Following the release of their debut album ‘Dominion’ on APF Records last year, Video Nasties are back with another slab of moral-panic inducing heaviness – the addiction inspired single ‘Draw The Shades’
With ‘Dominion’ selling out on vinyl, APF Records are repressing the album for release on 7th May. Limited to only 300 copies (150 Flaxen Lust / 150 Suspirium Pink), the reissue will include ‘Draw The Shades’ on a 70s retro style Flexi-disc. Bassist Rick Owen comments,
‘We’re extremely excited about Draw The Shades. It’s our first single since the release of Dominion and we feel it picks up right where They Rise left off so it makes a perfect companion piece for the repress of the album. We decided to go down the same path with recording it ourselves, to make sure we really nailed the early 90s sound that we felt we captured so well with Dominion. At its crux, the song is about addiction. Whether that is blood, drugs or love… There is a need that has to be sated. ‘
Was the whole thing really just a dream? The Armed, one of the most exciting and innovative experimental hardcore bands of the past decade say maybe it was via their new video for “AN ITERATION”. Featuring a voice-over and cameo from one of the most recognized voices in video game history, David Hayter — the legendary voice behind Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid series — the video watches the band’s Dan Greene as he comes to terms with the fact that The Armed may only exist in his head. A fever dream of sorts after one too many times falling asleep playing Metal Gear. A scattered timeline of past music videos that centered around Dan Greene, “An Iteration” is full of easter eggs from the band’s history as well Metal Gear Solid. Stay tuned to the very end.
Dan Greene states “The story of Metal Gear Solid 2–which seemed like convoluted, impenetrable nonsense when we were kids–has turned out to be disturbingly prescient of society in 2021. I would argue that this video game raised more interesting artistic and philosophical questions than a lot of “higher art,” and much earlier too. We are beyond honored to see David Hayter take on the role of Dan Greene within The Armed Cinematic Universe.”
ULTRAPOP, available April 16th via Sargent House features work from Mark Lanegan and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, and 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. 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.
The coming together of Paul ‘Zanntone’ Tone and Christopher Nosnibor was a random one which more or less encapsulates their approach to creativity: Paul placed ashout-out on FaceBook for recommendations for a vocalist for his upcoming Foldhead show in Leeds, and Nosnibor’s name was thrown into the hat after a number of previous collaborations with noise artists that had seen his ‘Rage Monologues’ project move from the spoken word scene into the realm of ‘music’.
What happened at that show occurred more by accident than design, but it worked – and so …(something) ruined was born.
Subsequent live shows saw them really hitting their stride – and the pain threshold in terms of volume and intensity – before the COVID apocalypse swept the globe, putting paid plans for further shows and a planned live studio recording.
Nevertherless, live-stream gigs catering to fans of electronic / experimental / noise has continued to give them a platform, and they’ve continued to develop their sound and visuals. Following their brief but brutal turn at FEAST #2 hosted by Nim_Brut, they’ve released their track, ‘Life is too Short’ as a videosingle.
Of the track, Nosnibor says “the lyrics were inspired by conversations I’d been having with a friend of mine, about how if one thing the pandemic had brought into sharp relief was that life’s too short. You never know when your time’s going to be up, and we waste so much of the time we have expending energy stressing over work and trivial shit. No-one ever lay on their deathbed saying ‘I wish I’d spent more time in pointless meetings, or watching trash TV’. I recorded the vocals in one take – first take – and send the file over to Paul, who mangled them beautifully, in a way that conveys all the anxiety, anguish and rage beyond the words themselves”.
The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then “scratched and abused to add texture and colour,” from which the entirety of ‘Clara’ was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres.
Although Morgan’s compositional premise for ‘Clara’ was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album’s title comes from the Latin for ‘bright’: a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where “shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.”
Beak> made a new song during lockdown last year called, ‘Oh Know’. It is not being released as a single, they just want you to know that they’re still here and are making music during this global upheaval.
When Beak> were asked by their friends at the NRMAL® Festival in Mexico City (an all female run company with diversity and equity as core values) if they had anything they could provide for their monthly YouTube TV show, ‘NRMAL CAMARADA TV’, ‘Oh Know’ came to mind and Beak> were only happy to oblige their friends in Mexico.
For the making of the video, Beak> teamed up again with Echo Panda films from Canada, who had previously made a fan video of their song, ‘The Gaol’ in 2019. The band were mightily impressed by its bare boned strangeness and backwards wit. Made within a two week deadline so it could be shown in time on NRMAL’s TV show, Echo Panda films delivered again, and a whole lot more, as you’re about to see…
Steve Von Till shares another piece from his forthcoming ambient album A Deep Voiceless Wilderness approaching on 30th April via Neurot Recordings. "Called From The Wind" arrives by way of an elegant video from Chariot Of Black Moth, which can be viewed below. The track is also available on all the main streaming sites. About the video Steve comments, "Jakub Moth hints at the emotion behind a timeless story about humanity and landscape without saying too much, without limiting the universal scope of the sound. As I have removed the verbal language from the ambient version, he has added visual poetry to accompany it."
Tomahawk today release their first full-length album in eight years, Tonic Immobility (Ipecac Recordings), and with it they have shared a new video ‘Predators and Scavengers’ directed, animated and produced by Diego Cumplido.
