Posts Tagged ‘Detail’

R. Schappert – Hellherz

Posted: 4 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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r-ecords – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A crackle of static washes in and obfuscates the murky bass and beats which begin to emerge. It’s a strange experience, like listening to a tune while under water. Over time, this shifts: hypnotic beats with clicking, cracking snares and low, thwocking bass drum sounds cut through the curtain of hiss which hangs like heavy rain. And so it is that ‘Waiting for nothing’, the first of the three compositions on R. Schappert’s Hellherz EP. It’s an intriguing piece, layered and unpredictable and multi-faceted.

In context of his bio, which informs us that ‘Roland Schappert pursues border crossings in the form of an “organic digitality” oscillating between melos, sound and rhythm’.

The EP’s accompanying notes are somewhat winding, kind of cryptic: ‘Where do we put all the words that held us captive? We put them in a bottle post and send them out into the open sea. Back on land, there is fluttering in the space of spaces. Corners and edges crumble away in tumultuous layers. Let us take the time that the melos urges us to take, let us entrust him with our voice.

Sensually coded sequences of notes disrupt the free flow of our thoughts. Cranes hop and counter common notions of progress. Hopping instead of marching. Jumping instead of stomping. Up into the sky. From 3/4 to 4/4 time and back again. With hissing and quiet humming. Do we like it better up here? Where do we come from, where are we flying to for the winter? No more getting lost: Wrap your words. Our hearts are light.’

It appears that much of this is cultivated around the EP’s centrepiece, ‘Wrap your words’, the credits for which draw my attention in a way which imbues me with a certain unease:

Lyrics by R. Schappert

Vocals: revised AI voice

AI’s ubiquity is cause for concern in itself, and the reasons for this are a thesis in themselves. But specifically, given the way AI trains itself, voluntarily feeding it words to recycle and regurgitate feels like an abandonment of artistic ownership. When William Burrroughs cut up existing texts in order to form new ones, he questioned the notion that anyone ‘owned’ words, contending that the act of writing was simply the selection and manipulation of words in differing sequences. But this is not the same challenge of ownership and methods of creativity, because the application of AI serves to remove the artist from the process, partially or even wholly. Moreover, while AI is being used for military and medical purposes (and fears over where that may lead again are another thesis worth of debate at least), in the day-to-day, AI for the everyman seems to be about creative applications. Personally, I would rather AI did my admin and cleaned the oven in order to give me more time for creative pursuits. The idea that an artist would delegate any part of their creative work to AI is something which I find truly bewildering. Yes, there are skills we may lack, but the joy of art, in any medium – is learning those skills, or collaborating with other creatives to fill those skills gaps. There are real people with real skills, and working with them and learning from them is how we grow as artists.

So, AI voice? Why? Why not find a vocalist? Why not even apply autotune to a real vocal if that’s the desired effect? The warbling, autotuned-sounding digital vocalisations sound pretty naff, if truth be told, and add little to a tune which clops and thuds along with some retro synth sounds hovering vaguely around a beat which stutters along in soft focus. But as I listen, the whole AI vocal thing gnaws at me: has AI been utilised, uncredited, to the instrumentation too? What can we trust, what can we believe now?

The title track draws the EP to a close, with some brooding, quavering organ sounds and glitchy beats and more static, returning things full-circle before an abrupt end. It’s atmospheric, and a shade unsettling, too.

It may be brief, but there are many layers to this. As a whole, Hellherz provides much to ponder.

AA

(Click image to link to audio)

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David Shea – Meditatons

Posted: 21 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room 40 – 7th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice: in terms of daylight hours, the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. As I write, we’ve had cloud, fog, mist, and rain most days here in York for weeks, so it’s essentially felt like one perpetual night for nigh on an eternity. I’m certainly no summer sun lover (I have fair skin and suffer with hayfever), but do struggle with this time of year – always did, but personal circumstances have accentuated the struggle. Watching Shutter Island with my fourteen-year-old daughter earlier (it seemed like a good idea to avoid conventional ‘family’ ‘Christmas’ fare), she commented on how the ‘man with dead wife is troubled and has wild dreams’ trope is perhaps disproportionately common in movies. She’s absolutely right, of course, but the observation hit hard and brought me back to the reason we were avoiding the schmaltzy family Christmas shit – and reminded me that there’s simply no escape from my personal narrative, that my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just before Christmas in 2021, and died just after Christmas in 2023. These facts not only make it hard for Christmas to be happy, but dealing with all of the stuff like Christmas shopping, present-wrapping, arranging seeing relatives, etc. – stuff that was primarily her domain – on my own is a significant source of stress.

