Posts Tagged ‘Drone’

Teleost / Cwfen / Makhlon – The Fulford Arms, York, 6th February 2024

Posted: 7 February 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

On arrival, it looks like Nu Jorvik have pulled and been replaced by Makhlon, and at somewhat short notice, but it’s hard to grumble when you’ve got three heavy bands for six measly quid and the headliners are guaranteed to be worth double that on their own.

There’s lots of leather, studs, long coats, and long hair in the gathered crowd, it turns out those sporting corpse paint – perhaps not entirely surprisingly – belong to the first band who are straight-up black metal.

Makhlon’s singer has Neil from The Young Ones vibes. He’s about 7ft tall and wearing a Lordi T-shirt, but snarls full-on Satanic rasping vocals from behind his nicely-washed jet-black hair. The lead guitarist and front man swap roles for the last two songs – both of which are epic in scope, with some nice tempo changes, and they really step up the fury. It’s quite amusing to see him clutching a notebook in the arm which is thrust forward and enwrapped in a spike-covered vambrace, and checking the lyrics, as if it’s possible to decipher a single syllable. But this is all good: time was when York was wall-to-wall indie, folk, and Americana. Now… now we have homegrown acts like this, and the thing with black metal is that it only works when the band and its members are one hundred percent committed to the cause. These guys are, and while they may be fairly new, they’re tight, they can really play, and they give it everything.

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Makhlon

Cwfen – pronounced ‘Coven’ – aren’t Welsh, but in fact Scottish, and this is their first trip south of the border. It seems that since relocating to Glasgow, Teleost have been making some good friends. And Cwfyn are good alright… Woah, yes, they’re good. They are heavy, so heavy, as well as melodic but also ferocious. There’s a lot going on, all held together by a supremely dense bass. The ‘occult metal four- piece’ may be the coming together of artists who’ve been around a few years, but the fact they’ve only been playing as a unit for a couple of years is remarkable, as they really have everything nailed. They’re both visually and sonically compelling: Siobhan’s fierce presence provides an obvious focal point, but the way everything melds instrumentally is breathtaking. The third song in their five-song set slows things, and brings some nice reverb and chorus textures. Piling into the penultimate song, the crushing ‘Penance’, which features on their debut release, they sound absolutely fucking immense. The closer, the slow-burning, slightly gothy ‘Embers’ is truly epic. With their debut album in the pipeline, this is a band to get excited about.

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Cwfen

I’m already excited about Teleost, and the fact that there’s such a turnout on a cold Thursday night says the people of York are extremely pleased to welcome them home. Having knocked about in various bands / projects previously, with Cat Redfern fronting Redfyrn on guitar and vocals, before pairing with Leo Hancill to form Uncle Bari, who would mutate into the ultimate riff-monster that is Teleost, they departed for Glasgow, leaving a uniquely Teleost-shaped hole at the heavier end of the scene.

Absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, but it’s apparent they’ve spent their time getting even more immense since they left.

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Teleost

They’re a band to watch with your eyes closed. Not because they aren’t good to watch, but because their sound is so immersive. Teleost have perfected that Earth-like tectonic crawl. Imagine Earth 2 with drums and vocals. Or, perhaps, Sunn O)))’s Life Metal with percussion. Each chord hangs for an entire orbit, the drums crash at a tidal pace, and with oceanic, crushing weight. Somehow, Leo Hancil’s guitar sounds like three guitars and a bass, and it looks like he’s actually running through two or even three separate cabs. It’s not quite Stephen O’Malley’s backline, but it’s substantial. And you’re never going to get a sound like that just going through a 15-watt amp, however you mic it up. They play low and slow, and Cat plays with drumsticks as thick as rounders bats, yielding a truly thunderous drum sound. In fact, to open your eyes is to reveal a mesmerising spectacle: two musicians playing with intense focus and a rare intuition, and Redfern’s slow, deliberate drumming is phenomenal, and the whole experience is completely hypnotic. They play over the scheduled time, and then, by popular demand, treat us to an encore with an as-yet-unreleased song. Everyone is absolutely rooted to the spot, currents of sound buffeting around us.

Teleost’s influences may be obvious, but they’re at the point where they’re every bit as good as their forebears. The future is theirs. But tonight is ours. We can only hope they visit again soon.

Aaron Landsman / Norman Westberg – Night Keeper

Posted: 2 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Hallow Ground – 7th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

If it’s got Norman Westberg on it, I’m in. The longtime Swans guitarist is – and I’m not ashamed to say it – something of a hero of mine in the league of guitar players. The discipline he displayed churning out sometimes just a couple of chord at a crawling BPM is beyond admirable, and those releases, particularly from Cop to Children of God were entirely reliant on punishing guitar monotony, and while his post-Swans solo works have been of a significantly more ambient persuasion, his brilliance as a musician still lies in his adherence to a ‘less is more’ approach, playing to achieve sonic effect rather than to showcase himself or his musicianship. There’s something refreshingly egoless about this.

