Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Valentin Silvestrov – Moments Of Silvertones, Evgeny Gromov

Posted: 10 July 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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Kyiv Dispatch – 17th July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

For those of us who have never lived through war – domestically, that is – it’s hard to imagine what life is like. Living in the UK, I have the privilege of not having experienced it: both of my parent were born at the end of the second world war and lived under rationing as children, but they didn’t grow up living in fear of bombs falling. And while I look out into my back yard and see the brick and concrete bomb shelter which I use to brew beer, it’s beyond my conception to imagine what it must have been like to live in a time where I would actually have to take refuge in it, although the part of York where I live – or nearby – was bombed in 1942, with numerous some 94 people killed and 238 injured by some 84 tonnes of bombs, dropped in just 90 minutes.

But the fact is that life goes on – because it has to. And art is still made – because what else are artists to do? The title of this release is a little confusing, but the text which accompanies this release, which is particularly powerful, and speaks of the effects of war on the citizens of those countries stricken by war sheds some light on the questions of artistic ownership. It also highlights the fact that wars are waged by governments, not the people. and so we learn how ‘In 2022, with war in Ukraine raging, the composer Valentin Silvestrov was forced, at the age of 85, to flee Kyiv, abandoning his home studio. Silvestrov is one of the leading figures of the Ukrainian musical avant garde, active from the early 1960s onward and for Evgeny Gromov, Ukrainian pianist, researcher and curator, his forced departure was a tragedy, his absence keenly and personally felt’.

The notes go on to explain how this prompted him ‘to hasten the release of this double album, on which Gromov performs key piano works by Silvestrov, from his early, modernist period to his later, more beautifully accessible pieces. The sense of urgency is not just because Silvestrov is approaching ninety years old but also out of the daily sense of mortality felt by all those living in Kyiv. Hence also the founding of the Kyiv Dispatch label in 2022, dedicated to showcasing the full spectrum of Ukrainian new music. Both artistic and existential immediacy underpin the album, as Evgeny Gromov explains: “A great deal of Silvestrov’s music simply does not exist in sound. It exists as scores, as reputation, as a name but not as a lived, performed body of work. There is still no real tradition of its performance. For decades I have been working with this music across its full range, from the early avant-garde works to the later Bagatelles. In a sense, I am its performing extension. And at a certain point it became obvious: if this is not played now, systematically, insistently, it will remain absent.’

This is significant. How much art, how much thought, is lost in time due to an absence of documentation? This, then, is more than a matter of the impacts of war, but also a question of legacy, and of ephemerality.

Recorded in just four days, Moments Of Silvertones is Gromov’s urgent, even desperate, attempt to capture and document the work of Valentin Silvestrov, and we are all fortunate that he has. ‘Five Piano Pieces 1961’ is dramatic – essentially neoclassical in style, in places playful, in others feeling more moody, while ‘Triad 1962’ is very much more geared toward the delicate side, but again revealing a levity which counterbalances the shade.

The expansive ‘Piano Sonata No 2’- extending to almost sixteen minutes in duration, is a magnificently balanced work, and entertaining, playing with the tropes of jazz and minimalism as well as classical music with some bold hits resonating as hard as falling down a flight of stair, and evoking the spirit of silent movies – although it’s a fair way from Laurel and Hardy. Because it’s as a bygone age, and as much as we may wish to remember it fondly… we are increasingly drawn by nostalgia, as we cling with ever-increasing desperation to a past which felt to much better, so much easier, but, despite its focus on compositions from the 1960 (in its first half, at least), while also being devoted to preserving the more recent past (the ‘Bagatelles, Op.’ pieces dating from 2003-2006), Moments Of Silvertones is ultimately a collection of pieces which are delicate and soothing. And despite the conditions of its recording, nothing could be further removed from war or its soundtracking. This is what it means to be human. Moments Of Silvertones is an album hat needs to be heard as a reminder of this – and also because it’s an example of magnificently poised composition and beautiful musicianship.

