Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Blueblut – Lutebulb

Posted: 11 March 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Janka Industries – 3rd May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Once again, I find myself tussling with a jazz album and in a quandary as to quite what to make of it. For many, many years, I was absolutely certain I detested jazz. Until, that is, having been introduced in my line of work to acts like The Necks, I came to learn I’d simply been exposed to the wrong kinds of jazz. The weirdy, noisy, cacophonous kinds of jazz made sense in context of my appreciation of mathy noise rock, and wasn’t such an immense leap from Shellac to be incomprehensible. Like any genre, or even tea or coffee, it’s all about finding a point of entry, a flavour that suits your palette. I used to hate both tea and coffee, having been given the former with full-fat milk and sugar and the latter in the form of a fairly weak blend with milk but no sugar, and they only really clicked when I ditched the sugar and discovered Earl Grey, and that you could have really dark-roast coffee with no milk and a shovel-load of sugar. So, you know, you find your thing.

And then along comes Lutebulb, by Blueblut.

The blurb isn’t wrong in describing Blueblut’s lineup as ‘highly unusual, bringing together ‘three musicians acclaimed for exceptional contributions to their respective spheres in experimental jazz, electronica and rock.’ It’s a jazz-centred fusion, for sure, but it’s not jazz fusion as one tends to think of it, and certainly not as I’ve come to understand it. So what is it? As we learn, ‘Lutebulb is the fabulous culmination of ten years of intensive touring, with the Vienna based trio of Pamelia Stickney (theremin, vocals), Chris Janka (guitar, loops, samples) and Mark Holub (drums, vocals, percussion) socking it to global audiences with an international polystylistic musical language which takes in improv, jazz, avant-rock, ska, folk and Krautrock among other elements.’

There’s certainly a lot going on: initially, it comes on a bit laid back, not so much loungey as a smug muso pop collision of jazz and Latin dance, and I suppose the title, ‘Cocktail’ is something of a giveaway as to its swinging party vibes, but then shit happens – particularly some pretty crazy guitar work, and the percussion goes big and suddenly the party’s been crashed by a towering riot of sonic chaos, before suddenly, the entertainers seemingly remember themselves, pull their ties straight again and try to pull together some semblance of a funtime groove.

This sets the album’s template, really. Tracks tend to begin a bit kinda loose, a bit kinda boppable, a bit pool party fun times, albeit with some weirdness in the way the rhythms and the notes don’t quite chime in the conventional ways, and you wonder if it’s maybe the punch or the heat, but the tempo drifts a bit, first one way, then the other, and then maybe something doesn’t quite feel right, and it certainly doesn’t sound right and… what is going on? The room’s spinning and there are all sorts of random noises and you can’t tell if it’s people losing the plot or if some chickens have escaped and the sky’s falling in.

‘Aumba’ starts rather differently, a gentle piece led by acoustic guitar that brings a more reflective atmosphere, but it takes a hard swerve, the pace picks up, there are choral chanting vocals and then a handbrake turn into buoyant math-rock territory before some truly frantic fretwork. And because more surprises are needed, from nowhere, we get a crooning lyrical ballad in the last couple of minutes.

There’s unpredictable, and then there’s Lutebulb, which emerges with a fourteen-minute centrepiece of oddball experimental jazz that mashes absolutely everything together: one minute, I’m reminded of America’s ‘Horse With No Name’, the next, it’s Paul Simon’s Graceland and a Joolz Holland world music extravaganza. Then, somewhere in the midst of it all, we get the jazz breakdown with erratic percussion and space, dogs barking, and then, something else again. Led Zep riffage. Noise. More dogs barking. Every time I leave the house, the streets and parks and fields are like bloody Crufts, and the headfucking noise that’s emanating from my speakers – mostly a horrible conglomeration of barking and a strolling bass is making me angry and tense. And then the last piece, ‘Kaktusgetränk’, incorporates a familiar and popular jazz piece I can’t place or be bothered to research because by now I can’t decide if I need a lie-down or a massive gin.

With Lutebulb, Blueblut have created one of the most wildly varied – and in places, difficult, irritating, random – albums I’ve heard in a long time. I neither like nor dislike it: it has some truly great moments, and it has some not great moments. But when you throw this much into the blender, it’s to be expected, and I’d like to think that this kind of reaction isn’t entirely unexpected. The musicianship is outstanding, and their capacity to switch style, tempo, form, is something else, and the results are enough to leave anyone punchdrunk.

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Warren Schoenbright – Sunless

Posted: 10 March 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 15th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Warren Schoenbright isn’t a person, but a noise duo, based in London. And Sunless, we’re told, presents ‘eight tracks [which] chart a blistering course through different circles of misery, abjection and darkness. Alighieri’s Inferno is the armature around which this new record has been sculpted with glimpses of horror plucked straight from Dante and Virgil’s descent. Schoenbright are preoccupied with using the classical trope of a descent into the Underworld to explore how transformative and redemptive navigating the melancholic and horrifying depths of one’s mind can be.’

