Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

loscil – Lake Fire

Posted: 5 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Kranky – 2nd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Landscapes, in all their forms, have always been significant in the inspiration for loscil works. Scott Morgan is an artist who seems sensitive to his surroundings, and also responsive to them when it comes to the creative process.

This is true of many artists, of course, and any artist who isn’t in some way influenced by their surroundings and the things which happen around them are… largely incomprehensible to me on a personal level. It simply seems unnatural to create art in a void, detached from experience. I’m not advocating that all art should be grounded in the here and now, or even in reality, but even the most imaginative of scenarios require an element of grounding in order to be credible. The most wildly-imagined sci-fi and fantasy only work when there’s a demonstration of an understanding of human character, or how dialogue works, and so on.

The misty, murky shadings of the cover are replicated in sonic form on ‘Arrhythmia’, the first of the album’s nine compositions. Where are indecipherable whispers eddying behind the piano notes, which gradually blur into a watercolour wash, and a slow pulsing tide slowly rises, only to fall and resurface and fall again.

Interweaving layers create an aural latticework on ‘Bell Flame’, the different tempos of the rippling waves merge together effortlessly to create a shimmering, ever-shifting fabric that’s soft, almost translucent. These supple, subtle ambient works are far from abstract, although their forms are vague to distinguish, and single release ‘Candling’, it so proves, is exemplary of the album’s finely-balanced layerings and contrasts.

With ‘Sparks’ preceding ‘Ash Clouds’, one might be tempted to perceive some form of narrative, or at least a linearity in their pairing: the two six-minute pieces drift invisibly from one to the next, although ‘Ash Clouds’ is heavier, darker, an elongated drone providing one of the album’s moodiest, most oppressive pieces. ‘Flutter’ is appropriately titles, and warps and bends in a somewhat disorientating, disconcerting fashion, creating an effect not dissimilar from the room-spin of inebriation, while the title track concludes the album with a lot of very little, as long, low droning notes hang heavy. It’s pure desolation, and yet… there is something which rises upwards other than smoke and flame – a gasping breath and the sound of a thousand souls transported in vapour.

There are beats on this album, but they’re almost subliminal, a heartbeat underneath the mix, and provide a sense of orientation like fence posts visible through fog or low cloud on a barren moor. More often than not, though, the rhythms come from the interactions between the different elements as they meet and then separate once again. The abstract nature of the work somehow compels the listener to not only fill the blank spaces with their own sensory and emotional input, but also to visualise in the mind’s eye what they may look like. As such, Lake Fire, while largely tranquil, sedate, and even soothing in parts, is stimulating, and to more than just the ears.

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Fawn Spots – Ersatz

Posted: 2 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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4th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I miss Fawn Spots. I didn’t especially like them at first – musically, they were lo-fi, energetic, and thrilling, but they came across as bratty, even a shade twatty, at times, notably in my recollection as coming across as somewhat ‘off’ and disparaging when supporting The Twilight Sad at The Duchess in York. I miss The Duchess, too. I suppose, like Fawn Spots at the time, it had its faults: the pillars weren’t great for views at times and the sound was often a bit crap, but it brought some top-notch touring bands to York, with The Fall, and The Psychedelic Furs’ DV8 performance being clear standouts.

But I came to feel an affection for Fawn Spots: they evolved, in every respect – from a raw, messy two-piece cranking out some frantic racket, to a proper band, with some proper songs – although not too polished. They never got so slick as to lose their edge. It’s easy to take bands who are always out on the local circuit for granted, and it’s only when they move on – whether it’s because they call it a day, or move on beyond the local scene – that their significance on a personal level becomes apparent. You go from seeing them every other week either headlining or supporting a bigger-name touring band and it all being so much ‘yeah, whatever, cool, but this is the sixth time this year, and it’s only May’ to suddenly, they’re absent.

