It may be a ‘me’ issue that when an artist suddenly hits the world with a blunderbuss blast of output, I feel somewhat overwhelmed. There are some acts I know I like which I’ve simply avoided because of not knowing where to start. Overfaced is the word: a term I discovered perhaps in my early teens when presented with a large roast dinner. The sheer amount of food in front of me instantly killed my appetite, to the point that I felt queasy and, not knowing where to start, felt incapable of starting, meaning that I would fold before I’d barely consumed a forkful.
While I did manage to ease myself into The Fall after dipping a toe, I very much feel this way about the likes of Merzbow, among others, and, to a lesser extent, the Melvins – and the specific reason I come to them is because of their early 00s trilogy, when they cranked out The Maggot, The Crybaby, and The Bootlicker on top of one another. Ben Heal, aka Coaxial has truly splurged with his output this year, as Redux Trilogy is not even the total. My head swam. The prospect of listening to, and reviewing, three albums in one session, for one piece… No. Just no.
Having stepped back and broken things down to more bitesize chunks, I have come to Redux Media, which is in fact the second of the trilogy, first. This feels reasonable, since this is set of releases is sold as ‘a triptych of cassette releases conceived as a recombinatory system rather than linear statement’. I will return to the other releases in due course, but for now and content to dabble.
The seven tracks on Redux Media are soft, squelchy, electronic and experimental. ‘Onyaxial’ lifts the lid on the set with a bibbling, bubbling stroll that sits in the space between minimal techno and the pulsating grooves of Kraftwerk. It bends and warps a bit, and there’s some weird shit going on near the end as it battles with its own identity, but this is the very essence of this release – it’s about the exploratory, about swimming out of the lanes and venturing wherever the mood takes.
‘Tryxxial’ is mellow, an 80s drum machine sound plodding along while keyboard sounds trill along, mixing all shades of electronic action with no suggestion of a conclusion, and rightly, with the wonky babbling of ‘Peswyx’. ‘Pymediax’ wanders into eighties electropop, but without vocals, and it’s more DAF than Depeche Mode.
In the main, it’s entertaining, and despite the overarching connotations of seriousness, it’s quite good fun. Redux Media finds Ben Heal venturing every which way and drilling deep into different dimensions.
XKatedral / La Becque Editions – 27th February 2027
Christopher Nosnibor
Not content with the completion of the first new Sunn O))) album since 2014, set for release in the spring on Sub Pop, co-founder Stephen O’Malley has been busy working on a new solo album, which will appear as a rather more low-key (if not necessarily low-frequency) release a couple of months before. Historically, one might have expected this release to have been put out through Ideologic Organ, but then again, when it comes to his solo and collaborative releases, O’Malley operates very much with within the milieu of the experimental artists and labels based in mainland Europe, as his collaboration with François J Bonnet, released in 2021 on Editions Mego evidences.
And while this is billed as an O’Malley solo album, this too is a collaborative work, featuring as it does ‘two long-form compositions for pipe organ by Stephen O’Malley, which he performs alongside the celebrated organist Kali Malone and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary)’.
There is something grand and powerful about the pipe organ, the sound of which is capable of stirring something – if not primal, then deep-seated in the emotional psyche. Creating a vast, reverberating sound, it’s capable of triggering something beyond verbal articulation. And for this release, O’Malley found some remarkable organs, and around Christmas 2021 recorded some immense drones on Les Grandes Orgues (Scherrer (1777), Walker (1867), Kuhn (1995)) at Église Saint-François, Lausanne, Switzerland. It seems that this album emerged as a detour from another project, but why not make the most of a recording opportunity?
And so it is that Spheres Collapser consists of two longform pieces, each around twenty-five minutes in length, whereby little happens beyond textural and tonal shifts. It drags heavy, an does so without apology. Rightly do: why should there be any concession here?
There are sounds which are immediately identifiable as emanating from a pipe organ, and then again there are others, which are not always immediately apparent on Spheres Collapser: instead, there is simply the sound of low, swelling, drone. The organ-led nature of the recording only becomes apparent to the ear midway through ‘Phase I Organ’, when the trilling, tremulous tones come to the fore. Twenty minutes in, there are treblesome quiverings which begin to trouble the earsdrums as the sound narrows and becomes more niggling in its nature. But the exploratory nature of this album is what it’s all about, and O’Malley is truly a master when it comes to drawing different kinds of drone from instruments.