And this is why, on seeing this release had arrived for my attention, it made sense to do myself a favour, for a change. Music is, after all, one of the best therapies. While I’ve little to no interest in new age cack or pseudomystical bullshit, and have generally failed at any attempts to mediate with the limited assistance I’ve had, the idea of a method of achieving mental calm still holds significant appeal.

As David Shea explains in the album’s accompanying notes, ‘Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha’s death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

‘The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians, languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.’

Each of the eight pieces is around eight minutes in duration, and are centred around Shea’s piano, with a host of musicians bringing a range of electronic and acoustic additions, ranging from singing bowls and vibraphone, to samples and midi guitar. The resultant work is gentle, subtle, and sedately-paced. There are tweeting birds flitting around notes which hang, suspended, resonating for substantial durations. Hums and drones. Hints of melodies. Any structures are not based around motifs or repetition, but a flow. That flow is not a linear trajectory, a passage from A to B, but a flow which weaves into the places where the calm is residing.

As much as I’ve always struggled to work with visualisation in guided meditation, Meditations somehow conjures mental images through its abstraction – perhaps because of its abstraction. Being told to visualise a stream, a woodland, a beach, is too much direction, too much ‘relaxation to order’, the meditative equivalent of mandatory of fun in a corporate environment. But with open-ended, non-specific assistance, the channels seem to open more freely. Just as I find ideas and words come to me more readily while out walking, when my blood is oxygenated and my lymphatic flowing comfortably, music which invited free interpretation and successfully evokes images without directed prompts unlocks doors and presents access to unknown passageways.

Piano and acoustic guitar ripple and trickle and ebb and eddy. On ‘Sitting in a Painted Cave’, which ventures more overtly into experimental and Eastern-influenced territory, picked acoustic guitar weaves a textured tapestry. The spoken word interjection is something I find proves to be a distraction in terms of the flow, but I feel this is more because my ideal tranquil space contains no evidence of human existence whatsoever. As a human being myself, I do accept this contradiction, just as I accept the irony of my rage at the presence of others when out for a walk seeking solitude. The track’s second half is rather more dissonant and difficult, with muffled voices adding an unsettling edge. It’s rather less relaxing.

The harmonics, drone, and piano-led ambience of ‘Stillness’ is rather more tolerable, but still wailing drones and tapers quaver before the rippling piano rises from the dissonance of amid-range feedback.

I might have expected ‘The Morning I Awoke’ to be more uplifting, and more… hippy, but it’s largely piano and calming acoustic strums and brooding strings. ‘Tye Heart Sutra’ more than compensate, and offers a spiritual trip and then some. But how to differentiate between business as a need to maintain production? It’s felt like It’s felt like the longest night of the year for about 2 months now.

‘The Heart Sutra’ arrives unexpectedly, before ‘Svaha’ arrives boldly but swiftly tapers into a droning serenity. The sound is dense, a resonant ‘om’, and it leads the listener – at last – to slow, deep breaths, as an undulating vocal –a folky, almost shanty-like lilting quaver- comes to the fore.

Despite its intentions – as specified by the title – Meditations is not quite the sonic still water is first implies. There are dark currents, difficult swells amidst the soothing flows. But for that, it feels more honest, more real.

AA

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GHOLD – Bludgeoning Simulations

Posted: 10 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 14th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Human Worth seems like a comfortable place for the latest album by sludge behemoths GHOLD. The band has forged a remarkable career to date, with each album showing development and progression, building on previous works – and as they’ve been going for some thirteen years now, that’s some significant expansion. PYR (2016) saw the duo expand to a trio, and Stoic explored the potentials of the three-way interplay in much greater depth. INPUT>CHAOS took the band in a rather different direction, fully embracing the avenues of straight-up noise while bringing, at times, almost accessible shades to the monstrous riffery that defines the GHOLD sound. So many bands spend their entire career recreating their first and second albums because they’re so desperate to appease their fanbase, and while that might be alright for acts who’ve sold their soul and their lives to major labels and likely have no say in the matter, any act who has artistic freedom who peruses such a creatively limiting course is likely doing it for the wrong reasons.