As the title suggests, Sunless is dark. Really, really dark. Immersed in mythology and biblical references, it’s an exploration of the most torturous sufferings, gouging deep into the depths.

‘Christquake’ made for an obvious choice of lead single: the album’s shortest track at two minutes and twenty, it encapsulates the album’s entire essence in that brief and intense span – but this is an album which is best appreciated in its fullness, with the majority of the tracks extending beyond five minutes and bringing forth almost untold torture and pain.

‘Boiling Vermillion’, the album’s first track, blisters and burns. It brings expansive, tranquil passages, not least of all the vast intro, punctuated by explosions of fiery post-metal rage. There’s blasting industrial percussion and a wall of noise that towers all the way to the sky. And when it slams on the distortion – fuck! This is a sound that you feel gouging at your guts. More often than not, there’s perhaps a tendency to see heavy or noisy music as being primarily cathartic, that the sound itself is a vent, by which to channel emotions which don’t readily translate into more detailed articulation. This tendency is furthered when the lyrics are rendered obscure by their delivery. But while the lyrics are largely impenetrable, there’s another level of articulation here, and so much sonic detail…

Where Warren Schoenbright differ from so many other bands who make bleak, intense noise, is that there is so much space, so much reverb here on Sunless. Most bands this thick and heavy are suffocating in their gravity, their density. This is something I personally appreciate: the capacity for music that has an impact that’s so powerfully physical is a reason to let it enter your being. Sunless is different, though. Sunless is not suffocating. It’s intense, but its texture is different. Its scope is broader, and the album as a whole simply feels immense, in a cinematic, widescreen sense. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t contain moments of pulverising weight and density: they blast hard in short bursts which arrive unexpectedly, something which only intensifies their impact.

‘This Litany They Gargle in Their Throats’ begins fairly gently, a nagging guitar and solid percussion defining the shape of an irregular sonic sculpture which lays the foundations for a rasping, fire-breathed vocal. It’s a slow-build, and the feedback and anguish grow until there’s a sudden switch after a couple of minutes or so, and it takes a turn whereby Young Gods meet Swans circa 1984. It’s stark and intense… and then the monster grind hits like a bomb. The abrupt ending sticks like a bone in the throat.

The wailing feedback of ‘These Drear Abodes’ really tests the listener’s limits, and the hearing. Here, the intensity derives not from crushing power chords, but from a different kind of force – although the grinding low-end feels like a bulldozer excavating unseen depths, and when they do hit a barrelling blast of heavy, it’s as if the sky is falling down, a descent into the inferno indeed. This brutal bludgeoning hits even harder on ‘Minos the Judge’, and again, Swans’ Young God EP and early Godflesh stand as the most representative comparisons, but this fails to convey the soaring, transcendental elements which are every bit as integral to the sound.

While the title track brings dolorous chimes, picked guitar echoes, and burnt offerings, the final cut, ‘Icarus and the Bruised Air’ closes the album with eight and a half punishing minutes of slow grind that weighs in against the best of Godflesh, only with a much more organic feel. The drumming is nuanced, as is the guitar work, which introduces an atmospheric, almost gothy aspect to this remarkably multi-faceted composition, which culminates in a colossal and utterly eviscerating slow climax.

Playing Sunless at great volume not only heightens the impact, but really brings out the detail, and the production is absolutely incredible: the drums hit hard and you feel as if you’re in the room with them as they play, and play hard. Sunless is heavy and intense, but it’s so much more, and it’s cerebral as well as physical.

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Joe Solo – Sledgehammer Songs

Posted: 4 March 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1st March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Joe Solo is a man with a message. Through tireless touring, relentless releases, and devoting endless toil to the cause, he has established himself as a strong and singular voice for not only the working classes, but for social equality, fairness, and a proud advocate of socialism. He sings songs of solidarity, without resorting to lumpen sloganeering, penning protest songs which are bursting with humanity – political without being overtly mired in politics. He’s also staunchly DIY, plugging away at making music from his shed, from where he also hosted a radio show for a number of years.

The biggest obstacle facing any DIY artist is actually reaching an audience: the algorithms of social media don’t exactly favour the little guy, and so for his latest album, Sledgehammer Songs, he’s gone all-out on engaging his friends / fans on Facebook to help spread the word – and it’s paid off, with pre-sales sufficient to necessitate the production of more CDs and a big run on the vinyl, not to mention the wealth of merch. And why this album, and why now?

Well, first, it’s so easy to get stuck in the cycle of record, release, tour, often to returns which are plateaued or even more dispiriting, and second, Sledgehammer Songs is a significant work. And because Sledgehammer Songs is very much an album which is about collectivism and community, and features a number of likeminded singers – notably Rebekah Findlay, who features on several songs, as well as York’s Boss Caine, Jess Silk, Carol Hodges, and some community choirs, too.