‘Phase II Organ’ presents twenty-two minutes of continuous drone, which commences low, resonant, with a comparatively pacey undulation, before a bassier note enters the mix. But still that low drone continues on… and on… and on… Some may pin this as Sunn O))) but on organ, and that summary wouldn’t be entirely wide of the mark. What else would you expect, really? And then the track simply drones out to the end.
What to say of this release? Drones are what they are: immersive, the sound of freedom, in a sense. The sound of escapism, of freedom, of breaking free of the constraints of the now. Spheres Collapser is heavy, dense, suffocating. You feel the air seep front your lungs as the notes merge in a thick, penetrating polyphony, ultimately tapering to a single sustain which feels like an eternity. Somehow, it’s strangely draining, but exhilarating at the same time.
Both A-Sun Amissa and Gizeh Records have sustained their existences while hovering just below the radar, and while it may not be the ideal position in terms of financials, in terms of creative freedom, it undoubtedly has its benefits. Home to the myriad projects centred around label founder Richard Knox, in its early days, Gizeh released the first mini-album by Her Name is Calla. Ever since its inception, the label has devoted itself to quality, and a focus on acts it has close artistic ties with. Featuring both Richard Knox and Claie Knox, A-Sun Amissa meets both criteria.
A-Sun Amissa’s meeting with Lauren Mason – maker of ‘dark and experimental poetics’ is a perfect coming together of sound and word – although as the former bassist and lyricist with the much-missed Torpor, Mason is in her element here, weaving poetry with some dense, dark sounds. Mason’s input ‘explores the curses of corporate extraction and pollution on our planet’s water, and listens in, as water speaks back. Mason is best known as bassist with now-defunct existential sludge band Torpor, where she often wove her spoken word pieces through heavy soundscapes. She has been developing her poetic practice for many years and published her first book Rust Canyon in 2025’.
A-Sun Amissa may not bring the same pulverising weight of Torpor by way of musical accompaniment, but they do create a dark, suffocatingly dense, swirling drone that reverberates around the body in a way which is as physical as it is mental or psychological.
Water Scores takes the form of a single, continuous piece, almost forty minutes in length. It begins with sparse, low, rumblings, subsonic, tectonic drones, and Mason’s words are placed prominent, above this accompaniment. Her tone is even, her delivery clear: the scenes she depicts laying bare the ecological crisis which defines our times.
Her calmness and poise is admirable: in recent years, I’ve personally struggled to maintain a level head in the face of this. In fact, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to articulate. The world is simply overwhelming, and as AI trends of action figures and caricatures, nudifications on X swamp social media, the rivers and lakes are being drained in order to facilitate this – the most insidious datamining operation vaguely disguised as the most puerile, facile shit to have ever swept the globe like a plague. Instead of whooping ‘hell yeah, this is fun’, more people should be screaming ‘this is destroying the planet!’. It’s also diminishing the collective mental capacity at an alarming rate.
Mason skips gently through evolution, celebrates the salmon and the plankton, the things we take for granted on so many levels.
By the eighteen-minute mark, her words are being buffeted amidst a swell of extraneous noise and surging feedback: the ambient drift which lifted the curtain on the album has evolved to a vast blast of sound which is nothing short of an immersive assault on the senses… and it builds, steely walls of sound, sonorous scrapes and howling feedback combining to affect a cranial compression, and as Mason’s words are increasingly submerged beneath this squalling tidal wave of devastating noise, you feel yourself carried away.
From the half-hour mark, the vocals rise again to the fore, being battling against a thunderous cacophony of noise, wails of feedback and a relentless churn which registers in the gut, and registers in the ribs. It’s not pleasant or easy: this is difficult, grey noise. But the detail… the detail makes it. Water Scores is rich in detail, and some may find the level of this difficult to process. But spend some time… this is an album which takes time.
1984 has never felt more relevant. In the early chapters, Winston is shown rewriting history, in the form of news articles – something which has become a defining feature of the Trump Administration of late. The quotation ‘The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’ has been all over social media in recent weeks. Because we live in a time when a woman in her car calmly saying ‘I’m not mad’, or a medic shielding a woman from assault, can be murdered by the state, the event filmed and broadcast from many angles, and reported as being ‘domestic terrorists’. When news reportage becomes outlandish fiction, there’s a problem of unspeakable proportion. And so it’s become the objective of the media wings of governments – those of America, if Israel, of ours here in England – to preserve fictions and mask facts for their own propagandist, gaslighting ends.