AA

Valentin Silvestrov – Moments of Silvertones, Evgeny Gromov digital cover

Sun Ra ǀ Merzbow – Strange City

Posted: 8 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cold Spring – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

This release is something of a curio, in the sense that it’s a collaboration between two of the most famously prolific recording artists of recent times – Sun Ra recorded over 100 full-length albums, comprising well over 1000 songs prior to his death in 1993 at the age of 79, while Merzbow, active since 1979, has released in excess of 500 albums to date. However, this collaboration occurred posthumously for Sun Ra, and it’s worth quoting the context as given by the label, Cold Spring here:

Officially licensed from Irwin Chusid, who oversees the catalogue of the late Afrofuturist artist/composer/bandleader Sun Ra, Cold Spring negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the Sun Ra archive to be remixed and treated by Masami Akita (aka Merzbow). The tracks incorporate the jazz power of Sun Ra with the brutal excess of the Japanese noise artist Merzbow.

Originally released by Cold Spring a decade ago and long sold out, the music was spread across vinyl and CD, with completely different music on each format. The tracks have now been collected together for the first time, using the original master tapes and presented in the order intended (the vinyl format dictated the order due to optimal sound quality restraints).

Included for the first time on any release is a bonus two minute track entitled ‘Granular Jazz Part 5’, a special composition created for ‘Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone’, a weekly radio show on BBC 6 Music in the UK. It was broadcast ahead of Merzbow’s live concert at the FAC251 venue in Manchester in September 2016.

There are obviously practical reasons why the different formats featured different track listings on the original release, although these things can prove frustrating for fans finding themselves faced with the dilemma of missing material or forking out for multiple formats. This ‘complete’ reissue has the added incentive of an unreleased track, and while it’s only a couple of minutes of unreleased music, it does round off what is unquestionably a monster release – the six pieces having a combined run time of a massive 104 minutes.

So, to begin with a brief content comparison, the contents of the original CD – the 32-minute ‘Livid Sun Loop’ and ‘Granular Jazz Part 2’ (34 minutes long) makes up the corresponding first disc here, while the 2016 vinyl contained ‘Granular Jazz’ parts 1, 3, and 4. Chances are that some will still be dissatisfied that the CD tracks still haven’t made it onto vinyl, but you can’t please all the people all of the time, and as much as I’m a fan of vinyl myself, the longform nature of the compositions does seem well-suited to CD.

As for the contents of this ten-year expanded reissue… it’s no criticism or complaint to comment that it very much sounds like what you’d expect. ‘Livid Sun Loop’ encapsulates the album in its entirety in the first few minutes – shrieking horns flying in all directions against an apocalyptic churn of cement-mixer noise with the treble cranked to the max, feedback and flayed circuitry exploding like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. A squall of treble, scraping, screaming, like a Brillo pad scouring away at the inside of your skull. There are prolonged segments which are pure Merzbow, shredding digital noise, but then, suddenly, amidst the blitzkrieg, there are honking horns and random toots which pop through the raging wall. The track is a truly relentless assault, and brutally harsh. The frequencies very much favour the top-end, with howls and hisses of tinnitus-inducing quality tearing from the speakers with not so much as a second’s let-up. Every time you think that this must – must! – be the limit, Merzbow does the Merzbow thing of finding new frequencies with which to cause injury. Oh yes: this hurts. But what else did you expect? Some cozy club vibes, a bit of mellow sax and piano? Right. Merzbow brings the harshest head-shredding hell.

Twenty minutes in, there’s a segment that sounds like everything is breaking – not just the gear, I mean it sounds like a field recording of the collapse of civilisation, the absolute end of the world as we know it. And it just goes on. And on. What have I done to deserve this? What has anyone done to deserve this? Actually, perhaps this is the answer to the UK’s issues in the penal system. Being forced to listen to this a couple of times may be a viable altern alternative to shorter custodial sentences. But here I am, listening with great interest and even with a degree of perverse pleasure – although after half an hour, I will admit that I’m wilting somewhat, and not just because it’s 30C with 70% humidity in my office at 9pm. This is nothing short of punishment: it hurts. And it ain’t very jazzy. It’s a mangled mess of skin-peeling, face-melting horror.

But if ‘Livid Sun Loop’ makes for a long and challenging half hour, you’d better buckle in and brace yourself for the endurance test of all endurance tests. To dissipate any doubt, I am a big fan of noise, and enjoy basking in blistering waves of aural annihilation. And Strange City is special in its vision and scope, and its sheer enormity. There are fleeting flickers of strolling double bass which pep through the wild bleepery, woozy drones and sheet metal shredding.

