Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Smote – Songs From The Free House

Posted: 6 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Rocket Recordings – 17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The thing that particularly stands out in the bio for the latest Smote album is this: ‘Daniel Foggin has spent the majority of his adult life working as a landscape gardener, frequently pursuing his trade in conditions of either baking heat or freezing cold and, as he puts it “more often covered in mud than not”. Yet the primal, meditative aspects of this work, the act of communing with nature, its histories and its depths have fuelled his art on a profound level. As Daniel himself relates; “I think the music is a direct reflection of this feeling that I haven’t quite managed to define yet, it is dirty and hard but there is an overwhelming comfort to it.”’

It’s something artists rarely mention: they have day jobs. Perhaps there’s an element of shame in it for some. Maybe it detracts from the mystique. Or it could be that it’s considered a detraction from the pitching of the latest creation. But it’s a truth rarely spoken: most musicians, and artists in any medium, have day jobs and have to make time for their creative work. Tours have to be negotiated with work, taken out of annual leave, often juggled with family responsibilities. Sleevenotes by Joe Thompson of Hey Colossus and Henry Blacker is the most open narrative on the realities of this I’ve read to date, and at times the exhaustion crawls from the pages. As such, it’s refreshing that Foggin not only acknowledges his day job, but recognises it as a significant influence on his creative work. And why not? The most engaging art is drawn from life, after all. Much as it would be a more ideal situation that artists could make their living from art, at the same time, there is perhaps greater value in art created by those who live in ‘the real world’ rather than floating, detached, elevated above it in some kind of bubble.

The words ‘Free House’ make me automatically think of pubs, which perhaps says more about me than the artist, of whom we learn that ‘In the world of Smote, going further out means going inward. Less a metaphysical journey into inner space, more a physical journey into the ground itself, converging with its roots and vibrations. What’s more, a journey right to the heart of its principal architect’s daily experience’.

A cottar is a farmer, and with the album’s first piece, we’re plunged into a deep, surround-sound immersive dronescape, There are many layers to it: reverberating voice, trilling flute, sonorous synths, distant percussion… and it builds, and builds, growing into a hypnotic swell before finally breaking into a slow, weighty post-metal riff that twists and turns with spectacular force, hammering with the force of Pale Sketcher by the six minute mark. It has the weight of sodden earthworks, and conveys the hard exertion of ploughing and tilling, as it descends into a speaker-shredding wall of distortion.

‘The Linton Wyrm’ brings heavy Nordic connotations as it plods on, and on, over the course of a rousing nine and three quarter minutes. It’s not so far removed from the epic force of Sunn O))), but equally Wardruna, a band who evoke earthiness and the essence of pagan spiritualism – not about worshipping mythical gods, but celebrating a connection with nature on a level which is almost primal, and isn’t readily articulable through words: it’s something which transcends language.

Single cut ‘Snodgerss’, which clocks in at under four minutes is both representative of the album as a whole – and not. With its trilling flute and thunderous slow riffery, it incorporates some of the leading elements, but in a way which is considerably more accessible, not least of all with its folk leanings, and presents them in a condensed format. That said, it’s an intense piece, which offers no let-up.

The ten-and-a-half-minute ‘Chamber’ is slower, heavier, dronier, and encapsulates the true essence of the album as a whole, building on a low, resonant throb before the introduction of mournful woodwind. As graceful and soulful as it is, it connects with a primitivism which reaches to the core, a place beyond linguistic articulation. This is the sound of forests, of hills, of streams and moorlands.

The final track, ‘Wynne’ hammers the album home in a squalling blast of overloading guitar and powerful oration propelled by thunderous percussion. It’s mighty, and beyond, seven and a half minutes of blinding intensity which concludes an album that’s varied but unswerving in its density and force. You can truly feel the earth move.

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Misery Bacon – Turning in the widening gyre

Posted: 4 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 3rd October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This is proving to be a particularly good week in the world of noise, what with Foldhead’s Paris Braille and this being released on the same day. There’s more information given about this release than most to slip out from Swedish underground label Dret Skivor – in that there is actually some. We learn that the work was ‘Recorded and assembled on residency at Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, Leveld AIR and Gallery ASK, Norway 2025’, and that the ‘Album and song titles taken from / inspired by WB Yeats ‘The Second Coming’’. We also learn that Misery Bacon is the vehicle of Bergen’s Luke Drozd. It’s not clear if this is one of those monikers that’s amusing because translation, or if it’s a case of humour that doesn’t translate geographically, like Die Toten Hosen. I’m sure dead trousers are a massive wheeze in Germany, but here it’s vaguely surreal but mostly a bit odd. Then again, ‘Misery bacon’ makes me think of all the moaning gammons we have here in the UK, red-faced and chuntering into their Carling about ‘immagrunts’ and how everything’s ‘bloody woke’ nowadays.

