Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Death by Love – 444

Posted: 1 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Distortion Productions – 20 February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Life is full of surprises: Peter Guellard’s band, Dichro, looked to be on the brink of a breakthrough, when, out of the blue, singer Charmaine unexpectedly announced her departure.

As Peter recounts, ‘Around the same time, I was remixing a track called ‘Hide’ for the Polish electronica band NUN Electro. That remix pulled me into the deepest, darkest corners of my imagination, and it sparked something unexpected. Inga Habiba, the band’s incredible vocalist, reached out to collaborate further on her solo project, CallMe. One thing led to another, and soon we were dreaming up the idea of starting a new band together. It felt only natural for us to vibe within the goth, industrial, darkwave, and trip-hop realm’.

Fast forward not all that far and here we are, arriving at the release of Death By Love’s debut album – a truly international collaboration, facilitated by the power of the Internet between Poland and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Two of their three previous singles – debut ‘Sellenno’, and follow-up ‘Strong Inside’ (both released in January 2025) feature here, and it’s that debut which opens the album with drive and energy, immediately grabbing the attention with its driving beat and technoindustrial / goth crossover vibes. It sets the tone and the level for the album, which is bold on beats and big on darkness.

‘I Don’t’ stands out as bringing a tension and sense of drama, as well as some esoteric Eastern flavours, and ‘Strong Inside’ is also tinged with Eastern influences, hints of The Cure circa The Top and The Head on the Door, melded with the driving electronic throb of, but KMFDM, but with a strong focus on vocal melody. Elsewhere, ‘Lost and Found’ goes large with an epic, cinematic sound that would comfortably fill a large venue, and the slow, brooding, string-laced ‘symphonic mix’ of ‘Temros’ – the original mix of which is yet to surface – stirs the same primal power as Wardruna. It’s potent, powerful stuff.

For its throbbing bass and more laid-back beats, ‘God’ – which sees Guellard step up to taker the mic – is more mellow and casts nods to David Bowie, and ‘Cosmic Power’ showcases a very different aspect of their form, spinning elements of trip-hop and country into a New Age electro cocoon – and without sounding naff – and the eight-minute ‘reprise’ of ‘Sellenno’ which concludes the album is a radical reworking, built around a weighty organ drone and breathy, breathless spoken word offers another unexpected stylistic switch.

AA

And so it is that with 444, Death by Love deliver an album which slots neatly within the bracket of electro with an industrial / goth edge, but at the same time proves they’re no slaves to genre tropes, with some stylistic outliers which alter the listening experience and perception of the band in subtle but significant ways. Already, they’re evolving their own style: 444 is a strong and solid debut, and the directions in which they will develop this will be interesting.

AA

f009f436-999d-4534-ae2d-3e90e4adca41

rsn | BA´AH – coarseness #1

Posted: 28 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 27th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature are on a roll again, with four albums released simultaneously on 27 February. And they could not be more different, stylistically, although one commonality shared between the Neon Crabs album and this is intercontinental collaboration.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘When sonic extremes meet meditative depths, an atmosphere is created that is both demanding and hypnotic. coarseness #1 is the result of a transcontinental collaboration between Malaysian noise tinkerer BA’AH and German ambient/drone artist RSN’.

The album contains four longform compositions, which tend to span between twelve and twenty-three minutes, with the five-and-three quarter minute ‘coarseness #1.3’ being something of an outlier and more of an interlude in the shadow of the other three megalithic pieces.

‘coarseness #1.1’ plunged straight into murky, dark terrain which conjures images of misty swamps, the likes of which were commonplace in horror movies and early 80s sci-fi series, with layers of dry ice covering the ground and shadowy trees looming from a blue-grey hue. Images which come to mind with this kind of dense, dark gloominess call to mind Dr Who for me: my recollections are a shade hazy, but born in 1975, and growing up with Tom Baker era Dr Who and – before the advent of Peter Davison as the Dr, repeats of earlier seasons, where, for me, John Pertwee stood out – some episodes were actually quite tense, even scary. And this is essentially what filters through here: the shifting tones and lurching tectonics are unsettling, queasy. This is thick, dark noise which churns like a cement mixer.

The tracks run together, the transitions subtle, and ‘coarseness #1.2’ is perhaps less abrasive, but nevertheless presents a sixteen-minute wall of buffeting, extraneous noise – thick, nebulous, cloud-like – and also suffocating, stifling, simultaneously tense and soporific. It builds and builds, almost subliminally, to a level of immersion which becomes almost like a straightjacket or a sonic pillow over the face. You can’t move. You can’t breathe.

