Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Watch: ‘OutPSYder’ by Junkie Kut

Posted: 1 November 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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British industrial techno/gabba artist JUNKIE KUT is excited to reveal his new single ‘OutPSYders,’ available on the main digital streaming platforms.

Following the release of last year’s ekstasis album, JUNKIE KUT returns more fierce than ever with his blistering new anthem for the outcasts:

“So many of us struggle to live in mainstream culture, so I wanted to make a track of optimistic rage, dedicated to the people who don’t fit in; the goths, the ravers, the punks, the geeks, the freaks – its a battle-cry for individuality in a painfully homogenous world.”

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Junkie Kut fuses industrial, punk and metal with the sounds of speedcore, gabba, techno & trance. Fresh from opening the main stage at both Resistanz Festival and Infest this year, Junkie Kutis bringing a wake up call to our ‘culture of despair’ with his fierce energy, raw passion and psalms of freedom.

Destroying traditional genre boundaries, he is recognised for confrontational live shows in both the industrial / alternative world and the digital hardcore / speedcore network – performing at hardcore raves and cybergoth festivals worldwide. Playing on stages with the likes of Aesthetic Perfection, Zardonic, Deviant UK and Ayria, as well as countless iconic hardcore festivals such as Hardshock, Pokkie Herrie, Terrordrang and Berlin’s F*ckParade – it has built a loyal fan base in Germany, Netherlands, and the UK.

Inspired by radical counterculture and neo-shamanic visions of a future utopia, JUNKIE KUT brings a refreshingly optimistic battle-cry to our lost society and summons the magick of our collective emancipation. This is music for the outPSYders!

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'OutPSYDers' Single Cover

Stewart Home vs JIz – Problematic Memorials

Posted: 26 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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26th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently had his early punk rock recordings reissues, Stewart Home makes a new foray into the recorded medium, this time with a rather more experimental collaboration with JIz. Delivering a spoken word list of ‘problematic memorials’ (as the title suggests) with some additional commentary, in a fashion not dissimilar from The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s ‘It’s Grim Up North’, across three variants with backing that ranges from swampy experimental noise to minimal avant-jazz, Home leads us on a tour of London taking in sights that most people don’t realise have unsavoury connotations and commemorate people and events which probably ought to be damned rather than celebrated.

The long history of slavery throughout the British Empire has – belatedly – become subject to more open discourse in recent years, but our current government, who seem determined to resurrect the spirit of the empire through jingoism and xenophobia and a completely false reimagining of history as a way of selling Brexit as a win, are averse to such discourse, branding anything and everything from the Army to the National Trust as ‘woke’ – as if being woke is a bad thing.

For the most part, the sense of ‘Britishness’ which is increasingly only a sense of ‘Englishness’ in our ever-more isolated and impoverished part of a small island on the edge of Europe – geographically, and sinking off the coast of Europe politically – is born of ignorance. Stubborn, belligerent ignorance, but ignorance nonetheless. And out of such ignorance arise pathetic, futile culture wars.

Home has so far managed to slide his antagonistic sociopolitical position under the radar in recent years – in contrast to his controversy-piquing earlier years when he was churning out pastiche works about skinheads and riots and anarchy. What happened? Perhaps in developing his approach to be more subtle, Home achieved even greater subversion by being able to continue his mission without interference. Whatever the reason, here we have Problematic Memorials. Call it woke, call it what you like, but it needs to be heard. And beyond the message, it’s a top-notch spoken word / experimental music crossover collaboration, so go get your lugs round it.

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Carl Stone – Stolen Car

Posted: 9 October 2020 in Albums
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Unseen Worlds – 25th September 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Pitched as ‘the gleeful, heart racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape’, Carl Stone’s latest release of a remarkably lengthy career is a smash-and grab hotch-potch of percussion-driven pieces.

Writing on the album on its release, Stone comments, ‘These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion.’

Stone’s purpose is integral to appreciating the album, because the sounds with which it I formulated are the epitome of derivative, and without that context, one may be inclined to consider Stolen Car a serious endeavour rather than a work of subversion and commentary.

It begins with ‘Huanchaco, is a hyperactive mess of undulating synth which duels with freakout freeform jazz horns, all propelled by some frenetic drum ‘n’ bass beats.

Stammering, overlapping vocal loops provide the fabric of ‘Auburn’. Cut and spliced in such short fragments as to bubble and blur, and as everything melts into a foamy soup, there’s a fast-pace indie tune playing on the radio in the next room, and this in turn melts into the r’n’b pop froth of ‘Au Jus’, a chopped-up summary of the sound of the autotuned contemporary mainstream – slick, stylised, and devoid of content.

As the album progresses, everything seems to accelerate, growing more dizzying as K-pop and Katy Perry are whipped into an out-of-control fairground. Each track feels – and sounds – like listening to the entire top 40 single chart for the last five years with each single playing simultaneous and 25% faster than recorded. With the quickening of the pace also comes an increasingly bubblegumminess, but also a sense that things are out of control. It feels like a metaphor for postmodern culture, its endless acceleration built on a perpetual recycling whereby surface substitutes depth.

Stolen Car is a disorientating rollercoaster of a ride – a joyride where the joy is edged with panic as the smile becomes a fixed plastic grin as the fun turns to fear that at any moment you’re going to flip off the road, meet head-on with a wall, or worse still, carry on going, ever faster, forever….

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