Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

She Spread Sorrow & Luca Sigurtà – The Grimorian Tapes

Posted: 28 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 23rd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The pitch alone is harrowing: ‘“Don’t be scared by death,” Alice Kundalini (aka She Spread Sorrow) calmly instructs at the beginning of her collaborative Grimorian Tapes with partner Luca Sigurtà. Her words slither from her lips with a subtle, sinister unease, compounded by the unsettling quality of her whisper. The fear of death, this most profound condition, has long been a subject of philosophical, spiritual, and existential inquiry. To fear death is undeniably human; to transcend that fear is often seen as reaching a higher plane of existence. At least, that’s the intention behind the rituals, the spells woven into the fabric of The Grimorian Tapes.”

I myself have spent a lot of time contemplating death, and the fear of death, especially of late. We are all scared of death, particularly in Western culture. When my wife was diagnosed wit stage 4 breast cancer, where it had spread to her bones, I was terrified, not only of losing her, but of waking up to find her dead in the bed beside me. What do you do in that situation? I did not want to see her dead, and she did not want me to see her dead. Thankfully, she made it to a hospice for her last day, but I lived for a year under the shadow of that ‘what if…?’

You might think that her passing brought peace, but it did not: instead, I have spent many mornings twitching and drenched in sweat lest I should die and leave our daughter an orphan, being thirteen. This is not a call for sympathy – simply as summary. It’s hard not to be scared by death, inevitable as it is.

For additional context, it’s worth delving into the details of the album’s inspiration, a large portion of which comes form The Black Pullet, ‘an 18th-century French grimoire filled with instructions for making talismans and magical artifacts’. We learn that ‘Kundalini weaves her own take on the book’s esoteric themes into the shadowy tape loops that comprise The Grimorian Tapes. The Black Pullet is a detailed guide into alchemy, divination, and occult practices, with a particular focus on harnessing hidden forces through the construction of specific objects imbued with magical power. Though Kundalini doesn’t practice these rituals per se, she finds a deep, poetic resonance with these ancient teachings. The allure isn’t in the performative aspect of these rituals but in the seductive power of its symbols and ideas, which speak to a long-forgotten language of metaphysical mystery. It’s this sense of transmutation, hidden knowledge, and occult wisdom that lends The Grimorian Tapes its dark, ritualistic intensity.’

And so it is that ‘grimoire’ introduces the album with a dark etherality, whispered vocals, the words indecipherable. Echoing amidst rumbles and a persistent drone which ebbs and flows. It’s compelling, and enticing, but at the same time, unsettling. It’s the fear of the unknown, of course: the esoteric and other-worldly and anything that speaks of a realm beyond one’s ken is always difficult to assimilate. This, in a nutshell, is the appeal of horror, because a lot of us find entertainment in being scared. It’s the same reason people go on rollercoasters. Being scared half to death reminds you that you’re alive. And The Grimorian Tapes is pretty scary, in the suspense and horror sense.

‘initiatory’ rumbles and hovers dark and murky, sonically entering the domains of Throbbing Gristle, and again, the whispered vocals are menacing, and reminiscent of Prurient’s Cocaine Death, while ‘the stairs’ brings a hint of disturbing playground, psychological derangement, the other ‘other side’ we’re all so afraid of due to a lack of comprehension. And the further this album progresses, the more uncomfortable and unsettling it becomes, the further it extends beyond the domains of the ordinary, the mainstream comprehension.

‘babele’ is a dank, muddy morass of sound over a slow thudding heartbeat rhythm, while ‘kirtan’ brings flickering, stuttering beats, while again leading the listener through hair-prickling terrain, with triffid-like stem-clattering and gloomy swirls and abstract vocals. ‘we worship you’ plunges deeper into a darker space, with sputtering electrostatic sparking, and gargled vocals, deep and robotic, growling, threatening and emanating from another place, another world, one beyond reach. ‘me and I’ churns like slow machinery, and is industrial in the primitive sense. Again, the way we have come to understand ‘industrial’ has evolved: Foetus is a far cry from Throbbing Gristle, and both are a world away from NIN and Ministry. But The Grimorian Tapes takes us right back to the origins of the genre.

This is one dark and difficult album, heavy and suffocating and uncomfortable from beginning to end. Two thumbs up. And now I need to lie down.

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Gintas K – Breakcore

Posted: 22 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K’s latest offering was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard and controller in January 2025, and first released by Japanese label Static Disc in May.

