Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Sadie Powers – Souvenir

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Patterns – Screamers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Dragged Up – Blake’s Tape / Clachan Dubh

Posted: 16 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to formats and the strategies for marketing new releases, it’s clear – particularly in hindsight – that the 90s was the peak period for milking fans with myriad formats, each featuring different mixes or edits, B-sides, and artwork. Now, I am by no means a nostalgia nut, but as a collector, part of me does miss this – particularly when most releases aren’t even available physically anymore, and some aren’t even downloadable. Adding a track your playlist is… nothing.

The latest offering from Glasgow’s wonky lo-fi maestros, Dragged Up, sees a different approach, at least, with an edited version of the A-side being released to streaming platforms but a full-length version available to download via Bandcamp, with the B-side being released a week later, followed by a physical release via the ever-innovative label Rare Vitamin.

You really need the full five-minute version of ‘Blake’s Tape’ to take it all in, to bask in the glory of the epic intro of churning feedback and rumbling discord which eventually gives way to a stomping, rambunctious indie tune which brings in elements of post-punk and folk, a collision of UK 80s and US 90s, and with the verses and choruses sounding like they belong to different songs, the dynamic is strong, switching as it does from nonchalance to pumping energy. And both are magnificently executed.

‘Clachan Dubh’ is a fast-paced, high-energy blast of fizzy guitars and blissfully loose interswitching vocals, and again it’s a collision of Pavement and The Fall plus all the scuzzy indue acts you’d read about in NME and Melody Maker in the early 90s. It’s less a case of them sounding like this band or that band, and more about the way they distil these various zetigeists and amalgamate them into a magnificent alt-rock hybrid which sounds like so much that’s gone before, and at the same time completely unique.

Oh, and they’ve got songs. Great songs. Get stuck in. And maybe go and see them on tour in a small venue in August, because after touring as the support for Steve Malkmus’ new band in the summer, there’s a fair chance they’ll be playing bigger places by this time next year.

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Anne-James Chaton, Andy Moore, Yannia Kyriakides, Handmade Volume 03: Tailles, abstract, ambient, single, homemade,

Posted: 15 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Unsounds – 4th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Oops. It seems I let things slide a bit. Just over two years ago, I provided coverage for the first ‘Handmade’ volume, and now, here we are, faced with the third instalment of a four-single series. And for those who mat be wondering, ‘A physical album of the collection will be released with volume 4’.

As the accompanying text outlines, ‘The Handmade series is an homage to craftsmanship through an exploration of the lexicons specific to traditional metiers. It unfolds over the course of 4 thematic volumes. With guest Yannis Kyriakides on electronics they create works where abstract notions mix with tangible ones by linking the arts of the hand with sound and poetry.’

Before we delve into the single’s two tracks, it’s worth relaying the contextual blurb, as it might as it might be to paraphrase, I always worry about missing something pivotal ad looking lame, so I prefer instead to lay it out as given: ‘Equipped with the “Method of Cutting and Assembling for Women’s Dresses, Children’s Clothes, Trousseau and Layette” by Mrs. G. Schérer, a work duly authorized and distributed in state normal schools and municipal schools at the end of the nineteenth century, Anne-James Chaton imagined a contemporary dance choreography in which « grand battement » and « pas chassé » were performed by following the instructions for the construction of a bodice with basques, a frock coat, a little boy’s jacket. Then he cuts, pleats and sews together a few letters of the alphabet – a, e, i, l, n, o, p, s, t, u – and writes a sentence that he borrows from the French poet Jean-Marie Gleize. In Tailles, the art of couture thus reveals its affinity with dance and literature.” Are you all on board?

Here, ‘The trio push the boundaries of traditional rock music incorporating spoken word, electronics with experimental angular guitar riffs to produce unconventional but infectious, beat driven music that embraces dissonance and distortion.’

