Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Theo Nugraha & {AN} EeL – 1XXTR / TRXX1

Posted: 3 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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29th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s not a good thing to feel nostalgia for something from the recent past which wasn’t even any good to begin with. But on seeing the cover for this split release by Theo Nugraha and {AN} EeL, I’m reminded that Google DeepDream was actually quite fun for about five minutes in 2015. Ah, hindsight… The results DeepDream produced were weird, psychedelic, trippy, and resembled no dream or subconscious thoughts I’ve ever known, its hallucinatory aspects were oft said to share qualities with LSD. But this was part of the appeal: it was novel, silly, with dog faces emerging from inanimate objects, whappy wallpaper, and the like. How many of us knew that it would be a precursor to the AI hell we now find ourselves in? Ten years is not such a long time in the scheme of things, but in the context of the now, it feels like another lifetime. A lifetime when doing daft stuff with digital tools wasn’t annihilating the environment, when it wasn’t stealing the work of writers and artists, when it wasn’t rendering jobs obsolete while creating billionaires at the expense of those losing their livelihood. Arguably, the golden age of The Internet was in the first years post-millennium, when applet-based chatrooms first made it possible to connect in real-time with people around the globe and MySpace was a wild melting pot where people came together through shared interest and communities evolved. This isn’t just some nostalgia wank: these were exciting times, and the world truly began to open up in ways hitherto unseen. These were times when The Internet offered freedom, where, as Warren Ellis’ novel Crooked Little Vein expounded, anything goes and if you could imagine it, you’d find it online. Godzilla Bukkake? You got it.

Everything changed when major corporations realised that they could really, really make on this. But major corporations being major corporations, they didn’t want to participate – they wanted to take over and own it, to wring every penny of profit from every last keystroke. And so now, while Napster and Soulseek were the equivalent of home taping, which didn’t kill music, Spotify and most other major streaming services really are damaging artists’ livelihoods – because unlike small-time peer-to-peer file sharing, this is a multi-billion dollar industry which siphons off pretty much all of the money for owners and shareholders rather than artist – and then you have scums like Daniel Ek using those proceeds to fund war. Something has gone seriously wrong.

Theo Nugraha’s contribution, 1XXTR is a longform work – seconds short of thirty minutes – and while it’s perhaps not quite Harsh Noise Wall, it’s most definitely harsh noise, and there’s not a lot of variation. It may even be that any variation is in the imagination as the mind struggles to process the relentless barrage of sound and seeks tonal changes, details within the texture. It doesn’t so much sound like a cement mixer – more like being in a cement mixer with half a ton of rocks, at the heart of an atomic blast. There are squalls of feedback and mutterings beneath the blitzkrieg, and around ten minutes in, the tempest suddenly begins to rage even harder and it’s like being hit by a train. Twenty minutes in, the relentless roar drops to merely the blast of a jet engine and the sensation is like huge pressure drop, or a fall. It’s impossible to discern what’s going on inside this swirling vortex of noise (there does sound like a vast amount of collaging and random things floating in and out), but it’s a full-on physical assault that vibrates every cell in the body. By the end of this most brutal half hour, you feel battered, bruised, damaged.

‘TRXX1’ by {AN} EeL, which runs for a second over the half-hour mark, is altogether less abrasive, but it’s no more comfortable. At first, it’s a clattering, metallic rattle, like an aluminium dustbin rolling down the street in a gale, accompanied by rattles and chimes. Extraneous noises – twangs and scrapes – enter the mix, and the sound starts to build, like the wind growing stronger at the front-end of a storm. But soon, from nowhere, a squall of static – or rainfall – begins to swell and while off-tune notes reverberate in the background, and a scan of radio stations yields alternately cut-up fragments and random noise, and while it may not possess the same physical force as Nugraha’s piece, ‘TRXX1’presents a disturbing array of frequencies and makes for a particularly tense listen. There’s a thunderous ripple like a freight train a mile long barrelling along, while disjointed voices echo here and there, and as bhangra and old-time brass fade in and out, the collage approach to the track’s creation, harking back to William Burroughs’ tape experiments, and early Throbbing Gristle become increasingly apparent. The Police’s ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ cuts through what sounds like a snippet from lecture or interview. The repetition of the same fragments becomes difficult to deal with after a time, and you begin to feel like you’re cracking up. The it’s back to the sound of metal buckets being dragged down a cobbled street, with random busts of discordant noise jabbing in for extra discomfort. The final segment is a cacophony of abstract drones and crashing, calamitous racketry – a combination which is uncomfortable and unsettling.

The two pieces are quite different, but equally difficult in their own ways, and as such compliment one another. And if you’re seeking an album that really tests your capacity for abrasion and nauseating noise, 1XXTR / TRXX1 hits the spot like a fist to the stomach.