‘Granular Jazz Part 1’ yawns and snarls, bibbles and bleeps and pulses and creaks and swashes and swinges its way through just shy of eighteen minutes of existential anxiety, but it’s simply a prelude to part 2. The slow fade-in and trickling digital cacophony is simply a lure, creating the illusion of listenability. And it does take some time to build. But, of course, build it does. A quarter of an hour in, and it’s reached a sustained crescendo or chaos that’s dense enough to crush your skull. The jazz quota is ratcheted up, too, and the result is something else. Finding the words for this is a challenger, but I’m starting to feel that it’s not words I need, but an ambulance.

Strange City is… intense. In large parts, it feel like Merzbo is the dominant party in this mash-up (which is essentially what it is), and at its best, Strange City makes for a fitting posthumous release for Sun Ra. But from whichever able ou approach it, Strange City is one serious blast of noise. Killer all the way.

AA

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Mortem – Mørketid

Posted: 30 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville – 3rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, you just need some metal, and the heavier and more extreme the better. This is something I only realised quite some way into adulthood. Perhaps it’s – at least in part – because the only metal I was exposed to as a youth in the 80s was chart or otherwise popular stuff like Iron Maiden, which struck me as corny and excessively widdly. It wasn’t until I started listening to John Peel in the 90s that I heard anything really fucking brutal, and grindcore proved to be a gateway of sorts. But even after that, so much metal felt a bit tame and rather like it was trying to hard to be menacing. It’s only through further exposure in my capacity as a reviewer that I’ve come to appreciate the myriad shades of metal and its cathartic qualities, particularly in a live setting.

I can immerse myself in ambience as a means of escape as happily as anyone, and often do. The tranquil, immersive experience is often soothing and transportative, even meditative and soporific. But there are times when a furious, guitar-driven blast of nihilism is what’s required. And with Mørketid, that’s precisely what Mortem deliver.

Although formed in 1989, amidst the most nascent bubblings of the swamp that would spawn the infamous Norwegian black metal scene, their first demo being produced by Euronymous and Dead of Mayhem, but they fizzled out fast, and it wasn’t until 2019 that they reconvened and recorded their debut album Ravnsvart. They could never be praised for striking while the iron’s hot, so to speak, but to toss another cliché, good things come to those who wait, and after nearly seven years of waiting, Mørketid has no weak spots whatsoever, with eight searing, lacerating sonic assaults that hit with an unrepentant fury.

It’s the six-minute title track that bursts in, all guns blazing, to announce the album’s arrival, after a dark ambient instrumental intro that makes way for thousand-miles-per-hour guitar and drums, rasping vocals and some rather playful but simultaneously sinister keyboard work. It’s quintessential black metal, but with a broader sonic vision and some tidier production. This is to the album’s benefit: there’s an abundance of vision on display, and it would be a shame to lose the detail to production that makes it sound like it was recorded from the next room on a 90s phone. That isn’t to say it’s overproduced – far from it. On Mørketid, everything is cranked up to eleven and it hits with all the force the music deserves.

The driving, dynamic ‘Skyggeånd’ is – in the main – slower in comparison to the majority of the album, and its seven-and-a-half-minute expanse is rich in atmosphere and strong on power, which makes for an album standout.

For the most part, Mørketid is simply relentless, double-pedal drumming and a blanket of overdriven chords provide a backdrop to vocals ripped from Satan’s very own larynx. It’s dark and it rages, hard. One could have readily forgiven and accepted an album of template-based black metal from Mortem given their back-story – but instead, Mørketid is an album that ventures forth in the most unexpected of directions. Sure, it’s black metal all the way, and that’s quire as it should be. But Mortem bring something more. And that more is the detail and compositional skills that make Mørketid a cut above.

AA

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Darkthrone – Pre-Historic Metal

Posted: 29 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of Pre-Historic Metal marks forty years of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto’s musical collaboration, initially as Black Death, the album’s back cover proudly boasting ‘No metronome since 1987’. The images which accompany the lyrics in the CD’s booklet depict damp logs, thick, verdant moss, and the centrepiece is a misty shot of what appears to be the remains of a stone circle – or just a rocky clearing – in a forest, where the band are lurking, shadowy figures in the background. It’s all a fair indication – or forewarning – of what Pre-Historic Metal, an album pitched as ‘the new studio album of primitive metal from the Norse cavemen’ is all about.

