It seems only fitting that lo-fi indie duo Videostore should return to the roots that inspired their vaguely nostalgic moniker and the theme for their debut album Vincent’s Picks for their latest lockdown single release with a song which Nathan says was inspired by ‘sitting around watching superhero movies.’
Certainly, inspiration for a lot of art has been coming from closer to home this last year, and most life has been lived vicariously for many of us. Movies provide a much-needed escape when the limits of your life are just four walls, and this punchy, guitar-driven single is exemplary of Videostore’s resourcefulness. Written and recorded just a week ago, accompanied by self-filed footage (mostly shot at home or in local parks in a single day) and assembled by Dave Meyer, it’s once again a strong sell for the DIY methodology that facilitates not only full artistic control but a greatly reduced time-lag between conception and release, ‘Superhero Movies’ celebrates its uncomplicated evolution – Nathan sitting on the sofa with one of his many guitars, parked in front of a laptop, the pair supping wine.
‘This is not my movie’ Lorna sings, increasingly frenzied, as she spirals and spins around, beshaded, in a park somewhere as the guitars fizz and the bass thumps against an insistent drum machine.
And while this is ostensibly an indie tune, the tumultuous distortion of the buzzsaw guitar and the overall production is actually reminiscent of Big Black – in particular their cover of Wire’s ‘Heartbeat’. It’s not entirely pretty, and it’s better for it: ‘Superhero Movies’ packs all the energy, and delivers it with a raw immediacy that really hits the spot.
Releasing their most recent album ‘Canyons’ in 2019, Slomatics have solidified their status as veterans of the underground heavy scene since forming in 2004 with 6 albums and a number of split releases alongside Conan, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard and Holly Hunt. Now as part of their upcoming split LP with Ungraven they have shared new track, ‘Kaān’.
The band state, ‘Sometimes the joy of music is the contrast between light and shade, the subtle textures and the space between notes. Other times it’s just about turning the amps to eleven, loading as much fuzz into the signal as possible, putting everything in the red, cranking out the same neanderthal riff relentlessly and screaming into the void. ‘Kaän’ is most definitely the latter.’
Danny Kiranos, otherwise known by his musical alter ego Amigo The Devil, will release his highly anticipated second full length album, ‘Born Against’, on 16th April (Liars Club/Regime Music Group). A song from it entitled ‘Quiet As A Rat’ is available from today and is the second single taken from the record. ‘Quiet As A Rat’ is comprised of three vignettes that feature characters hiding their inner turmoil in order to maintain a strong outer façade. The video for the song is packed full of gallows humour, in fact literally so, with Kiranos as the narrator of its interlinked tales with themes modelled after both fables and biblical elements. Subjected to what appear to be Jodorowsky-esque tongue in cheek torture and execution attempts, they ultimately represent questions of faith and the doubt of it.
As with many of ATD’s songs, everything serves as a metaphor for something larger that resides within. “Faith without doubt seems unhealthy,” states Kiranos. “It’s an extreme that leaves no room for growth and honest learning, only the mindless repetition of old and sometimes hateful traditions. This song explores the bridge between faith and doubt, nurture and abandon…the fine line between belief and control. It plays to the true value of our spirit and whether we have a purpose to find or if we are the purpose and are simply here to be used and forgotten. You know…real fun stuff.”
Over the past several years, Sandro Perri has been letting us in on a fascinating collection of strange and enchanting collaborative sound recordings that he’s crafted under the project name Off World. Chiefly a studio-based endeavour, Off World traces its origins as far back as 2008, with Perri and fellow Torontonian Lorenz Peter (Corpusse, Processor) working together on tracks and very occasionally performing live under the moniker. However the project’s recordings encompass collaborations between Perri and many other producers and musicians, including Drew Brown (Lower Dens, Blonde Redhead, Beck), Susumu Mukai (Zongamin), M J Silver (Mickey Moonlight), Craig Dunsmuir (Glissandro 70, Kanada 70), Eric Chenaux, and Jesse Zubot.