It’s worth perhaps mentioning that ‘Breakcore’ is – and I shall shamefully quote from Wikipedia here – ‘is a style of electronic dance music that emerged from jungle, hardcore, and drum and bass in the mid-to-late 1990s. It is characterized by very complex and intricate breakbeats and a wide palette of sampling sources played at high tempos.’ In the main, not really my personal field of expertise, or particularly within the remit of Aural Aggravation.

But this is a Gintas K album, and the nine pieces are typical of his style, combining experimentalism and the application of software and midi / laptop setup, producing a range of glitchy, frothy, gurgly sounds which stop and start intermittently, unpredictably. His live and improvised works always come with a sense of unpredictability, of spontaneity, while bearing his distinctive sounds. One of the key focuses within K’s work is on detail, zooming in on microtonality, granularity. When I say it sounds ‘bubbly’ or ‘frothy’, I mean it’s the sound one might consider the equivalent of the visual experience of slowly swirling a latte or a pint of ale, or hyperfixating on the bubbles in a bath. This is not, however, the gentle swill and flow of currents, but a frenzied effervescence, like the reaction between bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. And look long enough and hard enough, and patterns begin to emerge.

Listening to the bubbling blitzkrieg of digital clicks, beeps, and fizzing of any work by Gintas K can be stimulating to the point of eye-popping discombobulation. It’s almost too much – and this is nevermore true than the experience that is Breakcore. There are beats present – but they’re composed not of beats in the conventional sense, being neither rhythmic nor percussive, either from an analogue source or a digital sampled source or emulation. These are flickers, pulses, rapidfire stutters, hard sounds which replicate the essence of a beat without being a beat, per se. For example, those of a certain age may recall the successive ‘pink-pink-pink’ chattering digital babble of dial-up. Few would necessarily consider those sounds beats in context, but… yes, they have a certain beat-like quality. And this is how the beats often emerge from the clicks and pops, moans and drones or another quintessential Gintas K demonstration of circuit meltdown as an artform.

I had never considered his work in a ‘dance’ context before, and still wouldn’t: one feels as if the title is perhaps a shade ironic. But the tempo is certainly high and the beats are complex and intimate, emerging as they do from the thrum of what sounds like a revving engine, the whirr of an old hard-drive, the click of a CD driver whirring into action. Every second of this release sounds like some kind of digital or mechanical malfunction, as tempos whirl and blur, drawl and slow. Scrunching, crunching, twanging, springing, stammering and stuck, it’s a relentless attack of wrong sounds. But emerging from all of it, there are erratic beats, like a succession of deliberately jarring jazz fills and simply wild judders.

It is relentless, and it’s complete overload. The nine tracks run for a total of twenty-nine minutes: its intensity is such that you feel as if your brain is starting to melt after the first ten. In short, Breakcore is truly wild, and it’s not remotely easy or accessible – but it absolutely encapsulates everything that defines what Gintas K’s does.

AA

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Sadie Powers – Souvenir

Posted: 19 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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9th May 2025 – Room40

Christopher Nosnibor

Souvenirs are unusual things, in that they’re intensely personal, and imbued with a resonance which is often difficult to articulate.

I will revisit an anecdote I relayed no so long ago: my dad gave me £15 spending money when I went on a Cub camp in Yorkshire when I was probably fourteen. We had a day trip to York, where I discovered an independent record shop, the now gone and sadly-missed Track Records. I blew most of my £15 on 12” singles by The Sisters of Mercy: Alice, Temple of Love, and The Reptile House EP. On returning home, my father was not happy: he’d given me the money for real souvenirs – fridge magnets, mugs, erasers… but the fact that I still have those records and tale to tell says these were the best souvenirs I could have ever purchased. Would I still have an I Heart York mug or a tea towel thirty years later?

But one thing that’s become apparent is that for fringe, niche, and unestablished acts like Sadie Powers, even when released by labels like Room40, physical releases are becoming less of a thing. It’s a sad reflection on the state of the world and how the arts in general are suffering. People don’t want to pay for stuff, or they can’t afford to pay for stuff, and the end result is the same.

Souvenir is a sad album, based on a premise which resonates on a personal level. I’ve written extensively of late on both the impact of the pandemic, and of losing my wife, and Souvenir is a work which explores grief, with a particular focus on the pandemic. Powers explains the album, its context, and its musical limitations and development in terms of instrumentation, in a fashion which warrants quotation in full:

‘Between 2020 and 2022, a significant number of friends and family passed away. Due to the pandemic, funerals became impossible to travel to or just didn’t happen. How does one grieve alone? What is that language? What is that movement? What do I do with my hands, with the muscle memory of care weaving phantom thread? What is the shape of the shelter one makes to bear this loss? If I’m not holding, will I sink to the bottom?

