Loading
Ensomhet (Shattered Memories From A Distant Past) is a seven-track raw black metal ‘n’ dungeon synth split. It features Chile’s Mantiel and Ecuador’s Wampyric Rites. The former takes in great blackly gurgling vocals & an almost shambling outsider music take on BM. And the latter shifts from gloomily wavering retro synth craft, onto cluttering & haphazard BM. All making for rewarding spilt.
A famous musician once quipped, when he was asked if he is a postmodernist, "Sure, that's the easy way." For those behind the curtain of irony, the desire for genre subterfuge is more than appealing – wanting to have your cake and eat it too – opting for a kind of negative dialectic of earnest sound production, and then re-, or de-, production, as fits the case. Maybe the metaphor of the curtain in the "curtain of irony" is too stagey, theatrical, and ought to be replaced with the mixing console of irony, though nothing could sound clunkier and more unsexy than that. Yet, I think the shoe fits here nonetheless, with Brad Allen Williams' Œconomy, an album so overwrought with intention that it begs the question: Who is the "intended" audience?
The Art Of Crashing servers up six slices of taut, tense, and often angularly seared improv for drums and alto Sax two-piece. It’s a release which sees the instruments at times swapping their formal roles, in both an intense and rewarding manner.
The Last American Virgin was Cannon Film's stab at the teen sex comedy genre. The early 1980s film is cheap, cheerful, and largely charmingly amusing- sure it’s a little rough ‘n’ ready around the filming edges, and its sexist/ at times downright ridiculous- it’s an entertaining ride. With a soundtrack featuring the likes of Devo, U2, Oingo Boingo, The Commodores, The Waitresses, The Cars, The Plimsouls and REO Speedwagon. Here as part of the MVD Rewind collection is a locked region A release of the film- taking in a new scan of the picture, a good selection of extras, a mini poster, and a slip sleeve.
Enter Santo: The First Adventures of The Silver Masked Man is a Blu-Ray boxset bringing together the first two big screen 1960s appearances from the infamous bad guy ‘n’ monster fighting Mexican masked wrestler Santo- who landed up appearing in fifty-two features between the early ’60s and early ’80s. The two-disc set appears on Powerhouse Films and features new 4K scans of both films, some neat extras, and an eighty-page book.
Composer, programmer, and instrument designer Matthias Puech brings his “audio-naturalist noise” to Hallow Ground with Mt. Hadamard National Park. With a five-part title track and two additional compositions, Puech looks at nature and noise both mathematically and artistically, using chaos theory as one of his inspirations. Utilizing electro-acoustic and varied electronic styles, Mt. Hadamard National Park presents an intriguing look at nature's visual beauty, auditory wonders, and intriguing chemical processes.
The Working Class Goes to Heaven aka La classe operaia va in paradiso or Lulu the Tool is an Italian political drama from 1971 written and directed by Elio Petri (The 10th Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country and Investigation of A Citizen Above Suspicion) and starring Gian Maria Volonté (For A Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars and La Strega in Amore), Mariangela Melato (Flash Gordon, The Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy) and Gino Pernice (Django, D’Artagnan and The Hell Benders) in the lead roles.
Luer is one of the projects of Montana-based noise maker Matt Taggart (40 Watt Womb, PCRV Quartet, Pop Culture Rape Victim). Constant is its third release, and takes in two twenty-minute plus tracks that sit somewhere between moody noise scaping, and hovering droning synth scaping. All making for a release that is both rewarding active/ shifting, but equally atmospheric.
Here’s a release that takes us on a textural journey inside a breaking tape recorder. It features eleven tracks in all, and as expected these all fit into the decidedly wrapped ‘n’ noise-bound side of things.
!T.O.O.H! ("The Obliteration of Humanity") is a Czech experimental metal duo that creates extremely dense, non-repetitive music that should appeal to fans of groups like Krallice, Behold the Arctopus or Atheist. This eleven-minute EP, Primiant, is the latest in a discography of sporadic releases dating back to the 90's, making them one of the pioneers of avant-garde technical metal.
The history of electroacoustic music has a few well-worn narratives, some more reliable than others, with each in its own way embracing the revolution that electric sound production had on the course of music as we know it. One such tale is that of the increasing discretization of the smallest, controllable element of a sound wave into parts that are simultaneously concrete (irreducible) and fully expandable, through synthesis, and waveform modification. Frequency is the common denominator, and collects chromatic scale and sine wave oscillators under its umbrella. With this in mind, we should be able to give frequency expression to anything in the world, like, for example, the colours associated with that most ephemeral of elements, air.
Trampling Iris is a new hour-plus work from Chicago based walled/ drone noise project Inanition. It moves from a decidedly eerier and cryptic begins, through to thick ‘n’ bone grinding HNW.