GHOLD’s unpredictability, then, is a strong positive. And Bludgeoning Simulations is bursting with surprises, and none greater than the tremulous piano opening on the first track, ‘Cauterise’. It’s tense and dissonant, but at the same time, soft, reflective… and then the monstrous, churning riff crashes in and lays waste to everything which stands before it. The guitar and bass are welded together tight to forge a solid wall of sound, and it’s delivered with attack., a raw, barrelling intensity. You don’t just hear the volume from the speakers: you feel it.

Without a moment’s pause, a thick, lumbering bass riff crashes in hard, and leads ‘Lowest’ into spectacularly Sabbath territory – it’s hard and heavy, but also captures both raw contemporary feel and that vintage 70s sound. Sabbath as played through a filter of Melvins goes some way to explaining where they’re at. It sound like abrasive hardcore played slow.

The ridiculously long and sludgy single cut, ‘Place to Bless a Shadow’ s a beautiful slow-burner, expanding everything they’ve ever done to a new and remarkable breadth. There’s detail here, and deep, dark, whispering atmosphere, before ultimately, after some sparse, slow-building tribal beats and simmering tension, not to mention vocals that start gently but gradually come to resemble the rage of Trent Reznor on The Downward Spiral, they finally go full Melvins sludge mania just after seven and a half minutes. It’s heavy, and it’s wild. And – alright, sit down and take it – it’s solid GHOLD.

‘Fallen Debris’ is a fast-paced, buzz driven blast, and a contrast in every way – hard, driving, it’s a tabid blast of a punk / gunge / metal hybrid that hits like a kick in the stomach. Whipping up a stomach-churning maelstrom in the last couple of minutes, we find GHOLD hitting peak energy, before the slow-churning Sunn O))) ‘inspired ‘Leaves’ drifts in and drives hard. It’d s heavy as fuck. And it hurts.

There are no simulations here: this real bludgeoning, from beginning to end. Bludgeoning Simulations is heavy, and make no mistake, there are no simulations here: this is fucking REAL. The album’s second monumental beast of a track is the groaning, droning, nine-minute monster that is ‘Leaves’, and it’s nine minutes of sepulchral doom fully worthy of Sunn O))). It’s heavy shit, alright, but the reason it hits so hard is because of the context: Bludgeoning Simulations is remarkably nuanced, inventive, a questing work that seeks new pathways, new avenues, and shows no interest in genre boundaries of conformity. ‘Rude, Awaken’ brings the dingy riffs that will satisfy thirsty ears, but again, there’s a stylistic twist that’s truly unique, in a way that’s not even easy to pinpoint. It’s simply something different.

Bludgeoning Simulations is inspired, and inspiring, and finds GHOLD conjuring sonic alchemy with a visionary take on all things doomy, sludgy, low, slow, and heavy.

AA

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Watch: ‘Romeo’ by Glazyhaze

Posted: 9 November 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Glazyhaze return with ‘Romeo’, the final single and B-side from their acclaimed album SONIC.

Following the release of their acclaimed album SONIC earlier this year, Italian alternative band Glazyhaze shares ‘Romeo’, the final single and B-side just before their EU/UK tour kicks off.

At its core, ‘Romeo’ blends raw rock energy with dreamy, atmospheric textures. The track carries the spirit of the ’90s, where distorted guitars and floating reverbs meet a subtle tension between anger, sweetness, and nostalgia. Built on shimmering guitars and driving rhythms, ‘Romeo’ captures the feeling of powerlessness that comes with loving someone who cannot love themselves or change. It’s a song for those who hide behind pride, who destroy everything rather than show vulnerability, for those who live through control yet burn inside and will never admit it. ‘ROMEO’ is a farewell to the illusion that you can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

Recorded and mixed by Paolo Canaglia and mastered by Maurizio Baggio,‘Romeo’ marks an emotional and sonic conclusion to the SONIC era, reaffirming Glazyhaze’s ability to fuse intensity and atmosphere into something deeply human.