‘Perpetual Sequence’ is the ninth full-length album by Croc Shop, an electronic based act featuring long time members Mick Hale and vMarkus. With a post-electro, pop and synth-rock approach over the duration of its eleven captivating songs, the duo also make occasional nods to their post-punk goth and electro-industrial origins.
Originally formed as Crocodile Shop in a flat above a record store in West Berlin, the band released their debut album, ‘Lullaby’, in 1988. Produced by Dave Fielding of The Chameleons, the record displayed dark goth-rock influences that only hinted at what was to come. They subsequently transitioned towards an electronic-industrial sound as they began replacing band members with machines, releasing ‘Celebrate the Enemy’ in 1993.
In 1995 they signed to Metropolis Records and issued the albums ‘Beneath’, ‘Pain’, ‘Everything Is Dead And Gone’, ‘Order + Joy’ and ‘World’. The last of these was a nifty fusion of EBM and synth pop that arrived in 2002 and their first album under the shortened name Croc Shop. 2004 saw the release of ‘SEA’ (Self Extracting Archive), which was a double CD ‘Best Of’ the band’s musical output. Pursuing other musical interests, group mainstays Hale and vMarkus then took a longer than expected break from recording together.
Fifteen years later, with the ‘election’ of and chaos caused by Trump, the band’s creative and political fires were rekindled and they began to work on new material that resulted in the blistering ‘Resist!’, a nine song digital album released in 2020, followed by ‘(TRiP): The Rest In Pieces’, a thirty track ‘Rest Of’ Croc Shop that featured tracks not included on ‘SEA’ as well as a number of remixes.
Croc Shop have toured heavily across North America and Europe throughout their career and have garnered loyal fans the world over. They have shared stages with acts such as Rammstein, Front 242, The Damned, Nitzer Ebb, Project Pitchfork, Xymox, Switchblade Symphony and Numb. Their live show has been described as an “audio-visual-assault”, with multimedia video projections, bold lighting and an energetic stage presence.
Ahead of the album ,they’ve unveiled a video for second single, ‘Secrets’: what it here:
‘Love Poem’, the second video from Los Angeles-based instrumental outfit TEETHERS’ eponymous first EP; all the songs are from drummer Andrew Lessman’s book of compositions. Lessman is a drummer known in the L. A. underground for his chameleonic contributions to a roster of projects whose jazz, avant garde, and indie pop scenes don’t always intersect.
Watch the video here:
AA
Most of these pieces were written during Lessman’s days studying at the California Institute of the Arts under Wadada Leo Smith. This is also where Andrew met the irreverent psycho-talents who now 10 years later play on this first TEETHERS EP… sometimes it takes time to cultivate a group sound that does justice to the sound in one’s head. Joining Andrew in the studio on these recordings are: Graham Chapman on bass, guitarist Alexander Noise, Joe Sanata Maria and Ted Faforo on saxophones and Stefan Kac on tuba. Laced into this moody wordless music, like a delicious mushroom chocolate, is a humble nudge to look past the decaying fetters of our assumed boundaries and imagine new organizational forms.
Andrew grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Elgin with a single mom who worked as a dental hygienist. With no musicians in the immediate family, his musical awareness came from playing trombone in the middle school band and listening obsessively to Q101 (“Chicago’s Home for Alternative”).
At age eleven, after making fart noises on a rented trombone for a year, he received a $200 Hohner drum kit as a birthday reward, and promptly formed a Nirvana cover band with his buddy Jim. It was a good start, but at age thirteen everything changed. His mother had been fighting cancer for about six years and it spread out of control and took her life. It was decided that he and his sister would leave Illinois to go live with his jazz musician father in San Diego.
It was a painful loss, but dialectically embedded in this loss was opportunity for growth. On the first day of high school, he made fast friends with some punks on the quad who’d also just gotten some instruments, and they started a band called The Irrelevants. Through hardcore punk, they learned how to channel teen angst into volume and speed. They wore ugly homemade clothing, hated the government, smoked weed out of apples, and booked quite a bit of DIY shows.
At the same time, his dad was a professional gigging musician and his home was a constant hangout for many of the great players in the San Diego scene. His dad’s record collection confronted him with the confusing sounds of Miles’ “Kind of Blue”, Ornette’s “Shape of Jazz to Come”, Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, and Art Blakey’s “Freedom Rider”. These sounds were incredible, and his dad was there to help demystify it. Within a year of obsessively drumming along to those records on the same $200 Hohner kit, he started sitting in at his dad’s gigs, booking gigs of his own, and picking up lessons from local legends like Charles McPherson.
One of his dad’s friends, drummer and educator Duncan Moore, thought he would benefit from attending UCSD’s summer jazz camp, so he pulled a few strings to squeeze him in last minute. Since all lessons with the drum faculty were full, he was randomly given a lesson with Wadada Leo Smith, the iconoclast composer and trumpeter who in the 60s helped start the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). From this very first meeting, he permanently broke Andrew’s brain and got him thinking about composition. His advice on thinking beyond rhythm, melody and harmony to make creative use of musical form was like jumping from 3D to 4D. Andrew spent the next year shedding for college audition tapes and he ended up following Wadada to the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
Chicago-based industrial rock band Nuclear Sun has released a new single/visualizer clip covering the iconic Nine Inch Nails hit, "Head Like A Hole." The track appears on Nuclear Sun’s new tribute release, Couldn’t Have Said It Better Vol. 1, available digitally via Bandcamp and all major streaming services.