It contains two longform pieces, each filling a side of the cassette release – of which there are just six copies – ‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’, and ‘Shambling onwards in the shadows of indignant birds’, and neither literary allusions or social commentary are apparent in the work itself.

‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’ starts with some sampled dialogue and an array of pops, clicks, whirrs and glops, a swampy collage of seemingly random elements layered across one another. It’s atmospheric, but also difficult to get a handle on any idea of where it’s headed, if there’s any theme or concept that connects the diverse sources. But soon, serrated drones and distortion build to a sustained whorl of noise atop a quivering bass judder. Five minutes in, and it’s an all-out assault worthy of Merzbow or Kevin Drumm. It’s noise, and it’s harsh, but it’s an ever-shifting, seething mass of tinnitus-inducing tones and textures, at time fizzing and crackling in such a way as to give the impression that the sound is actually inside your own head, rather than reaching the brain from an external source. There’s a niggling crackle of static that sounds like there might be a problem withy your equipment. This is most pronounced and unsettling during a quieter spell of jangling metal which sounds like a light metallic object being rattled against a metal fence, or the clattering of cutlery. It’s a piece that slides and slithers hither and thither, and sits well against Throbbing Gristle’s most experimental, abstract works. Towards the end, it does feel like it could be the soundtrack to the collapse of everything. Listening to it while the US government is in shutdown, Israel seemingly continues to level Gaza despite a supposed ceasefire, hundreds of people are arrested in London and other cities for protesting against genocide, and Russia continues to expand its campaign of interference across Europe, it’s hard to feel much positivity.

On a personal level, the present feels overwhelming. The world is at war. The world is on fire, and at the same time that we have drought, we have flooding. But instead of coming together collectively to address this global crisis, as a species, we’d rather bomb the fuck out of one another. And with shootings, mass knife attacks and all manner of savagery taking place daily, it really does feel as if humanity has descended into a spiral of insanity and self-destruction. And there are really no words to articulate the panic and anguish of all of this. Music and literature may provide a certain comfort and distraction, but it’s in sound alone – more specifically, sense-shattering noise – that I find something which articulates the experience of living in these torturous times.

And so it is that ‘Shambling onwards in the shadows of indignant birds’ returns to the sampled dialogue which opens ‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’, before plunging into a mess of static cackles and hiss. It’s a Bladerunner world of rust and robotics gone wrong. It’s murky and it’s unsettling. A blast like the roar of a jet engine momentarily hampers the hearing, and we sit, dazed, in the comparative quiet of crackles and pops. There’s a mid-track lull, which feels uncomfortable as whistles of feedback and laser bleeps criss-cross before collapsing into a broken wall of noise on noise.

Turning in the widening gyre is harsh, heavy, bursting with uncomfortable frequencies. The final minutes are nothing short of punishing. And yet, at the same time, that punishment offers vital release. This is where you get to let go. At last.

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Content – Geezer Reimagined

Posted: 1 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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House of Halifax – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Content’s career to date – such as it is – has certainly not followed a conventional trajectory, or even one designed to gain a following. It’s not the shifting lineups (that’s hardly unusual) but the fact the direction of their output is completely unpredictable. Their debut EP, We Keep Improving, released five years ago, was a riotous DIY racket, which I described as ‘a gnarly mess of electronics, popping beats and a disorientating sonic swirl’. Released in an edition of seventeen physical copies, it has all the ingredients required to become a near-mythical underground work.

So of course, with a different lineup, they followed this with an album which recreated the entirety of Yes Please! by Happy Mondays – an album which was roundly pilloried, and saw one of the weekly music papers review lead with the headline ‘No Thanks!’. It was the Mondays’ Shark Sandwich moment.

Amazingly, their second album is another cover of an album in its entirely, this time the 2018 Geezer by Leeds grindcore legends Ona Snop, who recently called it a day. I can’t think of anything further removed from, the slack, bloated funk of Yes Please! But this is Content, the vehicle of Benbow and – currently – Richard Knight. And this is absolutely guaranteed not to bring them world domination, or even more than a handful of fans. I don’t think they’re fussed about that, though.

Given that Ona Snop’s approach to powerviolence / grind was never entirely straightforward, or serious, Content’s irreverent approach to ‘reimagining’ the album, which blends industrial, techno, ambient, electropop, ‘retains some of the humour included in Ona Snop’s original work’, they say. Indeed it does. It certainly doesn’t contain much else, although that shouldn’t be construed as a criticism. The ‘reimagined’ tag gives them licence to pretty much do whatever the hell they please, and that’s precisely what they do.