AA

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Gintas K – The Third Policeman

Posted: 3 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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12th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

While the approach to recording his latest album is pretty much standard for Lithuanian sound artist Gintas K – that is to say, ‘recorded live, without any overdubs, using computer, MIDI keyboard, and controller’, the inspiration and overall concept is a little different this time around, with Gintas explaining that ‘The album is a subtle allusion to Flann O’Brien’s absurdist novel The Third Policeman, reflecting its surreal and enigmatic atmosphere through sound. In itself, this is quite ambitious – not quite the musical equivalent of interpretive dance, but nevertheless.

And, in contrast with many of his other albums, which tend to be relatively concise and often contain some shorter, almost fragmentary pieces, this one is a whopper, with thirty-one tracks and a running time of over two hours.

Initially, it’s display of K at his most manic, with ‘black box#1’leading the first four-track suite more frenzied and kinetic than ever, the sound of an angry hornet the size of a cat trapped in a giant Tupperware container. There aren’t always discernible spaces between the individual pieces, and after just the first eight minutes of wild bleeps and buzzes, I’m already feeling giddy. ‘black box#1 – 4’ is a quintessential Gintas K blizzard of noise which starts out like trickling digital water tinkling over the rim of a virtual glass bottle and rapidly evolves into an effervescent froth of immolating circuitry.

The second suite of pieces, ‘black box inside#2 Dog Hoots’ is made up of eight chapters – compositions feels like a bit of a stretch – and while there are a couple of sub-two-minute blasts, the fifth is a colossal nine minutes and forty in duration. This marks distinct segment of the album, in that it sounds a little more structured, like the sounds of a toy keyboard or a mellotron, rewired and then tortured mercilessly. It grinds and drones, hums and yawns, it bubbles and glitches and whirrs and it fucking screams. Before long, your brain will be, too.

The third segment, a set of six pieces labelled ‘black box inside… Calmness’ is anything but calm: in fact, it’s more likely to induce a seizure, being more of the same, only with more mid-range and muffled, grainy-sounding murk. There are more saw-like buzzes and crackles and pops and lasers misfiring in all directions. It’s not quite the soundtrack which played in my head as I read the book, but the joy of any art is that it affords room for the audience to engage and interpret on a personal, individual level.

The nine-part ‘rolling’ (or, to give it’s full title ‘black box iside#4 Rolling’ is more fragmented, more distorted, more fucked-up and broken. The pace is slower, the tones are lower, and it’s the sound of a protracted digital collapse. It’s unexpected to feel any kind of emotional reaction to messy noise, but this conveys a sense of sadness. By ‘Rolling – 4’ it feels like the machine is dying, a breathless wheeze of a thick, low-end drone, an attempts to refire the energy after this are reminiscent to trying to start a car with a flat battery. It’d messy and increasingly uncomfortable and wrong-sounding as it descends into gnarly distorted mess. ‘Rolling 7’ is creaking bleats, woodpecker-like rattles. and warping distortion, with additional hum and twang. The last of these is no more than roiling, lurching distortion, without shape or form.

Arriving at the four pieces tagged as ‘omnium – The Fourth Policeman’, its feels like you’re surrounded by collapsing buildings and the exhaustion is not just physical. Gintas K has really pushed the limits with this one. The is an arc, a trajectory here, which can be summarised as ‘gets messier and more horrible as it progresses’. Artistically, this is a huge work, a work of patience, and a work of commitment and focus. As a listening experience, it’s intense, and will likely leave even the most adventurous listener feeling like their head’s been used as a cocktail shaker and that their brain has been churned to a pulp. Outstanding.

AA

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Now After Nothing – Artificial Ambivalence

Posted: 1 December 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

13th September 2025

It is impossible to escape AI now, and its ubiquity has arrived at a shocking pace, its acceleration seemingly exponential. You can avoid social media, but can you avoid computers or mobile phones for even more than a few hours? The news – beyond the main headlines, at least – is abrim with reports on how it’s affecting us as individuals, as a species, and the environmental impact. I watch a training video at work: it’s presented by AI actors who move their arms in strange ways and occasionally mispronounce a word in the worst way. Meanwhile, management want us to save time on report-writing by using Copilot. Drained by all of this, I go to the pub for soe decompression time, and the talk is of how jobs are being undermined by AI, and some guy’s got a video AI made using just a photograph. Why? Why do we need this? We don’t, of course, but it’s novel, mindless entertainment that can be created in seconds. Increasingly, it feels like we’re volunteering ourselves for virtual lobotomies. Despite the fact that the current technoscape is every sci-fi dystopia playing out exactly as told in real-time, it seems the majority of people are more than happy to embrace AI. Even writers, artists, and the like, present themselves as ‘curious’ and will engage with AI for prompts or to brush up something they’ve done. But the fact it that it’s a slippery slope, which gets steeper and steeper and further down is an abyss that plunges straight to hell. The worst of it is that it’d becoming increasingly difficult to separate real life.

