Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Rupert Lally – Lunar Forms

Posted: 23 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Lunar Forms is Rupert lally’s second release on Milton Keynes label Mortality Tables, following his Interzones album, released in November last year, and forms part of the latest ongoing project by the label, dubbed The Impermanence Project (which so happened to feature a tense but lugubrious ambient work by some guy called Nosnibor a short while ago).

Sometimes, while I try to work through my review pile in a broadly systematic way, I have to reshuffle my priorities according to mood. And right now, my mood is jittery, jumpy, tense, unfocused, meaning that what I need is something fairly gentle, somewhat abstract, if not necessarily ambient. But also something which feels relevant, in some adjacent fashion. And so here we are: bombs are dropping and missiles are flying, and it’s maybe easy to dismiss it as taking place at a safe enough distance away…. But is any distance truly safe enough?

And so, it’s necessary to seek solace in distraction, solace in abstraction, something that offers layers and textures that draw you in, captivate the attention… but at the some time, offers something more to reflect on while listening to the glitches and echoes, woozy, skitty fragments of analogue pull my attention in different directions.

Impermanence… as polyartist and the innovator of the cut-up method, Brion Gysin said, ‘we’re all here to go’. And we are. We fear it, but it’s impossible to escape the inevitable. It’s not a question of if, but when.

Lunar Forms transitions between stuttering, glitching minimal techno and slowcore EDM, and more expensive, cinematic instrumental sounds which are overtly ambient. Electronic fuzzed and buzzes spark over swirling soundscapes, and at times we’re led into Tangerine Dream territory, while at others, we find ourselves adrift. The fact that, including bonus tracks, Lunar Forms features eighteen pieces, and has a running time of some seventy-four minutes, is significant. It’s a vast and expansive work, and one which is easy to get lost in, since the tracks are distinguished only numerically, ad those numerical titles are not tagged sequentially.

There is a lot of dark atmosphere, a lot of rumbling. There is much haunting reverb, considerable space, a great deal of bubbling, blipping, hovering. The deeper it plunges into spacious, cloud-like disturbance, the more immersive and simultaneously the more the power of this work increases. Breathe deep… and feel everything this represents. ‘313’ May be sparse, but it also edges its way into the space between dance music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, while ‘325’ pitches jittery microtonal beats against sonorous strong-like sound. It’s simultaneously tense and introverted, and outward-facing through cloud. The beats of ‘303’ are like the dripping of a tap amidst synthesizer drones and swirls. And it goes on. As such, Lunar Forms is more than varied: it straddles boundaries in a way which renders it almost impossible to place.

AA

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Gintas K – Breakcore

Posted: 22 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K’s latest offering was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard and controller in January 2025, and first released by Japanese label Static Disc in May.

It’s worth perhaps mentioning that ‘Breakcore’ is – and I shall shamefully quote from Wikipedia here – ‘is a style of electronic dance music that emerged from jungle, hardcore, and drum and bass in the mid-to-late 1990s. It is characterized by very complex and intricate breakbeats and a wide palette of sampling sources played at high tempos.’ In the main, not really my personal field of expertise, or particularly within the remit of Aural Aggravation.

But this is a Gintas K album, and the nine pieces are typical of his style, combining experimentalism and the application of software and midi / laptop setup, producing a range of glitchy, frothy, gurgly sounds which stop and start intermittently, unpredictably. His live and improvised works always come with a sense of unpredictability, of spontaneity, while bearing his distinctive sounds. One of the key focuses within K’s work is on detail, zooming in on microtonality, granularity. When I say it sounds ‘bubbly’ or ‘frothy’, I mean it’s the sound one might consider the equivalent of the visual experience of slowly swirling a latte or a pint of ale, or hyperfixating on the bubbles in a bath. This is not, however, the gentle swill and flow of currents, but a frenzied effervescence, like the reaction between bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. And look long enough and hard enough, and patterns begin to emerge.

Listening to the bubbling blitzkrieg of digital clicks, beeps, and fizzing of any work by Gintas K can be stimulating to the point of eye-popping discombobulation. It’s almost too much – and this is nevermore true than the experience that is Breakcore. There are beats present – but they’re composed not of beats in the conventional sense, being neither rhythmic nor percussive, either from an analogue source or a digital sampled source or emulation. These are flickers, pulses, rapidfire stutters, hard sounds which replicate the essence of a beat without being a beat, per se. For example, those of a certain age may recall the successive ‘pink-pink-pink’ chattering digital babble of dial-up. Few would necessarily consider those sounds beats in context, but… yes, they have a certain beat-like quality. And this is how the beats often emerge from the clicks and pops, moans and drones or another quintessential Gintas K demonstration of circuit meltdown as an artform.