About this latest track, Sandro Perri comments, “Impulse Controller (Pre-Dub)” was born in the Off World “1” sessions and developed during the making of Off World “2”. A “pre-dub” (not to be confused with a "rough mix" or a "demo") is made long before a track meets its death and subsequent rebirth as the “final mix". It has a special and usually private purpose – to hear the sounds as they are, without too much concern for the musical composition – and to notice what impulses arise in response to them. This version in particular is a showcase for a blistering first take by trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud".
Born of the long dark winters of Norway Årabrot was too black for metal and too avant-garde for punk so it forged its own path. Hewn from empty roads and the cold impenetrable depths of the fiords of its home.
A Norwegian Gothic, tales sung and stories told in screams and whispers. With its steel guitar, a steely gaze a sneer and a Stetson, Årabrot is the bastard offspring of Billie Holiday and Elmore James. It is The Velvet Underground if Johnny Cash was a member and Nico was able to sing. It is Camus, Sartre, Poe and Burroughs cut-up and regurgitated in an unholy erotic mass. It is all the great bands you haven’t even heard of. It is you. It is here it is now and there are other bodies to bury. Årabrot is not fucking around.
Årabrot is Kjetil “Tall Man” Nernes and Karin “Dark Diva” Park. They live in the Swedish countryside with their two children in the old church that they own. Rock’n roll is their religion.
Discussing the new video for ‘Kinks of the Heart’, Kjetil comments, “’Kinks Of The Heart’ and ‘Hailstones For Rain’ is one narrative in two parts. It is the tale of Årabrot, preachers of rock’n roll. The videos are shot in the church where we live and its surroundings, our neighbours and friends as the congregation. Karin is 8 months pregnant. If you want to know what Årabrot is all about this is where you want to start. Brilliantly directed by Thomas Knights and Kassandra Powell of Obscure Film Collective.”
Watch the video here:
AA
Årabrot’s 9th full-length album Norwegian Gothic sees the band collaborate with Lars Horntveth (Jaga Jazzist), cellist Jo Quail, Tomas Järmyr (Motorpsycho), Anders Møller (Turbonegro, Ulver) and Massimo Pupillo (Zu).
A stellar production by Jaime Gomez Arellano (Black Eyed Peas, Paradise Lost, Hexvessel, Oranssi Pazusu) makes this the quintessential Årabrot record. Commenting on latest single ‘Kinks of the Heart’, Kjetil adds,
‘There is a certain beauty to living in the countryside- there’s clear crisp air, fresh water, splendid sunsets. Every day we see wild animals coming down from the forests that surround us. There is a freedom attached to all that. The other day I went out of the church where we live and found a dead crow on the porch. It was only the head, its eyes gorged out and it had a huge claw stuck in its neck. There is also a brutality to nature which is ever-present out here. It is this duality Cormac McCarthy so masterly puts into words. It is also what Kinks Of The Heart is about.’
While the 20 years history of the band is a story of change and correlation, it would be too simple to
break this creative duality down to the stereotypical dichotomy of the yin and the yang… and if one attempted to do so, it would turn out to be quite difficult to determine which of these forces would be represented by which individual.
A chubby child from a Christian family, growing up in a small Swedish village and years spent in a Missionary school in Japan made Karin desperate to break away from narrow thinking. And she used her only advantages to do so; her unique voice and personality. By the age 15 she had moved away from home to find her place in music After studying at Stockholm Music Conservatory, a Norwegian poet took her to Norway where she started her pop career, this was followed by a move to London to write songs, and working as a model.
After five albums, a few Grammy’s, writing a Eurovision entry for Norway and hits for other artists and performances with Lana Del Rey and David Bowie, Karin returned to the village of her youth and bought the church where she first sang in front of an audience as a child. She turned the church into where they rehearse and record, surrounded by pianos, organs and hundreds of old bibles that the church left behind when the congregation stopped.
The clerical environment has proven to be an excellent creative tapestry for a band whose lyrical focus orbits around sex, death and defiance.