And so it is that the first track, ‘In Pieces’, is transformed from forty-nine seconds of thrashing, splashing aural vomit, into a three-and-a-half-minute technoindustrial workout with a funk groove, coming on with the strut and snarl of Revolting Cocks circa Linger Fickin’ Good. It’s grimy and sleazy and fuck – and it’s as ace as it is audacious. It sets the tone for a wild ride: ‘Total Both’ brings bump and grind and flamboyance in spades, like Rammstein covering The Rocky Horror Show – or perhaps the other way around. Either way, it’s camp and crazy.

It’s all going on here: ‘More Important Than Christ’ starts out with wibbly 80s wizardry before going hyper electropop, landing somewhere between The Associates and The Teardrop Explodes in the process. There’s wonky electronica, spoken word, bleeps and horns… ‘Mustard Farm’ seemingly draws from Depeche Mode, Devo, and Man 2 Man in equal measure, while ‘Respect’ goes lounge, and there’s a hint of early Foetus in the warped disco blast of ‘Rotisserie Geezer’, before ‘Cement Head’ goes a bit Tom Waits.

How all this actually works, it’s hard to pinpoint. That each track is well executed – in that it’s apparent what they’re aiming for, and they achieve – helps, but the hectic, drum machine-propelled arrangements are dizzying, and so far removed from the source material at times it feels beyond tenuous. While the original ‘CD / DVD’ opens with a sample, Content rework it as a cut-up collage of glitched-up, mangled samples, harking back to the old-school Industrial roots demonstrated on the EP, with a debt to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, and in turn, William Burrroughs. ‘Ona Snop F.C.’ is a super-slick autotuned workout that’s equal parts Prince, Har Mar Superstar, and overprocessed R’n’B. Horrible as it is, the knowing levels of cringiness are something to respect. Then, seemingly from nowhere, ‘Hot Soup’ goes all Mike Oldfield and ambient.

While the original album has a running time of less than twenty-five minutes, pulling the songs out and stretching things apart in every direction means that this reimagining runs for closer to an hour, and it never ceases to confound with its weirdness, or its willingness to embrace the cheesy. It’s almost impossible to judge Geezer Reimagined by conventional benchmarks or assess its merits by the standards one would ordinarily apply, because it simply doesn’t conform, and exists in its own sphere of strangeness. And whether or not you dig it – and I do – it’s impossible to deny that it’s imaginative in its interpretations.

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Content - Geezer Reimagined (House Of Halifax, 2025) (Front Cover)

Deadman’s Ghost – A Votive Offering

Posted: 29 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 22nd September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Love a few drones, me. Aural ones, not the buzzy buggers that tossers fly about for fun, or the nasty ones that undertake military operations and shoot the shit out of people and places. But places… places are important, the way they are so closely connected to memory, the way they evoke recollections of experiences… memory fades over time, but placers can so often provide triggers. The blurb for A Votive Offering register a deeper meaningfulness on account of the way the significance of place bears weight. I find myself; yearning for places I half-remember from childhood. My memory is a databank of random shots, from standing stone circles in Scotland and in the south, to a metal sign with a bullet hole in it, somewhere isolated on Dartmoor.

And so we arrive as A Votive Offering, and I shall quote in full from the Cruel Nature site here:

4 years since 2021’s Tethered Tales, the latest album by Deadman’s Ghost for Cruel Nature, uses drones, dark folk sounds, old samples and electronic beats to coalesce around a central theme. Each track in this collection evokes an obscure place in the Irish countryside with connections to folklore. Tucked away amidst today’s regimented rural landscape, small pockets of wilderness survive; vestiges of another era hidden behind roadside hedges and across farmer’s fields. These include the ruined cottage of a clairvoyant healer; a pair of standing stones believed to be oracles; a well which cures madness; and a cave where offerings were once left for ancient spirits. The songs presented here are paeans to these liminal spaces, and are infused with recordings taken there.

The first of the album’s seven compositions, ‘Chtonic Currents’ combines hovering hums, sonorous drones, gongs, bells, chimes, and special abstraction which occasionally builds to immense levels. ‘The Speaking Stones’ is ominous, heavy, and brings ominous waves of noise which wash over resonant, droning vocals.

There are samples on ‘The Man Who Felled the Fairythorn’, and one can’t help but contemplate the sad situation of Sycamore Gap. Or perhaps that is just me. The surprise here is that things suddenly take a turn for the heavy with throbbing industrial grooves cutting in.

A Votive Offering is dark. While twitters and chimes abound, dark surging, sonorous drones dominate, and weigh heavy over the sci-fi intimations tracks like ‘Biddy Early’s Potion’, where hints of Westworld twang, and hang ominously.

Gulls craw and waves splash on ‘Lunnaigh Dunes’, and a certain sadness pervades, inexplicably, dragging at the guts and lying heavy. Life was simpler once, and no so long ago. Nostalgia now is not what it was. And suddenly a drone grinds dark. The dynamic of A Votive Offering is one of continued motion, which keeps it interesting, but it’s also haunting.