And yes, a lot happens a mere nine and a bit minutes: ‘Pas De Danse’ for a start, being a dark stark whir and clank and chank and clatter of electronica which intimates an industrial edge. It’s the whipcrack of a vintage drum machine that provides the spine for ‘Pas de Danse’ – the sound of a Roland TR606 or thereabouts delivering a crisp, relentless snap that keeps metronomic time for a spoken word narrative, delivered in French, in a muttering monotone ., there are swipes of distortion and squalls of disruptive noise which interrupt this, intrude on the relentless swell of sound.

The five-minute ‘Ecrire un Phrase’ (that’s ‘write a sentence’ in translation) brings jagged drones shards odd angular noise – including shards of dissonant guitar reminiscent of Gang of Four. There’s something of a DAF vibe about this relentless, dissonant, drone attack.

Immediate it is not. Droney and difficult, it is. Just the way we like it.

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Psychic TV – A Prayer For Derek Jarman

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Cash Bribe – Demonomics EP

Posted: 11 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Futureless – 13th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Formed in Brooklyn in 2019, Cash Bribe have released a couple of previous EPs, showcasing a sound that brings together a number of elements, but above all brings the riffs. And they’ve really turned things up a way for their latest offering, a few tracks from which we’ve already aired here at Aural Aggravation.

While it’s something of a vogue right now for bands of heavy, and particularly a metal, persuasion, to open an EP with a short intro track that’s delicate and atmospheric, and eases the listener in before hitting the pedals, Cash Bribe aren’t here to piss about with pleasantries or conventions, and the minute-and-a-half long opening track, ‘Feral’ arrives in a ferocious wall of feedback and hammers in hard and fast, a frenetic blast of raw and raucous hardcore punk that’s nothing short of savage.

Single cut ‘Bay of Pigs’ powers in before the feedback’s faded, and it’s propelled by some mighty drumming: Larry Koch is a hard-hitter, but what’s more, the drums are up in the mix and drive the track hard.

These are dark and difficult times globally, but America… America, WTF? Where to begin? It’s hard to articulate, and this is precisely why this EP is perfect, a spitting, savage roar, equal parts rage and nihilism. More often than not, I would unpack the social or political context, and perhaps explore my own reaction to the material in a reflective fashion. But sometimes, the task feel too great, and what’s more, the material speaks for itself. It’s positively explosive, and bludgeons the listener without mercy..

The title track is the longest, clocking in at exactly four minutes, and is maintains a hundred-mile-per-hour pace for its duration. There is no let-up on this EP: it is truly relentless, and the fury flames unabated. It’s all killer, alright.

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Sledges – Losing Pace (EP)

Posted: 10 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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9th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sledges are described as ‘a four piece Alt-metal/Heavy-shoegaze band that blends genres like grunge, metal, shoegaze, emo/post-hardcore, and alternative to craft songs with catchy hooks and big riffs,’ and while this is true, it fails to convey the way the various elements melt into one another to conjure something quite special.

Take the first track, ‘Stumbling as I Fall’: the guitars bend and pixelate in a way that evokes the essence of My Bloody Valentine, but it’s grunged up and beefy, and at the same time the melodic vocals contrast with that thick overdrive, capturing the spirit and sound of ’94, and in particular, Smashing Pumpkins circa Siamese Dream. The title track is harder, heavier, with loping drums melded to a tight, chugging bass underpinning some hefty overdriven guitars that provide the backdrop for vocals that ae by turns breezy and gnarly, offering one of the most overtly metal moments on the EP. I find myself momentarily thinking of Troublegum by Therapy? – a classic example of solid tunes brimming with melody played with hard distortion and some raw aggression – but then Soundgarden also poke their way into my cognisance. If it sounds like I’m simply pulling bands out of the air, it’s very much not the case: Losing Pace simply has that much going on, although the fact that many of the touchstones I’ve referenced thus far are of a 90s vintage does also serve position the various elements which contribute to the Sledges sound.