Kjetil Nernes was diagnosed with malignant throat cancer in 2014, in the middle of a tour. Instead of heading in for surgery right away, the band finished a full European tour first, "Every night of that tour was like the last show ever“, Nernes comments, "It was really strange. When a doctor calls and says, ‘you’re terribly sick’, it’s surreal. You go into this phase where life is more vivid and more real, in a weird way. We’ve done so many shows through the years and sometimes it’s a little like going to the factory to do a job. But with an axe hanging over your head you perceive the world differently.“
But the axe did not fall, and after successfully recovering from cancer, Årabrot are now stronger than ever.
The band has collaborated with procuders like Billy Anderson and Steve Albini, and musicians like Ted Parsons (Killing Joke/Swans), Sunn O))))’s Stephen O’Malley, and Kvelertak’s Erlend Hjelvik. They have composed music for silent movies like “Die Niebelungen” and “Doctor Caligari”, and have teamed up with The Quietus founder John Doran on his spoken word tour. Their album “The Gospel” was named “Album of the Year” by The Quietus.
Norwegian Gothic is released 9th April (Pelagic Records).
The End Of All Things is for CROWN what Kid A was for Radiohead: an album that nobody was expecting from them.
Dark and moody; bleak and sublime; airy and crushing; mesmerizing and engrossing; bold yet unerring; strident, danceable and suffocating, all at the same time. An album oozing with tasteful, fragile hooklines flirting with the abyss they are hovering above, encapsulated within an ingenious major production, provided by one half of CROWN himself:
David Husser has worked as a sound engineer, producer and musician all across the globe with artists like Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode or at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio, and has toured with his industrial band Y Front alongside Rammstein in the 90s. Paul Kendall (Mute Records, NIN, Nick Cave) said about David: “a distorting diamond… we have collaborated on a number of projects and I have been amazed by his ability to teach an old dog new tricks. He is simply the best recording engineer I have ever met”.
The other half of C R O W N is founding father and vocalist Stéphane Azam, who has worked as live sound engineer for French blackgaze pioneers Alcest for years. Stéphane’s low, soothing voice on The End Of All Things comes as a complete surprise to anyone familiar with the band’s previous 2 records, which featured mostly screamed vocals – a fact showcasing the immense versatility of the musicians at work here.
On new single ‘Illumination’ Stéphane comments:
"Illumination is about exploring the depths of inner self destruction. Humanity as the great destroyer. ‘Illumination’ is the darkness that is gradually invading our world and the heart of man, leading to his loss.“
Chelsea Wolfe has shared new video for her latest single, “Anhedonia” which features vocals and guitar by labelmate Emma Ruth Rundle. Wolfe joined efforts with stop motion editor and video producer Cressa Beer for a moving creation that reflects grief and loneliness, yet brings hope that with time and support, healing is possible.
Cressa explains, “The core idea of the video came from an artist and mutual friend that Chelsea and I both love – Jess Schnabel (Blood Milk Jewels) – who created a ‘grief moth’ inspired by real moths that drink the tears of sleeping birds. It’s an idea I’ve wanted to animate for a while. So, that became the backbone of the project: the lifecycle of a moth literally born from overwhelming sadness. From there, the video grew into a reflection of what I was experiencing during quarantine, as I found myself confronting my own grief and deeply rooted trauma. I suffer from PTSD that envelops me like a black void. I wanted to visually articulate how that feels, as well as feelings like disassociation and loneliness; the way that trauma can physically alter your body and mentally reshape the world around you. But still, the moth can fight its way out, can fly, can follow the light; just like the comfort in the final verse of the song, I wanted to still show that healing is possible.”
Automatisme is the electronic music project of Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec-based producer William Jourdain. Since 2013 Jourdain has released a brilliant series of albums and tracks under this moniker, exploring various intersections of drone, glitch, dub techno, ambient, electro-acoustic and noise. Starting with site-specific field recordings, Automatisme samples, processes, signal bends and transforms this source material into soundscapes charting a broad spectrum spanning minimalist pulse, methodically additive beat, stacked-tone maximalism, spatial drone and arrhythmic ambient/noise.
This new a/v single "Non-Representation Field" is the 12th entry in Constellation’s Corona Borealis Longplay Singles Series, with an accompanying short film by Marilou Lyonnais Archambault. 100% of proceeds go to the artist.