The promised interlude brings rib-rattling bass and punishing low drones, dense with distortion, worthy of Sunn O))). It makes for a long and harrowing five and a bit minutes.

‘coarseness #1.4’ arrives by stealth, a low, humming drone, to which layers are gradually added, so squawks and trills, some gut-shuddering low frequencies, and over the coursed – or maybe that should be the ‘coarse’ of almost twenty-three minutes, the piece meanders and churns. Elongated trills ring out amidst metallic, grating edges, hints of post-rock and abstraction which head nowhere specific, but at the same time transport the listener on a dreamlike journey. Again, it’s hard to settle into this. It feels like a nuclear detonation in slow-motion, the sound of total annihilation played at half the pace, calling to mind the scenes in Threads when the bomb drops and there is a deafening roar which is also silence.

Bombs are dropping and missiles are striking now – again – as the US and Israel strike Iran, and retaliatory strikes are being made far and wide against countries who are home to US air bases and beyond. coarseness #1 feels like an appropriate soundtrack to this – something which feels like, if not the outbreak of WW3, then a particularly dark period in history. Remember where you are at this moment – and listen to this. This is the soundtrack.

AA

AA

a0273919217_10

Neon Crabs – This Puppy Can See A Frog

Posted: 27 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 27th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a small world, as they say, especially if you live in York. As a city, it has more of a town feel, and round my way to the south of the city, it’s more like a village. It’s rare that I go for one of my daily walks or head to the local shops without seeing at least one person I know to nod or say hello to, and it’s nigh on never that I turn up at a gig where there aren’t people I know – mostly from previous gigs, and it’s a positive thing: there’s a palpable sense of community. So it’s more of a surprise that despite mutual friends, I’ve never encountered Andy Goz, or his band Neon Crabs, a transatlantic collaboration with Matt Nauseous of Dallas, Texas (I’m guessing those aren’t the names on their birth certificates), which has been operating since 2021. They made their debut last year with Make Things Better? on Half-Edge Records, followed by Drop It On Ya on Metal Postcard Records, with the cassette edition of This Puppy Can See A Frog representing their first physical release.

I’m going to guess that the colour scheme of the cover is no accident, a knowing reference to Big Black’s Songs About Fucking – although the material it houses is more in the vein of The Hammer Party.

It’s pitched as a collision between The Stooges, post-punk, and 90s noise rock, and as a fan of all three, I’m sold. The way in which they draw these elements together to conjure a sonic hybrid is inspired: here, we have the mechanoid, piston-pumping drum sound of Big Black paired with the scuzzed-out guitar fuzz of Metal Urbain. Just as The Stooges were punk years before punk was even a concept, and Metal Urbain and offshoot Dr Mix and The Remix (a huge influence on both Steve Albini and The Jesus and Mary Chain), so Neon Crabs launch themselves headlong into that space where acts were feeling their way around forms, styles, and technologies which seem primitive now, but where limitations led to innovations. This Puppy Can See A Frog has a raw energy, an underproduced, analogue feel with jagged guitars and some loose but dynamic playing.

The songs themselves are simple in both structure and chords – the guitars often straying away from chords to create texture rather than melody. The same is often true of the vocals, Matt swerving between semi-spoken word and drawling, occasionally singing but weaving around a tune rather than following it, in a style that’s perfectly suited to the frenzied maelstrom of discord which fizzes all around. ‘White Collar Witch’ is a messy collision between early Pavement and The Fall circa 1983, and is arguably Neon Crabs’ equivalent of ‘The Classical’.

‘Creature Violence’ adds free jazz to a murky mess amidst which Nauseous lives up to his name with what appears to be an extended riff on the ‘your mum’ insult with some scatological references as an added bonus. Or something. Maybe. The Fall comparisons stand on ‘Vicious Debasement’, a snarling, mess of layers spilling every whichway over a throbbing motorik backing – but then again, there’s a bit of the irreverent chaos of Trumans Water happening here, and a whole lot more.

Things seem to get darker, starker, and more desperate and ugly and experimental during the second half the album, dragging in dubby bass which seems to reference Bauhaus and squalling, scratchy guitar work with hints of Gang of Four and Wire abounds.