A Votive Offering as a whole is haunting, but also strange, abstract, otherworldly. Ultimately, it’s… different, and an album get lost in.

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Kevin Drumm – Sheer Hellish Miasmah

Posted: 27 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 10th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This is a monster. A monster that’s been roaring and raging for twenty-three years now. The appropriately-titled noise classic, Sheer Hellish Miasmah, was first released in 2002. It remains a pinnacle of abrasive noise after all this time. To say that Kevin Drumm has released a lot of albums would be an understatement: as is the case with many experimental / noise artists, the likes of Merzbow, and myriad lesser known underground noise acts he’s cranked out multiple albums per year, and the question of quality versus quantity becomes an obvious point of debate, or even potential friction. But when it comes to Sheer Hellish Miasmah, there’s no real debate: the consensus is that it’s a classic in its field.

I step back for a moment to present the summary offered in the press release: The history of Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma is one of resilience to the twists of underground trends that have come and gone since its initial release. Using guitar, tape manipulation, microphones, pedals, analog synthesizers, and subtle computer processing, Sheer Hellish Miasma is an overwhelming experience: a sonic onslaught of storming feedback, fractured textures and an unrelenting energy. At once brutal and meticulously composed, the album offers a singular vision at the outermost edges of sound art.

And here it is, reissued on four sides of vinyl. I assume it’s nice and black and heavy and shiny, because I’m working from an MP3 download, as is the way these days. Does vinyl sound better? It depends on your kit. And your ears.

A lot of extreme noise albums are mercifully brief, presenting a short, sharp shock. Not so Sheer Hellish Miasma, which presents a sustained and truly brutal assault, with five tracks stretching out for well over an hour, some sixty-six torturous minutes. The track sequencing has been altered, with the two longest tracks first, and ‘The Inferno’ is split over sides B and C.

The first, ‘Hitting the Pavement’ is a twenty-minute blast of oscillating, pan-heavy drone and distortion. As grating sinewy nose and distortion riven with feedback hard enough to annihilate even the toughest eardrum, the discomfort levels are high. Sunn O))) may be hailed as pioneers of heavy drone, but Drumm’s activity is contemporaneous, taking electronica to the same extremes and over the same epic durations. The first couple of minutes of ‘The Inferno’ are gnarly, overloading crackle and pop, stutter and static that give you cause to wonder if your speakers are fucked or there’s something wrong with either the recording or your equipment (something I genuinely experienced when I first heard Whitehouse – having downloaded a couple of tracks via Napster back in the day, I deleted the files and searched elsewhere as I assumed the files were corrupted). But no, it’s supposed to sound this fucked-up, and it burrows into your skull in the most intense and uncomfortable way. Over the course of twenty-four minutes, he gives the listener’s ears a proper kicking, and more, seemingly conjuring new frequencies and discovering infinite new angles from which to deliver a truly brutal sonic assault.

At times, it’s like having a road drill applied directly to the head. Full-on doesn’t even come close. It’s not just the frequencies, either: it’s the jagged, abrasive textures that graze hard enough to draw blood. And there is absolutely no respite. Glitching laser bleeps shoot across grinding earthworks. It’s the sound of total annihilation. The album’s title provides the perfect summary of its content: it is absolutely, mercilessly, hellish.

If ‘Cloudy’ offers a momentary pause to breathe and feel the tinnitus, the sawing oscillations of ‘Impotent Hummer’ hit with all the more impact, a persistent buzz that grates away at every sense. The effect is cumulative, and the reaction is physical. The track’s thirteen minutes is a test of endurance. ‘Turning Point’, which now closes the album, leaves the listener with an obliterative thrum, which, while comparatively mild in terms of its attack, is insistent, and again feels like a considered, targeted sensory assault.

Sheer Hellish Miasma is a hard listen – but it’s not hard to understand how it’s come to be considered an outstanding noise album. It’s not for the feint of heart.

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Ashley Reaks – At Night The World Belongs To Me

Posted: 24 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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2nd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The context for Ashley Reaks’ sixteenth solo album – and his third in three years (not counting the compilation of demos released earlier this year) – is weighty. He has written openly and extensively of his health issues, while sharing images and commentary nocturnal wanderings, and these both inform At Night The World Belongs To Me, of which he writes:

The looming spectre of death and loss haunt the album: Reaks survived two major health scares and a misdiagnosed terminal illness over the last 18 months, experiences that inform the reflective, poetically gloomy lyrics, and the 4 am downtempo grooves. Adding to the sense of loss, guitarist and long-term collaborator Nick Dunne died suddenly at home just one week after completing his guitar parts for the record.