One of the issues I have personally is that just as every significant technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution brought the promise of more leisure time by making work lighter, the opposite is true – unless you consider unemployment and life on the breadline to be leisure. AI isn’t saving time by vacuum cleaning the house, hanging up the laundry, putting the bins out or doing the school run: it’s simply devaluing creative skills. Anyone who has read an AI-generated article, heard an AI-assisted song, or seen some AI-created art will know that there’s something ‘off’ about it, that it’s soulless and vaguely alien. Meanwhile, the world seems to be spiralling into a cesspit of animosity, hatred, and division. Something happened during the pandemic which meant that when we all emerged from lockdown, war and rage and unspeakable cuntiness exploded on a scale beyond articulation. It’s no wonder people are struggling with life right now.

Now After Nothing is, in some respects, a therapeutic escape from all the shit. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Spatial paired with Michael Allen after what he describes as ‘a relatively difficult time in my life [where] I had become lost and depressed without a creative outlet with which to express myself’. There’s much to say that creativity – and exercise, both physical and mental – are the best self-maintenance. Listening to this EP, it’s clear that Spatial is really pouting everything into this.

His comments on the EP are worth quoting: “Artificial Ambivalence, as a concept, to me represents the state of feeling lost and/or the ‘shutting down’ from the negativity and toxicity around each of us,” Spatial explains. “They say ‘ignorance is bliss’, but in the (mis-)information age we seem to have reached a point of being pummeled into exhaustion from the constant barrage of negativity. For some, while the desire is stronger than ever to make positive change in the world, we might get derailed by feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and being powerless in a society that seems to increasingly favor only one set of values. For others, it’s the choice to conveniently ignore the inhumane atrocities happening in our society when those atrocities don’t directly impact that individual.”

Of the music, there are references to ‘goth-glam grooves slick with sweat, raw enough to leave a mark’ and a nod to the fact that ‘fans have called it “S&M disco,” a sinister shimmer of punk, industrial grind, and nocturnal new wave.’

The first thing that strikes on the first listen of this EP is the energy. Everything is up-front and it lands like a proper punch in the face. Big, gutsy riffs underpin some sinewy lead guitar parts, driven by some explosive percussion and sturdy, throbbing bass. Straight out the traps, ‘Sick Fix’ blends post-punk and grunge to create a hard-hitting blast, and one that’s got hooks and melody in spades, too, with hints of Big Black in the background. It sets the bar high, but ‘Criminal Feature’ hurdles it effortlessly.

Slowing the pace and changing not only the tempo but the mood, the piano-led ‘Holly’ broods hard and is unashamedly mid-80d goth in its vibe, but also incorporates more post-millennial post-punk and goth in its genetics. The result is – to wheel out a cliché – anthemic. And it is, of course, the perfect mid-set slowie, which sets things up for the chugging, bass-driven beast that is ‘Fixation Fantasy’, a track that’s more 90s alt-rock than post punk or goth. More than anything, I’m reminded of psychedelic grunge also-rans Eight Storey Window in the ear for melody and the emotional heft delivered by some achesome riffs delivered at an intense volume.

‘Dare’ brings some dark pop intimations paired with some searing guitar work which lands like a post-rock Placebo crossed with Salvation – that is to say, it’s richly immersed in that mid-80s Leeds sound. It’s inspired stuff, and then some. Closing off, single release ‘Entangled’ offers glorious shoegaze gentility before breaking into a magnificent slice of synthy post-punk with some massive guitar. Artificial Ambivalence is better than ‘all killer’ (which it is) – it’s next-level solid quality and absolute gold.

AA

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Moons in Retrograde – The Third Side Of The Coin

Posted: 30 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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25th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

As the blurbage explains, ‘The Third Side Of The Coin is a split, 2 part album which includes 2 sides of one coin, Anima and Animus. They are separate entities but together they create a bridge between dark and light, outer identity to inner truth and form a union of opposites that gives birth to universal truth. They are the gatekeepers of transformation.’

Well that’s two sides, but what about the third? Of course, this is where the truly conceptual aspect of the work comes in – the part which goes beyond the recordings themselves – and which only really makes sense in context of the following explication:

‘The Third Side Of The Coin is about the natural but paradoxical dualistic state of the universe. This split album explores both sides of a polarized world by peering over the precipice of the coin only to see a reflection staring back from the other side. It is a surreal mirror showing that what you fear and what you hate is living within the unconscious parts of yourself, both sides being parts of a whole. As you look into the familiar and uncomfortable reflection the coin spins, dissolving duality and revealing a clear image of the third side.
Dissolve the duality! The magic is in the middle!’