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After being nominated for the Music Moves Europe Award and announced for ESNS 2026, Glazyhaze will embark on a tour across the EU/UK in November and December.

Tue 11 Nov – Kranhalle – Munich, Germany 

Wed 12 Nov – Isc Club – Bern, Switzerland

Sat 15 Nov – Nová Cvernovka – Bratislava, Slovakia

Mon 17 Nov – Badehaus – Berlin, Germany

Tue 18 Nov – Helios 37 – Koln, Germany

Wed 19 Nov – Patronaat – Haarlem, Netherlands

Thu 20 Nov – Supersonic – Paris, France

Sat 22 Nov – The George Tavern – London, UK

Sun 23 Nov – The Croft – Bristol, UK

Tue 25 Nov – The Prince Alberto – Brighton, UK

Wed 26 Nov – Voodoo Daddys – Norwich, UK

Sun 14 Dec – Bronson, Ravenna, Italy

Sat 20 Dec – Arci Bellezza, Milano, Italy

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Osak:Oslo – Silt and Static

Posted: 1 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Vinter Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The post-rock boom feels like a long, long time ago now. Perhaps because it was: realistically, we’re talking about nearly twenty years since Explosions in The Sky and Her Name is Calla were super-hot topics. I discovered HNIC supporting iLiKETRAiNS on tour circa 2007, and Maybeshewill via their split 12” with Her Name is Calla, before seeing them playing with AndSoIWatchYouFromAfar… There are always chains and sequences, but the post-rock bubble burst in a tidal wave of oversaturation maybe around 2009. It all got a bit samey. But there was – and still is – always room for a band that take a genre template and take it somewhere else, offering something different, instead of a template-based rehash. Enter Osak:Oslo, who most certainly offer something different. Silt and Static is nuanced, but at the same time forceful.

There’s nothing like going all-out epic on an opening track, and that’s what precisely what Osak:Oslo do here, with the eight-minute forty ‘Biting In’, which begins with some enticing, chiming guitar that’s quintessential post-rock in every way, but then the rhythm section kicks in, and it drives along straight ahead, riding a solid motorik groove for a bit. After taking it down in the mid-section, they come back in, driving harder than before, a sprawling desert-rock soundscape expanding like a straight road headed to the horizon. Hell yes! You feel this. Exhilarating is the word.

They take things slower and bring more weight on ‘Days Adrift’, but still conjure rich layers of atmosphere, and bring things together with a chunky, chugging, bass-driven groove. In contrast, ‘Salt Stains’ is altogether more jangly, indie, at least to begin, and then, less than a minute in, a solid riff powers in, topped by soaring lead guitar work.

Over the course of the album’s nine expansive tracks, Osak:Oslo demonstrate a real knack for beefy riffery – nothing overloading, hugely overdriven, distorted or gritty, but just big, bold, solid and defined by a sense of forward trajectory, and what’s most remarkable is the way the band arrived at this work:

Recorded spontaneously, Silt and Static captures the band at their most stripped-down and unfiltered, balancing atmospheric fragility with crushing depth. With tape rolling and no roadmap, the album emerged naturally, giving shape to a sound that’s both deeply personal and bleak yet beautiful.

‘Bleak yet beautiful’ is a fair summary, but establishing, or unravelling, precisely what’s personal on an instrumental work is not easy, or sometimes even possible, although it is clear that certain elements, sounds, structures, transitions, which hit in a particular way are deeply evocative, often moving. But as a listener, those moments feel personal and are rooted in one’s own experience, one’s own individual response. I write this as someone who has sat with friends, playing songs saying, as I practically burst with enthusiasm, “Wait… there! That’s the key change!” or “That’s where the distortion comes in!” or “There! There!”, to be met with… mixed results. Is that moment which floors me the same one which the creators feel is the pivotal point in the song, the one which articulates, through the medium of sound alone, that deep-seated, complex emotion which has been tormenting your psyche for months, or even years? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What matters – for artists and listener alike – is that connection, achieving that vital emotional resonance, where the music speaks.

‘Resonance in Ash’ slips into shoegazey territory, but also offers the most potent swell of noise that threatens the eardrums, bursting into a ragged explosion of noise, bordering on post-metal and racing to a blistering crescendo, and despite being one of the album’s shortest songs, ‘The Onward Strike’ feels like one of the most immense. Then again, there’s ‘Break and Sink’, which goes all-out to crush… It’s riffy, it’s heavy, and it lands hard. The bass… it grinds, alright.