Through all of this, he has continued to collage and write prodigiously, but At Night The World Belongs To Me marks a distinct change of tone from its immediate predecessors, The Body Blow of Grief (2024) and Winter Crawls (2023). The usual elements are all present and correct – the sense of experimentalism, the collaging of genres, melding post-punk, jazz, and dub – but this feels darker, more introspective. The cover art, too, reflects this. While it has the same rather disturbing, grotesque strangeness of his usual work, the grim-looking figure in repose has connotations of ailment, frailty, even the deathbed.

The first track, ‘Playing Skittles With The Skulls and Bones’ has a bass groove that calls to mind The Cure’s early sound, melded to a rattling rhythm reminiscent of ‘Bela Lugiosi’s Dead’. The smooth sax that wanders in around the mid-point provides something of a stylistic contrast, but at the same time, it’s minor-key vibes keep the song as a whole contained within a bubble of reflection, evoking the stillness of night. I know, I’m sort of dancing about architecture here, but something about Reaks’ work prompts a multi-sensory response.

‘Rimmed With Yellow Haloes’ brings soaring post-rock guitars atop of an urgent ricochet of drumming and solid bass. On the fact of it, it’s almost poppy, but it soon shifts to take on a folksy aspect, while Reaks sings of death and funeral pyres, and the refrain, delivered with lilting, proggy overtones, ‘The Lord gave the day to the living, the night to the dead’. In context of the album’s title and theme, there is a tangibly haunting foreshadowing here, a suggestion that Reaks has not only accepted his mortality, but has assumed his place. It’s powerful, and deeply moving. Of course, Reaks can’t help but introduce incongruous elements, with some horns which are pure ska and some super whizzy 80s pop synths providing a pretty wild counterpoint to it all. It’s hard not to smile, because there’s an audacity to this approach to composition and arrangement – a lot of it simply shouldn’t work, but it does, and it’s uniquely Reaks.

The album’s shortest song, ‘Things Unseen’ is snappy, poppy, Bowie-esque, an amalgamation of post-punk and electropop, a standout which is succinct and tight, and consequently, the dark connotations of the bleak shuffle of ‘Life Forever Underground’ – a rippling synth-led tune – are rendered more profound. The sequencing of this album is such that the shifts between songs accentuate their individual impact.

‘Mask the face, unmask the soul…’ he sings softly on ‘Mask The Face’, which has a somewhat spacey Krautrock feel to it – before a guitar solo that worthy of Mark Knopfler emerges most unexpectedly. And as dark as things get here, Reaks never ceases to bring surprises. At Night The World Belongs To Me perfectly encapsulates the reason he’s so respected and critically acclaimed, but orbits light years outside the mainstream. In a world defined by an exponentially reducing capacity for sustained attention, Ashley Reaks makes music that requires real engagement, the musical equivalent of complex carbs and high fibre foods in a processed, white bread culture. But also, contemporary mainstream radio music favours short songs which cut straight to the chorus, where the hook has to land in the first twenty seconds. Here, we have eight songs, all but one of which are over five minutes long. They take their time, they’re expansive and exploratory, there’s atmosphere, there’s depth. And as ‘Eyeing Up The Sky’ tapers away on a buzzing drone, we’re left with much to chew on, much to consider.

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FÏX8:SËD8 – Octagram

Posted: 22 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dependent Records – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve always favoured words over numbers – meaning, maths was never my strong point, and my qualifications strongly favour the arts. But it doesn’t take a maths genius to deduce that there are some serious numerical gymnastics taking place when conjuring the equation for this release. That Octagram extends the love of the number 8 which is clear from the band’s name to a concept, whereby the album features 8 songs with a playing-time of 8 minutes is logical, but when they try to spin it that ‘when the 8 just turns by a little in the context of the German electro industrial project’s sixth album, it becomes the symbol for infinity’, I’m lost. How does infinity fit in, and how does it all sit with being their sixth album, something which really screws up the whole thematic.

The tracks aren’t all exactly eight minutes in duration, but in the eight-minute span, ranging from 8:11 to 8:58, so it doesn’t feel as if the limitations / constraints of the project are so rigid as to inhibit the creative freedom necessary to explore and interrogate the themes flexibly.

We’ve already aired single cuts ‘New Eden’ and ‘Oathbreaker’ here at Aural Aggravation, and it’s fair to say they’re representative of this expansive, ambitious effort. It’s electronic industrial, with expansive, ambient trance elements woven in, as well as sampled snippets of dialogue. It’s perhaps worth noting that the vocal samples consist mainly of recitations quoting the last words of persons that were about to receive the death sentence. It’s all there on the sweeping, cinematic, dark electronic dance opener, ‘The Unborn’. In terms of texture and production, it’s absolutely meticulous, but a bit predictable and of a form. Three minutes or so in, the tone and tempo changes, the atmosphere darkens and the beats get harder, and the gritty, distorted vocals finally arrive and while it’s still quintessential technoindustrial / dark electro, the switch makes the song work in terms of structure and dynamics. And this seems to the strength to which FÏX8:SËD8 play to on Octagram, blending the trancey ambient dance elements with the driving hard-edged aspects of the genre.