‘Weightless’ is – ironically – pretty heavy, and it’s not (believe it or not) a criticism to stand it alongside Linkin Park, in that it brings nu-metal heft and a strong emotive hue to a song that’s both riffy and rich with a palpably sincere feeling of angst. It matters because this is no cheap stab at commercialism, and nor it is just another song that tries to alternative by hauling all of the tropes into the mix: there’s a sincerity to this which lends it an indefinable power, and it hits hard.

After a soft acoustic intro, ‘June is Better than July’ goes widescreen, a cinematic burst of post-rock, post-grunge, alt-rock riffcentric extravaganza. There’s a nagging sense that it’s a but emo, a bit ‘things we’re not supposed to like’… but bollocks to those strictures of convention. It’s pure quality, and that’s ultimately what it all boils down to.

Losing Pace was originally released as a four-track twelve-inch, but this new edition, which also marks its first digital release, offers a brace of bonus tracks, in the form of ‘Fading’ and ‘Letters’. The former is the weakest and most overtly emo song of the set, but it’s bathed in reverb and the guitars are bold and overdriven and grungy, and it’s impossible to deny that it’s well-executed. Rounding it off, bonus cut ‘Letters’ is both dreamy and dynamic, melding elements of early Ride and MBV and Chapterhouse with later exponents of shoegaze / nu-gaze like The Early Years as swirling guitars conjure cathedrals of sound around a pumping drum machine.

On Losing Pace, Sledges successfully combine classic and contemporary, and do so with an aptitude and energy, and a keen sense of dynamics. It’s quality all the way.

[bandcamp width=400 height=340 album=244179070 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

AA

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Felix Kubin – Der Tanz Aller

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Belk + Casing – Liminal Veil (EP)

Posted: 8 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Panurus Productions – 2nd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Northern noisemongers Belk are no strangers to the virtual pages of Aural Aggravation: I personally first caught them live as a duo back in 2021, when I remarked in my review that as fierce as they were, they might benefit from some bass. I could never have imagined just how much. These days, their sound is dominated by some juddering low-end that’s practically arsequake. It’s as if they thought ‘you want some bass, eh, bastard? Here’s some fookin’ bass. BOWWWWWWWMMMM’. They’ve certainly evolved over the last four years – but what that means, in real terms is that they’ve developed methods of making noise that’s even more nasty and gnarly and generally unkind to the eardrums. This is a good thing, and ‘Flayed’, the first of their two contributions to this split release is a beast. It has a definite and undeniable sense of swing to it, a swaggering groove that’s somewhat unexpected. But what is expected – and delivered – is a crashing riot of noise, a juddering wall of distortion, squalling, dirty guitars, drums blasting at a hundred miles an hour and guttural vocals half-submerged by the swirling chaos, with tempo changes galore and simply all hell happening at once inn explosive, brutal frenzy.

‘Cloak of Bile and Oil’ begins a little more gently – and for a moment I’m reminded of the intro to Fudge Tunnel’s ‘Hate Song’, which inevitably bursts into shards of incendiary sludge and squall – and sure enough, so does this, the extended intro giving the deluge of noise even more impact when it finally does arrive. They describe their style as ‘Blackened Leeds Hardcore’ and this must surely be a definitive example of what that means.

Casing are an unknown quantity, and their two contributions are brief – the longest piece is just over two minutes in duration. The sound they offer is certainly no less abrasive or disturbing. There’s nothing to indicate what the initialisms of the song titles actually mean, but the electronic excursion which is ‘L.U.A.N.L.B.’ begins with some rumbling dark ambience, soon rent with the wail of siren-like feedback, before a wall of harsh noise distortion swells like a tsunami and swallows everything. In contrast, ‘D.T.H.D.T.C.’ launches headlong into a gut-churning blast of manic grind, with a nauseating bass churn to rival that of Belk.

What it lacks in duration (the four tracks have a combined running time of less than eight minutes), this release more than makes up in devastating intensity. Mission accomplished.

AA

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