As Fenriz himself proclaims of the title’s symbolic origin, “Prehistoric is a loose term. I just figure it’s our VIBE, our take on things and it’s more a statement that we use old style to create something new”. It sets their stall out nicely, and prepares the listener for precisely what Darkthrone deliver, which is, quite simply, forty-one minutes of relentless, riff-driven metal.

There are twists and turns galore during each and every song, opener ‘They Found one of My Graves’ packing in some well-placed breakdowns and flourishes into its five and a quarter minutes, wedging these moments tight between the thunderous overdrive and gnarly guttural vocals, drawing together elements of Black Metal and Thrash in a completely natural fashion. The title is a hell-for-leather blast of blistering overload, which suddenly becomes a doomy pagan ritual, the commanding vocals booming through cavernous reverb amidst a chthonic growl of barbarically brutal guitar.

The seven-minute ‘Siberian Thaw’ takes the basic principles of a grunge riff and slows it to a glacial crawl, adding some Sabbath-influenced doom drone to its sludgy trudgery. And yes, they do the thing of picking up the pace to that of a solid headbang before bringing the riff back slow and low and denser than before. It’s a tried and tested template, and they play it to perfection, spinning a meandering prog mid-section before blasting in with the pulverizing grind segment that makes you go ‘hell yes!’ before, of course, finally, going back to the starting point.

The album’s second six-minute epic, ‘The Dry Wells of Hell’ plays out a delicate, atmospheric intro, and strikes a more theatrical stance all round, pitching some bold, soaring vocal melodic moments amidst the demonic snarling and the vibe is unmistakably and unashamedly vintage. But the joy of Pre-Historic Metal is that it’s not specifically one thing or another, but a curated catalogue of metal. And they don’t put a foot wrong.

Sure, if you’ve listened to enough metal, you’ve heard it all before, in various permutations, but that’s the point. Pre-Historic Metal is about execution rather than innovation, and every single riff lands in a way that absolutely hits the spot.

AA

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melondruie – Sound of Rain

Posted: 28 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 3rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Despite our reputation, it’s not just us Brits who have a weather fixation, and the fact of the matter is, the weather has a baring on our daily lives, perhaps more than many of us even recognise – and that’s without considering the effects of weather events on the likes of transport and food production. On a primal, human level, weather conditions affect our moods, and even our health.

I myself recorded a longform piece, ‘January Can’t Last Forever’ from a bleak place in early 2023, when weeks of rain had caused widespread flooding locally, and a few particularly heavy downpours overwhelmed the guttering at the front of the house. Those weeks, in the darkest days of winter, felt like a lifetime, and it was all I could do to get through it by reminding myself that these things do pass, eventually. April and May of this year saw rain most days, too, although I’m writing this as sweat pours off me at the tail end of the second heatwave of 2026, during which a couple of brief thunderstorms have only contributed to ramping up the already suffocating levels of humidity.

As such, there’s a particular relatability, on a personal level, with the inspiration for melondruie’s Sound of Rain: the Seattleite’s latest work of minimalist ambient electronical was ‘made in the spring of 2025 during various rainy days’. As the liner notes explain, ‘The record frames rain as a calming, almost therapeutic force – masking the noise and tension of human life with a steady, immersive sonic wash’, with ‘a focus on texture, atmosphere, and subtle emotional resonance.’

There’s a certain playfulness about some of the compositions: ‘Washed Away’ bounces and ripples with something of a lightness, and the rhythmic nature of the notes interplay through patterns which shift gradually and with a liquid ease.

Despite the angry and negative connotations of titles like ‘Red Mist’ and ‘Destroyed Again’, the heavier, darker undercurrents of rumbling bass and wraith-like howls which resemble thin, chilling winds are counterbalanced by soft sounds which seem to connote the relief of shafts of light breaking through the cloud cover, or a vague hint of a rainbow. Consequently, and album which could have been rendered relentlessly bleak, gloomy, oppressive, is anything but.

On Sound of Rain, melondruie explores the interplay between gentle textures, with smooth, gliding drones interacting and interpolating with rippling, bubbling layers. ‘Falsehoods’, the final track, expands on this territory with the gush of a torrent to begin, gradually tapering from a current of sweeping tension towards something altogether calmer.