After a clutch of indie and self-released EPs and bits, and some touring, and with the release of their critically-lauded debut LP From Safer Place in 2015 on Critical Heights, which received coverage from Record Collector and Louder than War Fawn Spots seemed to be on the brink of something. And then… they vanished, and we forgot about them because we were busy with our lives and all the other bands we were listening to, and all the rest.

This posthumously-released album has been lurking in the vaults for some time. As they write – and at the same time highlighting their wildly eclectic influences – ‘A few months after recording this album the band ceased to exist… The product of a period of obsession with Arab Strap, Angels of Light, Lungfish and the song ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ by Crowded House.’

I love Angels of Light, but don’t love nostalgia: however, while cooking the other day, I flipped to the 80s music day on the Smithsonian channel, and heard ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ – a song I own on 7” – for the first time in ages, and was reminded just how good it is. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind listening to the fuzzing, buzzing guitar blast of Ersatz.

‘Fortunes’ is a bit Fugazi, a bit Girls Against Boys, gritty, driving, sturdy, while ‘Blossoms’ is dynamic, textured in the way Nirvana pushed soft and chiming vs max overdrive.

The album has energy, that’s for sure. It also has some dense riffs and some keen melodies. Some are keener than others, it’s true, and the hollering ‘Daylight Runner’ feels a bit emo with a dash of mathiness. The same could be said of ‘Strangers’ but the early Dinosaur Jr vibe rescues it., while ‘Faint House’ has the post-punk-with-a-commercial-edge feel of White Lies. Quite liking White Lies, and bearing in mind the timing and context, I have no issues with this, but a decade on, I can comprehend why some may be rather less enthused.

Listening to these songs now, I feel I’d have appreciated them more contemporaneously. Buzz does count for something, it seems, as does being in the moment. If they’d sustained their momentum, if they’d remained current… things would likely have been very different. And perhaps some sounds do date, until nostalgia resurrects them. What goes around comes around, but sometimes it takes time.

Winding the clock back, the songs on Ersatz are well-realised, and played with real energy. But this an album that is, essentially, of its time. It’s not so much that its dated, as that is just feels… not entirely confluent with the zeitgeist of 2025, not entirely gripping in the sense that you need to check your back yard to feel safe.

Had it been released in 2015, and given the right press push and media uptake – because. let’s be honest, leading horses to water is only part of the equation when it comes to getting new bands heard – Ersatz could have propelled Fawn Spots to the next level – not because it was their best work, but their most accessible, and their most zeitgeisty work. And it has hooks: the post-punky ‘No Source’ is bold and guitary, but catchy, too.

Ersatz is now a historical document. It feels anachronistic, and doesn’t really sit anywhere in 2025. But it reminds us not only of how things were, but what could have been… and how we miss Fawn Spots.

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Gintas K – Atmosfera

Posted: 2 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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9th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

With his latest offering, Gintas K promises a work of ‘ambience, electroacoustical micromelodies and noise played and record live without overdub.’ That he is so relentlessly active is perhaps one of the reasons its possible for him to create such wild improvised works on a first-take basis – which in turns means it’s possible to crank out new releases at such a staggering rate.

The first of the seven sequentially-numbered pieces is eleven and a half minutes in duration, and begins as a barely audible drip, a tiny trickling sound at the fringe of perception. Instantly I find myself on edge: it’s a sound I’ve become increasingly and acutely aware of in recent days, as the shower in my bathroom – only an internal stud wall away from my office where I listen and write – has progressed from a slow and infrequent drip to a full, continuous dribble, a nagging, torturous sound which has led me to place the shower head in the bath in order to mute it. There’s something of a liquid, and sometimes foamy, frothy sound to many of Gintas’ works, and Atmosphera begins with all the promise of being another one of these. And, indeed, as the drip and trickle increases in rate to become a gurgling stream, there is a sense of growing volume – in terms of liquid, rather than sonically. But a sparse piano rings out over the babbling stream, and as the piece progresses, creaks and bleeps and bumps and strange warps in the very fabric of time and space disrupt the flow. And yet, as the abstract interruptions and distractions become increasingly frequent and ever-more alien, sometimes extending to washes of fizzing distortion, and even fill-on frenzies of chaotic noise, echoing drips and splashes, like water falling from above into the lake at the bottom of a heigh-vaulted cavern, and reverberating piano notes remain at the core of this bewildering sonic collage.