As Joe’s notes on BandCamp explain, ‘This is an album about music and its importance, not only to the political struggle, but to our own sense of who we are. It is both personal and protest.’ Joe’s no middle-class muso lecturing on working-class issues: he squeezes in music-making around a dayjob repairing washing machines, and he knows what it is to grind out a living to support his family, and often recounts conversations with the people he encounters in his work. Real people, real lives. Real struggle. And so, when he speaks, he speaks for both himself and for the people, and does so truly from the heart.

This very much comes through in the songs themselves. It’s a set of acoustic-led songs with simple structures, some augmented with harmonica, there are hints of The Clash, hints of Bob Dylan, slivers of Billy Bragg, and Solo sings with an unashamedly northern accent, and his voice is melodic, gentle, but he’s capable of bringing some throat for emphasis when it’s called for. ‘The Last Miner’, which adds a folksy violin and the voices of The Hatfield Brigade for a lilting sing-song tune which balances melancholy and positivity.

‘A Better Way’, released ahead of the album, encapsulates the sound and spirit of Sledgehammer Songs. It’s a depiction of the everyday realities of life in Brexit Britain, from nurses in the food banks to the diminishing spending power of wages under rocketing inflation, social division and inequality, and each line a call and response met with the refrain ‘there has to be a better way’, and while it’s a bleak picture, the sentiment is positive, unifying.

The title track with Boss Caine and Rebekah Findlay brings folksy Americana, and a celebration of the power of music, while on ‘City of Sanctuary’, the message is simple, but effective: ‘If you’re a refugee, you’re alright by me’. Listening to Sledgehammer Songs reminds us just how bad a state we’re in, where we have members of parliament saying that asylum seekers should ‘fuck off back to France’ and demonising the poor and disabled in the most shamefully dehumanising ways – led by a multi-millionaire prime minister who’s so far removed from the realities of everyday living that he doesn’t know how to fuel a car and pay at the pump. But despite it all, instead of wallowing in the endless shit – the likes of which is floating along our rivers and washing up on beaches around our sorry island – everything about this album is so direct, vibrant, real, and uplifting that it restores faith, and brings hope in the human spirit. All is not lost yet.

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Pissed Jeans – Half Divorced

Posted: 29 February 2024 in Reviews
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Sub Pop – 1st March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When grunge exploded and was endlessly touted as ‘the voice of a generation’, there was considerable truth in this: as a teen in the early and mid-90s, it felt like a moment in time which was fresh and exciting. After years of polished pop and hip-hop becoming the dominant forms, a breakthrough of music so raw and visceral felt like a tidal wave, crashing through the airwaves and obliterating the endless sameness, while articulating the angst and disaffection that filled the stagnant air at the time. Sub Pop unquestionably played a significant part in bringing these vital bands to the world – the label equivalent of a grass-roots venue putting out records by bands they believed in – and that belief proved to be justified. Even the ones who didn’t go full Nirvana or Hole, like Mudhoney and Tad, were culturally significant and remain so.

Every generation seeks music which speaks both to, and for it, in some way or another. Which brings us, smoothly, to Pissed Jeans. A racketous grunge band on Sub Pop who speak to, and for… well, I sort of feel an audience who are growing up – by which I mean older and more disillusioned all the time – with them. If grunge was initially supposed to be the voice of working class, blue-collar, flannel-shirt and knackered up jeans wearing folks and articulating the angst of the stuck in small town in menial dayjobs, then Pissed Jeans brought a post-millennial, global capitalist, tertiary industry aspect to it. Their appeal has always been their ordinariness: ordinary guys with ordinary office dayjobs, writing songs about the shitness of ordinary life in ordinary office dayjobs, office politics, and generally mundane things that really grind your gears. We love them because when they finally get enough time out of the office to make music, it’s real, and it’s relatable, venting all the frustration and anger that an accumulation of small niggles over the course of a crap day at the office can build to a desire to shout and kick stuff.

Pissed Jeans have always been, if not heart-on-sleeve, a band whose separation between life and art had been fine at most. As the awkwardness and ennui of disaffected youth has faded, so it’s given way to reflections on the tribulations of responsibility and the cloud which descends with the realisation that time is passing – and at an ever-accelerating pace – and what have you got to show for it? You’re still grinding away at the dayjob, you’ve maybe made it to be a call centre team leader or something equally mundane and FUCK!

As much as they’re a band who don’t appear to take themselves too serious, it’s also clear that they’re serious about what they do: they need this outlet, this escape. And so while it’s tempting to focus on Matt Korvette as the lyricist and focal point, their work is very much a collective thing. They all went to school together, and have grown together, and you can imagine them all collectively ad individually navigating arranging band practices around work, wives, and so on. Why Love Now was a dark exploration of office politics and crass chauvinism and the fact that men suck, and attempting to navigate these times as average white men – because when you see average white men posting online in response to the latest grim revelation that it’s ‘not all men’ your heart sinks because it’s clear it’s most men at some time and we all need to do better – isn’t easy when you recognise that you are part of the problem and there’s no escaping it. Korvette’s lyrics are burning with bile, and while loathing abounds, the fiercest, most incandescent anguish manifests as immolatory self-loathing.