Skinny Puppy are an obvious touchstone, to which they themselves draw attention, they seem to have assimilated the entirety of the Wax Trax! catalogue, while pulling from all aspects of cybergoth, and even Tubular Bells to forge a hypnotic hybrid of techno, electronica, dance, and industrial, taking a number of cues from Ministry’s Twitch. It’s true that I often return to the same sources: Wax Trax!, KMFDM, Skinny Puppy, 80s Ministry… but I feel I should stress that this isn’t entirely a reflection of my limited sphere of reference, but the two inches of ivory on which so much of the electronic industrial scene carves its tales of angst. The use of samples does feel rather cliché, the way the beats build behind fuzzy synths which ebb and slow, the minor-key one-finger synth riffs… And that’s fine: you know what you’re going to get. But at least with Octagram, FÏX8:SËD8 push that envelope a bit.

If ‘New Eden’ represents the more accessible side of all this, ‘Blisters’ goes in hard. ‘Tyrants’, too, brings a heavy Industrial throb with a dominant percussion, led by a powerful bin-lid smash of a snare sound. With the distorted vocals low in the mix, it’s tense, it’s intense, it’s claustrophobic. Taking its title from one of my favourite phrases from Milton, ‘Darkness Visible’ brings an interlude of cinematic serenity, at least initially, before locking into another dark pulsing groove. The darkness has rarely been more visible.

‘An Unquiet Mind’ makes for a slow-simmering, brooding finale, cinematic, atmospheric, expansive, as synth layers and beats build, rising from a montage of samples to stretch out an almost post-apocalyptic landscape. It feels like the end… and it is.

The best electronic industrial has an intensely inward focus, and makes you feel tense, restricted, somehow, and as much as it draws on obvious influences, with its taut, claustrophobic feel and dense production, Octagram sits – shuffling, twitching, crackling with anxiety – with the best electronic industrial.

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The Dwarfs Of East Agouza – Sasquatch Landslide

Posted: 20 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Constellation – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The third album by The Dwarfs Of East Agouza (Maurice Louca (Lehkfa), Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies), and Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush) promises ‘a focussed set of rhythmic psych-trance free/improv’.

As their moniker and the album’s title suggests, they demonstrate a collective interest in urban myths, the strange, the embroidered and embellished tale, perhaps spun with a twist of esoteric mysticism, but at the same time, aren’t entirely serious about it all. That is by no means to imply they’re not serious about the music they make, even when the pieces have titles like ‘Goldfish Molasses’, ‘Saber Tooth Millipede’, and ‘Swollen Thankles’. Because it is possible to be intense and serious and at the same time retain a capacity for humour, a sense of the absurd.

Sasquatch Landslide is an album that’s knowingly ‘out there’, but at the same time, it’s clearly the work of a collective who are completely immersed in the world they’re creating through a conglomeration of sounds which border on the transcendental. Elongated, quavering drones and an array of percussion merge in a haze to forge loose, yet curiously intense grooves. The aforementioned ‘Sabre Tooth Millipede’ is a full-on wig-out jazz frenzy played with the psychedelic loopiness of Gong as their most far-out, and at the same time, amidst the twanging and clattering, there’s something of the spirit of The Master Musicians of Joujouka about it. For an added addling bonus, there are tempo changes galore, and some parts where there are multiple tempos crossing one another simultaneously as the players seemingly detach from this physical realm into different plains of consciousness, separate from one another yet still connected by some kind of telepathy. Because however weird and disjointed it gets, somehow it works.

‘Double Mothers’ goes spaced-out, haunting, and atmospheric. On the one hand, it’s one of the most overtly jazz pieces on the album, but the wandering, reverb-soaked saxophone weaves its way through a nagging twang of a distinctly Eastern influence, while a pulsing heartbeat rhythm creates an underlying tension.

Single cut ‘Titular’ is busy and adds an easy listening, lunge-like organ trill which is completely at odds with the hectic hand drums and frenzied fretwork. They really cut loose on the ten-minute ‘A Body to Match’, stretching things out in all directions – tempo, texture, detail, serving up a pan-cultural smorgasbord of noodlesome improvisation. There, they slowly pick apart the component elements, a slow-motion explosion or deconstruction of the composition, each part slowly moving further from the rest. ‘Goldfish Molasses’ slowly melts, a plodding beat reminiscent of ‘What A Day’ by Throbbing Gristle provides the spine for this slow, pulsating Industrial thudder, where a woozy bassline undulates in the background, and incidental noises and chattering yelps fill the space behind some indecipherable vocal.