There is a certain sense of evolution as the pieces run into one another: by Atmosphera #3, there is a sense of ambience blended with dissonance, and slow pulsations merge with the brooding and often melancholic piano lines, and these elements certainly contrast with the organic yet equally turbulent, almost artificial grunts and gurgles. Atmosphera #5 is the sound of lasers set to stun, with robotic squawks and a relentless whistle of feedback that hits right at the tinnitus pitch and congeal into concoction of wrongness, like a stew with a bunch of ingredients that should never be combined.

The album winds down gradually, sparse piano notes and a soft trickling liquid flow slowly descending, falling, and fading away…

Something about listening to Atmosfera is like watching a large fish tank. Just as the fish flit blithely and without any attention to the world beyond their own, darting here and there without any predictable linear path, so Atmosfera doesn’t follow a linear flow – and is all the better for it.

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Demonic Death Judge – Absolutely Launched

Posted: 1 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Suicide Records – 30th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Blammo! With Absolutely Launched, Demonic Death Judge slam straight in with the juggernaut riffage: ‘90s Violence’ is full-throttle, in-yer-face, no pissing about, thick guitars welded to a ball-busting rhythm section where the drums absolutely pound and the bass is lurking darkly, filling out that low-end with a heavy throb, while the vocals are a full-throated roar. Drawing together the extravagance of 70s heavy rock and the raging rawness of grunge, Demonic Death Judge land firmly in the territory of 00s racketmongering guitar slingers like Pulled Apart By Horses.

The six-minute ‘You’ve Got Red on You’ chugs and lurches along with all the grain and heft and would be just another heavy stoner cut taking its cues from Les Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were it not for the ravaged, gargling gasolene vocal, which is raw, incendiary. And on Absolutely Launched, they just keep on blasting out the meatiest, most monster riffs with no let-up. Any slower, less-up-front segments, such as the mid-sections of ‘You’ve Got Red on You’ and ‘Goner’, the latter of which chimes nicely, are simply brief breathers where they reload and come back, all guns blazing, twice as hard. They do chill things out on the mellow blues of ‘I Realise That… Now’, and it presents a switch in the emotional tone, too, hinting at a more reflective, contemplative side to the band which stands in contrast to the rest of the album, which is anything but reflective or contemplative, and instead rages all the way, breathing fire with every chord struck – and those chords are struck hard and at maximum volume.

Absolutely Launched is a magnificent exercise in spectacular excess, and it’s truly glorious. If you’re going to go big and hefty, and utterly ballistic, there can be no half-measures. Everything is overloading, cranked up to eleven. There aren’t many solos, instead favouring the monster riff as the dominant feature, but when the solos land, they’re epic, and wild. ‘Dead Dogs’ simply tears. ‘Spliffhanger’ roars in a raw-throated forest fire of a relentless rager, while the seven-minute title track which wraps the album is monumental in its punishment.

The easy blues rock touches which occasionally grace the compositions hint at accessibility and a more overt musicality, but more than anything, Absolutely Launched is all the revs, foot to the floor riffery, and it’s a behemoth of an album.

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World Sanguine Report – Songs From The Harbour

Posted: 29 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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God Unknown Records – 25th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A new album by World Sanguine Report is always something to pique the interest. The jazz-tinged avant-rock collective centred around Andrew Plummer, with longtime collaborators Matthew Bourne, Ruth Goller, and Will Glaser, has a knack of producing music that Does Something Different. In a world of mass-produced, off-the-shelf sameness, were even every ‘independent’ or self-professed ‘boutique’ business of any persuasion is simply a carbon copy of all the rest in their striving for Instagram perfection, this is welcome. Very welcome – even in their less accessible moments. Because all this endless sameness is brainrot.