The rhythmic cadences of the pieces give them a sense of movement, of flow, even a kind of groove at times, which draws the listener in and holds the attention in a way which is rare – in my experience – for an ambient work. The conception and execution is inspired, and while the extent to which it evokes rainy days will vary according to one’s own experience and perception, Sound of Rain cannot fail to inspire reflection and contemplation.

AA

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Conflux Coldwell – Echolalia

Posted: 25 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Bulletdodge – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since first presenting work under the Conflux Coldwell moniker in 2013, Leeds-based sound architect and explorer Michael C Coldwell has used this particular vehicle to venture forth through different environments of an external nature, often with field recordings providing an integral element. As such, while maintaining a focus on aspects of hauntology, Echolalia marks something departure in terms of its inspirations and themes, primarily in just how personal it is, particularly in comparison to his previous offering, Shadows and Simulacra which dug deep into the dark domains of AI and the absence of any human soul therein. This time, the explorations are focused very much on interior environments.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology’.

Something I’ve noticed, quite acutely, in the last few years, is just how many people I know – particularly on social media, where I’ve evolved a substantial network of creatives in all types of media – are receiving diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and various other neurodivergences in adulthood. Many are in the fifty-plus demographic. And so many of them relay that so much makes sense with this information. It isn’t, then, that there’s more autism, more neurodivergence, but simply that we have finally got better at diagnosing it. There remains, however, some way to go in terms of accommodating it. But this observation has set me thinking of late, that, given the way creatively-minded individuals gravitate toward one another – taking my virtual social circle as an example – perhaps neurodiversity is directly correspondent with creativity? I’m merely touching the edge of a discussion here, nudging an idea out into world… but artists are renowned for being misfits, a bit weird, prone to many of the traits associated with neurodivergence, and it may explain why some people – neurotypical ones – are content with working the nine to five, watching some TV and then going to bed at 10pm, while the creatives can’t settle and feel unfulfilled, and are instead compelled to stay up till the small hours doing stuff.

The ten pieces on Echolalia are tense, intense, and hit the listener from all angles simultaneously. And in doing so, Coldwell not only captures, but replicates that sense of overstimulation, of excessive input.

‘Complex Machines’ arrives in a fizz and crackle of distortion, wibbling synths and a sampled voiceover from what sounds like an educational or instructive film about the use of computers in school, before disembodied voices drift over some ominous drones. The number 23 emerges from the reverberating haze. It has the hallmarks of being from the soundtrack to a sci-fi technodystopia, but the fact of the matter is that this is where we are. Our education system is in crisis, and kids are increasingly suffering from an ever-diminishing attention span on account of the ubiquitous bombardment of myriad media. This is magnified significantly for those with ADHD and AuDHD, whose brains are already crammed and overcrowded, who find simply existing in the world an overwhelming experience.

‘Homeworld’ may or may not be a reference to Harry Harrisons’s 1980 novel, the first instalment of the To the Stars trilogy, but skittery synths and muttery vocal loops combine to create a tension that isn’t resolved by the end of the piece, which instead gives way to the crackling static and stammering electronic primitivism of ‘Pattern Glare’, with its aural allusions to Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, and also its near-infinite reverb. It’s eerie, unsettling, and it makes you feel nervous. Well, it makes me feel nervous, anyway.

It’s true that I feel nervous often, but something about Echolalia is truly nail-biting. ‘Dysthtythmia’ – a condition which covers a broad spectrum of irregular heartbeats – returns to lifted segments of speech to round off the first side of physical release, and as neat as this feels in terms of closing a loop, it equally feels like revisiting a trigger point.

The second half of the album is yet harder to process, a collage of synths and voices layering ever faster and ever deeper and ever more complex in their combination, the flickering shimmer of ‘Five Wing Four’ being exemplary. There is simply too much to take I in at once, and Coldwell knows this, because this is the soundtrack to assimilation and processing. ‘Left hand, right eye…’ My wife used to get so angry when driving: it was my job to navigate and I would forever confuse left and right. Having a PhD in English bears no relation to my suffering LRC (Left–right confusion) which apparently affects nearly 10% of the male population. But what it does go to show is that brains are strange and unpredictable. And ‘strange and unpredictable’ is ultimately a fair summary of Echolalia, too.