Half Divorced is an album burning with blind, impotent rage and life and the hand it deals. It sees the band really dive in hard to their hardcore roots and pack in track after track. Whereas Why Love Now may have ventured into more exploratory territory under the guidance of Lydia Lunch as a producer, with some longer songs, Half Divorced packs them in tight, with most songs coming in well under two minutes, in proper old-school hardcore style, and it’s one of their fiercest collections to yet.

The three singles released in advance, with the latest being ‘Cling to a Poisoned Dream’, are full of dark energy. Whereas its predecessor placed the lyrics more to the fore, they’re often buried in the blurry murk of the furious, balls-out hardcore assault, and overall, Half Divorced is about sonic impact and it rages hard through dingy basslines and squalls of feedback. Half Divorced is an angry record, and you get the impression they’re angry about everything, but a large portion of that anger is inwardly-focused. I mean, what’s more perfectly midlife than making an album that recreates the sound of your teens while being pissed off with work, the world, and the shitness of your ageing self? ‘Alive With Hate’, clocking in at just over a minute and a half is everything the title suggests, and pretty much sums up this dirty articulation of raging while ageing. If they’re overcompensating by cranking it all up a few notches, well, they can overcompensate away: as OFF! demonstrate, age is no barrier to being cool as long as you’ve still got the fire. Right now, Pissed Jeans have got all the fire, and Half Divorced is relentless and raging and as good as they’ve ever been.

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Nnja Riot – Violet Fields

Posted: 25 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 23rd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nnja Riot is the solo project of Lisa McKendrick, who also happens to be one half of experimental electronic noise duo Isn’tses, with Tim Drage, who makes serious noise as Cementemental.

It’s a small world, especially in circles of noise and experimental electronics, and so it is that a few years ago, I paired with Tim for a one-off collaborative set in London at the bottom of a bill curated by Human Worth, with the mighty Modern Technology headlining. I lost my hearing in one ear before the set due to some congestion, and by the end, I’d lost my voice, too. Somewhere along the way, I’m convinced I’ve crossed paths with Isn’tses, too, but can’t find the evidence at this moment in time.

Anyway, my needless digression brings me to the point of observation that their individual projects are quite different from one another, and their collaborative output. This is ultimately a good thing, because while algorithms which have seemingly replaced the music press in making recommendations of the ‘if you liked listening to this, you’ll like this’ ilk, it ain’t necessarily so. Because algorithms don’t understand art, or the fact that an artist’s output may be widely varied.

And so it is that as Nnja Riot, Lisa takes a much more songwriterly approach to things, and Violet Fields contains seven songs which can be described broadly as stark industrial electropop. ‘Horror Heart’ brings all of the elements in together to raise the curtains on the album: understated verses, with a thumping heartbeat bass beneath a delicate vocal bathed in reverb, are suddenly blown away in a wave of noise and monotone robotics with whipcracking synthetic snares cutting through the murk with some harsh treble.

‘The Evolve’ is a low, slow, dark pulsating grind which swells to a blistering ruckus of bubbling, broiling eruption of glitching electronic froth, and things get mangled fast and hard. Nnja Riot is indeed an appropriate moniker: the noise grows and takes over by stealth, as if from nowhere: one minute things are pretty mellow, the next, it’s all going off and you’re being carried away on a sonic tidal wave.

The album’s longest track, ‘Dark Assassination’, stretches beyond the seven-minute mark, and with a stuttering, beat hammering like a palpating heart in a state of fibrillation against the ribcage, it’s creates a muscle-tightening tension which is uncomfortable. The vocals are disconcerting, sounding as they do detached, off-key, non-melodic. Desperate drones bend and warp in the background, adding layers of dissonance and discomfort.

Everywhere across Violet Fields, there are subtle but essential incidental details, little lines of melody which ripple and fade. The title track is hazy, sedated, spaced-out, with melodic elements juxtaposed with swerving sci-fi noise which threatens to drown out the erratic beats and she cuts loose to another level of intensity with the vocal delivery: fuzzed with distortion, there’s a outflowing from the innermost which pours into the swirling wash of multi-faceted noise.

Violet Fields crackles and fizzes, often promising structures which crumble and evaporate and leave the listener feeling a little lost, grasping for something uncertain and just beyond reach. It’s this sense of vagueness which remains after the grainy ‘Musical Fix’ and the ephemeral drift of ‘Slow Release’, a mere fragment of a song which carries a spiritual richness on a ritual drumbeat before fading. There’s a sense that hearing Violet Fields and fully grasping it are not one and the same, and it feels that however long one spends engaging with it, there will always be depths and layers of implicit meaning that exist beyond the realms of conception. You wave a feeble hand, desperate to clutch and cling, but it’s gone. It’s gone.