Sasquatch Landslide is big on warped, looping drones and layers of intricacy upon layers of intricacy, which weave a shimmering sonic cloth that ripples and shifts before the eyes – and ears. Time itself bends and stretches, taking on an almost elastic quality as the threads unravel to reveal new layers and dimensions. One can feel the instrumentation expanding outwards into infinity – and infinite reverb – in the same way that the universe is continually expanding, only in an accelerated timeframe. For all of its abstraction, Sasquatch Landslide provokes quite visual interpretations of the sounds emanating from the speakers. I expect to have very strange dreams tonight after this.

AA

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Ran Slavin – Neon Swans

Posted: 12 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

One significant downside to digital music formats is that is reduces the dimensions of the experience. With a record, and even a CD, there is a physicality which is in many ways integral to the experience. I’m not here to sell the whole multi-sensory experience and tactility of vinyl line: yes, I grew up with vinyl, and in the 90s, a new LP was maybe £7.50 while a CD was £11, so I would often buy vinyl simply because I could get more music for my money. And records do scratch, sleeves get bent, and generally, vinyl requires more care than a CD, so I’m as much a fan of 5” silver discs as I am 12” black ones. And now, vinyl has become something of a fetishised luxury item: as much as there’s still pleasure to be had from sliding a thick chunk of wax cast in whatever hues from a glossy, heavy card sleeve, there’s sometimes a sense that they’re all trying too hard, and the £30 price tag takes some of the shine off the experience. There are a few exceptions – recent Swans releases have been works of art in every sense, and the physical formats have added essential dimensions to music which is something more than just some songs, recorded.

Had Ran Slavin’s latest offering been given a vinyl release, it would have been a triple LP, containing as it does thirty tracks, with a running time of almost two hours. It would have been epic. But despite having released previous albums on esteemed labels including Mille Plateaux, Cronica, and Sub Rosa, it’s unlikely that Ran Slavin has the kind of fan base that could justify, from a label perspective, a triple-vinyl release. But what Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings have done here is interesting, and utilises the digital format in a novel way, by offering alternative artwork in recognition of the album’s multi-faceted nature. Yes, it’s been done by major artists who’ve released physical albums with variant covers, with a view to enticing hardcore fans to buy multiple copies and thus increase sales and enhance the chart position (The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds probably wins the award for the pinnacle of pisstake on this score), but the idea of buying an alternative digital cover for a nominal price isn’t something I’ve seen before.

As the notes on the Bandcamp page explain, ‘Just as the music migrates across genres, the visuals migrate across states of being, extending the album into a network of parallel identities. Together, they construct a fragmented yet coherent cosmos, where each image is both an entrance and a deviation, multiplying the ways Neon Swans can be seen, heard, and inhabited.’

Appropriately, Neon Swan doesn’t quite sound like anything I’ve heard before, either. To unpack that, it contains many elements which are common and familiar. There’s sparse techno, minimal dance cuts with sped-up vocals and swathes of space between low-key beats and glitchy grooves, as represented by single release and album opener ‘tell///me///now’ – one of many titles which reflect the sense of fragmentation and juxtaposition which define the album (‘s4dert1ac’ and ‘d3xr3rity’ provide other examples, but then there are the likes of which also disrupt the conventions of language in the same way Slavin disrupts the language of genre tropes).

‘audio ease my pain’ plunges into darker territory, while introducing rap vocals atop heavy hip-hop beats (although there’s an instrumental version as well further on, which offers a different perspective again on the same material). Elsewhere, ‘c-r-i-m-s-o-n-schema’ brings spacey, spaced-out bleeps, heavy percussion that has a late 90s feel, a blend of The Judgement Night soundtrack’s melding of rap and rock, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

For all of the space, the reverb, the minimalism, something about tracks like ‘searching_heart’ is quite claustrophobic: the intense repetition and synthetic feel, paired with crackling fizz, brain-melting glitches and some grinding bass tones. It may be constructed using the fundamental elements of dance music, but this is not dance music. Electronic music to induce uncontrolled spasms and twitches isn’t a genre, but if it was, Ran Slavin would be a leading exponent.