Taken literally, this suggests that the magic resides in the space between track five and track six, but I don’t think that’s what they’re meaning. Similarly, although I’m reminded of how William Burroughs and Brion Gysion expounded the concept of ‘the third mind’ as how two minds in collaboration can create a work greater than the sum of the parts, as if there’s a ‘third mind’ at work between them, I don’t feel that this quite first with the concept Moons in Retrograde are offering here.

To delve into the album itself is to venture into a world of thumping beats and deep emotional exorcism: single cut ‘Mirror Obscura’ launches the set in classic style, forging a dark, industrial-infused, goth-hued slice of dark electropop – mid-tempo, atmospheric, anthemic, and completely enthralling. The tracks which follow feel rather more generic, particularly ‘Eternalgia’: it’s a solid electrogoth stomper, and while the synths are sweeping, layered, rich in texture, everything is centred around the hard kick drum, which cuts through it all and really slams. The final song on the ‘Anima’ side is a supple exercise in dreampop, with the emphasis on the pop, a quintessential anthemic mid-tempo ballad.

While the atmosphere is overtly darker during the second half of the album – the ‘Animus’ side – it doesn’t seem so radically different at first. ‘The Edge of Entropy’ very much employs the same instrumentation and approach to composition, and ‘The Rotten Tree’ is a classic, processed dark pop cut. But closer listening reveals more twangy guitar in the mix, and a more claustrophobic and subdued style of songwriting. ‘Taxidermy Mouse’ may sound like a rather humorous title, but it’s a slow, deliberate pulsating piece which goes full aggrotech stomper at the mid-point, drawing on elements of metal while pumping out technogoth grooves. And by the time we arrive at the heaving churn of ‘Biological’, with its rampant, frenetic nu-metal percussion and gargling noise, it’s clear that this is very much an album of two halves, and at times the second half feels like a goth Prodigy.

For the most part, The Third Side Of The Coin feels a shade too clinical to really hit the mark on the emotional scale. It packs some bangers, for sure, but there’s some distance between pumping beats and emotional intensity which has a resonant, moving impact. And perhaps, stripping away the concept and taking the album as it is is the best way to approach this…

AA

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WMTID aka Well Martin This Is Different! – Silica Bombs

Posted: 29 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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27th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Richard Rouka is… an unusual man. He’s existed around the Leeds scene since the emergence of the goth scene, and he documented it back in the day, in real time, but to describe his own musical output as ‘adjacent’ would be generous, to say the least. The mid-to-late eighties saw his label, Rouska, release a stack of stuff, predominantly by The Cassanda Complex and Dustdevils, bands with strong Leed connections.

His own works, released under the guise of WMTID aka Well Martin This Is Different! draws on the post-punk vibe of that period, but is predominantly primitive electropop with a distinctly bedroom / four-track vibe. WMTID has been a thing for over forty years, but Rouska’s output has skyrocketed in recent year.

One way of pitching it would be early Depeche Mode as performed by Young Marble Giants, but this wouldn’t really convey the ways in which these elements – played and tossed together in the most ramshackle of ways coalesce. But what it hopefully would convey was the fact that this is steeped in early eighties analogue experimentalism, the time when synths were breaking through as emerging technology and the Musician’s Union was shitting itself about how this would herald the death of ‘real’ music – particularly on account of the increasing popularity of drum machines, which they feared would end the need for drummers. Just as home taping didn’t kill music – and if anything it meant that music sharing exposed more people to new acts (I know I discovered countless new bands because people gave me mix tapes), so synths and drum machines broadened musical horizons instead.

Silica Bombs revels in the primitive: ‘Fool Moon’ is simple, sparse, in its arrangement, synths quavering around a persistent piston-pushing drum machine beat. With its stark, minimal production, paired with a fairly flat, monotone vocal delivery, ‘If It Happened Anywhere Else’ very much channels the spirit of Joy Division. The bleak, synth-led ‘Walk With Me (Into the Sea) sounds like a demo for New Order’s Movement. And yes, the recording quality is pretty rough, and it very much captures the spirit and sound of the late 70s and early 80s.

It’s different, alright, but above all, it feels like a magnificent anachronism. The eighties revival had been ongoing for at least a decade now, and so many acts have sought to replicate the sound and feel they’ve largely failed. Maybe you needed to there. Maybe you need the right kit.