The beauty – and creative success – of Silt and Static is that it succeeds on both levels. Because of the bold riffery – never succumbing to the post-rock cliché of the slow-build and epic crescendo, but instead forging these strong, cinematic, rock-orientated bursts of energy which are immersive, transportative, and reach far beyond genre confines. Silt and Static is an imaginative, inspired work, and the circumstances of its creation make it even more remarkable. It’s the work of a band operating with a rare level of cohesion, and it’s pretty special.

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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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Maja Osojnik – Doorways

Posted: 8 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mamka Records – 15th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

It feels like a while since we heard from Maja Osojnik – and, I suppose it has: her debut solo album, Let Them Grow, comprising work composed and recorded between 2013 and 2015, was released in early 2016: we’re now near the end of 2024, and a lot has happened in the last eight years.

Life… and we’ll spare another retread of the pandemic ‘lost years’. Along the way, Maja has founded her own record label, created and exhibited visual artworks, and produced some collaborative audio works, notably DRUCK with Anthony Pateras.

But the time between Let Them Grow and Doorways is significant in terms of the album’s inspiration and purpose. We learn that ‘Doorways was born from a longing to escape the city and everyday life – and the problematically fast pace thereof, a pace of production that accelerates the erosion of attention. In seeking to arrive in a quiet place, to linger there with an observational unprejudiced eros, to become completely aware of being alive. In line with Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, Maja Osojnik’s album explores the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. It raises the question: How attentively do we perceive, recognise and internalise the ever-changing (aural) environment?’

It’s a question few likely ponder, although one that I have found myself contemplating in recent years. It began with the first lockdown. I used to travel to work – a twenty-five minute walk, followed by a further half-hour bus journey – with my earphones firmly wedged in my ears, desperate to ensure the noise of everything and everyone was blocked out by music, and I craved my own space. But then, suddenly, I felt the need on my daily hour’s walk, to hear nature – and it’s true, my paranoia peaked to a level that meant I felt the need to have my eyes and ears open and be aware of anyone in the vicinity, when people were much scarcer in the street. But this reconnecting with the sounds of birds, the wind in the trees became more than simply a lockdown hobby. And while, it seems, ‘The Great Pause’ – something only some got to experience or enjoy – gave way to ‘The Great Return’ and ‘The Great Acceleration’ Maja Osojnik has been motivated to seek peace and space, and instead of yielding to any pressures – real or perceived – to produce endlessly, she has chosen to explore time, and space, and allow herself to draw long, slow breaths, and to absorb the details of her surroundings. And it is this different focus which has informed Doorways.

While essentially consisting of two compositions – ‘Doorways #9’ and ‘Blende #1’ – each with a running time of over twenty minutes, and corresponding with a side of an LP, for digital release purposes, each piece has been segmented into five movements or fragmentary length. This may seem to run contra to the idea of reclaiming headspace from the current climate of the truncated attention span endemic in Westers society, but it does reflect the collaging approach to sound Osojnik has taken in assembling a broad range of field recordings, along with the input of woodwind and strings. As the accompanying notes point out, ‘It’s about active listening – what the artist Maja Osojnik calls cinema for the ears – an interactive game with one’s own self. The compositions invite the listener to hear them deeply; they function like a rotary dial, bringing extremely sensitive changes into focus. By constantly readjusting the focal point, they create new relationships between the electronically generated sounds, instruments and field recordings.’

And yes, it’s a timely and necessary reminder not only about the way we close ourselves off to the world, but how music is often something which simply floats around in the background while you’re doing other stuff, and how listening habits have changed: the majority now listen to an endless shuffle stream on Spotify. Simply typing that sentence plunges me into a state of despair.

In its collaging approach to composition, Doorways has, in a sense, inbuilt the shuffle into its structure – but at the same time, it is best experienced as an album, as intended. Doorways is not a bunch of songs, penned as singles, lobbed together to make an ‘album’: Doorways is very much an album album. It’s also a very good one.

‘Doorways #9’ bring with haunting disquiet and glitches and trips, backward surges and traced of feedback. It’s meant to be skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and it is, as insectoid scrapes and scuttles.