A few years ago now, people started setting up independent burger places as a rebellion against the dominance of McDonalds, etc. But now there’s a hipster place doing smash burgers every few hundred yards, just as there’s an indie coffee place on every corner, and that’s great, but it’s total overkill. How much fucking coffee do we need?

In the early 00s, there was an oversaturation of post-rock. I can’t recall a time when we’ve ever been drowning in jazz-infused avant-rock, and while there are acts which stand by way of comparison when exploring their work, World Sanguine Report stand apart in a very open and sparsely-populated field. And for Songs From The Harbour, they’ve decided they need to do things a bit differently – just in case there was a risk of things getting a bit predictable.

They consider Songs From The Harbour ‘The most direct WSR album to date’. Plummer goes on to recall how ‘We auspiciously recorded the majority of the album aboard the Lightship 95 Studios on the Thames. The ship moved us, the ship moved with us. The Thames lapped at the boat, its tides washing in the Lightship’s echo chamber, housed in the hull of the ship, made its way into the recordings.’

London has a way of infiltrating the psyche and the creative mind of artists, in a way few other places do, other than perhaps New York. I digress. As usual.

‘Lay Down With Me’ makes for an interesting intro track: Less than two minutes log, it’s a low, slow, droner which leaves you pondering ‘where will this go from here?’ The answer is that will go deep, delving down and exploring difficult terrain. ‘She Is All’ is huge in its mere four minutes, with Plummer’s brooding baritone vocals resonating out over the space as reverb covers a crushing embrace. ‘Blue Skin’ finds Plummer brooding and musing, and sitting somewhere between late Leonard Cohen and Jim Morrison, only with a certain feel of despairing.

The same gloom hangs on the remainder of the album, with ‘Starboard’ not only clinging to the nautical theme of the album’s title, but sounding like a slightly inebriated sea funeral. ‘No Kids’ brings a slow, weary-sounding blues feel – and by weary, I mean fagged out, fatigued, it’s a knackered-sounding groan of a song, while the last song, the seven-minute ‘The Catching of the Bull’ rings out in a fuzzy-edged drift of melancholy with an almost sing-song back and forth with the dual vocals. It’s pretty and sad in equal measure, and leads the album out on an extended sonic cascade, like a slow incoming tide.

Songs From The Harbour is more bluesy and folky than jazz, and it’s also slow and weighty in its lugubrious mood. There’s a solidity to it, a coherence, and an assurance which radiates from its carefully-woven tapestry.

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Flesh Eating Foundation – Before the Skeletal Dance Of Our Festering Jesters

Posted: 27 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 25th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Limited to 30 cassette copies worldwide, which sold out in advance of the release date, anyone wanting this now will have to satisfy themselves with a stream or download. Tapes really have become cult cool again of late. Raised on vinyl, the cassette was my format of choice in the mid- to late-eighties, until I got a CD player for Christmas in 1991, although I continued to buy vinyl through the 90s because an LP cost about £8 whereas a CD cost around £12. I loved tapes, and I especially loved being able to copy stuff to tape, and do it so cheaply. It was a long time before the advent of the technology to rip and burn CDs.

But for a time, I would buy albums on tape, often in Woolworths or WH Smiths and sometimes from Britannia Music when my parents had made enough purchases to earn a free album – because a tape was about eight quid and you could stuff it in your Walkman and sometimes, perhaps, get it played in the car when going on holiday. Although I recall purchasing Children by The Mission in 1988 on the same trip my parents took me to buy a snake, and my mother moaned and asked if we could have ‘the nice man’ back on (meaning the Bruce Springsteen album I’d been listening to before discovering The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission.

So, the status of the cassette release has certainly changed – again, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s only a matter of time before the cassette single makes a comeback.