‘What is my last memory with them? Almost always, it is of embrace.

‘I’ve had a relationship with fretless bass for about 20 years. It’s an unforgiving instrument. It exposes everything. Like porcelain: elastic, pliable, detailed, expressive. Suggestive to subtle touches. It shows the hand of the player. I began recording improvisations with silence, thinking of those I’d lost, their embraces, those moments of stillness and when time folds in on itself, then cutting the tracks up processing and layering them, a sound collage. Programmable music box bells, sheet metal, cardboard box, and field recordings from the same spot on the back patio of my former home color the shape. Like a bird collecting items to create a nest of memory. Sounds drifting in and out like recollections, like ghosts. The practice became a life raft, or a grieving raft.

‘Is the souvenir the embrace? Souvenirs originated from pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as a remembrance of a journey.’

The four compositions which make up Souvenirs are each approximately ten minutes in duration, and this would have made for a magnificent vinyl LP, particularly given the texture and detail of the works.

The first track, ‘Right After’ is exemplary: it begins so quietly as to be beyond range, before the crackle of a slow fade-in becomes discernible. And against this, and some rumbling dark ambience, there is the strolling fretless bass work. I can’t help but think – however fleetingly – of Duran Duran, not because it actually sounds like Duran Duran, but because that fretless bass has such a distinctive sound – thick, bulbous, rounded, warm.

‘Soft Materials: Permanent Rose’ is move overtly ambient, and ripples its way along in an understated fashion, and ‘Rabbit Hour, too, hovers and hums, clatters and clinks, plunging deeper into abstraction, drifting cloud-like and formless, hovering, while occasional scrapes and nails-down-a-blackboard feedback sounds cut through the soft waves.

‘Princess Moo Bear’ may sound soft, but the clanking chines are pitches against thick helicopter sounds and dark abstraction, before finally expanding and drifting to nothing.

Souvenir is not an easy or instant album. Quite the contrary is true. But it is detailed, layered, and has much going on.

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Why Patterns – Screamers

Posted: 17 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 11th July 2025

Why Patterns’ latest offering marks something of a shift from Regurgitorium, released back in 2022. I say ‘back’ in 2022 because it feels like a lifetime ago. Some of that is, admittedly, due to personal circumstance, but for most, 2022 was a very different time. We still weren’t all that long out of lockdown, for a start. We were still coming up for air, and finding our way – and likely crawling our way back to the office, while a lot of shops still had their Perspex screens in place. I remember in the checkout queue in Aldi just willing these weird cunts who had seemingly either forgotten the preceding year and a bit, or had lost all sense of how to engage, by looming and leaning over and pressing too close would fuck off. I revisit the context of the last album because it somehow managed to capture the mood in some obtuse way, and when I wrote ‘It’s fucked up. It’s deranged. It hurts,’ I could as easily have been referring to life itself at that point in time.

Screamers is different again. Or, if not so much, different, compressed, compacted, distilled, the intensity amplified by the concision of the tracks.

The crunchy, gnarly bass still dominates, and it’s snarling away and tearing strips straight out of the traps on the frenzied ‘After the Bullfight’. Clocking in at a mere minute and forty-seven seconds, it’s noise rock smooshed down to the tight parameters of grindcore, and with insane amounts of reverb, the stuttering, stammering vocal yelps from Doug Norton, the man behind the ‘Mouth Sounds’ owe an equal debt to Suicide and The Cramps, and this may be the spawning of industrial psychobilly as a new genre. Everything is overloading, the speakers are crackling with megawattage overload, and when ‘Clown in a Housefire’ blasts in, you actually begin to wonder if it’s supposed to sound like this of it your gear’s fucked.

One may cling in references to the Jesus Lizard and all the rest, but really, this sounds like a psychotic reimagining of early Blacklisters – specifically early because of THAT bass racket. But whereas Blacklisters were, and remain, quite song-orientated, at least structurally, Screamers sees Why Patterns take their template and smash the living fuck out of it by throwing it against a brick wall and stomping on it until there is nothing but splattered pulp. None of the songs – I mean, they’re not really songs, more demented blasts of discord played at three hundred miles an hour, all of the instruments playing at angles against and across, rather than with one another, the vocals the sound of a breakdown in real time. And listening to this as bombs and missiles are going off everywhere and no-one knows what is going on anywhere, I fin myself listening to this tumultuous mayhem and thinking ‘yep, they’ve done it again. This is the closest I’ve heard anyone articulate this moment.’ I mean, they don’t really ‘articulate’: as the title suggests, Screamers is a raw, primal scream. It’s a frenzied, lurching, gut-punching racket that rattles the bibs and kicks the balls, hard. Pleasant, it is not. Especially that grungy bass that churns the stomach.