But the weird, trilling organ sound of ‘Good Mourning’ brings a dark weight and fizzed-put production which are incompatible with contemporised production values. ‘Crushing Bore; brings a certain humous to proceedings, while coming on like Cabaret Voltaire. ‘Opposites Attract’ brings some heavy drone which contrasts with the sing-song vocal melody, and in may ways this is typical of the way in which WMTID explore polarities with a shameless eighties naiveté. By this, I mean that the 80s was really the last decade of real innovation. The 90s were exciting, and that’s a fact – I was there – but the 80s witnessed the arrival of synths, of electronica, and marked a real turning point in the trajectory of music. And Silica Bombs doesn’t replicate that era so much as live there. With its thumping beats and swirling synth sound, ‘Rouge Planet’ has a strong club vibe. That vibe gets stronger and harder, with the pulsating groove of ‘Sweet Jesus’, which Rouska tells us ‘I’ve got a friend in Jesus’. Yeah. The Jesus and Mary Chain, perhaps. ‘Personal Jesus’ maybe. It drives hard fir a relentless five and a half minutes.

This is an album which wears its influences on its sleeve and shows no signs of shame in that. And why should it? Rouska is very much of that era and played a part. The fact that his musical output over the last few years is indicative of a person who doesn’t go for meetups with former colleagues. More than its predecessor, Finding the A.I. G-Spot, Silica Bombs feels significantly beat-orientated, and more hard-hitting. It’s retro, and its catchy. It’s retro and it’s weird in that it has no specific identity… it’s just what it is. And it’s a groove.

AA

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Teleost – Atavism

Posted: 28 November 2025 in Reviews, Albums
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1st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Since relocating to Glasgow, Teleost have been forging ahead, first with the release of the Three Originals EP at the start of the year, and now, bookending 2025 – which has seen the duo venturing out live more often – with their full-length debut. And it’s definitely got length: five tracks spanning a full fifty minutes. But it’s got girth, too. Atavism is everything they promised from their early shows – amplified. In every way. With five tracks, and a running time of some fifty minutes, Teleost have really explored the epic space they conjure with their monolithic, crawling riffery, pushing out further than ever before – and with more gear than ever before.

Despite there only being two of them, you have to wonder how they fit all that kit into a studio, let alone a van. They’re not quite at the point of Stephen O’Malley – who had to play to the edge of the stage at the Brudenell when playing solo in Leeds some years ago because the backline barely fit – but at the rate they’re amassing equipment, it’s probably only a matter of time. But this isn’t the accumulation of stuff for the sake of it: this is a band obsessed with perfecting its sound, and then going beyond and taking it to the next level. Volume is integral to that, in the way that it is for Sunn O))) and Swans – and again, not for its own sake, but for the purpose of rendering the sound a physical, multisensory experience. And also because volume facilitates the creation of tones and frequencies simply not possible at lower volumes.

The challenge for any band who rely on these quite specific conditions live is to recreate not only the sound, but the sensory experience, the full impact, when recorded. Recording compresses, diminishes, boxes in and packages something immense, compacting it to something… contained, confined, in a way that a live show simply isn’t. Live, there is movement, there is the air displaced from the speakers, there are vibrations, there is an immediacy and margin for error, all of which are absent from that ‘definitive’ documented version.

‘Volcano’ conjures atmosphere in spades, a whistling wind and tinkling cymbals delicately hover around a softly-picked intro, before a minute or so in, BAM! The pedals go on and the riff lands, and hard – as do the drums. Slow, deliberate, atomic detonations which punctuate the laval sludge of the guitar, which brings enough low-end distortion to bury an entire empire. The vocals are way down in the mix and bathed in reverb, becoming another instrument rather than a focal point. The pulverizing weight suddenly takes an explosive turn for the heavier around the mid-point, and you begin to fear for your speakers. How is this even possible? They do pair it back in the final minutes, and venture into the earthy, atmospheric, timbre-led meanderings of Neurosis. By way of an opening, this twelve minute track is beyond monumental.

They may have accelerated their work rate, but certainly not the tempos of their tunes: ‘Bari’ – which may or may not hark back to the band’s genesis, when they performed as Uncle Bari – rides in on a wall of feedback and then grinds low and slow. They really take their time here, with ten full minutes of jarring, jolting riffery that’s as dense as osmium. Turn it u and you can feel the hairs in your ears quiver and your cells begin to vibrate.

Where Teleost stand apart from other purveyors of slow, droning doom is in their attention to those textures which are grainy, thick, and each chord stroke hits like a tsunami making land reach, a full body blow that almost knocks you off your feet.

But for all of the annihilative volume and organ-bursting weight, Atavism is not an angry or remotely violent record: these are compositions concerned with a transcendent escape, and this is nowhere more apparent than on the mid-album mellow-out, ‘Life’, which offers strong parallels to more recent Earth releases. A slow, hypnotic guitar motif is carried by rolling cymbal-dominated drums. I find myself yawning, not through boredom, but relaxation – until four and a half minutes in when they bring the noise once more, and do so with the most devastating force.