The simple act of titling a track ‘Lisa Kudrow’ evokes the spirit of 90s noise rock, the likes of Butthole Surfers and Tar and sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get, with added samples.

This Puppy Can See A Frog is a wild assimilation of sources, a rackitacious mess of noise heaped together as an album. It sounds like it could have been recorded in a dingy basement on an 8-track, or even a 4-track, in the space of a week – and is all the better for it, because it possesses an immediacy and energy that’s rare here in 2026.

AA

AA

a3663775174_10

Fågelle – Bränn min jord

Posted: 27 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Self release – 27th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Riv mig’ is so quiet at first you can hear slight shuffles during the introduction, but it builds, first with the vocal intensity, her voice cracking slightly, before the instrumentation explodes. Nothing could be more fitting for a song the title of which translates as ‘Demolish Me’, and the beefy electro groove at the start of the segmented and transitional ‘Before the Moths Get In’ is prefaced by a brief interlude in the form of ‘Skogsskrik 1’ which contains the faintest of ambience and a raw, primal scream. The title’s translation ‘Forest Scream 1’ is self-explanatory, and this seems like an appropriate point to delve into what Bränn min jord is really about.

In a sense, it’s about homecoming, but it’s also so much more. The accompanying notes are worth quoting at this point:

‘The inland of Halland, a patchwork of forests and abandoned mills in southern Sweden, is the backdrop for Fågelle’s most personal album yet… After years in Berlin and Gothenburg, she returned home — not out of nostalgia, but as an act of reclamation. She wanted to reconnect with the soil that shaped her and let something new grow from what had been left behind.

‘Bränn min jord (“Burn my soil”) grew from this process of renewal. Its title references the tradition of burning the ground to spark new life — a metaphor for the personal upheaval and rebuilding at the heart of the album. The music explores the tension of growing up somewhere you know you’ll have to leave, yet which keeps pulling you back. It speaks about identity, memory, and the hidden emotional landscapes of overlooked places.’

Here in England, we used to burn stubble in fields of corn and when after harvest. The practice was ended a good time ago for environmental reasons – the smoke and emissions were grim – and while the practice of heather burning on moorland continues, it’s been subject to significant reduction of late. We burn less soil, but still we do, and for the precise purpose of clearance and renewal. And there is much to be said for the power of the purge, the clearing of dead wood – and not just in the physical landscape.

Returning to a place can be difficult, too; reconciling the changes which have taken place, the difference between the past and the present. All of this feeds into the wide-ranging forms of this detailed, crafted album. ‘Det blev våra liv’ is unexpectedly poppy and light, but rather than feeling at odds with the main body of work, it feels like part of the natural flow of a work which is already rooted in nature.

The album’s form is shaped by brief interludes, with samples and fragmentary segments sitting between the ‘proper’ songs, and rather than interrupt the flow, they add to the depth of this exploratory work.

Title track ‘Bränn min jord’ is nothing short of epic: it’s poppy, but also operatic, cinematic, and essentially encapsulates the while of the album’s form in four dramatic minutes, and ‘Satans jävla fan’ is powerful and dense, worthy of comparison to Big | Brave, with whom Fågelle toured in 2022.

Bränn min jord is not an album which conforms easily to any specific genre. It’s expensive epic. It’s post-rock, but its more, so much more. But genre definitions are only so helpful anyway: what matter is that Bränn min jord is a great album, rich in emotional resonance and heavy atmosphere.

AA

AA

a0512399592_10

Sicker Man – Spökenkieker

Posted: 23 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

blankrecords – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

For context, a definition: Spökenkieker: soothsayer / a person who has second sight and is believed to have the ability to know and tell what will happen in the future. And we also learn that ‘The local mythological figure of the Spökenkieker is situated in the mystical depths of the Teutoburg Forest and serves both as name giver and patron saint for this journey to the initial starting point.

Arguably, anyone who has invested any significant time in studying the past can predict the future. History has a habit of repeating itself, and this has perhaps never been more apparent than now. Consider the following:

In 1933 Mussolini closed the national opera to “renovate” it.

In 1934, Hitler closed the national opera house to “renovate” it.

In 1935, Portuguese dictator Salazar closed the national opera house to “renovate” it.