I had never considered his work in a ‘dance’ context before, and still wouldn’t: one feels as if the title is perhaps a shade ironic. But the tempo is certainly high and the beats are complex and intimate, emerging as they do from the thrum of what sounds like a revving engine, the whirr of an old hard-drive, the click of a CD driver whirring into action. Every second of this release sounds like some kind of digital or mechanical malfunction, as tempos whirl and blur, drawl and slow. Scrunching, crunching, twanging, springing, stammering and stuck, it’s a relentless attack of wrong sounds. But emerging from all of it, there are erratic beats, like a succession of deliberately jarring jazz fills and simply wild judders.

It is relentless, and it’s complete overload. The nine tracks run for a total of twenty-nine minutes: its intensity is such that you feel as if your brain is starting to melt after the first ten. In short, Breakcore is truly wild, and it’s not remotely easy or accessible – but it absolutely encapsulates everything that defines what Gintas K’s does.

AA

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M-G Dysfunction – Mista Self-Isolation

Posted: 20 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Panurus Productions – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

You’d think that cassette labels would be not only niche, but few and far between, and in the main, they are, but Newcastle is home to not one, but two labels who provide a near-endless supply of releases to satiate the need for weird shit the world over, with Cruel Nature Records being one, and Panurus Productions being the other. The labels have a considerable amount in common, too, not least of all in that they both favour music that’s of a quality, rather than a style.

The latest Panurus release is a perfect case in point. The label’s previous offering, a split release from Belk and Casing was a raw blast of guitar overdrive. In contrast, the third album from M-G Dysfunction is of an altogether more experimental bent, leaning toward hip-hop and beat-driven electronics, but once again marking the close connection between the scenes in Leeds and Newcastle, both of which have become significant spawning grounds for the offbeat, the difficult, the wilfully obscure.

According to the blurb, ‘Mista Self-Isolation is the fullest realisation of the M-G Dysfunction project to date – a record of trepidation and humour, of lopsided passion and warped poetics. This album is about surveying the wreckage of monoculture and navigating the act of making music amidst a land-grab of rights, melodies and rhythms by people who never liked music in the first place. It’s about properly honest artistic expression – what “keeping it real” looks like, sounds like, feels like in 2024. It’s about getting some official beats and saying fly shit over them.’

That it’s quirky may be obvious, but it’s a necessary headline observation. On the one hand, it’s white rap, so there’s an awkwardness, but on the other, there’s some dirty experimental electronic noise layered over the beats, and this is an act that shared a stage with Benefits, a band who may have made their reputation by being angry, shouty, and noisy, but who aren’t without humour or an appreciation of nuance.

As tracks like ‘Roger Daltrey (Permanent Record)’ illustrate, M-G Dysfunction are multifaceted – something likely to leave many quite nonplussed. How can they do jokey, daft, a bit random and be serious at the same time? In truth, the answer is simple: because human beings are complex creatures, capable of a vast range of emotions and infinite ways of expressing them. It’s something we seem to have lost sight of in recent years, when everything has been boiled down to binaries, and everything is a conflict because the lines have been marked in such either / or terms. It’s no longer possible to be a woolly socialist: suggest that, I dunno, people on disability benefits are right to receive free prescriptions, and you’re labelled a left-wing extremist, a communist, and by the way, disabled people should get back into work or die. Something is severely fucking wrong with this picture.

Back in the early 90s, genre crossovers were all the rage, and the Judgement Night soundtrack was a real watershed moment that took the idea of rock / rap crossover, first witnessed in the mainstream when Run DMC and Aerosmith did ‘Walk This Way’ to the next level. At that time, it felt like a new future was emerging, and perhaps, even a future where boundaries and differences were dismantled. But here we are, and times are bleak.

But with Mista Self-Isolation – an album which is by no means an exercise in buoyant pop tunes – M-G Dysfunction show that in 2025, there is still scope to create something that speaks of what it is to be human.