The first five minutes of ‘Doorways #9’, in its cave-dripping tension, builds anxiety, and it’s only when birdsong develops that there evolves a sense of levity. But the tone grows increasingly dark, and there are increasing obtrusive spikes in jarring organ, and a sense of menace hangs heavy in the atmosphere. ‘Doorways #9’ is in some respects a dark ambient work, in that it’s unsettling, uncomfortable and free of percussion, and as such drifts from one moody, uncomfortable segment to the next. Suddenly, unexpectedly, in the last three minutes, things plunge deeper into darkness, as there’s a churning noise and a sense of falling… down… things take on a nightmarish quality, and the experience is dizzying, gut-churning and it would work well as a piece off a horror soundtrack. Perhaps one day it will be incorporated in one.

‘Blende #1’ grinds, scrapes, and skitters through an array of tones and textures. And it goes on… and one, twisting, turning, droning, scraping, and churning. There’s some avant-jazz in the distance. It’s pleasant, but mournful.

This is not an easy, or immediate, album. We all need time, and to take and make time. Along way, Osojnik leaves us haunted an incurring . It’s a spacious, and low—key but cheering experience.

Maja Osojnik has created an album that’s dark, and difficult, but which creates space for slow contemplation and reflection and it’s no vague criticism to report that Doorways is ‘nice’. It’s much more besides: intriguing, it draws you in, and pulls you in different direction. It’s an album, alright.

AA

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Ran Slavin – New Dawns

Posted: 23 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 4th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Where does the time go? It’s a question one hears people ask often, and I often ask myself the same. Time, it seems, evaporates when you’re busy simply existing, keeping going from one day to the next, working, paying bills, shopping, eating, sleeping. All the things you want to do, but simply never get around to, for one reason or another.

Where does the time go? All too often, I’ll receive an album well in advance of release, and, because of life, and an endless inflow of upcoming releases and other diversions and distractions, I will take a long breath of relief on calculating that I have ages, weeks, before the release date, to listen, process, and digest the work, to write and refine my review, and still be ahead of time. The next thing I know, I’ve reordered my review schedule numerous times, perhaps drafted a few preliminary notes, and the album’s been out for almost a month.

It was only a little over six months ago that I covered Slavin’s seventeenth album, Oolong: Ambient Works.

New Dawns, we’re told ‘exemplifies Slavin’s nonconformity, commitment and expansion to his cultural roots of exploratory music, through early clicks and cuts electronica and instrumental ambient, highlighting an immediacy and necessity for musical independence, through which he hopes to reach attentive new audiences… The album is more than a collection of tracks. a cohesive blending of diverse influences and sounds into a unified experience. A beginning of a journey. As with his previous projects, New Dawns invites listeners to immerse in a unique and tropic sonic world, where the boundaries between acoustic traditional instruments, post leftfield electronica, east and west, are blurred.’

New Dawns comprises sixteen tracks, titled ‘Dawn 1’ to ‘Dawn 16’, each representing, I suppose a new dawn. Each composition is distinctive, and distinct: there is separation, rather than segue, and this very much determines how this feels as an album – in that it feels like an album rather than a single composition sliced into tracks. And as such, there is a sense that each piece, appropriately, starts afresh. And while the overall experience is mellow and broadly ambient, there are solid features which mark the territory, and actual, distinct instruments, too, which punctuate, and, indeed, provide form and structure to the wispy ambient soundscapes: strolling, jazzy double bass, haunting, twangy guitars, piano, irregular beats, and splashing cymbals all feature… to say they feature prominently may be something of an overstatement, but their presence is clear, and in context, powerful.

Just as the sun rises in the east, so the twang and drone of sitars colour some of Slavin’s dawns, and across the span of the sixteen pieces, the sense of mood changes every bit as the sense of geography. Oftentimes, the dawning is gradual, a slow emerging of gentle light, but then, for example, the more percussive ‘dawn 7’ arrives abruptly and unexpectedly, and simultaneously brings with it more overtly electronic vibes which bring together Krautrock and minimal techno. ‘dawn 8’ brings swaggering avant-jazz wrapped in a cloak of prog rock leanings, shrouded in a murky fog of obscurity. ‘dawn 11’ has the kind of murky robotic minimalism of late 70s industrial, hinting at the point where Chris and Cosey would go on to spawn trance.