Orwell’s 1984 is considered one of the greatest dystopian novels of all time, but 1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year it was written, and as such, penned in a recently post-war world, holds a mirror to the ways in which totalitarian regimes operate. And now, here we are, and it’s not just the US under Trump, but a creeping shift towards totalitarianism and total surveillance. We may not be in World War 3, but the world is very much at war, and what peace we have is hanging on a knife edge. If you’re not scared, you’re simply not paying attention.

Sicker Man’s fifteenth album, Spökenkieker is a mesh of different elements thrown together and mixed, blended, chopped, and pulped together. ‘Stop the Gravy Train’ is a perfect example of the melting pot of post-punk, stuttering drum machines, ambience, rave, and experimental jazz. And that’s just four minutes. And however representative it is, it doesn’t really prepare the listener for so much going on all at once. And it’s no mere wheeze that the album is strewn with spoken word samples culled from the past – the idea is to pull these snippets into the present, and cast the future, too, a layering of sorts whereby the past reverberates, echoes forward through the generations.

‘Jojatsu’ and its reprise, and the three-part ‘Ad Finem’ sequence is built around an orchestral / jazz hybrid that transitions between passages of tranquillity and of tension, while samples flit in and out.

I’m going to hit the pause button here for a moment: I’ve been fairly explicit in my dislike of Public Service Broadcasting over the years, online and in conversation. So why is Spökenkieker great and PSB’s work an abomination? It boils down to the fact that Sicker Man is digging through the archives and responding to both the past and the present in a way which strives to articulate something meaningful. It may not be immediately apparent, but some of the titles offer clues: ‘Greedy People’ and ‘Mean Drift’ for example. In contrast, boil these dark moments in history and present them as some for of nostalgia-infused entertainment, no more than the endless ‘documentaries’ churned out on Channel 5, lean on content and even leaner on analysis.

Spökenkieker engages on another level, and the aforementioned ‘Greedy People’ lands like Melvins gone jazz with a Roland 606 spinning a primitive post-punk beat while muttering samples criss-cross over one another as things take a turn for the experimental / ambient / dark dance vibe – and if that sounds like a wild hybrid, it is. ‘Matchless’ is simply a frenzy of elements which defies categorisation. The fact that it works is barely conceivable. But work, it does, and well.

AA

AA

a0932406359_10

Autistici – Familiarity Unfolded

Posted: 19 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Audiobulb – 7th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, an album packs in so much into a limited space that unpacking it presents itself as a major task – which in turn leads to the question of whether or not the process of unpacking is integral to the appreciation of the work. This is true of much art, beyond music. Is it essential to be familiar with the concept and the story of its creation to appreciate a painting. This is not in any way to devalue or diminish the context, but equally, a work should be able to stand by itself.

Autistici’s biography is in itself a work of abstraction, which tells us little about the artist and more about their vision of art, and cursory attempts to find further detail are scuppered by a swathe of search results about autism and anticapitalism. So to focus on what we do know rather than to vanish down yet another rabbit-hole of research, Familiarity Unfolded follows Familiarity Folded and Familiarity Enfolded to conclude a collaborative trilogy, which on this instalment features Datewithdeath, Jacek Doroszenko, Ümlaut, Distant Fires Burning, and Neuro… No Neuro.

‘2.25 Degrees of Internalisation’, which opens the album is dense and droney to begin with, but soon fragments into something that’s altogether more glitchy and jangly, electronic pulsations creating an ebb and flow of fractured robotics, stutters and echoes. ‘Grusch’s Biologics’, which sees Autistici come together with Datewithdeath is spacious, abstract and ambient in the background, with smooth, sedate bass notes filling out the sound, but with the foreground littered with all kinds of drifting debris, pops and pings. It feels like navigating the tranquillity of zero gravity while swerving space junk – the contrast between the calm emptiness with unpredictable clutter.

‘Scarlar (E-dit) with Distant Fires Burning’ serves up some squelchy analogue synth-driven Krautrock, the likes of which is easy to get lost in, particularly over the course of almost six motorik minutes, before ‘My Modal Realism’, created in collaboration with Jacek Doroszenko ventures into territory which could almost be considered dance… It’s by no means a bomp-bomp-bomp club banger, but with its looped vocal sample and spaced-out synth grooves, it very much incorporates elements of both trance and trip-hop. With Neuro… No Neuro, ‘We Melt Clouds’ is clicky, clatterly, an exercise in abstraction and microtonalism, the sound of beetles tap-dancing alongside bent piano notes and clouds racing past on a buoyant breeze. It’s noting if not imaginative and wide-ranging, and the album’s final piece – the twelve-minute epic that is ‘Subliminal Selves’, with Ümlaut is a microscopic textural exploration, the sonic equivalent of scrutinising cells dividing under a microscope.