Harry Christelis – whose latest offering features Christos Stylianides (trumpet/effects), Andrea Di Biase (bass/synth) and Dave Storey (drums) – is not seeking to propagate propaganda here, but simply to explore sonic territories, with a album of ‘post-jazz, ambient and folk-inflected improv’, which ‘captures a deep collective instinct – reflective, spontaneous, and richly atmospheric…’ Christelis explains that “in the creative process — as in life — there is never true certainty, never a ‘right way.’ These are simply fictions we hold onto. This realisation inspired the title Preserving Fictions: a reminder to stay present with whatever comes, grateful for each lesson, knowing that something new may be just around the corner, waiting to turn that on its head.”
The album launches with the longest track, the nine-minute ‘Blues of the Birds’, which is, at heart, an ebb-and-flow ambient composition… but then there’s clattering percussion and waves and wisps flittering skywards, before, around the mid-point, it settles into a smooth, strolling, settled feel. Nice. And all that.
The spontaneous nature of the way this album was created is perhaps one of the reasons behind the broad spectrum of the pieces which it comprises, and it’s worth noting that Miles Davis and Talk Talk are cited as central influences, in that they become more apparent once you’re aware of this fact, which roots what is, on first hearing, a nebulous, meandering work. Not that it isn’t nebulous or meandering, or that these are bad things, but there is a solid contextual framework in which these pieces sit.
The title of ‘A Sense of Parrot’ is laced with absurdity, but the sonic actuality is a composition which drifts serenely, underpinned by a strolling bass and some nicely loose-wristed percussion, while ‘Wood Dalling’ (named after the Norfolk village in which it was
composed) has something of a post-rock feel, a sepia-tinted nostalgia augmented with gentle woodwind. The percussion-led ‘Djembe’ is fundamentally self-explanatory, and one of the album’s most explicitly jazz pieces.
‘How old are you?’ is a phrase I’ve often used to disparage people – usually in the workplace – over petty or otherwise juvenile or irritating behaviour. Christelis’ piece by the same title doesn’t convey anywhere near the same sense of frustration at human behaviour, but with bowed low notes scraping beneath ambient undulations, while chirps and chatters of wildlife are just audible in the background behind ringing guitar notes and vast reverberations.
The compositions on Preserving Fictions are sedate, and take their time in unfurling, and it’s a welcome alternative to much of the wilder, more frenetic jazz-leaning releases which have come my way of late. It’s not that I dislike them – far from it – but in stressful times, something gentler and somewhat transportive is most welcome. Preserving Fictions fits the bill nicely.
Of Dave Procter’s myriad musical projects, Legion of Swine may not be his most endearing, but it’s certainly his most enduring – a vehicle for noise, often at the harsher end of the spectrum – with a highly political angle, and usually involving some form of porcine pun.
One of the orange fascist’s recent outbursts not only created a stir in the media, but gifted LoS with a title for this latest blast of angry noise. The notes which accompany the release make it clear where his thoughts are right now:
‘Who knows how many times that massive arsehole has his name printed in those files? Will we ever see them un-redacted before he threatens to invade everywhere/nowhere/nuke the planet/shit his pants/get bruised from too much handshaking and other bollocks? The soundtrack to the end of the world? Who knows. Enjoy it while we still can.’
To articulate quite how all of this feels in words is difficult. There’s certainly much anger, but also fear and confusion. Lately, the news has been such that had it been pitched as a plot for a movie, it would have been laughed out the door for being so ridiculously far-fetched. As such, there’s an air of unreality to it all. Is this shit all really happening? At once? And this is why everything is so bewildering. It’s not just the Epstein shit – which is even wilder than the wildest conspiracy theories about global elites – but it’s ICE, it’s bombing Venezuela and kidnapping the president, it’s plotting to turn Gaza into a holiday resort, it’s angling to take Greenland, it’s the rewriting of history, it’s the renaming of things, and the endless stream of outright lies and truly insane ramblings.