Excavations Of Being finds Pittsburgh’s RJ Myato serving up two twenty minute examples of walled noise. One ‘wall’ has a ghost in a machine-type vibe, as we have a densely packed track that’s alive with eerier mechanical-like drift ‘n’ hover. And the other ‘wall’ has a decidedly nasty cluttering ‘n’ shredding quality to it.
Naiads features five examples of atmospherically taut, and often brooding-to-uneasy modern chamber works from Leeds-based composer Martin Iddon. The works featured are all played with wonderful depth, flair and moody clarity by the respected modern ensemble Apartment House.
Run, Man, Run is a late 1960’s Spaghetti western that is both playful and humorous, and gritty at times bloody. The film is centred around scruffy, short, and roguish Mexican knife thrower Cuchillo- who along with a selection of other characters, is trying to track down $3,000,000 in gold. Here from Eureka, as part of their Masters Of Cinema series, is a two-disc release of the film- taking in two cuts of the picture, commentary tracks, and other extras.
Ladies And Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains is a rag’s-to-riches drama comedy charting the rise of Riot grrrl like-band in the early 80’s. It’s a messy, at times wondering film that has a fair bit of charm, some effective satirizing of the music business/ media, and ex-members of The Sex Pistols, and Ray Winston in its cast. Here from Imprint is a Blu-Ray release of this lesser-seen early 80’s film, with a good selection of new and archive extras.
Latin America has a long history of creating malevolent music and Cursed Excruciation is one such example. It’s a one-man black metal band hailing from Viamão, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and was formed in 2020.
Hailing from the land of the legendary Prince, Minneapolis' Nothingness just dropped their second album, Supraliminal. Blasting out intense and engaging death metal, this quintet of warriors put their speed and technicality to great use and have crafted a very well done death metal album. Feeling akin to the classic Gorguts album Colored Sands, Nothingness' sophomore LP brings a wide range of sound, rhythm, and riffage along with varying speeds to cater to any death metal fan.
Frozen Alive is a prime example of an exploitation film that’s very different from its promise/title/hype. On paper, this early ’60s suggests it’s going to be a tense thriller/ Sci-fi/ horror about folk being put in suspended animation- but in reality, it’s a soapy drama focusing on a few doctors, with some fleeting crime thriller touches in, and the freezing action only really takes up about 20% of the film. Here from Cheezy Movies is a region-free DVD release of this picture.
The Brain from the Planet Arous is a much-loved classic science fiction B-movie from 1957. Directed by Nathan Juran (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 7th Voyage of Sinbad and First Men in the Moon) it featured performances from John Agar (The Mole People, Sands of Iwo Jima and Fort Apache), Joyce Meadows (The Girl in Lovers Lane, The Christine Jorgenson Story and Flesh and the Spur), and Robert Fuller (Maverick, Return of the Seven and 70s action series Emergency).
The Munsters is the ninth feature film from shock rock musician turned director Rob Zombie. And it’s fair to say it stands as one of his most controversial films thus far- as it finds him stripping away all the violence and profanity he's normally known for a PG (sort-of) family film. It’s a colourful & campy ride, dotted with lightly chucklesome humour, quirky visual detail, and (largely) well-placed cast. Here from Mediumrare Entertainment is a UK Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a director's commentary track, and a making of.
Appearing at the tail end of 2022, The Residents 50th-anniversary, Faceless Forever is a nearing three hundred paged encyclopaedia focusing on the highly creative, but often cryptic/ puzzling career of this highly distinctive avant-pop come multimedia art collective. It’s a book that will appeal to those new to the project, and long-term fans- as it’s a great mix of key facts, figures, and release- as well as the more obscure/ lesser known.
Lieutenant Pigeon stand as one of the more unlike and quirky bands to chart in the UK pop charts of the 1970s. The four piece from Coventry focused its sound around honky tonk piano playing, which was wavering at times nearly out of tune. This was blended with upfront & simplistic percussion, mumbled at times rather creepy male vocals, and some rather wacky themes. Here from 7T’s Cherry Red’s 1970s pop/ rock label is a double CD set that brings together the band's first three albums, as well as a good selection of rarities.
Make some field recordings, load them into an input mechanism – DAW, synth, both? – and scramble their relationship to their sources (real or imagined) and poof, there you have it: a sound work. I realize that might ring a tad cynical on my part, but the formula has become something of a burden for composers looking to shape the barest means of production into something larger than the sum of their parts. It reminds me of the crisis of the easel picture in painting, or the homelessness of modern sculpture, divorced from its vocation as monument or totem. At the risk of leveling complexity – a risk, it seems, that anyone writing about minimalist electronic music is forced to take when confronted with the ubiquitous tools of the trade – I am tempted to argue that there have emerged, in the last ten years or so, at least two distinct families within approaches to working with roughly the same means: field recordings and electronic synthesis. One might be dubbed media-specific, and the other, narrative. Sure, there is some of each in the other, but I mean to underline the point of departure, the nexus, as it were, of making sense of what we're hearing when we sit down to listen to experimental electronic, free-form, composition.