AA

Penultimate track, ‘Djinn’ is contemplative, reflective at first and then goes on an all-out blow-out, seemingly more intense and more explosive than anything before it. While growling droning rumbling is the album’s defining feature, there does very much feel like there’s an arc of growing intensity over its course. Here, the vocals feel more skywardly-tilted, more uplifting in their aim to escape from the planet, and closer, ‘Canyon’ returns to the mesmeric, slow-creeping Earth-like explorations before slamming all the needles into the red. The result is twelve minutes of magnificent calm juxtaposed with earth-shattering riff heaven.

The fidelity is fantastic, the perfect realisation of their head-blastingly huge live sound captured. The chug and trudge cuts through with a ribcage-rattling density, and there is nothing else but this in your head. You mind is empty, all other thought blown away. It’s a perfect escape. And this is – at least in its field – a perfect album.

AA

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Deborah Fialkiewicz & {AN} EeL – Purple Cosmos

Posted: 27 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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22nd November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The second collaborative release of the year by Deborah Fialkiewicz & {AN} EeL (aka Neal D. Redke) lands amidst a blizzard of output from two musicians who are both insanely prolific – by which I mean prolific on a scale which isn’t far off Merzbow or Kenji Siratori: they each release more frequently than the average person has time to listen to it. I don’t in any way consider myself to be an average person – and we’ll not go there – but writing about music means that having something play in the background while I do other stuff, like changing the cat litter or whatever, isn’t always something I fancy, and certainly isn’t my way of hearing a release for the first time. Ok, so this is not how, say, my daughter, who’s fourteen, or her generation, or even some of my peers take in new music, but my formative experience of new music involved sitting down and setting a new album to spin and giving to my undivided attention for its entire duration. Sometimes twice in succession, or more on a weekend.

Attention, in 2025, is, it would seem, in short supply. And yet, flying in the face of this, albums with long tracks seem to be becoming increasingly more common. Perhaps it’s a sign of artistic rebellion. Perhaps it’s that artists feel a need to reclaim the focus and concentration associated with longer works. Whatever the reason, it’s welcome, and Purple Cosmos contains three compositions spanning a solid half an hour.

This is a thoughtful, delicate trilogy of compositions, which build from hush to tumultuous tempests of sound incorporating powerful space rock and progressive elements within their protracted ambient forms.

‘The Floating Monk’ is centred primarily around a thick, earthy drone that has the texture of soil, and it’s enmeshed with dark layers of serrated tones and thunderous rumblings. It’s dark and it’s dense, and it’s uncomfortable. The rest of the album doesn’t offer much by way of light relief.

Yes, the title track strays more toward bleepy electronic experimentalism –a different kind of space rock, if you will – and the final track combines wailing synth overload with some persistent beats… but first and foremost this is an unashamedly experimental work.

Purple Cosmos is a work which reflects a rare attention to detail, and it possesses a certain persuasive relentless in its marrying of dark noise, analogue undulations, and insistent beats. There’s more than a hint of Throbbing Gristle about it, and perhaps a dash of Factory Floor. It gets inside your head, and at the same time enwraps your entire being with its otherworldliness. It sure is a far-out groove.

AA

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Dawnwalker – The Between

Posted: 26 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room312 – 24th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

You know you’re in ‘epic’ territory when an album contains just two tracks (or one, depending on the edition). With a running time of thirty-two minutes, The Between is inching into the bracket of monster works that includes Earth 2, Sleep’s Dopesmoker, or much of Sunn O)))’s output – or Swans for that matter – but still. What they promise is ‘a long-form suite of experimental metal that runs the gamut of their whole discography’, described by the band as “a guided meditation through death and dying”, which ‘takes liberal doses of ancient Eastern philosophies on life and death and pairs them with a modern existential despair.’

And so it is that the vinyl release features the half-hour long ‘The Between’ split across two sides, while the digital version features the track unbroken, and paired with a ‘bonus’ track in the form of ‘Remember Death’, which has a running time of over twenty minutes. In short, this is an absolute fucking behemoth.

And it doesn’t stop there: this material was recorded with a twelve-piece lineup. Yes, you read that right. Said lineup features contributions from Oli Genn-Bash (Codex Serafini) on saxophone, virtuosic guitar solos from Alexander Brown (Infected Dead), sound design by new recruit Jack D’Arcy and notably, the return of Dane Cross (Sacred Son) on vocals. No wonder they pitch it as ‘Dawnwalker’s most ambitious work yet.’

I feel a degree of preparation is required for this experience. Candles are lit, whisky is poured. And I’ve brought the bottle up to my office because I suspect that I’ll be needing a refill before the album’s over, and I don’t feel like breaking the spell by pausing it and heading downstairs.