AA

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Puce Moment – O.R.G.II

Posted: 24 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Odd Doo – 12th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

There is something uniquely compelling about the sound of a pipe organ. I’m clearly not alone in this, as there have been many non-religious works which have explored the use of the instrument, ranging from ribcage-rattling drone to the tired groaning wheeze of dilapidated organs in dire need of restoration. Because organs tend to be installed – often designed and built specifically to work with the acoustics of the space – they can’t readily be transported elsewhere, and equally, they each have their own individual sounds, however nuanced the differences may be to the average ear.

After four subsequent albums, O.R.G.II finds Puce Moment – the musical and visual project of Nico Devos and Pénélope Michel, whose choice of name references a short film from 1949 – revisit the inspirations for their 2019 album O.R.G. It was recorded at Saint Joseph Church Armentières, France – a truly remarkable building, with, it would appear, a quite spectacular pipe organ.

They describe the album as ‘an immersive musical work that brings the traditional pipe organ into dialogue with electronic and drone compositions, unfolding within a liminal soundscape — a space of transition and encounter orchestrated by Puce Moment’.

And so it is that they present five compositions constructed around quivering, slow-moving drones which are tonally rich, warm and organic. And immersive they are, indeed. The album begins with the ten-and-a-half-minute ‘Simoon’, which was aired with an accompanying video last month. It’s incredibly textured and nuanced, but to extract those textures and nuances requires a degree of attention. In our overloading, hyperaccelerated, technologically-driven times, where the average attention span is barely three seconds, the idea of sitting down and paying attention to prolonged hums might sound untenable, but the fact is that spending time with the lights down, or off, and the phone in another room while simply feeling the textures, the subtle interplay between the layers and waves is nothing short of a revelation.

The individual pieces melt together – which seems appropriate, given that I’m writing this in the middle of a punishing heatwave, and I feel as if my entire body is slowly melting. ‘Pavna’ pulsates in a way which resonates with my own palpating internal organs… and as if in protest, my laptop crashes and I lose three hundred words of my review in progress. But I’m too sapped to panic, and perhaps more pertinently, I’m feeling too zen thanks to the soporific nature of the cinematic dronescape in which I find myself.

The nine-and-a-half-minute ‘Ruach’ rumbles almost subliminally at first, before transitioning into a rippling wave reminiscent of a combination of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, a trilling waltz with a distinctly retro feel, which bleeds into the fourteen-and-a-half-minute ‘Ilma’, a piece which truly encapsulates the layering and detail of the album.

AA

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Helen Svoboda – Headwater

Posted: 17 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s rare that an album sits so far beyond the realms of any genre that it’s difficult to know where to start in discussing it. Helen Svoboda’s Headwater is one such rare album.

The pitch describes Headwater as ‘a stream of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s solo practice. Sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ run throughout the record to form an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved songform. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself’.

Lately I’ve been quite amazed by how little people I know can actually remember from times past. I don’t mean the fact that friends from school can’t remember people from our year we weren’t eve n friends with (although I do), but just events and things in general. I find myself haunted by memories stretching as far back to when I was just three, but most people I know can barely remember what they did last week, or what they had for dinner. Seeing my mother slide rapidly into a haze of dementia forgetfulness in recent months, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on memory on many levels. I’ve long considered it analogous to a vast ROM drive, but have wondered about the means of access to the stored files. And as much as these contemplations have led to some dark places, I’ve become more accepting of different capacities for recollection, while still feeling a degree of fear for the future.

The ensemble she’s has assembled certainly makes for an unusual combination, consisting as it does of Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). Double bass is rare. Two double basses – in a quartet – is unheard of, and makes for some incredibly unconventional instrumental interplay across the sixteen compositions.

Many of those compositions are brief – under two minutes in duration – but convey so much.

‘Veins’, released in advance of the album and featuring vocals from Selma Savolainen is sparse, ethereal, and is representative – to some extent, although the range of the compositions is such that no one piece could ever truly summarise its contents.

The album’s first song, ‘If’, is a deeply atmospheric amalgamation of stylistic elements. In many respects, it’s predominantly a folk song, and one built on foundations of curving drones and rousing vocals. It’s stirringly evocative, and calls to mind in some ways the earthy feel of Wardruna, only without the tribal percussion or sense of the cinematic. This feels more inwardly-focused and reflective, but is certainly no less powerful.