Before the Skeletal Dance Of Our Festering Jesters is… bassy. And with good reason for certain. As the Bandcamp blurbage details, ‘Blind Johnny Smoke was born severely deaf in both ears, and started to lose his vision as a teenager with only a few degrees of central vision remaining and still decreasing. Then at the end of 2023 he experienced a sudden loss of his remaining hearing on his left side leaving him profoundly deaf. This posed huge questions for him, what life will be like going forward, how this would change how he felt about the nefarious shit going on in the world around him, and whether he was still equipped to be able to express himself through music. With the aid of The Juddaman, the answer lies within the tapestry of Before the Dance of our Festering Jesters.

Musically, the album is almost obscenely focused on bass frequencies, which coincidentally are the only sounds Blind Johnny can detect without hearing aids. There is a dub sensibility that the band have always dabbled with, but here it weighs in heavily alongside trademark percussive programming and unmusical cut up noise. The accompanying words are as angry as ever and, after a few years of Blind Johnny performing on the spoken word circuit, the lyrics have depth and trickery sitting alongside blunt vitriol.’

‘Sensory Denudation’ presents a groaning mass of distortion, and the spoken word vocals offer up comparisons to Pound Land and Sleaford Mods, and nothing about this is easy on the ear as ambience and trudging industrial noise grind away. It’s the Mods and Benefits who come to mind during the stark electronic grind of ‘Safety First’ and ‘Words Without Echo’, which also introduces a Public Image kind of slant, and Before the Skeletal Dance Of Our Festering Jesters brings together post punk and ranty rap with hip-hop and industrial and spoken word. It’s hard going if you’re wanting tunes, but ‘Ghouls’ is perfectly representative of the low-tempo, thudding noise approach the band have taken to the creation of Skeletal Dance.

‘This is All I Hear Now’ is pure rant, raw and aggressive, the ‘blah, blah, blah’ refrain snarled over a thick, woozy bass, before the six-minute ‘Party On’ turns its focus on the UK government’s COVID lockdown ‘partygate’ shenanigans and dubious contracts for PPE as dense, industrial percussion builds, and I’m reminded of Test Dept’s The Unacceptable Face of Freedom. It’s pretty potent stuff.

Running beyond seven minutes, ‘Crooked’ is the album’s centrepiece, a murky postindindustrial wasteland of a soundscape dense in distortion, crashing beats trudging hard through an unusually melodic chorus which provides the album’s lightest moment at the point it was least expected. Sorry for the spoiler there. It’s back to seething and sparse, throbbing techno bass and thumping beats on ‘Behind Closed Doors’, a bleak slice of dark dance that wouldn’t have been entirely out of place on a Wax Trax! release in the late 80s or early 90s.

‘Laughter’ offers a sliver of illumination in this overall dark offering, although it’s very much relative and it’s a cold, mirthless cackle than an uproarious belly-shaker: a piano-led piece of Numanesque electropop, it’s stark but structured.

Everything builds perfectly for the monster finale, the twelve-minute ‘Satellites, a low, rippling drone crawling and billowing from the speakers in the most lugubrious and ominous fashion. A chorus of voices rises up, dissonant but united, before fading out in a waft of reverb, to be replaced by slow-smouldering synths and a sparse but insistent beat that strolls its way to an almost tranquil horizon.

Before the Skeletal Dance Of Our Festering Jesters covers a lot of ground, and while much of it is pretty desolate, it is not an album entirely bereft of hope.

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staraya derevnya – Garden window escape

Posted: 23 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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2nd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

British-Israeli krautfolk collective staraya derevnya are the epitome of obscure and underground, and it’s precisely for releases like Garden window escape that Aural Aggravation exists. Obscure and underground are not criticisms or judgements here: the world of music is broad and exciting because it affords room for all forms of expression. I’m not going to touch on politics or anything else that may impinge on this as an exploration of a creative work, and suffice it to say that I in no way consider any government to be representative of all of the people, especially not the artists, the creatives. staraya derevnya are the kind of artists who exist not only beyond politics, but simply beyond, and Garden window escape is one of those albums which isn’t only bold in its experimental, but

Precisely what ‘Tight-lipped thief’, the album’s first track expresses, is unclear to me. While containing traditional folk elements, the experimental edge is strong, and it twitters and tweaks, like a squeaky toy for a dog or a baby, over an array of clattering percussion, and the cumulative outcome is a wild, murky, jazzy cacophony, whereby the muttered vocals are largely submerged beneath a discordant tumult.