Its total running time may be under seventy minutes, but New Dawns is an immersive work, and I find myself drawn deeper into the details as it progresses. And those details are abundant. There’s simply too much going on for this to be considered a truly ‘background’ work: zone out for a second, and something else will prod its way to the fore, nagging and needling for attention, before sinking below the surface, to be replaced by something else. Having found myself drawn into the scrapes and drones, the subtle – and not to subtle – details, the album slips by, and so does an hour and a bit. And that, I come to realise, is where the time goes.

AA

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The Royal Ritual / Neon Fields / Material Goods – The Fulford Arms, York, 24th July 2024

Posted: 27 July 2024 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Being restricted to live shows within walking distance of one’s house really does change one’s perspective and selections. As much as it also significantly limits my options, I’m fortunate to have no fewer than three venues within this range, and spotting that The Royal Ritual – a band I’ve long been aware of but have never witnessed live – were playing at one of them provided more than enough of a poke to get out.

It’s not exactly heaving. That is to say, come 8:15, it’s still pretty quiet, even for a Wednesday night. But then, I noticed that York was conspicuously quiet all day today: driving almost empty roads to a near-dead Tesco was as welcome as it was strange earlier in the day. The first week of the school summer holidays, and it seems everyone has buggered off – apart from the tourists clogging the town centre, which was far from quiet in the afternoon. But tourists tend not to seek out relatively unknown alternative bands playing a mile or two out of town. They should. Live music is as integral to a city’s nightlife as its pubs and bars and so on. I once ditched a conference dinner in favour of a gig when visiting Stirling, having clocked that maybeshewill were playing, and in the process, discovered And So I Watch You from Afar, who absolutely blew me away, plus I got to explore a new venue. It was a memorable event, and one which has stuck with me. It’s unlikely the alternative would have had quite the same impact – and while I’ll never know, as someone who’s uncomfortable dining with strangers and making small talk, I’m as comfortable with my choice now as then.

Comfortable isn’t really my default, and caving crawled out of my bunker, this is an evening I’m quite content to hide in a dark corner with a pint and observe.

Material Goods are a last-minute replacement for Dramalove. It’s a solid, blank name which suits the duo’s style, which comprises some heavy, complex synth work paired with live percussion – and quite outstanding live percussion at that. The processed vocals are a bit muffled, but overall, the sound is dark and dense and the drums really cut through it with energy and force. Essentially, their palette is 90s alt rock, a bit NIN but with a vague dash of nu metal, and a bit Filter, too. Multitasking and a vast amount of gear affords the singer limited scope for movement on stage, but the sound has a really good, strong energy, despite the songs being pretty downtempo and downbeat.

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Material Goods

With Material Goods overrunning and Neon Fields also possessing an immense amount of flash-looking tech which needed setting up, we’re fifteen minutes behind time when they take to the stage. Sonically, they’re astonishing. Playing a hundred-and-twenty-five-capacity pub venue, they sound like half a million quid’s worth of gear in an arena. And the songs match it. They sound like they look: black clad, tattoo bands, neatly-trimmed beards, big, soaring emotional outpourings… And completely lacking in soul. Christ, this guy’s level of emotional trauma is enough to raise the blood pressure to induce a heart attack. Wracked with anguish and all of the pain of the lovelorn, the love-torn… And yet it’s all articulated so blandly, everything is so slick, and so one-level. The theatre soon wears thin, and I start to forget I’m listening to it while I’m listening to it. It doesn’t help that there’s a group of four people bang in front of me gabbing on and pricking around, pulling faces, play-fighting, the guys trying to impress the birds by demonstrating their strength by lifting one another up… they get shushed by a fan but even the absence of their distraction doesn’t really improve the experience. There’s some earnest, meaningful falsetto, and the penultimate song had some cliché tribal drumming, and they wrapped up their bombastic set ten minutes after the headliner was due on.