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Hammok – look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once

Posted: 22 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Thirty Something Records – 1st March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Norwegian noise rock act Hammok have been giving much cause for excitement in recent months. Having first encountered them by way of their Jumping/Dancing/Fighting EP, just over a year ago, they’ve continued to produce something just that bit different. Noisy, yes, but also jerky, and quirky. Something about their sound and the delivery grabbed me. Perhaps it was the instant tinnitus brought on by the full-throttle blast delivered with unbridled mania. Jumping/Dancing/Fighting was less a knock on the door followed by polite head nodding and a round-the-group introduction than rocking up at a dinner party, kicking the door down, pissing on the welcome mat and setting fire to the hallway to announce their arrival.

The title of their debut album look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once, makes no sense linguistically, as a phrase, or even in terms of content. It’s a loosely-assembled succession of words that sort of convey something, although its precise meaning is unclear. And as such, it seems quite right and fitting for the sonic riot it hosts. Since Jumping/Dancing/Fighting late in 2022, they released a second EP last June, and with almost an album’s worth of material already out there, their first album doesn’t include a single track off these first releases, and, trailed by single release ‘Séance’ last month, look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is an album devised as an album – rather than a collection of songs.

look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is a short, sharp shock, and a brutal blast, to boot. It pack in eleven songs, and while a few are of a solid length – ‘Wannabe (Billboard No. 1)’, ‘BRAINROTDESPERATION’ and ‘Eat You Alive’ all stretch beyond the four-minute mark, but the majority off the songs are under three minutes, with a fair few – the 1:20 ‘Post Wannabe’ and 1:55 ‘Post Wannabe’ and 2:19 ‘Trap Door’ and 2:28 single ‘Séance’ all blasting hard like sonic injections, eye-popping explosions of innovation and raw energy.

‘Long Lasting’ crashes in on wave of feedback before blasting into an incendiary wave of noise with frenetic drums and manic vocals screaming all explode like a sonic supernova. Charging into an album headlong like this has impact, alright, but inevitably poses the question of just how sustainable that kind of energy is. Immediately after, the raging post-punk ‘Séance’ feels like the obvious lead single choice, with its neat synths, pumping percussion and something almost resembling a hook. It’s a cracking tune, but it’s wild, crazed, and intensely noisy, combining the screamy grunge of Pulled Apart By Horses with a ferocious hardcore punk element.

‘Nothing’s Never Better’ maintains the pace and the raging nihilistic fury, but again hints at an evolving signature for Hammok – a minuscule break, often no more than a couple or bars – where from amidst the chaos and the discord, there’s the briefest flicker off melody, or levity, like a single ray of run breaking through a thoroughly clouded sky following twelve hours of solid heavy rain. It’s so fleeting as to seem almost imaginary.

There’s grunge, noise rock, post-punk, hardcore, and post-metal all in the mix here, all fermenting away fervently, and it’s a lethal cocktail, which has resulted in an album that’s too hard, too fast, too wild, too varied, to get down with straight away.

‘Wannabe (Billboard No. 1)’ is almost pop-punk… almost. Because it brings an unexpected and hard to reconcile range of elements, from the charging fury of early Idles and the shimmering, chiming breaks of Interpol, delivered with a dash of shoegaze and for all the rambunctious rage, there’s something inherently sad about it – the mood, not the song or the band.

‘H.F.D.’ is as much of a blasting wall of house as it gets, making any Strapping Young Lad mentions appropriate, and then there’s a sudden lurch into gnarly metal with a lot of detail. Meanwhile, ‘BRAINROTDESPERATION’ is a magnificent piece which manages to cross post-rock with hardcore and brings a dramatic, gothic edge. The riffs and rackets keep on coming, back-to-back, end-on-end, and the intensity does not let up. There are brief flickers of melody which peep through the blanket of noise, occasional lines with almost resemble hooks, but they’re whipped away as soon as you catch a glimpse of them, leaving you wondering if you imagined them. ‘Eat You Alive’ is a ferocious squall of guitars, the vocals are positively rabid, and the final track, ‘Terror’ arrives not only as a contrast but a surprise, with some jangly indieness paving the way for something that’s an incongruously upbeat slice of emo metalcore.

look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is an overwhelming experience. There isn’t a dull moment, or even a moment to catch breath, and consequently, knocks the wind out of you and leaves you dizzy and dazed. look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is imaginative, inventive, insane, and is solid proof that Hammok are no slouches when it comes to mongering noise.

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Musique Infinie – Earth

Posted: 14 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Hallow Ground – 7th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Silent movies provide a perfect inspiration for musical scores: unencumbered not only by pre-existing scores, but also dialogue or incidental sound, they offer a completely blank canvas and space for musicians to fully explore – and articulate – the mood of the movie, the moments of drama, to become both immersed in and enhance, even create, atmosphere.

Following the split of Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1996, Steven Severin devoted much time to writing scores for old movies, and performing them as live soundtracks in movie theatres, and I was fortunate to catch him in around 2012 when touring Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr. It was a powerful and haunting experience, and one which clearly brought new dimensions to a very old film.