The structured, beat-led songs are interspersed with self-reflective spoken word segments, spanning CBT meditation and contemplations on experiences and life in general. It is truly impossible to predict the twists and turns this album takes.

’50 Words for Blow’ comes on like a hip-hop-inspired barber’s shop quartet, while ‘John Wick’ is a critical memo, and the title track is abstract, minimal, dreamy but quietly intense. ‘Junglists Only’ is a perfectly executed pseudo-banger which knows it’s absurd and works because of it. The last song, ‘All that is Solid Melts into Deez Nuts’ evokes both humour and at the same time draws attention to M-G Dysfunction’s hip-hop credentials. If you know, you know, as cunts say, but for those who don’t, it’s a reference to Dr Dre’s ‘Deeez Nuuuts’ from The Chronic in 1992.

Postmodernism is alive and well after all, at least in some quarters, and it’s very well in the world of M-G Dysfunction. There is a lot going on on Mista Self-Isolation – and it’s all good.

AA

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Sadie Powers – Souvenir

Posted: 19 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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9th May 2025 – Room40

Christopher Nosnibor

Souvenirs are unusual things, in that they’re intensely personal, and imbued with a resonance which is often difficult to articulate.

I will revisit an anecdote I relayed no so long ago: my dad gave me £15 spending money when I went on a Cub camp in Yorkshire when I was probably fourteen. We had a day trip to York, where I discovered an independent record shop, the now gone and sadly-missed Track Records. I blew most of my £15 on 12” singles by The Sisters of Mercy: Alice, Temple of Love, and The Reptile House EP. On returning home, my father was not happy: he’d given me the money for real souvenirs – fridge magnets, mugs, erasers… but the fact that I still have those records and tale to tell says these were the best souvenirs I could have ever purchased. Would I still have an I Heart York mug or a tea towel thirty years later?

But one thing that’s become apparent is that for fringe, niche, and unestablished acts like Sadie Powers, even when released by labels like Room40, physical releases are becoming less of a thing. It’s a sad reflection on the state of the world and how the arts in general are suffering. People don’t want to pay for stuff, or they can’t afford to pay for stuff, and the end result is the same.

Souvenir is a sad album, based on a premise which resonates on a personal level. I’ve written extensively of late on both the impact of the pandemic, and of losing my wife, and Souvenir is a work which explores grief, with a particular focus on the pandemic. Powers explains the album, its context, and its musical limitations and development in terms of instrumentation, in a fashion which warrants quotation in full:

‘Between 2020 and 2022, a significant number of friends and family passed away. Due to the pandemic, funerals became impossible to travel to or just didn’t happen. How does one grieve alone? What is that language? What is that movement? What do I do with my hands, with the muscle memory of care weaving phantom thread? What is the shape of the shelter one makes to bear this loss? If I’m not holding, will I sink to the bottom?

‘What is my last memory with them? Almost always, it is of embrace.

‘I’ve had a relationship with fretless bass for about 20 years. It’s an unforgiving instrument. It exposes everything. Like porcelain: elastic, pliable, detailed, expressive. Suggestive to subtle touches. It shows the hand of the player. I began recording improvisations with silence, thinking of those I’d lost, their embraces, those moments of stillness and when time folds in on itself, then cutting the tracks up processing and layering them, a sound collage. Programmable music box bells, sheet metal, cardboard box, and field recordings from the same spot on the back patio of my former home color the shape. Like a bird collecting items to create a nest of memory. Sounds drifting in and out like recollections, like ghosts. The practice became a life raft, or a grieving raft.

‘Is the souvenir the embrace? Souvenirs originated from pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as a remembrance of a journey.’

The four compositions which make up Souvenirs are each approximately ten minutes in duration, and this would have made for a magnificent vinyl LP, particularly given the texture and detail of the works.

The first track, ‘Right After’ is exemplary: it begins so quietly as to be beyond range, before the crackle of a slow fade-in becomes discernible. And against this, and some rumbling dark ambience, there is the strolling fretless bass work. I can’t help but think – however fleetingly – of Duran Duran, not because it actually sounds like Duran Duran, but because that fretless bass has such a distinctive sound – thick, bulbous, rounded, warm.

