The Clear Distance on Room40 is their second collaboration, following on from 2022's The Other Forgotten Letters. Here they can be heard creating ambience with instruments, taking melancholic chords and melodic fragments from the piano, guitar, strings and clarinet and allowing them to drift and dissipate, in a sense playing a kind of sensitive, deconstructed take on post-rock or indie soundtrack ambient.
Here’s a four-disc CD set that brings together seven largely instrumental dub albums from the mid-to-late 70’s helmed by respected Jamaican reggae producer Joe Gibbs, as well as near on an album's worth of unreleased tracks. The set takes in a whooping eighty-eight tracks- with the sound moving between stripped-back beat ‘n’ bass affairs, to more studio playful fare, and more lo-fi electronica touched ‘n’ pulled fare.
First released in 1959 to great controversy William S Burrough’s Naked Lunch is surely one of the most known & provocative experimental novels of all time. Its structure is often cut-up and episodic with its blend of conspiratorial/ paranoid noir, seedy and perverse Sci-fi, dives into unconscious landscapes, portrayal of hard drug use, and darkly humorous skits. Since the 1960s, there have been more than a few attempts to adapt the frankly unfilmable original novel into a movie. Antony Balch, who worked with Burroughs on a few short film projects, considered making a musical with Mick Jagger in the lead role in the ’60s. Then the author himself adapted his book for the scene; with Dennis Hopper being considered for the lead role. But finally, in the early 1990s Canadian director/auteur David Cronenberg stepped into the fray to realize the project's potential. He decided wisely against a straight adaptation, but instead, he mixed scenes/ themes from the book, with elements of Burroughs' own life, to create somewhat of a hybrid about the writing of the book rather than the book itself. Here from those fine folks at Arrow Video is a new release of the film- either coming as a double Blu-Ray set, or a single UHD release. I’m reviewing the former, and as we’ve come to expect from Arrow, we get a lovely new 4K scan of the film, as well as a great selection of extras.
Andy Ortmann and Anthony Janas are back with Panicsville's Take Root. Recorded at the end of 2019-2020, this newly released 2022 re-working has the pair revisiting their earlier work regarding ecological electronics. Originally recorded at a time when the world was in upheaval and the Earth was seemingly starting to take its ecology back (we had such high hopes), Take Root focuses on plants and their role on Earth and in society, as the title would suggest. Panicsville and Nihilist take this statement a step further, and all physical copies of the release come with a package of seeds for one to help "take root" and do their part to preserve and spread the horticultural goodness.
Here’s a just over nineteen-minute example of the walled noise form based around western/drama The Outlaw(1948)- the first film starring busty starlet Jane Russell. Magda is a wall-noise project from New Jersey- it seemingly started in April of this year, with all of its releases based around ’40s/ 50’s female glamour ‘n’ perversion.
Arrebato is a late 70’s Spanish film that sits somewhere between drama, drug-fuelled & sweaty fantasy, and low-key horror. It’s a film that seemingly slowly but surely sucks you into its damaged & off-kilter world- making you wonder what is real, and what is not, and where sanity begins & ends. The film regards a low-budget horror filmmaker, getting pulled into the world of a troubled twenty-something man- who may/ may not be having something supernatural going on in his life. Here as a joint release between Radiance Films & Altered Innocence- is a recent Blu-Ray release, of this strange unease trip of a film. With a new 4k scan, a new commentary track, and a few archive extras.
The contact microphone never seems to properly disengage itself from its environment the way that other field recording devices do – booms, mics in the wild, etc. – which makes manipulating its results all the more challenging. For how to disarticulate the vibratory from the vibration, the sound wave from the pulse that it measures and generates? There is never quite enough distance to squeeze between source and signal, and that is the strength of the two, long compositions that make up Tether by Murmer (Patrick McGinley). Whatever we hear, and how that hearing places us in turn, is routed through the rather humble appearance of metal objects in a field – fences, poles, and other intrusions within a statically charged landscape, which continue to draw Murmer's attention over the past three decades of work.
Directed by historian Thomas Antonic, Ruth Weiss, One More Step West Is the Sea is a 2021 documentary about the incredible life of the pioneering artist and jazz poet Ruth Weiss whose family fled to the US in 1938 to escape the Nazis, where she would settle and become one of the true greats of the Beat movement. Often overlooked in favour of the male Beat poets of the time, like Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg she nevertheless was an important figure, who has begun to receive greater recognition in the last twenty to thirty years. Here we have a recent region-free DVD release of the film on IndiePix Unlimited.
Crossing The Gateway is a thirty-eight-minute trip into tautly galloping ‘n’ crustily weaving HNW from this harsh noise-to-walled project from Tennessee, which (fairly) recently resurfaced after a few years slumber.
Here’s a C20/ digital download from Finish harsh noise project Genophobia. It features two side-long examples of scuzzy ‘n’ nasty noise craft- with a focus on shredding-to-scrubbing bound texturing.
V:XII deliver a serious dose of death industrial!. It’s the solo project of Gothenburg, Sweden’s Daniel Jansson (Deadwood, Culted) and has been active since 2018. Lu-Cipher-Sabbatean is the project's latest offering.