“We follow the alternate and accidental route of non-representation. It is used to signify the outside.” – Achim Szepanski
"This quote by philosopher and Mille Plateaux record label founder Achim Szepanski is the basis for the audiovisual work of “Non-representation Field”. Automatisme explores pathways of Mille Plateaux’s Ultrablack Of Music movement, processing these concepts with an ambient dub track that contains generative and euclidian partitions and modulations. Ableton Live and Max MSP software programming make the pads and bass instruments interpret the same archipelago of signals slightly differently with every temporal activiation. This recording is one instantiation. Parts of the source audio come from recordings made with a Buchla modular synthesizer at Stockholm’s Elektronmusik Studion (EMS) during a residency in 2019." – Automatisme
"Vidéo binaire evoking the iridescence of sounds and images and the dualism of nature and machine, produced using a selection of video samples from the web, which were then projected and filmed on folded paper structures – le froissement (creasing, crumpling; light trauma or injury) as a gesture of resistance. The video portrays the buzzing of natural landscapes, ineffable and transitory physical disturbances, the resonance of appearing and disappearing via the manipulation of creased and wrinkled images, as echoes of an exhausted and worn out territory. This experimental clip eulogizes the non-place as a refuge in post-modern times, in post-internet times." – Marilou Lyonnais Archambault.
Click the image to watch the video and witness ‘Non-Representation Field’ in its multimedia glory, or listen to the audio alone below.
The Armed have announced a new album, ULTRAPOP, available April 16th via Sargent House – their first album with the label. Featuring work from Mark Lanegan and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen this is the first album co-produced by the band’s own Dan Greene in collaboration with Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe). Kurt Ballou remains at the helm as executive producer. With the announcement comes a live video for the first track, "All Futures," explicitly revealing this album’s band member lineup for the first time. The video is a live take of the studio track, which can be heard here.
Ultrapop is the genre of music that said album features. It reaches the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise, and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres but finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. As is always The Armed’s mission, it seeks only to create the most intense experience possible, a magnification of all culture, beauty, and things.
Dan Greene goes on to explain, "crafting vital art means presenting the audience with new and intriguing tensions—sonically, visually, conceptually. Over time and through use, those tensions become less novel and effective—and they become expectations. The concept of "subgenre" becomes almost the antithesis of vitality in art—itself a fetishization of expectation. ULTRAPOP seeks, in earnest, to create a truly new listener experience. It is an open rebellion against the culture of expectation in "heavy" music. It is a joyous, genderless, post-nihilist, anti-punk, razor-focused take on creating the most intense listener experience possible. It’s the harshest, most beautiful, most hideous thing we could make. "
Hull quintet Low Hummer have shared new single ‘Never Enough’ on Leeds’ label Dance To The Radio.
Offering a first glimpse at the debut album the band are currently working on, Low Hummer have shared ‘Never Enough’, a driving new single that highlight the bands gift for classic indie songwriting with loving nods to bands like The Cure and LCD Soundsystem. Truly coming together in the studio, while the band poured over Joy Division and Cocteau Twins songs, singer Aimee Duncan could deliver her vocals with the cool understatement she does best, free from the noise of the rehearsal room.
Continuing their work digging into themes of social isolation, disinformation and online manipulation, ‘Never Enough’ explores Culture-bound syndromes, ageing and whether we have the ability to truly reframe the situations we find ourselves in.
‘Never Enough’ is accompanied by a new video shot in -5 weather in nearby Flamborough. Following three failed shoots due to positive Covid results, track & trace calls and extreme weather, and with an imminent lockdown in England the band set out with film maker Luke Hallett and documented their assent up Mam Tor creating a beautiful and apt account of the band struggling up a very high hill together…
Dan Mawer: Guitars, vocals:
“I researched culture-bound syndrome’s for ‘Never Enough’ – These are a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms, recognised only within a specific society or culture. Transmission of the disease is determined by cultural reinforcement and person to person interaction, I felt like this was an interesting topic for a song. The subject helped me pull together lines along with my own notes on ageing, self-doubt and the idea of cultural isolation. It all sounds very depressing but I hope there’s still lots of light in the lines, such as when Aimee suggests the idea of reframing the situations you find yourself in when you’re struggling.”
Aural Aggravation 