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Now here’s something you don’t often come across- a 70’s British sex comedy, that’s actually funny, and to boot also rather inventive, at points even oddly thought-provoking. The Girl From Starship Venus aka The Sexplorer blends in low-budget Sci-fi parody, an effective enough cast, and of course a fair bit of female flesh- though it’s all very much in the tame softcore side of things. Here from the folks at Cheezy Movies is a region-free DVD release of the film.
From the early 1990’s the rather neatly titled Little Corey Gorey is a dark teen comedy-drama- come-splattered edged horror film. For many years the picture has been available as only a heavily censored DVD- with the only way to see the movie in its completely uncut form being via the director's website. Here we have a fully uncut DVD from the fine folks at SRS Cinema, with director's commentary & make-of.
Crushing forth with their sophomore release, Canadian duo They Grieve brings it slow and heavy with To Which I Bore Witness. Bridging the gap between post-metal and doom, the two put the hammer forward to create a very evocative and boomingly wistful album that builds itself while taking the listener's emotions apart. Being a two-piece doesn't affect the heaviness, but it does allow for a lot of space, which adds to each reverb-laden pause and furthers the journey inward, resulting in a very personal piece not only for the band, but for each listener.
Enough New Ghosts is a three-track walled noise release from USA’s Performative Cruelty. It’s a digital affair, with the tracks being of the shorter variety- with a focus on crunch-bound & texturally crafted wall matter.
Darja Kazimira is a Latvian ritual ambient artist, from Georgia. Here’s the project's first album- which has just been remastered and reissued by Cyclic Law, following an unofficial release in 2016.
From Dissonance Productions Cherry Red’s extreme metal reissue label here, we have a CD release, bringing together the third and fourth albums from Florida-based ‘n’ Satan worshipping death metal band Deicide. There’s 1995’s Once Upon The Cross, and 1997’s Serpents Of The Light- both of which originally appeared on Roadrunner Records.
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.