This isn’t only discordant, but it’s also pretty dark: while ‘What I keep in my closet’ brings a sandpapery scrape and a monotonous vocal yelp, and the effect is cumulative, like sandpaper applied to the skin slowly but steadily, becoming increasingly sore over time, before the woozy, warping, dissonant drone of the twelve-minute ‘Half-deceased uncle’ offers up new levels of discomfiture. It’s a gloopy Krauty swell and surge, combining elements of Suicide and Throbbing Gristle with the electronic pulsations of Chris and Cosey’s Trance, along with some low and heavy drone and tooting horns which evoke the spirit of Joujouka, but with a sci-fi swirl a creeping uneasiness and a tension which pulls away as the chords, the limbs, and ultimately the senses. Noises peel and lurch over a loping rhythm which plugs and plods away relentlessly for quite some minutes. There’s an acoustic guitar strumming away amidst the pings and pows and muffled vocal mutterings which melt together in this lo-fi sonic froth which occasionally calls to mind the breathy discordant tension of Xiu Xiu.

‘Cork flight operation’ grumbles and rumbles on, and on, and constructed around a sparse guitar, it’s faintly evocative of later Earth, but instead of rolling beats, there’s an insistent crunching thud like slow-marching feet and there’s rippling synths and slow drones backing the almost melody of the vocals.

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Amidst squealing circuitry and melting synths, ‘Onwards, through the garden window’ emerges, sparse and gloomy. The hushed vocal, thick with a syrupy distortion, is menacing, the instrumentation borders on jazz but with an industrial / dark ambient edge, which is unsettling, uncomfortable, and this is how Garden window escape slowly grows its unsettling sonic tendrils. There is nothing easy or accessible about it, but it is strangely compelling.

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RuinsZu – Jazzisdead

Posted: 21 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Subsound Records – 18th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Twenty-eight years and fourteen albums into their career, Zu continue to confound, and to defy comfortable categorisation. Jazzisdead, their first release in six years, is their third live album. It’s most certainly not, however, a set comprising live renditions of greatest hits and fan favourites, and instead being a collaboration between Zu bassist Massimo Pupillo and saxophonist Luca T. Mai, with drummer Yoshida Tatsuya, founder of the Japanese band Ruins – and as such, the moniker follows in the vein of Zu93 (Zu with David Tibet of Current 93). The result, then, is a crazed hybrid of punk, sludge metal and jazz driven by some frenetic full-kit drumming.

‘Gravestone’ kicks it off with a thunderous riff and it’s a track that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Melvins album, while the frenzied ‘Speedball’ comes on like The Dead Kennedys but with some wild falsetto vocals and a blustering blast of sax. How is this even possible?

There are some more sedate passages, but they seemingly exist as tricks to convince you that they’re capable of delivering something more conventional: the introduction to ‘Asmodeo’ is gentle, atmospheric, and it’s almost soothing – but halfway through, it’s explodes in a riot of honks and parps, drums flying in all directions, and each composition slalems hither and thither: at times they’re tightly together, at others , the three instruments play across one another at wildly divergent angles, as if playing three completely different tunes – and yet somehow there’s a groove happening.

‘La Grande Madre Delle Bestie’ features some eye-popping machine-gun snare work before slithering to a swampy crawl, and the thing about Jazzisdead is that it’s simply impossible to second-guess what’s going to happen next. Repeat listens don’t render the work more familiar, but instead reveal entirely different albums. Elsewhere, ‘Hyderomastgroningen’ is a lumbering beast that brings a grungy swagger that brings hints of the Jesus Lizard. However, it’s perhaps Melt Banana who stand as the closes comparison to this in their crazed and irreverent approach to music-making, and this is nowhere more apparent than on ‘Memories Of Zworrisdeh’, the album’s longest track with a running time of five minutes, and which packs in an album’s worth of ideas into that time. ‘Muro Torto’ is another track of two halves, with long, groaning drones giving way to an almost ska-like bouncing thumpalong. Predictable, this is not.