In the same vein, Musique Infinie – the collaborative project of Manuel Oberholzer a.k.a. Feldermelder and Noémi Büchi – present an improvised score for Alexander Dovzhenko’s groundbreaking 1930 silent movie Zemlya (Earth) created for the 24th edition of the VIDEOEX festival for experimental film.

For those unfamiliar – such as myself, the crib notes inform that ‘Frequently cited as a masterpiece of early 20th century filmmaking, the movie deals with the collectivisation of Ukraine’s agriculture.’

Now, the movie clearly holds up on its own to be so revered and still revisited almost a century on, but what of the soundtrack? How does it hold up without the visuals which inspired it?

The soundtrack is divided into two movements of roughly similar duration – ‘Creation’ (14:25) and ‘Destruction’ (12:54). It begins with big, bold, sweeping symphonia, synthesised choral soarings atop majestic, broad-sweeping synth tones. There is a palpable sense of grandeur, and with deep string sounds resonating low beneath big, emphatic surging drones, this feels immense and so strongly cinematic that it’s hard not to be caught up in the tide. A sudden droning downturn marks a temporary change of mood before we’re brought out into calmer waters and begin to regain our breath around the five-minute mark. Robotic, industrial glops and bleeps undulate and oscillate, cresting through the smooth surface. Over time, the piece transitions between organic-sounding orchestral manoeuvres to altogether more space-age sounding synthscapes, before fading rapidly at quite an interesting intersection.

‘Destruction’ – as one might well expect – steps up the drama and the dynamics, but perhaps less expectedly becomes more overtly electronic, with stuttering, glitching disturbances and cold, dark waves blasting in, bending and warping. At times haunting, disconsolate, others foreboding and unsettling, this is certainly the more challenging half of the album. But on the one hand, while it’s more exciting, in some respects, it’s also less fulfilling. Partly, it’s because of the way in which the organic-sounding strings rub against the more overtly electronic sounds, and as much as this juxtaposition and interplay is essential to the compositional form, it sometimes feels like a clash whereby the pair are seeking to achieve two separate ends. Given its improvised nature, this is perhaps to be expected, and the overall flow of the album as a whole is marked by moments of convergence and divergence.

There’s also the nagging sense of just how contemporary this feels in contrast to the visuals the sound is designed to accompany, although without being able to observe the intended setting, it’s difficult to fairly judge the level of success here.

One could – and probably should – see the film, and should also watch it with this accompanying it, as intended – but that isn’t this release, which must be judged on its audio content alone. And taken apart, in isolation, Earth is a stimulating and dynamic work, and one which demonstrates that Musique Infinie aren’t afraid to test themselves and to test boundaries, and to create a powerful and dramatic listening experience.

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Photographed by Lightning – NO, Not Now, never

Posted: 14 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Incunabula Media – 28th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

First new music in twenty years. Crikey. This seems to be becoming a thing: collaborators reconvene after a really, really long time. Sometimes, it’s to the frothing enthusiasm of fans flooding out of the woodwork, as in the case of Khanate, sometimes, rather less so, in the case of a number of recently reconvened acts, including Photographed By Lightning. There ought to be some fanfare, of course, but that’s now how it goes for acts on the fringes. And PBL are fringe, niche, underground, and for all of the right reasons. Photographed by Lightning is essentially a side project for aa couple of guys who have countless projects on the go at any given time. Consisting of Syd Howells – words and music, vocals and instruments, and D M Mitchell – music, instruments, painting – the duo make noise, they do drone, they do weird shit, and NO, Not Now, never reinforces this with the addition of some heavy texture.

There is something strongly emphatic about the title, that solid ‘NO’ like a foot-stomping cry of dissent. No! Not now… not ever is certainly definitive. Prematurely perhaps. Maybe: let’s discuss. Whatever happened to ‘never say never?’ Perhaps it depends on what one is saying ‘never’ to – although it seems that the things which should never come to pass, and never should again, do, and do so again, and again, with depressing predictability. If Piers Morgan was offering me a bet, I’d have probably gone with WW3 being more likely than a new album by Photographed by Lightning. But it seems the recent reissues of their previous work may have been something of a catalyst for this rekindling. And if you’ve heard those previous albums, you’ll be buckling on for a weird ride, and recent single video for ‘Hands of Humans’  gives an idea of what to expect:.

The album starts as strange as it means to go on, with ‘Act Like Nero’, a curious collage of woozy bulbous bass, percussion that sounds like the clanking of cutlery and weird, warped, ghostly vocals which drift through waves of reverb, before ‘Dead Sparrow’ arrives sounding like a Bauhaus demo or on a tape that’s been stretched and is spooling at one-and-a-half speed, or Brian Eno’s ‘Baby’s on Fire’ and Metal Machine Music being played simultaneously and captured on a condenser mic. The experience isn’t dissimilar to the first time I heard My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, wondering if the record was warped. The vocals are twisted, and from among the polytonal strains of mangled guitar, only snippets of lyrics are discernible: ‘follow your heart / follow the dream’; ‘static in my head’: they feel incongruous and disjointed, only adding to the discombobulating effect.