“quiet piggy!” is twenty-five and a half minutes of obliterative harsh noise, a relentless sonic blizzard, a solid wall that batters every sense, tearing from the speakers with a force that’s positively physical. It’s like standing in a hurricane, or besides a jet engine. The best way to appreciate this is at high volume, to let the ferocious blast immerse your very being. The effect is, seemingly counterintuitively, quite soothing. Like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, it take the focus away from all of the shit swirling around in the ether and crowding the mind, affording mental relaxation, while blasting away the stress and agitation – at least until you realise that it probably sounds remarkably similar to the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
Holy fuck. Sometimes, you want a racket, because it blows away all the shit, the, the anxiety, the bewilderment, all the other messy crap that is life right now. And I do mean right now: not ‘the twenty-first century’, not the 2020s – although the last five years has been a relentless pummelling of awful, awful stuff – but this is the immediate present we’re looking at here. ‘Unprecedented’ is a word we hear a lot. But we really do live in times which are unprecedented. Waking up every morning wondering what fresh new hell has happened in the hours since you went to bed, wondering if the world still exists and if you have really woken up or if this is all a hellish nightmare is gruelling.
With UPSIDEYERHEAD, PLQ MRX deliver that racket. Their bio tells it that ‘From the depths of North Philadelphia’s underground comes PLQ MRX, a project operating at the intersection of abrasive noise rock, acid-soaked psychedelia, and warped funk’. Say what? We go on to learn that ‘Beyond the music itself, PLQ MRX cultivate an aesthetic steeped in excess, altered states, and grotesque carnival imagery. Their world is populated by surreal characters and exaggerated rituals, exploring pleasure, debauchery, and sensory overload. The band leans into both the highs and the ugly turns of the trip, embracing chaos as a core element of its identity’.
When we discover that PLQ MRX have emerged from ‘the remnants of the Philadelphia collective Plaque Marks, who first surfaced in 2017 with the EP Anxiety Driven Nervous Worship’ and that the current lineup features current and former members of Author & Punisher, UNSANE and SWANS (having been joined by Vinnie Signorelli for this release), it all makes sense.
And yes, it’s every bit as wild as the amalgamation of ‘abrasive noise rock, acid-soaked psychedelia, and warped funk’ would have you expect.
‘Us V. Them’ crashes in with some wild, frenetic jazz action before a thunderous riff crashes in, drums and bass to the fore, guitar a wah-wah laden blitzkrieg that calls to mind The Stooges. The vocals – half-spoken, half-spat, thick with distortion and swamped in reverb, sit almost on another plane, growling and snarling away amidst the maelstrom. Making out the lyrics isn’t easy, but feeling the vibe zaps straight to the very core instantaneously.
There’s a dirty, low-slung swaggering groove to ‘Gansta White Walls’, which locks into a heavy bass-led workout and grinds away, building layers of depth a couple of minutes or so in before hitting the ‘frenzied, motorik’ pedal, while the eight-and-a-half minute ‘Gentrify My Skull’ is a brawling, squalling sludgy stoner doom monster, littered with scrappy samples and as ugly as hell, with mangled-to-fuck vocals and a relentlessly gut-churning bass, and bursting into a full-throttle blast of black metal at the end.
The final track, ‘Hundred Dollar Hot Dog’ is the album’s shortest, but packs the most into a mere three and a half minutes. It really does seem to be a song about an expensive hot dog, and brings the rage in spades, with a lengthy refrain of ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you’ amidst a squall of guitar and an all-pervading dense murk.
It’s rare to hear a release that doesn’t sound like anything else, but with UPSIDEYERHEAD, PLQ MRX have done it. It’s crazed, outside the box racketmongering of the highest order. It might be genius, it might be madness, but it’s absolutely head-spinningly awesome.
The facetious part of me reads the title of this as being a greeting to a pane of glass. I should probably get my coat after such a shameful revelation, but never mind. I’m here with my ears for this complex and detailed release, and will share the standard biographical info to provide much-needed context here:
‘Evening, window is the debut full-length album by Helsinki-based sound artist and ambient composer miska lamberg. Working with intricate field recordings that gather the overlooked moments of daily life – rainfall, distant traffic, animal calls – lamberg threads these textures into compositions that ache with personal memory. On Evening, window, the familiar becomes spectral: fragments of sound blur into melody and mood, capturing the stark melancholy of Nordic winters and the soft violence of remembering.’
The album features some long pieces: four of the six compositions are over eight minutes in duration, and this allows the pieces the appropriate and necessary time to build.