The range of electronic experiments on Familiarity Unfolded is admirable – and experiments are the real emphasis here. Done differently, this could have been a far more accessible, commercial album. But this is not what Autistici is about – and so, instead, we get a diverse range of weirdness. Cue applause for art over plays.

AA

a3590824665_10

Smag På Dig Selv – This Is Why We Lost

Posted: 17 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Stunt Records – 6th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this is a conundrum. This Is Why We Lost is the second album by Danish trio Smag På Dig Selv is pitched as a work which ‘shatter[s] the boundaries of electronic music’, and was made with the ambition ‘to create music that can exist within a trance or club-oriented setting, while still carrying a strong melodic and narrative arc’. Only, the band lineup consists of two saxophonists and one drummer, while single cut ‘Vik’s Rawcore’ features vibraphonist Viktoria Søndergaard. No arguing that it’s an intriguing, even exciting proposition, but can it really ‘shatter the boundaries of electronic music’? Or does it instead take acoustic music into new territories?

I’ll admit that I’m not mad keen on conventional ‘club’ music – no doubt a revelation which will come as a shock to many – but then perhaps I’ve never been to any decent clubs. It may seem perverse that I like noise and drone but find bangin’ choonz insufferable. This Is Why We Lost is built on techno / electronic tropes with insistent beats and some throbbing basslines – the second half of the album’s first track, ‘Like A Word I Never Knew’ goes full drum ‘n’ bass… and sax. For atop the frenetic fills and frenzied rhythm, not to mention the pulsating bass – whatever instrument is responsible for that – there are some strong jazz currents.

‘Let’s Go!’ is a slab of lively Europop / EDM, while ‘Vik’s Rawcore’ is full-on HI-NRG stomper – albeit with a mellow breakdown in the mid-section which prefaces the inevitable build before the beat drops again.

There’s no question that this is technically (or techno-ichally, if I’m up for deploying a shit pun) accomplished and innovative, and while AI is insidiously creeping its way and hollowing out the arts at a devastating rate, it’s refreshing to find an act which turns the tables, instead using acoustic instruments to create sounds associated with electronic music. The fact musicians and artists in all fields are embracing AI is bewildering. Why? Just why? The creative process is what makes the work of creativity, learning new techniques and ways to articulate the contents of the mind via any given medium. When I write, as much as delving for words and scouring a Thesaurus may at times be painstaking, this is precisely what it’s all about. The fundamental purpose of art is to convey the complexities of the human condition. To remove the human element from the art is to remove its very heart and any sense of feeling. AI is not art, it’s entertainment plagiarised from all preceding art. Fuck that.

Smag På Dig Selv aren’t the only ones using conventional, acoustic instrumentation in unconventional ways: Jo Quail is very much striking forth in new territories in forging immensely powerful ‘(post-)rock’ music with solo cello (aided by effects and a loop pedal), but what they’re doing is rather different.

‘Ya Tal3een’, featuring Luna Ersahin is altogether different, a stirring, primal folk composition led by an immensely powerful vocal performance, is more reminiscent of the earthy works of Wardruna, evoking vast expanses of woodland and rugged mountains. Elsewhere, the title track manifests as a thick, textured drone, an ambient piece which forms shapes as it evolves, but sounds more like strings, organ, synths, than any of the instruments listed. There’s a fleeting moment of melody which reminds me of something else, too, but it eludes me. ‘Fitness Bro’ amuses with its hyperkinetic energy, the pulsating groove – topped with big sax action – evokes fast treadmills and rapid reps, pumping biceps and perspiration. It also call to mind that brief moment in the early 80s when post-punk acts embraced saxophone, extending the initiative of The Psychedelic Furs and Theatre of Hate.

‘Jeg Ved Ikke Hvad Jed Siger’ swings into dark hip-hop territory, and it’s cool, unlike the happy hardcore of ‘Hits 4 Kids Vol. 3000’, complete with whistles and samples. Just no. It may not be quite as bad as Scooter, but there really is no need for this.

And perhaps THIS is why we lost. The album has some strong moments – many, in fact and they’re solid, too, showcasing a rare creativity, and an approach to composition that’s postmodernism turned up eleven… or thereabouts. I’m personally very much on the fence with this one, since it’s 50% mind-blowing and 50% Europop mediocrity. It certainly has its moments, and will likely to appeal to most, at least at some time.