There aren’t really any riffs: it’s just a relentless assault of jarring noise. ‘Nervous Laughter’ brings hints of the latest mclusky album, but does so with menace, malice, and a hint of the unhinged, and following on ‘Wind Up Chattering teeth’ is a minute and six seconds of rabid raving. It’s almost enough to make you want to puke.

Then there’s ‘Club Foot By Kasabian by Blacklisters’. It extends the joke of the original – since the Blacklisters song, ‘Club Foot By Kasabian’ wasn’t a cover, and had nothing to do with Kasabian, and so it is that ‘Club Foot By Kasabian by Blacklisters’ is a minute and a half of squalling, brawling, guitar-led abrasion. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Castrovalva in its deranged intensity, and frenzied, squawking disregard for decency. The title track is fifty-two seconds long. It’s rabid. It has to be heard to be comprehended.

The last track, ‘Buffoons and Barel Organs’ is both the longest and most structurally coherent. ‘Why do I cross the road? Why do I cross the road? Because I’m a fucking chicken!’ Norton hollers amidst a raging tempest of bass and drums.

Screamers is certainly appropriately titled. Every song is a brief but blistering assault. It’s full-on, and will melt your face, and as such, I wholeheartedly recommend it, unless you’re a wuss.

AA

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Psychic TV – A Prayer For Derek Jarman

Posted: 15 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cold Spring Records – 23rd June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a heretical stance, particularly as a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, but Psychic TV never really did it for me. They felt a bit meandering, wanky folky, in the same way as a lot of David Tibet’s stuff does. This may be to my detriment, and I may be missing the joys and benefits of a huge catalogue, but… I can shrug it off, and I will live.

TG and seminal filmmaker Derek Jarman were kindred spirits, provocative, avant-garde, and testament of their reciprocal artistic respect is cemented in their 1980 collaboration, where TG soundtracked Jarman’s movie Under the Shadow of the Sun (with the soundtrack being released some four years later).

A Prayer For Derek Jarman was recorded later, on LP in 1985 by Temple Records and subsequently reissued as an extended CD version by Cold Spring in 1997. As the accompanying text explains, ‘Unavailable for almost three decades, this collection from the Cold Spring archive has been repackaged and remastered with new artwork. A documentation of the soundtrack work created by Psychic TV for the film-maker and artist Derek Jarman, it serves as a demonstration of why PTV were one of the most important groups in the underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s.’ The material on this disc was – as far as I can discern – last available in 2011 as part of the Themes six-CD box set, also released via Cold Spring, and this represents a solo release of disc two.

There’s no mistaking that both Jarman an PTV were important, although I would personally rank the former above the latter – that may be a rather subjective position to take, though, and there is no denying the immense shadow Genesis P Orridge would cast over the scene for many a year and perhaps an eternity.

The titular ‘Prayer For Derek’ is intended as an invocationary prayer and is based on Tibetan rituals; a collage of sounds including field recordings of the lulling waves running aground on the shingle beach opposite Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, home of some of the UK’s best preserved ‘sound mirrors’ – alongside bird song, crying babies and massed ritualised chants to aid the late director in his after-life journeys. It follows the seventeen-minute churning abstract noise whorl that is ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ – and which is, on balance, as good as any of Throbbing Gristle’s expansive dark noise works, and ‘Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2) on which the promo for the album is predominantly pitched, and the ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’. These compositions are piano-led and border on neoclassical. Dainty, charming, and musically eloquent, they certainly mark a departure from the work more commonly associated with Orridge or PTV, as well as evidencing the reasons why they are such a difficult act to pin down, or even distinguish the ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ works in their immense and wide-ranging – and variable – catalogue. With its echoed, looped vocal layers redolent of Gregorian chants, it’s not so hard to determine why ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’ is not mentioned in the promo, although it’s entirely captivating.

As the accompanying text observes, ‘Other tracks feature elongated drones, washes of dissonance, melancholic guitar chime, evocative piano scoring, Burroughs cut-ups, gothic chants and snarling dogs.’ ‘Rites of Reversal’ marks a clear contrasts from the delicate piano-led compositions, diving in with some hard-edged grinding oscillations, which, again, lean more toward the kind of dark noise that was the TG trademark.