‘Soft Materials: Permanent Rose’ is move overtly ambient, and ripples its way along in an understated fashion, and ‘Rabbit Hour, too, hovers and hums, clatters and clinks, plunging deeper into abstraction, drifting cloud-like and formless, hovering, while occasional scrapes and nails-down-a-blackboard feedback sounds cut through the soft waves.

‘Princess Moo Bear’ may sound soft, but the clanking chines are pitches against thick helicopter sounds and dark abstraction, before finally expanding and drifting to nothing.

Souvenir is not an easy or instant album. Quite the contrary is true. But it is detailed, layered, and has much going on.

AA

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Why Patterns – Screamers

Posted: 17 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 11th July 2025

Why Patterns’ latest offering marks something of a shift from Regurgitorium, released back in 2022. I say ‘back’ in 2022 because it feels like a lifetime ago. Some of that is, admittedly, due to personal circumstance, but for most, 2022 was a very different time. We still weren’t all that long out of lockdown, for a start. We were still coming up for air, and finding our way – and likely crawling our way back to the office, while a lot of shops still had their Perspex screens in place. I remember in the checkout queue in Aldi just willing these weird cunts who had seemingly either forgotten the preceding year and a bit, or had lost all sense of how to engage, by looming and leaning over and pressing too close would fuck off. I revisit the context of the last album because it somehow managed to capture the mood in some obtuse way, and when I wrote ‘It’s fucked up. It’s deranged. It hurts,’ I could as easily have been referring to life itself at that point in time.

Screamers is different again. Or, if not so much, different, compressed, compacted, distilled, the intensity amplified by the concision of the tracks.

The crunchy, gnarly bass still dominates, and it’s snarling away and tearing strips straight out of the traps on the frenzied ‘After the Bullfight’. Clocking in at a mere minute and forty-seven seconds, it’s noise rock smooshed down to the tight parameters of grindcore, and with insane amounts of reverb, the stuttering, stammering vocal yelps from Doug Norton, the man behind the ‘Mouth Sounds’ owe an equal debt to Suicide and The Cramps, and this may be the spawning of industrial psychobilly as a new genre. Everything is overloading, the speakers are crackling with megawattage overload, and when ‘Clown in a Housefire’ blasts in, you actually begin to wonder if it’s supposed to sound like this of it your gear’s fucked.

One may cling in references to the Jesus Lizard and all the rest, but really, this sounds like a psychotic reimagining of early Blacklisters – specifically early because of THAT bass racket. But whereas Blacklisters were, and remain, quite song-orientated, at least structurally, Screamers sees Why Patterns take their template and smash the living fuck out of it by throwing it against a brick wall and stomping on it until there is nothing but splattered pulp. None of the songs – I mean, they’re not really songs, more demented blasts of discord played at three hundred miles an hour, all of the instruments playing at angles against and across, rather than with one another, the vocals the sound of a breakdown in real time. And listening to this as bombs and missiles are going off everywhere and no-one knows what is going on anywhere, I fin myself listening to this tumultuous mayhem and thinking ‘yep, they’ve done it again. This is the closest I’ve heard anyone articulate this moment.’ I mean, they don’t really ‘articulate’: as the title suggests, Screamers is a raw, primal scream. It’s a frenzied, lurching, gut-punching racket that rattles the bibs and kicks the balls, hard. Pleasant, it is not. Especially that grungy bass that churns the stomach.

There aren’t really any riffs: it’s just a relentless assault of jarring noise. ‘Nervous Laughter’ brings hints of the latest mclusky album, but does so with menace, malice, and a hint of the unhinged, and following on ‘Wind Up Chattering teeth’ is a minute and six seconds of rabid raving. It’s almost enough to make you want to puke.

Then there’s ‘Club Foot By Kasabian by Blacklisters’. It extends the joke of the original – since the Blacklisters song, ‘Club Foot By Kasabian’ wasn’t a cover, and had nothing to do with Kasabian, and so it is that ‘Club Foot By Kasabian by Blacklisters’ is a minute and a half of squalling, brawling, guitar-led abrasion. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Castrovalva in its deranged intensity, and frenzied, squawking disregard for decency. The title track is fifty-two seconds long. It’s rabid. It has to be heard to be comprehended.

The last track, ‘Buffoons and Barel Organs’ is both the longest and most structurally coherent. ‘Why do I cross the road? Why do I cross the road? Because I’m a fucking chicken!’ Norton hollers amidst a raging tempest of bass and drums.