It’s a long album, with a lot to digest, and as it thumps and wobbles and glitches away, snippets and fragments collaged across one another, there are times it all feels a but much, a bit bewildering. At times it’s draining, exhausting, at times you simply zone out, and often, I find myself questioning the wisdom of persisting with it. The vibe is that of the kind of underground clubs I never got on with in the 90s and early 00s, and I’m particularly reminded of the time Whitehouse played an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2003: I was there for Whitehouse, who played for forty minutes starting around midnight, and the music being played was rather in the vein of the more groove-centric cuts on here. The people there for the DJs weren’t happy for the low-key electro pulsations to be paused for the noise and antics of Bennett and Best, but for my part, I struggled to get into the low-key electro pulsations. But the other reason I recount this experience, challenging in its incongruousness, is that in places, Neon Swans feels incongruous with itself, an album riven with unreconciled contradictions.

The execution of Neon Swans is hard to fault, and it does cover considerable ground, with range, over its expansive duration. But it is sprawling in its scope, its focus is variable, and it is very long. And it’s maybe better with drugs.

AA

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Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound

Posted: 6 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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The Flenser – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Agriculture – the name brings connotations of the slow, the sedate, a simple and calm life, of rolling fields, tractors, luscious foliage, abundant harvests. One may picture hedgerows, and hear birdsong, the lowing of cattle in the mind’s ear. But LA quartet Agriculture describe themselves as ‘ecstatic black metal’, which on paper sounds like an oxymoron, but on hearing them, it makes sense, although it’s hard to really unpack precisely why this is so. I mean, it’s black metal and its raging and ferocious, tempestuous, and tumultuous, with relentless double-pedal drumming and frenzied fretwork. And yet… and yet from the abyss emerges a strange sense of euphoria. Uplifting is not quite the word… but the release, the spirituality of pure catharsis – this, this is where we find ourselves. And in this sense, the album’s title is apposite. This is the sound of rapturous liberation from the grounded state, and an album that goes far, far beyond the confines of black metal as we know it.

As they explain ‘Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence: a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes “the only way out is in.”’

The brutal lead single, ‘The Weight’, set the expectations high for this second full-length release. And if it set a precedent in terms of anticipation for high octane, high-intensity, full-blooded metal intensity, then it still cannot really prepare you for the full force of this album – or its range, as the band push in myriad directions, at times making music of soft, aching beauty which hits just as hard as the all-out blunt force that dominates.

A minute into ‘My Garden’, I’m ready to take some time out to lie down. The sonic density hits like a hurricane, the thick, distorted bass grinding hard into the solar plexus, the guitars as gnarly and dirty and fuck, the vocals dragged screaming from the very pits of hell come together and hit hard. It makes for five gut-wrenching minutes, jarring, jolting, squalling hard through angular discord that burns like a wildfire. But, towards there end, there is an unexpected bridge, which is nothing short of angelic, arriving like a mirage rising through a heat haze in the desert, which swiftly disappear in a welter of warping noise.

‘Flea’ sounds more like 90s grunge, before a blanket of fretwork crashes in. The grungy track caries on, though, and the result being some kind of sonic palimpsest. Elsewhere, ‘Dan’s Love Song’ takes the form of a slow-tapering shoegazey drone work, which is delicate and graceful despite the underlying density of the soaring, vaporous guitar, while ‘Bodhidharma’ starts out sparse and delicate before lurching into a bruising grunge riff.

There’s no question that ‘The Weight’ is a clear standout, for its sheer relentless force alone. The narrative of the lyric is as heavy as the sludgy guitar and grinding bass, and the rabid vocals top it all perfectly, inflicting maximum anguish. It’s not overtly uplifting by any stretch – in fact, it’s outright harrowing – but it’s the sound of vital emotional release.

Indeed, this is the trajectory of songs like ‘Serenity’, which is similarly fast and frenzied, and it does offer a strange sort of serenity – but when the notes are played so fast they blur and melt together, there comes a point where things smooth out and everything simply washes over you. I have a sense that it’s the kind of calmness and serenity which comes to those who are drowning just before they lose consciousness.

The title track, as it happens, is but a twenty-nine second interlude, a slow, low, rumbling drone, and the soft balladry of the almost folky ‘Hallelujah’ is simply breathtaking in its simplicity and the beautiful nature of its execution.

The final track, ‘The Reply’ is six and a half minutes of blistering blackened post rock / post metal, which in places evokes the searching emotional introspection of Her Name is Calla, while in others simply pounds and soars, simultaneously.

The balance of crushing weight and aching reflection is hard to reconcile at first, as the juxtapositions are extreme, but given time to digest and process, it proves to be perfect. The gentler moments pull it back from the brink of excess, and – strange to say – from being too much. Where Agriculture really strike gold is in their ability to sustain the emotional intensity through the gentler moments, meaning that while you’re recovering your breath, they continue to prod at those mental pressure points. The result is at times bewildering, overwhelming, even devastating. With The Spiritual Sound, Agriculture don’t only transcend black metal, but genre entirely, and the experience is dizzying, a visionary creative peak which is truly peerless.

AA

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Photo credit: Olivia Crumm

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