A Prayer For Derek Jarman is broad in scope and mood, and this is as appropriate is it is likely deliberate. It certainly presents the more experimental aspects of Psychic TV, and as varied as it is, the quality is also there.

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Felix Kubin – Der Tanz Aller

Posted: 9 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza –16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Much of Felix Kubin’s work since the turn of the millennium has involved radio, although film and theatre and other soundtrack works have also been a feature. Der Tanz Aller is one such soundtrack work, which was ‘created for the performance of the same title by the experimental arts collective LIGNA. The group specialized in site-specific, participatory works. Der Tanz Aller is based on Rudolf von Laban’s radical 1920s concept of ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), collective dances in public space that aimed to reimagine social order through shared movement.’

The context and objective behind the composition are particularly useful to be aware of when listening to this album in isolation, as Kubin sets out: ‘When the performance group LIGNA approached me in 2012 to compose music for a play based on Rudolf von Laban’s revolutionary kinetic theories and so-called ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), I thought of a soundtrack that would be both rhythmically engaging, abstract and mechanical. I knew there would be pre-recorded voices talking about his philosophy and guiding the audience via headphones. So, I had to leave some “air” in the arrangements, allowing the visitors to concentrate on the spoken words, while simultaneously becoming dancers. In LIGNA’s conceptual works – just like Laban’s idea of the movement choirs – the audience members become the performers.’

I shan’t dwell too long on the conceptual aspects here, beyond noting that this predates John Cage’s 4’33” by more than two decades, and while Cage’s silent work was on many levels a quite different proposition, the way in which any sound made by the audience – be it a cough or the shuffling of feet or the creaking of a chair – immediately becomes part of the performance indicates clear common ground. Likewise, William Burroughs’ cut-ups, which invited ‘creative reading’ whereby the engagement of the reader and their experience and perception was integral to their success, arrived some thirty years later. As such, ‘Bewegungschöre’ represent the cutting edge of avant-gardism, belonging to the era which brought us Duchamps’ readymades and – perhaps more pertinently – Tristan Tzara’s directions to make a Dadaist poem.

For the most part, the ‘air’ in the arrangements is apparent: there is space, separation, and while we can only imagine the prerecorded voices talking about Laban’s philosophy through headphones, it’s possible to get a sense of how it would work. But then, occasionally, Kubin’s compositions get father more busy, as on ‘Dämonen der Zerstreuung’, with big band percussion and noodlesome orchestration that’s of a strong jazz persuasion, but has a whole lot happening, and often simultaneously. There’s drama with orchestral strikes, and creeping, urgent glockenspiels that bring a noirish, detective movie feel – not a chase scene, but a cat-and-mouse scenario.

There are some spoken-word passages, in German, as on ‘Raumstunde Vera Skoronel’, accompanied by evolving sonic backdrops, the likes of which I find hard to imagine inspire dancing, but spasmodic twitching and erratic lurching, while the title track is a slice of jerky, and quite insular and intense, Kraftwerkian synth bleepery, and ‘Rotes Lied’ is a perfect exemplar of sparse, spaced-out, glooping, blooping, reverby weirdery with occasional chimes and stuttering shot of snare. There is plenty of air here, as you sit and wonder what exactly is going on?

Who knows? And does it even matter at this point? The percussion builds from all sides, and the nagging away – until suddenly it doesn’t.

The unpredictability of Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is its strength. It is weird, unexplained in many respects, beyond simply the initial onboarding awkwardness. We should probably celebrate this weirdness, this sense of separation. Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is never dull, but always strange and alien – and these are reasons to appreciate it.

AA

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Lower Slaughter – Deep Living

Posted: 8 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 6th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Where does the time go? No, really? I’m not just stunned by the fact we’re a week into June already, but the fact that it’s been six years since the last Lower Slaughter album, and nine years since I missed their show in Leeds with Working Man Noise Unit supporting because I was watching Man of Moon play to a nearly empty room across town instead. That’s almost a decade I’ve spent being frustrated by my inability to clone myself, and I find it hard to let these things go.

They’ve undergone some changes since their last outing – changes of the nature which would have terminated, many a band. Their bio traces a raid succession of personnel switches:

Following the departure of long-time vocalist Sinead Young, their surprise return in 2024 saw the remaining former members unveil a new line-up, welcoming James Gardiner to the fold on bass, and with previous bass player Barney Wakefield switching over to vocal duties. Upon Gardiner’s addition, a considerably more expansive sound has emerged, bringing the band’s now recognised output of what the Quietus once referred to as ‘lurching noise-rock’ to new exciting heights, all the while set against an equally more confident and expansive dynamic, reinforced by the chemistry of Graham Hebson and Jon Wood, who remain tighter than ever on drums and guitar respectively.