Screamers is certainly appropriately titled. Every song is a brief but blistering assault. It’s full-on, and will melt your face, and as such, I wholeheartedly recommend it, unless you’re a wuss.

AA

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Psychic TV – A Prayer For Derek Jarman

Posted: 15 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cold Spring Records – 23rd June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a heretical stance, particularly as a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, but Psychic TV never really did it for me. They felt a bit meandering, wanky folky, in the same way as a lot of David Tibet’s stuff does. This may be to my detriment, and I may be missing the joys and benefits of a huge catalogue, but… I can shrug it off, and I will live.

TG and seminal filmmaker Derek Jarman were kindred spirits, provocative, avant-garde, and testament of their reciprocal artistic respect is cemented in their 1980 collaboration, where TG soundtracked Jarman’s movie Under the Shadow of the Sun (with the soundtrack being released some four years later).

A Prayer For Derek Jarman was recorded later, on LP in 1985 by Temple Records and subsequently reissued as an extended CD version by Cold Spring in 1997. As the accompanying text explains, ‘Unavailable for almost three decades, this collection from the Cold Spring archive has been repackaged and remastered with new artwork. A documentation of the soundtrack work created by Psychic TV for the film-maker and artist Derek Jarman, it serves as a demonstration of why PTV were one of the most important groups in the underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s.’ The material on this disc was – as far as I can discern – last available in 2011 as part of the Themes six-CD box set, also released via Cold Spring, and this represents a solo release of disc two.

There’s no mistaking that both Jarman an PTV were important, although I would personally rank the former above the latter – that may be a rather subjective position to take, though, and there is no denying the immense shadow Genesis P Orridge would cast over the scene for many a year and perhaps an eternity.

The titular ‘Prayer For Derek’ is intended as an invocationary prayer and is based on Tibetan rituals; a collage of sounds including field recordings of the lulling waves running aground on the shingle beach opposite Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, home of some of the UK’s best preserved ‘sound mirrors’ – alongside bird song, crying babies and massed ritualised chants to aid the late director in his after-life journeys. It follows the seventeen-minute churning abstract noise whorl that is ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ – and which is, on balance, as good as any of Throbbing Gristle’s expansive dark noise works, and ‘Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2) on which the promo for the album is predominantly pitched, and the ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’. These compositions are piano-led and border on neoclassical. Dainty, charming, and musically eloquent, they certainly mark a departure from the work more commonly associated with Orridge or PTV, as well as evidencing the reasons why they are such a difficult act to pin down, or even distinguish the ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ works in their immense and wide-ranging – and variable – catalogue. With its echoed, looped vocal layers redolent of Gregorian chants, it’s not so hard to determine why ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’ is not mentioned in the promo, although it’s entirely captivating.

As the accompanying text observes, ‘Other tracks feature elongated drones, washes of dissonance, melancholic guitar chime, evocative piano scoring, Burroughs cut-ups, gothic chants and snarling dogs.’ ‘Rites of Reversal’ marks a clear contrasts from the delicate piano-led compositions, diving in with some hard-edged grinding oscillations, which, again, lean more toward the kind of dark noise that was the TG trademark.

A Prayer For Derek Jarman is broad in scope and mood, and this is as appropriate is it is likely deliberate. It certainly presents the more experimental aspects of Psychic TV, and as varied as it is, the quality is also there.

AA

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BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

Posted: 12 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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11th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some artists thrive on collaboration. Deborah Fialkiewicz is one of those. While she’s prolific as a solo artist, the volume of collaborative works in her discography is also noteworthy: when she’s not working as part of SPORE, she’s part of the ever-rotating lineup of BLOOM – and that’s before we touch on the frequent collaborations with (AN) EeL, the most recent of which was only released three weeks ago.

The Improvisation Sessions was recorded live May of this year, with a lineup of Dan Dolby, Deborah Fialkiewicz, and John Koser, marking an expansion from the duo which recorded the trilogy of Parallel Minor, Besides, and Hybrid in 2020. Fialkiewicz is without doubt an artist with range, but one who favours the dark end of the ambient spectrum more often than not, and this is very much the case here.

The Improvisation Sessions features two longform tracks which would quite nicely align with a vinyl release.