Artistry is a new two-track release from the mysterious, prolific, and often creative walled noise project. It’s a digital download album on UK’s HNW Netlabel- with one track coming in at the thirty-five-minute mark, and the other at just over the twenty-minute mark.
Ostara is a two-way walled noise split taking its name/ theme from both the Anglo-Saxon goddess who brought in spring of the same name, and easter celebrations. It features two ten-minute tracks- one from Berlin’s Sebastian Tomb, and the other from Poland’s Sado Rituals.
The Last Hunter is one of the more gritty, gory, at points grim additions to the Italian Namploitation cycle of the 1980s. It finds chain-smoking ‘n’ troubled US army captain played by David Warbeck (The Beyond, Twins of Evil, Duck You Sucker), going on a secret jungle mission with photojournalist Tris Farrow( Zombie, Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper). Here from the new UK-based boutique label Treasured Films is the Blu-Ray debut of the film- taking in a bold ‘n’ bright 2k scan of the film, commentary track, a good selection of new & archive extras, a sixty-page booklet, and art cards.
One of the more evocative forms of dark ambient gives the listener a first-person perspective into an esoteric ritual. Whether real or imagined, this powerful approach is keenly utilized by Russia's Jagath on their latest, Svapna. After performing a ritual in an abandoned Soviet-era swamp drain, Jagath captured this energy with their brand of ritualistic industrial/ambient. Svapna ("dream" in Sanskrit) highlights the dreamlike "inside-out world" achieved through this ritual, along with a few other feelings and emotions that manifested during the process.
Picnic At Hanging Rock is a quietly enchanting and often haunting blend of period drama and mystery- with light brushes of dreamy unease & horror. The mid-1970s movie is set in the 1900s in the Australian countryside, where three students & their teacher go missing without a trace. It’s a film that has gone on to inspire and inform other moody/ lightly chilling movies and TV series. And though it’s nearing fifty years since it was first released- it still retains its highly distinctive air of haunting and lightly dreamy unease. Here from Second Sight, is a new four-disc (two Blu Rays & two UHD) set, taking in a beautiful new 4k scan of the film, a great selection of extras - all presented in a ridged slipcase, with six art cards, a soft cover booklet & original novel with new cover art.
From director Andrew Legge comes LOLA, a story about the invention of a future predicting televisual device. The Hanbury sisters have created LOLA to see what the world has coming in the future, giving them a chance to experience the art and music of the times ahead. And while initially fun, the device quickly reveals its military application to the sisters and the country. However, tampering comes at a cost and history is altered radically; now the Nazis rule Britain and Bowie never had the chance to sing. As Thomasina (Emma Appleton) becomes obsessed with saving the future, Martha (Stefanie Martini) realises the obscene power they control can only lead to destroying the future. As the sisters clash, the history we know fades away.
If you have even a passing interest in the bad-film genre, I’m sure you’ll be aware of at least the first Birdemic film. The 2010 production is a collusion of awkward/dead-eyed acting, cringe-inducing drama, very cheap-looking computer graphics of killer birds, and general inept filmmaking. Here we have a Blu-Ray boxset bringing together the three films in the Birdemic series-Birdemic: Shock and Terror, 2013’s Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and 2022’s Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. With each disc featuring at least two commentary tracks, and a few other extras.
The problem, or at least one of many, in a sibling group is the danger that you might only know how to talk to one another, leaving the rest of us either irked at the hermeticism of the familial language, or simply too annoyed to bother. Whether instinctual or not – and when it comes to electronics, instinct is sort of a weird fit – Comfort have apparently gained a kind of following for their relational affinities, but none of that should get in the way of enjoying what is on offer. Should is relative, like those inauspicious vocal deliveries and predictable beats that march along with them. It's perhaps a great feat, in the end, to manage something so formulaic while doing one's best to be anything but.
Sometime in the second half of the 1980s, I was introduced to Shogun Assassin by a friend who had an nth generation copy on a VHS tape. He sold it to me as the goriest Japanese martial arts movie I would ever see, and at that point in time, it certainly seemed to be the case. Shogun Assassin was actually an edit of the first two movies from the Baby Cart series, Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart At The River Styx. Robert Houston who was responsible for re-editing the movies for a Western market sanctioned a new score from two composers who had enjoyed success with 1960s rock bands, W. Michael Lewis was the keyboard player with San Franciscan psychedelic rockers Quicksilver Messenger Service whilst Mark Lindsay was vocalist for Paul Revere and the Raiders. Both men had worked together on other soundtracks during the 1970s and were becoming well-versed in the art.
Lush Exotica is the next release in Righteous ongoing Lux And Ivy series- which normally sees respected music journalist Dave Henderson crate-digging for 45s, to create 50s & 60s focused compilations. For this double disc set, we are presented with four late 1950s albums from band leader/ vibraphone and marimba player Arthur Lyman- who helpped give birth to Exotica -the globetrotting, playful, and often camp easy listening genre.