And so seemingly miraculously, they’re still here. Thus, we arrive at Deep Living, a colossal twelve-track document of the new Lower Slaughter, a release of blistering overload dominated by rolling percussion and thick bass. It’s varied, to say the least, and most certainly does not pursue the most obvious or commercial avenues. It was certainly worth the wait, and we’re most grateful that they are still here. And because it’s being released by Human Worth, 10% of all sales proceeds donated to charity The PANDAs Foundation – a trusted support service for families suffering with perinatal mental illness.

After a good couple of minutes of rolling, tom-driven percussion and muted vocals which sit partially submerged beneath a fat, fuzzed out bass ‘Year of the Ox’ suddenly slams the pedals on and erupts and Wakefield roars in anguish, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’. ‘Take a Seat’ is quite different, more overtly mathy, post-punky, and more accessible overall, despite its hell-for-leather pace and wild energy, and there’s a bit on jangle to altogether mellower ‘The Lights Were Not Familiar’ that’s a shade Pavementy – but it’s Pavement as covered by Fugazi. And the guitars sound loud. In fact, everything on Deep Living sounds loud, and what’s more, the recording and mixing work done by Wayne Adams (Petbrick/Big Lad) captures and conveys that it such a way that it feels loud, like you’re in the room with the backline practically in your face. This is nowhere more apparent than on ‘Dear Phantom’, which has something of a Bug-era Dinosaur Jr vibe to it – and the big grungy riff is magnificent. Then halfway through it goes slow, low, and sludgy – and that’s magnificent too.

Balancing melodic hooks and some quite breezy indie / alt-rock with some hefty, heavier and hugely overdriven passages, Deep Living has some range.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Memories of the Road’ is a slow-burning epic that builds to a roaring finish, and makes for a standout cut. It’s a trick they repeat on the title track which brings the album to a close.

In between, ‘Hospital Chips’ brings pace and jittery tension via thumping bass and jarring, sinewy guitars, and straight-up punk brawlers ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Motions’. All the range, but it’s the fact there are tunes galore that make Deep Living a cracking album.

AA

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Knox Chandler – The Sound

Posted: 4 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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30th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Knox Chandler may not be universally known, but many of the acts he’s credited as playing with over the last forty years are, with long stints as a member of  and the Cyndi Lauper band. Then there’s his work in various capacities with REM, Depeche Mode, Grace Jones, Marianne Faithful, Natalie Merchant, Tricky, The Creatures, Dave Gahan, Paper Monsters and The Golden Palominos… it makes for quite the CV.

This solo outing marks a fairly significant departure from all of that, though. The context behind it is that ‘Knox spent a decade residing in Berlin, Germany, while he explored sound-scaping. He developed a technique he calls “Soundribbons”, which he recorded and performed in its own right as well as applying it to different genres and mediums . He composed, recorded, toured, produced, and wrote string arrangements for Herbert Grönemeyer, Jesper Munk, Pure Reason Revolution, The Still, TAU, Miss Kenichi and the Sun, Mars William’s Albert Ayler Xmas, Rita Redshoes, Them There, The Night…”

And so what we have here is a collection of ten instrumental works, whereby the guitar doesn’t sound like a guitar. In fact, it doesn’t sound specifically like anything. Chandler conjures wispy, ephemeral sound sculptures, atmospheric, brooding, a shade filmic, soundtracky, with hints of sci-fi and BBC radiophonic workshop about their strange, twisting, abstract and keenly non-linear forms.

There’s more than simply droning guitar on offer here, though: flickering, surround-sound precision provides a shifting backdrop to the ever-morphing ‘Tea Stained Edge’, where tremulous, reverby guitar bounces here and there off sonorous string-like sounds and even something resembling a jazzy double bass, but in contrast, ‘Lost Dusk Feather’ takes the form of a magnificently disjointed collage work, flipping between ambience and discordant confusion. The playfully-titled ‘Hidden Hammock Pond’ is one of the album’s most overtly experimental works, a mish-mash of sounds overlaying one another, smooshed together and as strange and unpredictable as it gets, venturing via exploratory ambience and quivering drones and allusions of abstract jazz into Krautrock . It’s wilfully perverse, and swings between the dark and serious, and the light and entertaining within the space of a heartbeat. ‘Mars on a Half Moon Rising’ goes a shade New age strange, insectroid flutters, field sounds and mystical hoodoo, bells and chimes, Morris dancers and scraping bass which occasionally strays into some kind of Duran Duran bending bass moments.