There are several pieces which are but fragments, intersecting passages a minute or two in duration, and these only add to the experience of an album so packed with changes in tempo and key that it’s most discombobulating. It’s dizzying, jaw-dropping, impossible to keep up with, and the interplay between the players is remarkable. Ultimately, Jazzisdead makes for a hell of a listen – although you might need to lie down for a bit afterwards.

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Desiccated Corpse – Desiccated Corpse

Posted: 19 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 4th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This latest release on Swedish microlabel devoted to the most underground of underground music, Dret Skivor, may be form an act we’ve not heard of before, but something about it has all the hallmarks of the eternally prolific Dave Procter all over it. The man behind Legion of Swine (noisy) and Fibonacci Drone Organ (droney) and myriad other projects and collaborations – some occasional, some one-off – has a distinctive North of England drollness and a penchant for pissing about making noise of all shades, after all.

Released on CD in a hand-painted edition of just two, the notes on the Bandcamp page for the release are typically minimal: ‘Is it dungeon synth? Is it just spooky music? Is there torture afoot?’ I would say I will be the judge of that, but dungeon synth is a genre I’m yet to fully get to grips with, although it does for all the world seem as if it’s a genre distinction that’s come to be applied to spooky music, and seems to have grown in both popularity and usage comparatively recently, despite its roots going back rather further.

The cover art doesn’t give much – anything away, and in fact, I might have hoped for something more… graphic. But perhaps less is more here. However, the titles of the two tracks –‘the shithouses’ shithouse’ and ‘the festering flesh of the neoliberal’ are classic Procter and could as easily be titles for poems by Dale Prudent, another of his alter-egos.

The first begins with a swelling thrum of what sounds like a chorus of voices, possibly some monastic indentation, layered and looped and multitracked to create a torturous cacophony. For the first twenty, thirty, forty seconds, you wait for a change to come, for something to happen. After a minute that expectation is diminishing, and by the three-minute mark it’s impossible to be certain if there really are keyboard stabs swirling in the mix in the midst of it all, or if your ears and mind are deceiving you and you’re losing the plot. For some reason, I’m reminded of the Paris catacombs – not because it’s actually creepy, but because, just as seeing rows and rows of bones stacked up for quite literally miles becomes both overwhelming and desensitising after a time, so hearing the same sound bubbling away for ten minutes is pretty much guaranteed to fuck with your head. Near the eight-minute mark, there are most definitely additional layers of buzzing drone and there are some tonal slips and slows, like listening to a tape that’s become stretched or is slipping on its spool, but by this time your brain’s already half-melted, and I find myself contemplating the fact that while visiting the catacombs on a sixth-form art trip, one of my fellow students accepted the challenge to lick a skull for eight Francs – which was about a quid at the time. I was less appalled by the fact it was a human skull than the fact the bones looked dusty and mossy, and had probably been touched by even more unwashed hands than the handle of the gents lavs at a busy gig venue.

And so we arrive at the twenty-two-minute ‘the festering flesh of the neoliberal’. It begins with a distant clattering percussion – like someone bashing a car bonnet with a broken fence post heard from a quarter of a mile away, but with a gauze of reverb, as if echoing from the other side of a valley – or, put another way, like listening to early Test Dept through your neighbour’s wall – while a pulsing, pulsating electronic beat, like a palpating heartbeat, thuds erratically beneath it. And that’s pretty much it. But there are leaps and lurches in volume, and the cumulative effect of this monotonous loop is brain-bending. There are gradual shifts, and seemingly from nowhere rises a will of croaks and groans which grow in intensity, and it may well be an auditory confusion, but regardless, the experience is unsettling. Twenty-two minutes is a long time to listen to a continuous rumbling babble that sounds like droning ululations and a barrage of didgeridoos all sustaining a note, simultaneously, for all time.