It begins with a metallic clattering. Heavy rain on a tin roof? Perhaps. Then there is a rumble – possibly thunder – but chattering abstract voices and soft, gentle synths drift in a cinematic spatiality and an organ swell gradually comes to dominate as it drifts… Evening, window is a sonic diary of sorts, a compilation of recordings captured in everyday settings as she goes about her life. The nine-minute opener, ‘Half-memories absorb us’ is both immersive and transportative, provoking contemplation. In some respects, the title does more than speak for itself, and also speaks of the way our minds work. And how do our minds work, exactly? Erratically, unpredictably, leaping from one place to another. And we’re thinking one thing while looking at another.
From a certain perspective, Evening, window can be seen to operate within the same field as William Burroughs’ cut-ups, and in particular the tape experiments he made with Iain Sommerville, although the collaging of field recordings and various layers of sound aren’t nearly as extreme here, blending the field recordings and decontextualised samples with carefully-crafted layers of ambience, which maked for a rather more listenable experience. Different objectives through similar intentions, one might say.
There are some haunting, unsettling motifs which cycle through Evening, window: ‘Seeing only faces turned away’ is dark, and listening to the ghostly swathes of ambience which hang dark and heavy is uncomfortable, a repetitive chord sequence conjuring, if not outright fear, then a sense of tremulous trepidation and unease. While Evening, window is a work of lightness and air, it’s also a work of slow, dense weight.
There are children’s’ voices. There are supple strings. At times, the atmosphere is soothing, sedative, but more often than not, there are undercurrents of tension, befitting of a dystopian thriller. Some may consider this to be something of a disconnect from the concept of presenting, or representing, fragments from the everyday life of the artist. But life is strange; the world is strange, and scary.
‘I remember the day the world lost color’ is bleak, barren, conveying the murky gloom of a blanket of fog, while ‘Its monotony is unrelenting’ is the drudgery of life – at least some periods of it – summarised in four words. Anyone who has endured a crap job will likely be able to relate to the sense that life is slipping by while days evaporate trudging through eternal sameness and feeling a sense of helplessness and a loss of identity, a distancing from the self. The sound is muffled, and very little happens over the course of eight minutes of crafted stultification during which the chord sequence of ‘Seeing only faces turned away’ is reprised, only slower, more vague, somehow tireder-sounding. It’s the soundtrack to hauling your living corpse through another dead, empty day – and another, and another, and another.
Evening, window isn’t depressing as such, but it is not light or breezy, and the mood is low and melancholy. It’s a slow, gradually unfurling work which drags heavy on the heart, an album which radiates reflection and low mood. It’s a dose of stark and sad realism, and an album which speaks so far beyond words.
My parents weren’t really big on music. They had maybe fifty-odd, maybe seventy-five or so albums, and didn’t really seem to listen to many of them when I was growing up in the 80s. Most of those records were old… at least, that was how I perceived them at the time. There was a bunch of Beatles LPs, some Steeleye Span, and the same shit that occupied pretty much every collection at that time, at least for people of a certain age: Tubular Bells, Queen’s Greatest Hits, and Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra. They probably had Oxygene by Jean-Michelle Jarre, too. The 70s and 80s may well have been a boom time for the alternative breaking into the charts, with punk bands and the likes of Killing Joke making it onto Top of the Pops, and it may equally have been the period of peak postmodernism, but living through it then and reflecting on it now, the mainstream cultural dominance was anything but fragmented, and the comparatively limited choices of the time – can you imagine only four television channels, and no Internet? You had to be there, really – meant that there was a huge cultural homogeneity. Everyone watched the same TV shows – with something of an unspoken class division between BBC and ITV – and there was only really Radio 1 and Radio 2, and everyone listened to the radio.
And like most people their age, my parents thought they were hip buying the first Now That’s What I Call Music albums, and my mum would groove while listening to Phil Collins, The Bee Gees and Tina Turner while ironing, records purchased through Britannia Music. I’m not remotely nostalgic for any of this. If anything, my gentle, middle-class upbringing was marred by these experiences because it wasn’t just bland, it was… Look, imagine car journeys to UK holiday destinations in Devon and The Lake District spent listening to Barbara Dixon and Elkie Brooks and 80s Cliff Richard. I love Devon and The Lake District, but the soundtrack to my life as a child was fucking awful, and I feel a certain trauma tripped my life as a consequence. I don’t know if I ever heard Phaedra at home, I just spotted it while flicking through their collection.