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Neon Fields

The Royal Ritual are also a duo who have an extremely ‘produced’ sound. But their approach to production owes more to the methods of Trent Reznor as pioneered in the early 90s on Broken and The Downward Spiral, balancing gritty live guitars with synths and fucked-up distortion and harnessing their tempestuousness in a way that creates a balanced yet abrasive sound. David Lawrie plays live electronic drum pads in addition to the sequenced beats, adding dynamics and live energy to proceedings, and flitting between the drum pads, synths, and mic stand, he’s incredibly busy throughout the set. But something about Lawrie’s delivery highlights everything that was absent on Neon Fields, and just carries so much more weight: the whole package brings a rush of adrenaline propelled by that emotional heft and solid force.

Objectively, the feel is very Stabbing Westward, and goes hard NIN at times in its combination of guitar, synths, and sequenced and live electronic drums. The Royal Ritual are strong on dynamics and atmosphere, and Lawrie is an intense and compelling performer.

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The Royal Ritual

He does break out of the moody persona to thank other bands and plug merch, but what do you do? In the current climate, bands sadly need to plug the stall. The fact that David steps out of broody tortured soul for two minutes of affable chap may seem hard to reconcile, but then, this perhaps speaks more of the human condition than remaining ‘in character’; people are complex and conflicted, multifaceted and inconsistent. And this is what truly lies as the heart of tonight’s performance by The Royal Ritual. Digging deep into the complexities of the psyche, there’s something about the duo’s performance that gouges into the flesh and demands contemplation.

Material Object – Telepath

Posted: 20 April 2023 in Albums
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Editions Mego – 24th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Editions Mego have since forever released ultra-niche but eternally-fascinating exploratory works. Since their inception in 1994 as MEGO, before transforming into Editions Mego, bearing eMEGO catalogue numbers, the label has given home to pretty much every significant and emerging artist working in the field of electronica given to abstraction, minimalism, glitch, and the more experimental side of things. As such, this release is a very comfortable fit in the catalogue.

As the bio details, ‘Dismantling the acoustic to feed the electronic, Editions Mego presents Telepath, the new album by Material Object. Born out of a single improvised recording session with a lone Violinist, Telepath is a startling album of future electronic music, resulting in an LP of unique and timeless tracks that reimagine a classic sound for an endless future.’

Nothing about Telepath sounds remotely like a violin in any recognisable sense. Even the long, soaring tones and strong-scrapes which sound like a violin sound, in context, processed, abstract.

It’s all about the process, of course, and it’s the literal processing and manipulation of sound which renders the output so far from the initial input. The results are interesting, to say the least.

To return to the bio for context, Telepath is presented as ‘Boldly departing from his previous canon of largely ‘ambient’ work, Material Object’s Telepath renders itself out as something much stranger, something more spacious, more subtle and gradual. Moments of bouncing minimalism meet moirés of delayed pure tones phasing in and out of resolution, giving way to a series of strobing foreground gestures arranged and offset in disorienting landscapes which scatter themselves asymmetrically amongst crystal pools of reverb.

There are moments of deep, rumbling ambience to be found here, but it’s certainly not the album’s dominant feature.

‘Enter’ isn’t quite microtonal in its focus, but does very much narrow down to an extremely small sonic spectrum in order to interrogate minor changes and the relationship between notes as they resonate and bounce off one another – and that focus is intensely concentrated, remaining fixed for some nine and a half minutes. It sets the stall for Telepath overall: the fifteen-minute ‘Hyphae’ flickers and clicks as sounds bat back and forth at a rate of rapidity that’s tension-inducing, particularly as the click-clack becomes overwhelmed by a bubbling cloud of dense sound yet remains persistently audible.

Structurally, the album alternates between longer works and shorter interludes of a couple of minutes or so: these serve, I suppose, as the sonic equivalent of palate-cleansers, and they’re necessary in breaking up the vast sonic swaths of hyper-focussed detail as interrogated over five minutes or more.

It may seem a contradiction, but while focusing microscopically on the most minute details, Telepath also covers a lot of ground. It’s all about contrast and contradictions, and arguably these are the foundations of this intriguing and often quirky work.

Following the twitchy, processed pings of ‘Thermo’, the eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Exit’ is the perfect bookend to stand opposite ‘Enter’. And as the album leaves us reflecting the whisps of mist left in its trails, there is a hanging sense that there is something yet to come. From among the shadows, Telepath presents us with an unexpected sense of insight, both outside and in.

AA

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