It’s all going on here. It’s impossible to predict direction over the duration of this release: The Sound meanders here, there, and everywhere. At times expansive (as on ‘Burn’), at times claustrophobic, it’s never less than compelling or varied listening.

If you’re seeking anything in the vein of the headline acts with which Knox Chandler is associated with, you may well be disappointed. But if your ears are open to abstract, instrumental strangeness, you’re in the right place. The Sound is weird, unapologetically and strange – and it’s the sound of an artist cutting loose and exploring sound. It’s weird, and wonderful, in equal measure.

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Matthew Nowhere – Crystal Heights

Posted: 1 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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How times have changed. Back in the early 80s, this would have been mainstream. It would have been major label. It would have been huge. It would have smashed the charts. 2025: nah. And so Crystal Heights is a self-released effort, and the chances are its audience will be respectable but limited.

This is an album which is steeped in all things retro: it’s an electropop work which is light and airy and easy on the ear, and low on demand.

He describes it as ‘a sonic love letter to the 1980s’, and the title track is exemplary: it’s light, bouncy, melodic. But it feels somewhat shallow, a shade flimsy. Then again, this was also true of much 80s pop, and it was a criticism levelled at pop music at the time. Critics in particular were not especially enamoured by electronic instruments, particularly sequencers. Here in the UK, the Musicians’ Union sought to ban drum machines as they were seen as doing drummers out of a job. They weren’t really all that keen on synths, either. Using machines to make sound wasn’t considered ‘real’ music.

Again, how times have changed (although drum machines in a ‘rock’ context are still unusual). Drum machines didn’t eradicate drummers, but the death of small venues pretty much killed off bands, impacting the number of places for them to play in the most dramatic fashion. And the proliferation of two-piece acts, and solo acts, is nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the simple practicalities of performing live music. Rehearsal spaces are as scarce as gig spaces: what are bands to do?

The mid-tempo ‘Love is Only What We Are’ sounds like mid-80s radio-friendly movie soundtrack material, and drifts along nicely with some picked reverby guitar work, and it works nicely as a counterpoint to the crisp snare and clinical kick drum sounds. ‘Echoes Still Remain’ is atmospheric, evocative, and also sounds so familiar – not because it is, but because it’s the very quintessence of so much music released circa 1984. It’s hard to fault the level attention to detail here. ‘Ruby Shards’ provides perfect evidence of this, in that it manages to compress pretty much the entirety of New Order’s output into four and a half minutes.

‘Transforming’ was recorded with Lunar Twin, and is a bona fide electropop banger. Constructed around a rippling loop, it’s a supple work that oozes 80s vintage. It’s going to nag me for weeks which songs it reminds me of. It’s a clear standout in an album that’s solid but… but what, exactly? It feels light, perhaps lacking, even. But what more should we want from it, realistically? Innovation? No, that was hardly the objective here. Lunar Twin also features alongside The Antonio Family Singers on ‘Persist3nce’, a brooding slow-burner built around a mesmeric beat which fades to grey.

With Crystal Heights, Nowhere has achieved something that’s not insignificant – an album that’s instantly accessible, strong on melody, and enjoyable.

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Swans – Birthing

Posted: 29 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Young God Records – 30th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

And so we arrive at the end of another era in the epic history of Swans. When they called it a day in 1996 with Soundtracks for the Blind, and a farewell tour documented on Swans are Dead, it really did seem as if that was it. Swans had run their course, and the colossal Soundtracks double CD summarised everything they had achieved over

It may seem strange that the bookend to this phase of their career should be titled Birthing. But such is the cycle of life, and indeed, the avant-garde: death gives way to new life, to build anew one must first destroy. And so in this context, Birthing, which Gira has announced will be the last release of this epic, maximalist phase, makes sense. With a running time of a hundred and fifteen minutes, it’s comparable in duration to its predecessor, The Beggar, and The Glowing Man (a hundred and twenty-one minutes and a hundred and eighteen minutes respectively) , but on this outing, the individual pieces are all immense in proportion, with the album containing just seven tracks, with only one clocking in at less than ten minutes.