‘The Between’ begins with a bell chime. It rings on… and on… hushed spoken word and hovering tones conjure a rich atmosphere. There’s a magical mysticism about it, as well as a slow-build as rolling cymbals swell and drones hang, thickening the air. Over time, the instrumentation shifts, and doomy folk transitions towards post-rock, then towards cinematic progressive soundscapes. Four minutes in, it goes large… and there’s no looking back from here. It twists and turns, and takes myriad unexpected paths, with a sudden lurch into sludgy guttural metal. With dark, growly noise sharing space with huge progginess, and the riffs lurching this way and that, there’s a schizophrenic feel which begins to take hold after about five minutes. Nine minutes in, a wild solo simply explodes, and POW! Moments later, there’s a sax break. It’s simply too much to process rationally.

Ambitious isn’t the word, really. We’re talking about an album – A SONG – that veers more or less between Black Sabbath and Radiohead. It’s nicely produced, but where does that sit when you’re confronted with such extreme contrasts? ‘The Between’ is a head-spinning, brain-bending experience.,

The same is true of ‘Remember Death’. It begins with haunting, post-rock picked guitar and spoken word, and introduces the idea of years and life itself being cyclical: it’s gentle, its calm, and it’s human. Lyrically, it’s deep, deep, deep… ‘I know it’s an uncomfortable subject, but it shouldn’t be’, says the speaker. And it’s true. Death in our society remains a taboo subject. But why? That as a species we are afraid of death is one thig, but our avoidance of the topic is simply wrong, and the words of ‘Remember Death’ articulate all of this magnificently.

The simple fact is that death is inevitable and we all shall die. Preparing a will or something is good, but simply an acknowledgement of the inevitable rather than fully facing it. Facing it is to live every day like it’s your last. And the fact is, it may be, because you never know.

Things start getting particularly brain-bending around four minutes in. by this point, the atmosphere is hypnotic. You’re invested. You’re open, vulnerable. “The existence that we have now is not real. It’s an illusion. What we see as existence is fundamentally mistaken. What we see and perceive and taste and touch and feel is all filtered by subjective elements… and thus, we do not see reality.” And there is some truth in this: we each experience our own reality. We see colours differently, and our reality is simply our individual experience. It’s why eye-witness accounts of an event vary so. Wildly different as they may be, they will all be true for the person recounting the event. “Through a perfect death, we regain that perception of what is real…” the narrative continues. And this is where it really starts to get difficult, and strange. It is a very, very difficult listen. It continues in this vein, expounding the principles of Gnosticism, while the guitars gradually ebb and flow. The instrumental shifts are subtle, and ‘Remember Death’ contrast dramatically with ‘The Between’.

This would have worked well as a double album, but equally ‘Remember Death’ would have worked as a standalone album. Then again, they’d probably prefer that it was situated as a satellite work, being so far removed from the main release and their other work.

However you approach it, this release documents the work of immensely imaginative band at a creative peak, and it provides much food for thought.

AA

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Keihj Haino & Reinhold Friedl – truly, slightly, overflowing, whereabout of good will

Posted: 24 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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zeitkratzer productions – 21st November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This is by no means the first time these legends of the experimental world have come together, and one would hope it won’t be the last either. Reinhold Friedl, leader of the Zeitkratzer collective and master of the prepared piano, as pioneered by John Cage, has built a staggering body of work through the years, taking into account Zeitkratzer releases, solo works, and almost countless collaborations. Of those many collaborations, this latest one is indeed strong and ambitious.

There’s something unsettling about the sound of laboured breathing and strangled whispers – and not just because they’re the domain of horror movies. Something in the human mindset makes us fearful of these sounds. Perhaps there’s the notion that a certain type of breathing is the sound of panic, and hearing it triggers a panic response. And so it is that against jangles and creaks and wispy, wraith-like drones and hovering hums, conjured by Friedl, Haino gasps and chokes and hums mystically through the thirteen-minute abstract journey that is the appropriately-titled ‘strange fruits’.

‘wild harvest’ eighteen minutes of exploratory dark ambience and abstraction. It starts quietly, a soft haze of static – and then very swiftly gets weird. Haino’s vocals rapidly transition from a plaintive mewling to satanic snarlings, while Friedl tinkles and scrapes like he’s tinkering away on an egg-slicer. But then there’s a slam of keys like psychotic demanding attention, and Haino violently switches between gasps and rasps like he’s being strangled by a poltergeist, chthonic grumbles, and tortured howls like he’s having his fingernails torn out while on the rack. The eerie metallic scrapes which set the teeth on edge are one thing, and Friedl masterfully builds a wall of discomfort, the sound of post-industrial collapse. It’s the sound of rust, of degeneration, rain-sodden sci-fi dystopia, and in itself it’s bleak, harrowing. But Haino’s contribution amplifies the discomfort, gargling and gurgling like nothing recognisable as human. It’s hard to place and hard to describe as anything but the sound of suffering. And we reel at such sounds: something biological, instinctive, primal, kicks from the inside and tells us this is not good. How we react is varied – some rush to aid, others cringe and curl – but ultimately, it’s something which affects us, it’s something we feel in a way which isn’t readily articulable. But however we react, the paint of others, it hurts us (and if it doesn’t, you’re clearly defective as a human being). As much to the point, however, is that this is challenging listening: discordant tinklings and guttural retchings are not pleasant or easy on the ear, and later, it trips into wailing psychosis and derangement. Again, we struggle when confronted with psychotic gibbering and incomprehensible raving, because we simply don’t understand, and many look upon those experiencing metal disturbance with distain, but this is, in truth – an often unspoken truth – born from a fear that they’re only a slide away from being there.