Phaedra seems like something of an outlier in the context of such a collection, but it was a huge breakthrough release, the Hot Fuss of 1974. Or something. It spent fifteen weeks in the UK album charts, and achieved six-figure sales.
In context, it was truly a landmark album, famously the first to showcase their seminal sequencer-driven sound, and launched The Berlin School, the foundation of ‘space music’. The fact that it’s been fifty years since the album’s release is unfathomable, but it’s unquestionably appropriate to mark its anniversary. And while the thirty-fifth anniversary brought us Phaedra Revisited – a live performance of the album in its entirety, but reconfigured, retaining the thirty-eight minute duration of the original studio release, but with an abridged rendition of the title track making space for a new composition in the form of ‘Delfi’ at the end.
There’s no such sense of limitation when it comes to 50 Years Of Phaedra: At The Barbican – a colossal triple-disc of a commemorative live performance by the current incarnation of the band, consisting of Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Paul Frick – none of whom played on the studio version.
As the accompanying biographical notes acknowledge, ‘Part of Phaedra’s magic lay in its imperfections: the original sequences were never truly quantised, their timing drifting unpredictably through the Moog’s analogue circuitry. That subtle instability became part of its charm – a human pulse within the machine’ – before going on to explain that ‘it long left current bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning intrigued by what a fully realised version might reveal. Now, fifty years later, Tangerine Dream have revisited the work with the precision that technology once denied them. 50 Years of Phaedra: At the Barbican is the first time Phaedra has been performed fully quantised, each motif beautifully aligned with a crystalline precision previously unheard’.
It’s hard to find fault in either the performance or the fidelity here. It does sound great: there is so much detail, the experience is absolute, a sensory immersion, and that ‘crystalline precision’ means it feels more like an alternative soundtrack to something like Avatar.
The track listing also sees the current iteration move some considerable distance away from the sequencing of the original album: after a brief intro, they play ‘Sequent C’, followed by ‘Movements of a Visionary’, and then ‘Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares’. Of these, the first two are substantially longer, the third a couple of minutes shorter. Then they transition away from the original compositions to explore ‘The Hippolytus Session’, a work in eight parts, spanning some forty-odd minutes, but returning to fragments of ‘Phaedra’ in the form of ‘Phaedra 2024’ (and much later, there’s a reprise of sorts with ‘Phaedra 2022’. Hippolytus being the stepson of Phaedra in Greek mythology, there’s a clear trajectory in what they’re doing here – pushing the original concept out and exploring the stated intention of discovering what the album may have been had current technology been available in 1974. The concept is interesting, but in some ways feels like it should exist as a satellite or supplementary work, and as is the case with last year’s monster From Virgin To Quantum Years: Coventry Cathedral, it’s very much one for the more devoted fans, and ones who are accommodating of the fact that this is a different lineup and a different time. It’s nice and all, but it’s by no means an improvement on the original.
Ashley Reaks is an artist who has very clear creative cycles, releasing, as standard, an album a year, and sometimes two, which make the fallow periods more conspicuous. This is not one of those fallow spells: Nature Reversed arrives just four (dark, cold, wet, gusty, wintery and generally depressing) months after At Night the World Belongs to Me, released at the end of September last year. And it marks something of a shift, and even ventures into the realms of what one might consider a ‘concept album’.
Reaks describes the album as ‘a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.’ That’s a lot to unpack. If it was the plot for a novel, it would be a twisty-turny work, rich in allusion and haunting imagery – but likely jazz-free. But to compress all of this into nine songs and forty-five minutes… Ambitious would be one word for it.
The album’s first piece, ‘I Don’t Like The Old King’ does very much explore the expansive fields of folk, but through a proggy filter, performed with synths, and underpinned by a strolling bass – somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus song ‘Part of the Third Part’, at least at the start – and a beat that both shuffles and swings. It’s the bass that defines ‘We Forage in the Gutters’, going full Jah Wobble in its dubbiness. But at the same time, there’s a sparseness, an introspection which is different here. The elements we’ve come to expect from Reaks are all present and correct, but Nature Reversed takes those elements to another place, and it feels like the freneticism has been turned down in favour of a more focused approach.