Howell’s words are poetic, quirky, often abstract or otherwise seemingly stream-of-consciousness – at least when they’re audible amidst the sonic maelstrom – occasionally pithy and unexpected, with lines like ‘My social circle needs a transplant / and the donor ain’t you’.

Strolling basslines wander around most of the compositions, but they’re jerky, breaking the groove and creating tiny, nagging knots of awkwardness. NO, Not Now, never does seem to exist to challenge the listener, by needling away with relentless pokes and occasional punches of uncomfortableness reigning in from all sides, sculpted from discord, disjunction, and disparity. ‘Cantilever’ is exemplary, finding the pair making a foray onto more overtly dance-orientated territory – but doing so in a fashion reminiscent of some of The Fall’s more experimental efforts (I’m thinking ‘Mollusc in Tyrol’ from Seminal Live and the like).

Elsewhere, ‘I Wish I Could be Sure’ is theatrical, dramatic, gothic, and unsettling, a seething morass of wailing feedback and stuttering beats which eventually coalesce into a wonky motoric groove, amidst all of which Howells pulls at every psychological sinew to wrestle with his unease with himself. It’s the darkest, swampiest not-quite dance cut, and ‘Streel Echoes’ is a straight-up what-the-fuck splat of cheesy 80s synths and vocals that veer between Bowie on Outside and semi-spoken word, with more busy, chubby, but not-quite-tight bass bloomphing and bouncing about. Yes, it’s necessary to invent words to convey the experience.

The album’s final track, the seven-minute ‘Some One Thing’ is a whirling fairground nightmare of noise, which sees the krautrock-inspired repetition of a whipcracking snare blast and thudding bass yield to a whorling barrage of noise and a super-mellow-piano, while Howells achieves peak atonality in his vocal delivery. While many albums go out on an anthemic high, it feels as if the cogs are winding down and everything is slowly disintegrating as NO, Not Now, never drags its way to its conclusion. It seems fitting. With NO, Not Now, never, Photographed by Lightning seem to have gone out of their way to challenge every notion of how an album should hang together, what music should do, and to render the most uncompromising and uncomfortable aural experience, in a fashion which places them firmly within the lineage of Throbbing Gristle. NO, Not Now, never is an artistic triumph, a work created for its own ends and with no mind for audience or critical reception. And for that, it deserves applause. It’s a good album. Variable, difficult, and purely for the art.

AA

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Legion of Swine – under ytan ligger nåt

Posted: 3 February 2024 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nostalgia sucks. On so many levels, nostalgia sucks. It’s something which looms a longer, darker shadow over life with ever years that passes, as every memory recedes further into the past until eventually it tips over the horizon, beyond sight, to a distance whereby its very happening takes on a dream-like quality and you begin to question if the even was real or imaginary, a myth which has grown from the creeping spores of hazy recollection.

I was probably ahead of the curve when I began feeling pangs of nostalgia on moving to secondary school in 1987. Nostalgia wasn’t big business then, and didn’t even strike me as something that so many people felt deep pangs of back then, although perhaps shows like The Golden Oldie Picture Show which I would often watch with my parents after coming home from Cubs should have given me a clue as to how adults mire themselves in their past. It was on reaching my thirties when I began to separate from my peers who constantly bemoaned the state of music, now there was no good new music, how it had all turned to shit since they left school.

Today, I took myself for a quiet pint, only to find myself eavesdropping inadvertently on a couple of old bastards complaining how there’s no proper music anymore, how it’s all 70s and 80s bands which headline Glastonbury and it’s all rap like 10-bit and one began spouting on how he saw Dave Grohl’s band, Metallica, on TV and wasn’t into it. Then they raved about Pink Floyd and The Eagles and now awesome they are, and how their songs are ‘minutes, minutes long… And then there’s a guitar solo. And Dire Straits… and how Blondie’s career ended with Parallel Lines, but they did this comeback song, like Duran Duran. I wished I was deaf, and congratulated myself for not being so painfully moored to the past – or so ill-informed.

But for all of this, I feel a pang of sadness on the arrival of a new Legion of Swine release. I miss Dave Procter’s presence in the UK for a start, surely one of Brexit’s biggest losses, at least on the underground music scene. I miss his crazy noise shows, particularly back when he would don a latex pig’s head and lab coat to crank out harsh noise. I have a particularly fond memory of our two collaborations, but especially the room-clearing effort where I yelled like a maniac as he ambulated the venue with a portable speaker emitting screeds of feedback in the middle of the afternoon.

Beyond this particularly personal context, of course, the latest offering from Legion of Swine is by no means a nostalgic work, although it does explore wibbly analogue synth and lasery sounds which hark back to the early 80s, when primitive synths were becoming widely available. But then, it equally passes nods to early Tangerine Dream, and to the bubbling pink noise and synthy waves of Throbbing Gristle early Whitehouse. But, on balance, the listening experience alone does not evoke nostalgia. What the hovering hums do evoke is a sense of awkwardness, if difficulty.