‘Chameleon Soul’, which spans a colossal continuous twenty minutes, begins with low, rumbling ominous drones, but soon escalates to a busy, buzzy criss-cross of sounds, interweaving and interlacing, leaving one’s head in a spin as if after trying to trace several flies flitting about the kitchen on a hot summer’s day for any period of time. It’s a morass of warping tones overlaying a ballast of churning noise, and any comparisons to Hull luminaries Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow are entirely justified.

The layers of distortion only grow denser and gnarlier as the track progresses, crashing waves of white noise blast in from one side and then the other as they really push to test the stamina. And then you realise we’re only six minutes in. This is a positive: plenty more left to enjoy… Enjoyment is of course subjective, and enjoyment of this requires being appreciative of a dizzying, disorientating assault simultaneous with a full-on white noise blizzard.

The momentary lulls, the spells where they pull back from the precipice of all-out aural obliteration, are far from mellow, as serrated spurs of hard-edged drones, wails of feedback and brain-melting extraneous noise conglomerate to seismic effect. There are some nasty high-end frequencies knocking about in the mix, moments were one has to check if the whistle is coming from the speakers of if it’s that troublesome tinnitus nagging again, and said frequencies rise from a battery of ugly distortion, bone-shattering blasts of which simple explode around the twelve-minute mark, and from hereon in, things only grow harsher, more corrupted, more intense, more difficult to withstand. We’d be inching into polythene bags on heads territory were it not for the variation, but the last three minutes or so are fractured, damaged, and agonizing – part power electronics, part circuit meltdown.

As the world becomes evermore and increasingly fucked up, I find words fail me more by the day. It’s harder to articulate, and this is where I’ve found that sound has come into its own. Sound as the capacity to convey something beyond words, something that lies in the most innermost parts, giving voice to the subconscious, even. On The Improvisation Sessions, BLOOM convey anxiety, gloom, pessimism.

‘The Dark Room’ is indeed dark, constructed primarily around a fixed but thick, distorted hum. Oscillators whine and whistle, and something about it calls to mind Whitehouse around the time of Never Forget Death, when they discovered low-end frequencies and restraint, the impact of a low undulating wave and subtle tweaks of reverb.

It rumbles and drones on, eddying and bouncing around in a shrilling mesh of dissonance. There isn’t a moment where this is an easy listen, and so often, it sounds as if the equipment is faulty, whether it’s a stuck loop or generating unexpected noise.

This set hangs on the edge of ambience, but be warned, it’s dark, and noisy at times, to the extend that it may shred your brain. For me personally, that’s my idea of fun, so it gets a two thumbs up, but for the more sensitive, this is a release to approach with caution.

AA

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Felix Kubin – Der Tanz Aller

Posted: 9 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza –16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Much of Felix Kubin’s work since the turn of the millennium has involved radio, although film and theatre and other soundtrack works have also been a feature. Der Tanz Aller is one such soundtrack work, which was ‘created for the performance of the same title by the experimental arts collective LIGNA. The group specialized in site-specific, participatory works. Der Tanz Aller is based on Rudolf von Laban’s radical 1920s concept of ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), collective dances in public space that aimed to reimagine social order through shared movement.’

The context and objective behind the composition are particularly useful to be aware of when listening to this album in isolation, as Kubin sets out: ‘When the performance group LIGNA approached me in 2012 to compose music for a play based on Rudolf von Laban’s revolutionary kinetic theories and so-called ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), I thought of a soundtrack that would be both rhythmically engaging, abstract and mechanical. I knew there would be pre-recorded voices talking about his philosophy and guiding the audience via headphones. So, I had to leave some “air” in the arrangements, allowing the visitors to concentrate on the spoken words, while simultaneously becoming dancers. In LIGNA’s conceptual works – just like Laban’s idea of the movement choirs – the audience members become the performers.’

I shan’t dwell too long on the conceptual aspects here, beyond noting that this predates John Cage’s 4’33” by more than two decades, and while Cage’s silent work was on many levels a quite different proposition, the way in which any sound made by the audience – be it a cough or the shuffling of feet or the creaking of a chair – immediately becomes part of the performance indicates clear common ground. Likewise, William Burroughs’ cut-ups, which invited ‘creative reading’ whereby the engagement of the reader and their experience and perception was integral to their success, arrived some thirty years later. As such, ‘Bewegungschöre’ represent the cutting edge of avant-gardism, belonging to the era which brought us Duchamps’ readymades and – perhaps more pertinently – Tristan Tzara’s directions to make a Dadaist poem.