As with everything Reaks releases, Nature Reversed is interesting… by which I mean it’s a collage of weirdness that draws together a host of disparate elements. Just as Reaks’ artworks are crazy collages, so his music is relentlessly unpredictable. ‘The Desire to Seduce Euphoria’ is perfectly representative: it brings together some moody, melancholic postpunk, with chiming, reverby guitar… there are some processed vocals and there’s some jazz in the mix… I say ‘some’, but the mid-section is a massive blast of horns, before it careens into a heavy prog synth workout What the fuck IS this? This is no criticism: Reaks relentlessly challenges the borders, and does his own thing.
AA
Nature Reversed gives us all of the conventional Reaks elements – but the wild jazz is dialled back significantly. He describes it as ‘cut-up jazz, awkward Eastern folk, medieval motifs, old ghosts, and new life pushing through ancient stone walls — music about inheritance, rebellion, and what survives when you break things wide open’, and so it’s no surprise that William Burroughs features in the list of inspirations, ‘ranging from ‘nature poet’ John Clare and William Burroughs to Rip Rig + Panic, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart, Nature Reversed fuses literature, music, and visual art into a chaotic, lyrical, and intimate landscape. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on survival, rebellion, and renewal — the feral life that surges when you break open your origins.’
As is always the case with Reaks’ work, Nature Reversed is a huge intertext, and it would be reasonable to describe him as a classic postmodernist, celebrating and revelling in multitudinous sources, plundering his influences and inspirations openly and emphatically. This feels more restrained, more contemplative, and lyrically there’s a proliferation of images drawn from nature – but then again, there’s no shortage of sharp-edged, darker stuff, as on ‘Picking on the Meat Membranes’, and ‘Swan in a Womb’ brings together post-punk grooving bass, sprawling jazz, glittering prog synths and vocal processing – and this is point of definition for Nature Reversed, really. It’s everything, all at once, but at a sedate pace. Don’t be fooled by the gentler, more introspective sound: Reaks stull pushes experimentalism to the absolute limits, and Nature Reversed is the singular sound of creative freedom.
I’d apologise for being a little late to this one, but given that Corpus Delicti took some thirty years to reconvene for this, their fourth studio album, I think I can be forgiven. Formed in 1992, they kicked out three albums in quick succession establishing themselves as leading exponents the goth renaissance, or the next wave of goth (which wave is which… is a subject of debate, but that’s perhaps a topic for another time), before departing a short while after the release of Obsessions in 1995. During their time away, they’ve had more compilations released than they had albums, and it seems their popularity has grown significantly during their absence.
Their planned reunion in 2020 was scuppered by the pandemic, but they finally reemerged as a live entity in the spring of 2022 and now, finally – finally – they deliver Liminal. And if you’re into that later goth stuff – from Rosetta Stone to all things Nightbreed – it does everything you’d want it to.
From the outset, Liminal is dark and brooding, with fractal guitars and infinite reverb: ‘Crash’ brings the stark post-punk dynamics of X-Mal Deutschland paired with the soaring theatricality of The Associates, and it’s a work of high drama which evokes Bauhaus at their best. That’s by no means to suggest that it’s derivative, but it’s clear they know their heritage.
They also know how to bring kineticism and range, and how to sequence an album to best effect. ‘Room 36’ comes on like an industrial reimagining of Soft Cell, landing like She Wants Revenge cranked up to eleven, with lasers and guitars set to stun. ‘It All Belongs to You’ channels Bowie, but again via SWR and The Associates – at least vocally: instrumentally, there’s layered synth work and swirling shoegaze guitar all over. But for all the dark, Liminal is a work of magnificently-crafted pop.
‘Under his eye’ is an obvious reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, a book the which has become more resonant in recent times than could have ever been foreseen at the time of its writing and publication in 1985. Led by a rolling piano and augmented with sweeping strings, there’s drama galore. Between the driving guitar buzz and snaking bassline of the super-urgent ‘Chaos’ propelled by lolloping drums, and ‘Fate’, which brings an atmospheric shoegaze aspect to some trad goth stylings, there’s a lot going on here – and they pack in some really sharp hooks and strong choruses.
As an example of modern goth, Liminal brings so much of what’s missing from many recent releases in the same field – broad in range, big on energy, this is how it’s done.
Corpus Delicti are on tour in the UK in February, performing Edinburgh (19th), Newcastle (20th), Leeds (21st), Birmingham (22nd), Portsmouth (24th), Bristol (27th), and London (28th), with dates in Mainland Europe in April. Full details and tickets are availableHERE.
Aural Aggravation 