AA

‘Child’ begins almost acapella save for a sparse, low-key drone, but builds to a wailing crescendo, and Svoboda’s voice is nothing short of captivating, conveying so much more than the words alone. In contrast, the instrumental ‘Blur’ is a sawing strain of dissonance as a cacophony of strings scrape and scratch discordantly to create a nerve-jangling tension. It may only be two minutes in duration, but it’s ten minutes in intensity.

There’s spacey experimentalism and loose jazz leanings on ‘Void of Space’, and ‘Evening Hepuli’ brings high drama and breathy, operatic hysteria over stop/start strings which ring and reverberate. The final piece, ‘Hepuli Earworm’ is commanding, in places a wild jazz frenzy, occasionally inviting comparisons to The Necks, in others conjuring expansive soundscapes and moments with real emotional edge.

Headwater is not a straightforward album: it’s quirky and unconventional, and not always immediately accessible. But it’s inventive, imaginative, truly unique in composition and delivery, and, in parts, incredibly powerful.

AA

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Photo: Celeste de Clario

Sinister Shadows – Sinister Shadows

Posted: 16 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The two single cuts from this eponymous debut couldn’t have been much more different, with ‘No one home but me’ taking the form of an epic, fuzzed out stomper that straddled authentic post-punk and second- or third-wave goth, while ‘Just Begun’ ventured into more epic, emotive territory.

I was intrigued as to the extent to which they represented the album as a whole – while at the same time harbouring certain misgivings over the use of AI for the videos and graphics. It was immediately obvious that the lyrics on the lyric video for ‘No one home but me’ weren’t entirely accurate, and while visually striking, the vid for ‘Just Begun’ was a bit ‘off’, straying into the same territory as the comeback by SPK / SPKtR. I get the appeal, particularly for self-releasing artists with no budget who can’t afford to pay professionals to do artwork and make videos… The spirit of DIY was always to find a workaround, to make something crappy yourself and be proud of the often amateurish results, whether it was a record sleeve made with a pencil sketch and stencils or a video shot in the back alleys near your house. There’s the argument that no artists are losing out, since no artists would have been employed anyway, but as much as AI stuff looks slicker, at the same time, it’s also lacking in soul and in that respect looks no more pro than the self-made work that accepts individual limitations. And that’s before we consider the environmental impact.

It may sound like it, but I’m not judging Ryan Michalski here – he’s only doing what everyone else is doing, and musically, he’s doing a lot more than most, covering quite literally everything: voice, guitar, synth, bass, drum, programming. Apart from the intro and outro, which take the form of dark rumbling noise courtesy of Clint Listing, aka The Slumbering. And he does a decent job of it, too.

The pitch for Sinister Shadows is as a ‘Gothic Death Rocker meets Post Punk project .Think Bauhaus , The Mission, Sisters of Mercy meets Wire and Killing Joke’, and there’s plenty of all that in the mix – as well as something quite unique – and much of the appeal is in the homespun and raw nature of the recordings. The songs don’t so much end as simply cut off and slam into the next one – no fade-outs or full stops – and it’s kinda cool in its primitivism. Similarly, the sound and mixing is a bit more advanced than the four-track tape recoding of old, but not much, and again, this is integral to the sound. The guitars are gritty, the drums / drum machine crisp but often partially submerged bar the crack of the snare which cuts through the welter of thick distortion.

‘Kiss the Dead Gothic Girl’ is expansive, emotive, with the layers of synth often washed away by a tsunami of overdriven guitar. ‘Day go by’ very much showcases the same sound as ‘No one home but me’, Michalski’s baritone vocal bathed in reverb, low in the mix amidst a tumult of fuzz and a soaring lead line, as he intimates dark thoughts. ‘I’ll make you suffer / I’ll make you bleed…’ he croons menacingly.

The guitars dominate, and showcase a distinctive sound that suits the material well, and the album favours mid-pace brooding. As such, the variety comes not from variations in pace but mood. ‘Lost My Mind’ is sparse in its arrangement but dense in its sound, and it finds Michalski pouring anguish, sounding brittle and vulnerable amidst a deluge of distortion, through which cheap synths blip and bleep through on occasion. This is the prelude to ‘No one here but me’, a song that reminds me of how desperate I was for a few minutes with the house to myself during lockdown. Yes – I was waiting for no-one home but me. It also reminds me that you should be careful what you wish for. It’s a killer tune, six minutes of relentlessly grinding away at a maxed-out riff while Michalski growls amidst cavernous reverb about waiting like a disease. The album’s worthwhile just for this.