For the most part, the ‘air’ in the arrangements is apparent: there is space, separation, and while we can only imagine the prerecorded voices talking about Laban’s philosophy through headphones, it’s possible to get a sense of how it would work. But then, occasionally, Kubin’s compositions get father more busy, as on ‘Dämonen der Zerstreuung’, with big band percussion and noodlesome orchestration that’s of a strong jazz persuasion, but has a whole lot happening, and often simultaneously. There’s drama with orchestral strikes, and creeping, urgent glockenspiels that bring a noirish, detective movie feel – not a chase scene, but a cat-and-mouse scenario.

There are some spoken-word passages, in German, as on ‘Raumstunde Vera Skoronel’, accompanied by evolving sonic backdrops, the likes of which I find hard to imagine inspire dancing, but spasmodic twitching and erratic lurching, while the title track is a slice of jerky, and quite insular and intense, Kraftwerkian synth bleepery, and ‘Rotes Lied’ is a perfect exemplar of sparse, spaced-out, glooping, blooping, reverby weirdery with occasional chimes and stuttering shot of snare. There is plenty of air here, as you sit and wonder what exactly is going on?

Who knows? And does it even matter at this point? The percussion builds from all sides, and the nagging away – until suddenly it doesn’t.

The unpredictability of Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is its strength. It is weird, unexplained in many respects, beyond simply the initial onboarding awkwardness. We should probably celebrate this weirdness, this sense of separation. Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is never dull, but always strange and alien – and these are reasons to appreciate it.

AA

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Lower Slaughter – Deep Living

Posted: 8 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 6th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Where does the time go? No, really? I’m not just stunned by the fact we’re a week into June already, but the fact that it’s been six years since the last Lower Slaughter album, and nine years since I missed their show in Leeds with Working Man Noise Unit supporting because I was watching Man of Moon play to a nearly empty room across town instead. That’s almost a decade I’ve spent being frustrated by my inability to clone myself, and I find it hard to let these things go.

They’ve undergone some changes since their last outing – changes of the nature which would have terminated, many a band. Their bio traces a raid succession of personnel switches:

Following the departure of long-time vocalist Sinead Young, their surprise return in 2024 saw the remaining former members unveil a new line-up, welcoming James Gardiner to the fold on bass, and with previous bass player Barney Wakefield switching over to vocal duties. Upon Gardiner’s addition, a considerably more expansive sound has emerged, bringing the band’s now recognised output of what the Quietus once referred to as ‘lurching noise-rock’ to new exciting heights, all the while set against an equally more confident and expansive dynamic, reinforced by the chemistry of Graham Hebson and Jon Wood, who remain tighter than ever on drums and guitar respectively.

And so seemingly miraculously, they’re still here. Thus, we arrive at Deep Living, a colossal twelve-track document of the new Lower Slaughter, a release of blistering overload dominated by rolling percussion and thick bass. It’s varied, to say the least, and most certainly does not pursue the most obvious or commercial avenues. It was certainly worth the wait, and we’re most grateful that they are still here. And because it’s being released by Human Worth, 10% of all sales proceeds donated to charity The PANDAs Foundation – a trusted support service for families suffering with perinatal mental illness.

After a good couple of minutes of rolling, tom-driven percussion and muted vocals which sit partially submerged beneath a fat, fuzzed out bass ‘Year of the Ox’ suddenly slams the pedals on and erupts and Wakefield roars in anguish, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’. ‘Take a Seat’ is quite different, more overtly mathy, post-punky, and more accessible overall, despite its hell-for-leather pace and wild energy, and there’s a bit on jangle to altogether mellower ‘The Lights Were Not Familiar’ that’s a shade Pavementy – but it’s Pavement as covered by Fugazi. And the guitars sound loud. In fact, everything on Deep Living sounds loud, and what’s more, the recording and mixing work done by Wayne Adams (Petbrick/Big Lad) captures and conveys that it such a way that it feels loud, like you’re in the room with the backline practically in your face. This is nowhere more apparent than on ‘Dear Phantom’, which has something of a Bug-era Dinosaur Jr vibe to it – and the big grungy riff is magnificent. Then halfway through it goes slow, low, and sludgy – and that’s magnificent too.