AA

a2314316735_10

Coaxial – Redux Media

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 6th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a ‘me’ issue that when an artist suddenly hits the world with a blunderbuss blast of output, I feel somewhat overwhelmed. There are some acts I know I like which I’ve simply avoided because of not knowing where to start. Overfaced is the word: a term I discovered perhaps in my early teens when presented with a large roast dinner. The sheer amount of food in front of me instantly killed my appetite, to the point that I felt queasy and, not knowing where to start, felt incapable of starting, meaning that I would fold before I’d barely consumed a forkful.

While I did manage to ease myself into The Fall after dipping a toe, I very much feel this way about the likes of Merzbow, among others, and, to a lesser extent, the Melvins – and the specific reason I come to them is because of their early 00s trilogy, when they cranked out The Maggot, The Crybaby, and The Bootlicker on top of one another. Ben Heal, aka Coaxial has truly splurged with his output this year, as Redux Trilogy is not even the total. My head swam. The prospect of listening to, and reviewing, three albums in one session, for one piece… No. Just no.

Having stepped back and broken things down to more bitesize chunks, I have come to Redux Media, which is in fact the second of the trilogy, first. This feels reasonable, since this is set of releases is sold as ‘a triptych of cassette releases conceived as a recombinatory system rather than linear statement’. I will return to the other releases in due course, but for now and content to dabble.

The seven tracks on Redux Media are soft, squelchy, electronic and experimental. ‘Onyaxial’ lifts the lid on the set with a bibbling, bubbling stroll that sits in the space between minimal techno and the pulsating grooves of Kraftwerk. It bends and warps a bit, and there’s some weird shit going on near the end as it battles with its own identity, but this is the very essence of this release – it’s about the exploratory, about swimming out of the lanes and venturing wherever the mood takes.

‘Tryxxial’ is mellow, an 80s drum machine sound plodding along while keyboard sounds trill along, mixing all shades of electronic action with no suggestion of a conclusion, and rightly, with the wonky babbling of ‘Peswyx’. ‘Pymediax’ wanders into eighties electropop, but without vocals, and it’s more DAF than Depeche Mode.

In the main, it’s entertaining, and despite the overarching connotations of seriousness, it’s quite good fun. Redux Media finds Ben Heal venturing every which way and drilling deep into different dimensions.

AA

a3334382171_10

Stephen O’Malley – Spheres Collapser

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

XKatedral / La Becque Editions – 27th February 2027

Christopher Nosnibor

Not content with the completion of the first new Sunn O))) album since 2014, set for release in the spring on Sub Pop, co-founder Stephen O’Malley has been busy working on a new solo album, which will appear as a rather more low-key (if not necessarily low-frequency) release a couple of months before. Historically, one might have expected this release to have been put out through Ideologic Organ, but then again, when it comes to his solo and collaborative releases, O’Malley operates very much with within the milieu of the experimental artists and labels based in mainland Europe, as his collaboration with François J Bonnet, released in 2021 on Editions Mego evidences.

And while this is billed as an O’Malley solo album, this too is a collaborative work, featuring as it does ‘two long-form compositions for pipe organ by Stephen O’Malley, which he performs alongside the celebrated organist Kali Malone and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary)’.

There is something grand and powerful about the pipe organ, the sound of which is capable of stirring something – if not primal, then deep-seated in the emotional psyche. Creating a vast, reverberating sound, it’s capable of triggering something beyond verbal articulation. And for this release, O’Malley found some remarkable organs, and around Christmas 2021 recorded some immense drones on Les Grandes Orgues (Scherrer (1777), Walker (1867), Kuhn (1995)) at Église Saint-François, Lausanne, Switzerland. It seems that this album emerged as a detour from another project, but why not make the most of a recording opportunity?

And so it is that Spheres Collapser consists of two longform pieces, each around twenty-five minutes in length, whereby little happens beyond textural and tonal shifts. It drags heavy, an does so without apology. Rightly do: why should there be any concession here?