Is it dungeon synth? Probably not. Is it spooky? Not really. It is torturous? Without doubt. This is a tough listen, with dark babbling repetitions rendered more challenging by the cruelly long track durations. The torture afoot is right here.

AA

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RAMM – Bound To Never Rest

Posted: 18 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Eiga – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Bound To Never Rest follows 2022’s The Fall of Europe and for this, their second release as RAMM (formerly know as Il Radioamatore), core member Valerio Camporini F. and Roberta D’Angelohe are joined by Filippo De Laura who brings percussion and cello, and Caroline Enghoff, who provides voice and lyrics on ‘Hanging Rock’

Here, they promise to takes us ‘to a very contemporary feeling scape – of being constantly on the verge of seeing your world collapse – but it does so through very a unfamiliar sonic landscape, so different that we struggle to put a label on it… The core of this work is to represent this ‘permanent state of flux’, a paradoxical condition we’re all experiencing now, when being unsettled is the constant in our lives.’

They go on to explain that ‘To achieve this purpose RAMM started with a scribbled set of compositional rules, with the idea of building a living organism, in constant evolution, some rules were abandoned along the way, some were retained.What comes through at the end is the sensation of being swept away by meandering, random, river. Trying to hold on to something, only to have to adjust to a new setting. It’s a compass with its needle forever trying to find its north.’

This, it seems, is like life itself. Even periods of apparent monotony, where it seems that life has been consumed by the treadmill of working, eating, and sleeping, and running just to stay still, the likelihood is that it’s your ability to see beyond the blinkers that’s been stolen rather than it being the case that there’s nothing else happening. In fact, the world about us is an eternal maelstrom. However, the last few years have witnessed the turbulence increase to a roar that’s beyond deafening, and it’s little wonder that there’s a mental health crisis assailing western society, and people are immersing themselves in more or less anything mindless in order to avoid news.

The title ‘Disturbed Tea Time’ somehow captures the way we often crave normality and routine in our lives as a means of having a sense of grounding, a sense of control over our lives. But when those familiar routines are disturbed, it can often feel catastrophic. And the more precariously balanced our safety is, the harder it becomes to deal with those disruptions calmly and objectively. Many of us experienced the destabilising effect of a rapidly-changing situation and contradictory guidance and (mis)information during the pandemic, and the ’shock and awe’ strategy being employed by the Trump administration right now is a perfect – and terrifying – example. People become more fragile, more sensitive, more susceptible, more fearful and less able to cope even with small changes when the entire world around them ceases to provide the comfort of familiarity. Sonically, this first track it’s a deft, almost soothing, minimal electronic composition at first, before doomy, overloading guitars rupture the tranquillity. And so it continues, smooth, airy vistas of serenity float in an easy, linear fashion, unexpectedly dashed and smashed by roiling distortion. The metaphor may be fairly straightforward in terms of concept, but it’s executed in such a way that when the blasts of noise to explode, you feel the tension through your whole body.

‘Permanent State Of Flux’ washes in on delicate strings, subsequently joined by piano, and a persistent pulsation, and as the piece progresses, the layers, textures – and moments of dissonance – build, while ‘Good Morning Ansa’ takes the form of a more darkwave synth piece with a flickering beat in the background. But this, too, changes midway through, with both the instrumentation and mood making a shift.

The only piece with lyrics and vocals, ‘Hanging Rock’ is tense, dark, and discordant. But none of the works are any one thing for their duration, and in this way, the structure of not only the individual pieces and the album as a whole come to represent the overarching theme.

There is a perfect restlessness about this album, and while for the most part volume, harsher textures, and discord are used only sparingly, rendering it a comparatively subtle work, the fact that any emerging flows are swiftly disrupted make it something that holds the focus and keeps the listener alert and just that bit on edge for its duration.

AA

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