But regardless of and individual prejudices and fears, the fact remains that this is disturbing, weird, and does not correspond with out normal way of interacting with the world.

‘true, sightly fly’, the track which provides at least half of the album’s title, is a twenty-three-minute monster of a track. It’s on the CD and digital edition, and included as a digital download by way of a bonus with the vinyl edition, which feels like a shame, but then the cost of adding a second disc would likely be prohibitive both in terms of productions costs and sales. How times have changed from the late 80s and early 90s when vinyl was a budget option compared to a CD, when an album cost £7:50 against the cost of a CD being £11.99 or so. But it does feel like vinyl afficionados are being somewhat short-changed with only two of the three tracks, particularly given the fact that ‘true, sightly fly’ is arguably the belt of the set.

On ‘true, sightly fly’, Haino and Friedl plunge into the deepest, darkest, most unsettling depths, gasping, throat wrenching, slithering, churning noise unsettling the stomach writhing and churning, unsettled with beastly gasps rushing onto your nervous, trepidatious face.

This… is not fun and it’s certainly not entertainment. truly, slightly, overflowing, whereabout of good will is not fun: it’s uncomfortable, unsettling, and at times deranged, demented. Inarticulable is, sadly, a reasonable description; I am out of words, and this is weird – but good.

AA

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The Music Liberation Front Sweden – Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye, I’m Sorry For What We Have Become

Posted: 23 November 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Among their ever-expanding catalogue, Mortality Tables have put out a number of releases which are essentially singles or EPs, with this being one of them: with a running time of just over eleven and a half minutes, this single longform composition is only marginally longer than its title, but its creator, Michael Evill, has condensed a considerable amount of material and experience into this space.

As he writes, ‘I have created a movement which includes the last breaths of my beloved dog Watson. It also includes the last time I recorded with my most talented and wonderful best friend Gustaf in 2001, which I have slowed down so I (and you) can spend more time with him. There are the sounds of new stars being born – my own interpretation and ones ripped off from NASA through this modern internet connection we all have. Surely we own the stars still?

‘We have Aztecs having fun with drums. These were recorded live in Mexico, sadly not from the 14th century before we invaded. We have the hourglass from our kitchen, which Mat inspired me to sample. This was the first idea of this piece and everything else fell in to place very quickly as it’s been swimming in the back of my mind for a while.’

Clearly, some of these elements have deep emotional significance for Michael, but this isn’t conveyed – at least not overtly or explicitly – in the work itself. It’s a collage-type sonic stew, where all of the myriad elements bubble and roil together to form a dense soup, in which none of the flavours are distinct, but in combination, what he serves up is unique, and provided much to chew on. That this protracted food-orientated metaphor may not be entirely coherent is apposite, but should by no means be considered a criticism.

As Evill goes on to write, ‘this was the beginning, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about it and just coalesced those ideas.’ Sometimes, when seeking to articulate life experience, it doesn’t serve to overthink it. Life rarely happens that way: life is what happens when you’re busy thinking and planning. And just as our experiences aren’t strictly linear, neither are our thoughts and recollections. Indeed, our thoughts and memories trip over one another in an endless jumble of perpetual confusion, and the more life we live, the more time we spend accumulating experience – and absorbing books, films, TV, online media, overheard conversations and dreams, the more everything becomes intertwined, overlayed, building to a constant mental babble.

William Burrroughs utilised the cut-up technique specifically to bring writing closer to real life, contending that ‘life is a cut-up… every time you walk down the street, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors… take a walk down a city street… you have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments.’

This encapsulates the artist’s quest: to create something which conveys the thoughts in one’s head, to recreate in some tangible form the intangible nebulous inner life, if only to help to make sense of it for oneself.

‘Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye’ is a woozy, disorientating churn of noise, which is, at times, dizzying, unsettling, nausea-inducing. But then again, at other times, it’s gentle, even melodic, reflective, contemplative. There are some passages where it’s all of these things all at once. It very much does feel like a scan of the artist’s memory banks, the human brain equivalent of skipping through the RAM files and pulling items seemingly at random. It does feel somewhat strange, even awkward, being granted access in such a way, but at the same time, it feels like ‘Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye’ is more than an insight into the mind of one individual, but an exploration of the human psyche.

AA

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