There are sounds which are immediately identifiable as emanating from a pipe organ, and then again there are others, which are not always immediately apparent on Spheres Collapser: instead, there is simply the sound of low, swelling, drone. The organ-led nature of the recording only becomes apparent to the ear midway through ‘Phase I Organ’, when the trilling, tremulous tones come to the fore. Twenty minutes in, there are treblesome quiverings which begin to trouble the earsdrums as the sound narrows and becomes more niggling in its nature. But the exploratory nature of this album is what it’s all about, and O’Malley is truly a master when it comes to drawing different kinds of drone from instruments.

‘Phase II Organ’ presents twenty-two minutes of continuous drone, which commences low, resonant, with a comparatively pacey undulation, before a bassier note enters the mix. But still that low drone continues on… and on… and on… Some may pin this as Sunn O))) but on organ, and that summary wouldn’t be entirely wide of the mark. What else would you expect, really? And then the track simply drones out to the end.

What to say of this release? Drones are what they are: immersive, the sound of freedom, in a sense. The sound of escapism, of freedom, of breaking free of the constraints of the now. Spheres Collapser is heavy, dense, suffocating. You feel the air seep front your lungs as the notes merge in a thick, penetrating polyphony, ultimately tapering to a single sustain which feels like an eternity. Somehow, it’s strangely draining, but exhilarating at the same time.

AA

a2263268530_10

A-Sun Amissa & Lauren Mason – Water Scores

Posted: 11 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Gizeh Records – 27th February 2026

Both A-Sun Amissa and Gizeh Records have sustained their existences while hovering just below the radar, and while it may not be the ideal position in terms of financials, in terms of creative freedom, it undoubtedly has its benefits. Home to the myriad projects centred around label founder Richard Knox, in its early days, Gizeh released the first mini-album by Her Name is Calla. Ever since its inception, the label has devoted itself to quality, and a focus on acts it has close artistic ties with. Featuring both Richard Knox and Claie Knox, A-Sun Amissa meets both criteria.

A-Sun Amissa’s meeting with Lauren Mason – maker of ‘dark and experimental poetics’ is a perfect coming together of sound and word – although as the former bassist and lyricist with the much-missed Torpor, Mason is in her element here, weaving poetry with some dense, dark sounds. Mason’s input ‘explores the curses of corporate extraction and pollution on our planet’s water, and listens in, as water speaks back. Mason is best known as bassist with now-defunct existential sludge band Torpor, where she often wove her spoken word pieces through heavy soundscapes. She has been developing her poetic practice for many years and published her first book Rust Canyon in 2025’.

A-Sun Amissa may not bring the same pulverising weight of Torpor by way of musical accompaniment, but they do create a dark, suffocatingly dense, swirling drone that reverberates around the body in a way which is as physical as it is mental or psychological.

Water Scores takes the form of a single, continuous piece, almost forty minutes in length. It begins with sparse, low, rumblings, subsonic, tectonic drones, and Mason’s words are placed prominent, above this accompaniment. Her tone is even, her delivery clear: the scenes she depicts laying bare the ecological crisis which defines our times.

Her calmness and poise is admirable: in recent years, I’ve personally struggled to maintain a level head in the face of this. In fact, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to articulate. The world is simply overwhelming, and as AI trends of action figures and caricatures, nudifications on X swamp social media, the rivers and lakes are being drained in order to facilitate this – the most insidious datamining operation vaguely disguised as the most puerile, facile shit to have ever swept the globe like a plague. Instead of whooping ‘hell yeah, this is fun’, more people should be screaming ‘this is destroying the planet!’. It’s also diminishing the collective mental capacity at an alarming rate.

Mason skips gently through evolution, celebrates the salmon and the plankton, the things we take for granted on so many levels.

By the eighteen-minute mark, her words are being buffeted amidst a swell of extraneous noise and surging feedback: the ambient drift which lifted the curtain on the album has evolved to a vast blast of sound which is nothing short of an immersive assault on the senses… and it builds, steely walls of sound, sonorous scrapes and howling feedback combining to affect a cranial compression, and as Mason’s words are increasingly submerged beneath this squalling tidal wave of devastating noise, you feel yourself carried away.

From the half-hour mark, the vocals rise again to the fore, being battling against a thunderous cacophony of noise, wails of feedback and a relentless churn which registers in the gut, and registers in the ribs. It’s not pleasant or easy: this is difficult, grey noise. But the detail… the detail makes it. Water Scores is rich in detail, and some may find the level of this difficult to process. But spend some time… this is an album which takes time.

AA

AA

GZH122_A-Sun_Amissa_Lauren_Mason_Water_Scores_Digital

Older Entries
Newer Entries