The last couple of ‘proper’ songs, ‘Waiting here alone’ and ‘Your Breath’ round the album off nicely: the former is particularly dark, dense and sludgy, and arguably the album’s most Killing Joke / late 90s goth moment, the latter brings a lighter sensation, before another abrupt cut, and we’re thrown into the dolorous doom of ‘Outro’.

Sinister Shadows is everything the singles promised – bold, dark, guitar-driven, textured, deep. Exciting. The videos and cover art do the album a disservice. Raw, immediate, driving, this is killer.

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Death-Static – Red Fire In The Open

Posted: 16 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound in Silence – 18th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sound in Silence produce nice releases. Like the Loom label and early Gizeh releases, they disprove the notion that the CD format is impersonal, no more than mass-produced plastic. The latest offering from Death-Static, released as a run of 200 handmade, hand-stamped, and hand-numbered copies is exemplary. It’s more than just a CD. It’s art, and an artefact, and one worthy of the music it houses.

Death-Static is the solo project of Gareth S. Brown, who has no small catalogue of output to his credit, having previously released music as a member of the bands Hood, The Declining Winter and Memory Drawings, and solo under his real name and various aliases. We learn that Red Fire In The Open, his second full-length album, ‘is more drone-based than his last year’s debut Time Is Ignorance and consists of three tracks… conceived as a prelude, interlude and main piece, using bellows instruments, organs, cellos and field recordings’.

The prelude takes the form of the fourteen-minute ‘Blackhorse Infirmary’ and it starts out as a quavering analogue drone which stutters and stalls in between undulations. It’s the kind of warm tone that’s eerily close to the human voice. Organs and bellows are uncannily breath, and the polyphonic exhalation which defines this piece is uncanny and somewhat discomfiting. It swells like a chorus of voices humming, wordless, all around you, as trilling synth drones and elongated scrapes ripple, with feedback occasionally rising up through the slow, dense drift. The final minutes are a rustling, rupturing cacophony of churching chaos and discord. Although not entirely unpleasant, it is challenging, and feels like being assailed by a storm.

In context, the interlude, in the form of ‘The Last Days of Light’ is welcome. It’s a piano-led moment of reflection. Quiet, calm, with a hint of melancholy, it’s soothing, and extremely emotive. I feel a certain sadness. Not in having been manipulated to sadness, but because there is simply something about it. Life is sad. The world is sad.

The title track, ‘Red Fire In The Open’ is the main event – a composition which stretches beyond thirty-four minutes in an exercise in patience. It’s pitched as being ‘like a guided meditation, using bellows instruments, organs, cellos, and field recordings to move the listener from the grimy, urban trudge of a major metropolitan train station to a woodland dawn chorus – and at the same time towards a sense of possibility and hope.’ It very much marks a shift in tone, but at the same time expands on the gentle drone forms of the previous pieces.

Like cheese, or for some, bacon, birdsong always makes everything better. I used to march into town to get a bus to the office on the city’s outskirts on the opposite side from where I live under the power of the MP3. Since lockdown, I’ve sought silence and felt the need to keep my ears open, and to venture into nature as much as possible. This has been a huge life change in many ways. I actually appreciate the sound of the breeze, the ripples of air though the leaves of trees, now, not because I’ve turned into some massive hippy, but because I crave the sounds of life, and feel I need that connection. The nature on my doorstep has become far more meaningful to me than any David Attenborough documentary. Whales are cool, but so are bees and birds and green spaces closer to home. We live in the most horribly overstimulated of worlds. We’re far beyond the postmodern blizzard Lyotard and Jameson wrote of, in that we’re in a place where we’ve devolved, concentration spans have been diminished to mere seconds and most people use AI to do their thinking for them. We’re so fucked, in so many ways, and on so many levels. But Red Fire In The Open reminds us that there is an alternative, and that there is more. It reminds us that it’s still possible to step outside, and to open your eyes and open your ears, and open your lungs. Please, do, while you still can.

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