Balancing melodic hooks and some quite breezy indie / alt-rock with some hefty, heavier and hugely overdriven passages, Deep Living has some range.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Memories of the Road’ is a slow-burning epic that builds to a roaring finish, and makes for a standout cut. It’s a trick they repeat on the title track which brings the album to a close.

In between, ‘Hospital Chips’ brings pace and jittery tension via thumping bass and jarring, sinewy guitars, and straight-up punk brawlers ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Motions’. All the range, but it’s the fact there are tunes galore that make Deep Living a cracking album.

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Lower Slaughter LP.indd

Various – Marc Urselli’s Ramones Redux + Best of Redux

Posted: 5 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Magnetic Eye Records / Redux Records – 6th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Magnetic Eye have released a few of these ‘Redux’ tribute albums now, each of which has come in two editions, and each of which has taken a different approach. Whereas the Meantime Helmet releases offered a standard and expanded version, for example, others have presented an album on one version and a ‘best of’ as a companion. And in all instances, they’ve managed to score some outstanding names as contributors. This time around, it’s the Ramones’ eponymous debut which is accompanied by a ‘best of’ set as a counterpart, and the project was ‘masterminded and curated by New York City and London-based Italian-Swiss audio engineer, sound designer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy winner Marc Urselli’ – hence the titles.

Mondo Generator, Napalm Death, Ufomammut, Arthur Brown, David J, and Voivod are among the big-hitters featured here, but as I settle down with a cold pint of Oranjeboom, I contemplate the need for a Ramones tribute – or, more specifically, another one. There have been a few, perhaps most famously 2003’s We’re a Happy Family, which featured The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Marilyn Manson, Green Day, Garbage, U2, Metallica, and The Pretenders, among others, and there are so many tribute acts out there, too, one has to ask ‘is this not overkill?’ Well, no, because that would be Motörhead, and what’s more, with a lower tier of ‘name’ contributors, it feels more authentic, somehow. I’m not saying U2 aren’t fans of The Ramones, but they feel like they’re on a par with the fans who bought a T-shirt in Primark and only discovered they were a band after the fact. Casuals, in other words.

Some might say that the debut album doubles as a ‘best of’, and there’s a case for that, given that every single song is a pure classic. Mondo Generator kick off the debut album covers set with a roaring ‘ONETWOTHREEFOUR’ before launching into ‘Blitzkreig Bop’, and it’s a faithful but fiery, fizzy rendition, the guitars like jet engines on what you could only describe as a proper punk blast.

Daníel Hjálmtýsson and Mortiis offer an altogether different take on ‘Beat on the Brat’ – slowed down, moody, gothic, a bit theatrical, a shade menacing, and yet somehow accentuating the pop currents which flow through this, and indeed, all Ramones songs. Boots Electric, with the help of none other than Wayne Kramer, push the pop to the forefront

Ufomammut bring the metal and convert the sub-two-minute surf-pop ‘Chain Saw’ into a six and-a-half minute grind that’s downtuned, dense, and dirty. It’s also absolutely brilliant in its execution. Napalm Death have enlisted Thurston Moore for their take on ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’, which is a minute and a half of speaker-shredding thrash nihilism, and absolutely perfect.

The Ramones weren’t only punk progenitors, but purveyors of precise and often perfect pop songs, and this pair of albums represents the fullness of their influence (still not saying they. didn’t influence RHCP or U2., but…) Arthur Brown and The Berserker’s take on ‘I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You’ is crazy, and absolutely perfect.

Voivod rope in JG Thirlwell for their hell-for-leather yet hooky as hell take on ‘Zero Zero UFO’ which opens the ‘best of’ set. And there are some corkers, with a slowed-down, heavy psyche yet oh-so-pop take on ‘Pet Sematary’ by Impostor Cult with Amy Tung Barry Smith being exemplary. So Hideous’ twangin’ take on ‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’ is one of the most radically different interpretations on the album, although Kayo Dot and Ihsahn push ‘Teenage Lobotomy’ in the most unexpected directions, while David J and Paul Wallfisch push ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ to a soporific seven minutes. With a super-sparse arrangement, it sounds as if they’ve achieved their wish before entering the studio.

What these two albums illustrate, more than anything, is that The Ramones wrote superlative and truly classic songs, with earworms galore. And as tributes go, these albums do feel perfectly fitting.

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