‘The Healers’ makes for a suitably atmospheric, slow-burning opener. Around seven minutes in, the gentle eddying begins to swell, like a breeze which wisps and ruffles the leaves on the trees – a minute or so later, the drums have entered the mix, and the ambient drift begins to take a more solid form, and there’s a change in the air temperature, the barometer plummets and the breeze becomes a wind. In no time, there’s a swirling wail of sound surrounding Gira’s increasingly exultant enunciations, but as he growls and mumbles and raises his voice higher, he’s increasingly drowned by the maelstrom. And yet, it’s nowhere near a crescendo, and I’m reminded of their set on the 2013 tour, where, having told my friend that having seen them in the same venue three years previous that they took volume to another level, the first twenty minutes of the set was loud, but not remarkably so – and then suddenly, there was a leap of around thirty percent that felt like a double-footed kick in the chest. Will it happen here? Around the fifteen minute mark, it tapers down to a haunting whistle of wind – and it’s the calm before the storm, as a raging tempest suddenly erupts, a frenzied wall of noise that has become their signature, and the song surges to a powerful sustained climax.

While the delivery is considerably less brutal than it was in the early 80s, Gira’s lyrics are still riven with dark and disturbing imagery, and now coloured with a hint of abstraction and madness, and this is nowhere more evident than on ‘I Am a Tower’, which was aired as a lyric video a little while ago. ‘With thin boneless fingers and pink polished nails, I’m searching for the fat folds of your blunder. Speak up, Dick! …Bring your fish-headed fixer to whisper in my ear. Please worry me here, tongue that victim in there…’ he intones like a cracked messianic cult leader against a backdrop of swirling drones. Attempting to unpick sense or meaning from it feels futile, and potentially traumatic, so instead, it’s perhaps experienced holistically, as a jumble of images and impressions, a fractured collage, a derangement of the senses whereby you allow it to transport you to another plane, away from anything concrete or grounded, beyond all that you know. Seemingly from nowhere, a motorik rhythm kicks in and we get something approximating a driving Krauty post-rock riff, hook and all. It could be Swans’ most pop moment since the White Light / Love of Life albums in the early 90s.

The title track arrives in a ripple of proggy synth that has a hint of Mike Oldfield about it, but gradually builds into a dramatic swell of sound, the likes of which has come to characterise the last decade of Swans, with a single chord struck repeatedly for what feels like an eternity. And then, from nowhere, they launch into something approximating a jig – on a loop, where the bass and drums simply hammer away repeatedly, like a stuck record. It is, if course, pure hypnotic magnificence. Gira’s words slip into soporific sedation amidst descending piano rolls. ‘Does it end? Will it end?’ he asks at the start of an extend wind-down, and it does feel like this would make a perfect gentle close – but there are more jarring, jolting ruptures to come, whipping up a truly punishing climax by way of a close, and by the end of the first disc – a full hour in duration – we’re left drained and hollowed out, tossed this way and that on a sonic – and emotional – tempest only Swans could create. Disc one, then, feels like a compete album. But this is a Swans release, and a landmark one, at that there isa whole further album’s worth of material yet.

‘Red Yellow’ begins in a dreamy drift, but soon slides into a warping drone pitched against another of those relentless, repetitive grooves, this time with some jazz horns freaking out in every direction. And at this point, there does arise the question of what new this iteration of Swans is offering at this point, but the immense, immersive soundscapes provide the answer in themselves. Swans have certainly evolved, but they have always done so gradually. The first half of the eighties was devoted to crushing slow grind, and you’d have to be a glutton for punishment to listen to more than one album in a sitting. The point is that Swans have always pleased themselves and made music that tests the listener’s limits, and Birthing is no exception.

Reviewing a Swans album is always a challenge, especially their comeback releases. They’re not about songs, and, broadly speaking, not really about impact in the way their early works were: instead, they’re about transcendence, about moving beyond mere music.

‘Guardian Spirit’ starts out textured an atmospheric, but ends full Merzbow, before ‘The Merge’ takes noise to the next level, albeit briefly. It’s as if Gira is toying with us. Perhaps he is, but when the noise erupts, it really erupts. ‘Rope’ returns us full cycle to there My Father Will Guide Me, while making an obvious connection with all phases of their career, through which ropes and hangings have been a perpetual theme.

Birthing is not an easy album, but it is one which requires listeners (and reviewers) to do something different in terms of approach. You don’t listen so much a feel it, and ride its endless waves: sometimes slow, gentle, at others an absolute roar, Birthing brings together everything Swans have done, and achieved, over the course of this iteration. It’s often overwhelming, and almost impossible to reduce to words. The second disc does feel softer, more abstract, and leaves on wondering precisely what the next phase will look or sound like.

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