Legion of Swine’s output has never been about commercial success, but noise for the sake of simply making. Art as it should be. It it’s for the benefit of Legion of Swine first and foremost, for whom it’s entertainment. It’s for the benefit of an audience as a secondary concern, and the number of people who are likely to be entertained by this is few. But it’s a storming album, which really explores tones and texture. Consisting of a tow longform tracks each with a running time around twenty minutes, it’s an evolutionary piece, and within each continuous composition, the various segments flow from one to the next.

It reminds us of the fundamental difference between albums made up of ‘songs’ and shorter pieces and longform works, in that the former can contain ideas and concepts in a compartmentalised way, with no necessary correspondence between them, while the latter is a journey, and requires an altogether different level of focus and concentration in order for it to work as such. Gloopy alien soundscapes and long, low, ominous drones are rent with laser blasts and trickling ominous electronics worthy of some vintage sci-fi works, and ‘jag hör röster’ is a lot less overtly noise-orientated than previous Legion of Swine releases and live outings, sitting very much within the domain of dark ambience rather than abrasive noise. But it’s well-executed and with occasional blasts of overloading, needles-into-the-red distorting drone, it’s not as mellow as all that, with skronking feedback and earwax-vibrating buzzing and an array of organ-vibrating oscillations pouring their way into your ears. ‘hör du röster?’ is absolutely head-melting thick, buzzing noise abrasion all the way, a monstrous wall of distorted drone amped up to the absolute max, with surging, sloshing swells of dense analogue noise, and a relentless barrage at that.

Uncomfortable as always, under ytan ligger nåt is one hell of a racket. All hail the Swine!

AA

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Lothar Ohlmeier / Rudi Fischerlehner / Isambard Khroustaliov – In the Gloaming

Posted: 1 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Not Applicable – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

What we’re given to expect from this three-way collaboration is ‘an album of explorative, freely improvised electroacoustic music by an acclaimed trio of acclaimed genre-defying musicians’. I can’t help but blame the music press – as was, rather than the broken skeleton of what remains of the music press – and streaming algorithms for the obsession with genre. One could probably take it as far back as to the 50s when the press was all over this shocking ‘Beatnik’ counterculture, but to consider more relevant and recent history, ever since the ‘goth’ tag was applied to a fairly disparate selection of post-punk bands – and their fans – categorisation has been the method by which to both shortcut detailed analysis and to market acts. The groupings rarely make sense, or at least never did to me. For example, I loved Nirvana, but had absolutely no interest in, say, Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, who lacked ant of the elements I loved about Nirvana, and to my ear weren’t especially grungy. Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy have nothing in common beyond there being an arch, art aspect to their work, and the idea that both Throbbing Gristle and Ministry are ‘Industrial’ is absurd (and while I get that ‘industrial metal’ may be the distinction when considering Ministry, Pitch Shifter, etc,. it’s never rendered any more clear than when the term ‘hardcore’ is used. Many acts claim to be ‘genre defying’, but so few are. That said, the very function of the avant-garde is to defy genre, to smash preconceptions, to push boundaries, to do something different. In the Gloaming, remarkably, is something very different, and is truly ‘genre defying’.

It’s often intriguing to see just what players of such an unusual selection of instruments will produce when they come together and set out with the primary purpose of seeing what happens. Lothar Ohlmeier’s bass clarinet, Isambard Khroustaliov’s electronics, and Rudi Fischerlehner’s drums make for an interesting lineup, and sometimes, even the most experienced musicians will come together and create sound, but it doesn’t really gel. This is most certainly not one of those instances.

The album contains six pieces, and they each explore subtly different musical terrain, seemingly with all participants working on the understanding that less is more. There is a lot of space in which they all breathe and step back from soundmaking to allow the atmosphere to evolve. While the bass clarinet clearly has jazz connotations, this isn’t an overtly jazz album in any sense.

‘Leaf Silhouettes’ is a celebration of discord and dissonance, as clattering drum rattle like bin lids blown down an alleyway in a gale, the squelching electronic sounds conjuring an eeriness amidst seemingly random toots, while ‘Out to Dry’ has an almost sixties sci-fi feel, with hints of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop about the alien ambience, where the electronics take the lead, but remain restrained, with the result being sparse and atmospheric.

If any one of the pieces does have a more avant-jazz feel, it’s the nine-minute ‘Violet Weeds’, where the clarinet tootles and hoots every which way, spreading like tendrils over the bibbling synths. The percussion remains noteworthy for its restraint, as it does over the course of the album. And if ‘End Zone’ employs the same elements, the mood is quite different by virtue of the difference in balance of its instruments. It is, in the main, a subdued, understated piece, but whistles of feedback and extraneous bleeps bringing extra dimensions..

The final piece, ‘Pixel Head’ is a ten-minute monster of a composition, and one which, while spacious, brings so many different ideas and segments that it really does bend the brain.

From the beginning In the Gloaming is a work of intuition, and the interplay between the three musicians is something special.

AA

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