The context of this release is that ‘Night Keeper is a collaborative album by New York City-based artist Aaron Landsman and former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg that is based on the former’s eponymous play. Westberg recorded it together with performer Jehan O. Young for the Swiss Hallow Ground label, with Landsman serving as the record’s producer. The original piece was first performed in the Spring of 2023 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens and filled the stark industrial space with spoken text, choreography, projections, and music in dim light and, occasionally, complete darkness. Westberg and Young afterwards brought it to the studio to record it as a two-part album in whose course his textural sounds, based on loops and samples, set the stage for her soothing, sonorous vocal performance.’

In a sense, then, it’s a soundtrack album of sorts, and it’s also a spoken-word album.

The accompanying notes explain that ‘Night Keeper is a performance inspired by sleeplessness and the wanderings of the human mind at night—about time and memory… The initial spark for Night Keeper was a run of almost sleepless nights in different neighbourhoods of a city that is perpetually insomniac. Instead of trying to force himself to go back to sleep by any means necessary, Landsman started writing down his thoughts.’

I first experienced insomnia at the age of five while staying at my grandparents’. As the time wore on, I grew increasingly scared, and convinced that if I fell asleep I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Bordering on hysterical, I went downstairs to see my parents, who told me not to be ridiculous and to go back to bed. I cried myself to sleep that night, But I did wake up.

In my mid-teens, I came to embrace the insomnia, spending my nights watching television and videos, drawing, writing, making music, and later, dwelling in internet chatrooms and talking shit till the small hours while writing a novel and downloading stuff from Napster and Soulseek, before perhaps embracing it a little too hard in my mid-twenties, reaching petrifying levels of paranoia and experiencing hallucinations, before collapsing and being off work for six weeks.

I recount this, because the spaced-out, dreamy, disjointed stream-of-consciousness un-narrative of Night Keeper feels uncomfortably familiar. The way the internal monologue flows on, and on… and sometimes spills out to external monologue without realising. The soundscapes forged by Westberg as a backdrop to this is abstract, unsettling. At the end of the first part, there’s a glitching loop, which starts with a thud. It’s an uncomfortable rhythm, akin to water torture and replicates, to some extent, that heightened sensitivity and self-reflectiveness which interrupts the flow of the monologue: what is that? Am I going mad? Oh my god, I’m going mad. What is it? Make it stop… And then, it does, and the silence feels strange.

‘I still can’t sleep. Am I sleepy?’ the narrator asks as one point, after picking through an alertness to a range of sounds. There are people out there, and not everyone is asleep. Sleep’s for wimps, and you can get so much more done if you sleep less, even if that’s starting a fight club. The narrator counts the hours – not with close attention, but suddenly, it’s gone form 2:15 to 4:15. ‘How did it get so late? When is it time to give up?’ are questions which resonate. It’s no longer a late night, it’s no longer tomorrow, it’s almost time to get up for work again. It’s not worth going to bed. Might as well get a couple of chores done and arrive a bit early at work in the hope of an early finish. As if.

In the main, the musical backdrop is supremely subtle: occasionally, ripples of chiming guitar ripple across the murky surface of the dark, misty drones. Sometimes, there are some stuttering crunches, thick scrapes, and they change the dynamic, create seismic shudders which break through the low, slow, undulations. It’s the perfect soundtrack: sympathetic, subtle, nuanced, detailed, textured, dynamic, and understated. You find yourself drifting in and out of the words, and drifting in and out of the backdrop, too – and this is the most fitting experience, in that it’s the most accurate representation of the insomniac life. If you’ve ever not slept for a prolonged spell, Night Keeper will feel familiar. If you’ve had the good fortune to habitually enjoy the luxury of quality sleep, then Night Keeper may provide some education and insight into the torment of what it’s like, you lucky bastard.

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Listen: ‘La notte’ by Golem Mecanique

Posted: 23 January 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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“Golem Mecanique touch[es] upon the ashes and fibres of back metal and the DNA of gothic music, literature, sorcery, and most of all—poetry.”  – Stephen O’Malley

The last words that poet and visionary film director Pier Paolo Pasolini said in his final interview were “Siamo tutti in pericolo”; translated: we are all in danger. Pasolini was then brutally murdered on a beach in Italy, a case which is still cold today.

On this album, named after the man’s final public words, Golem Mecanique loses herself on that same Italian beach alongside his body and translates her observations and mourning into a devastating musical landscape. Siamo tutti in pericolo will be released via Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label on 14th March.

Siamo tutti in pericolo is dangerous, conveying the darkness and uneasy nature of both the art Pasolini created when he was alive and the circumstances of his murder.  In her early teens, Golem taped the Pasolini film Accatone when it was shown on television and watched it the next day after school. In her words, “it was an earthquake!”,

Immediately leaving a great impression on her as it was unlike anything she had ever seen before. She describes the feeling she has when watching a Pasolini film as “silent violence” – a cold and radical response which calls into question her beliefs about the behaviour of people and lies and truth. She hopes to evoke this feeling with her music – a melding of beauty and dread.

Today, she shares the track ‘La Notte’ from the album…

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Nate Wooley – Henry House

Posted: 4 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ideologic Organ – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s already looking like 10th January is going to be an intense date in terms of the sheer volume of releases. Time was when January was something of a quiet spell for new music, as everyone recovered from the Christmas glut, and labels tended not to release much since people were skint. It also used to be the case that unexpected releases would sneak unexpectedly high in the charts, especially the UK singles top 40, with remarkably low sales figures, usually with cult acts with savvy labels whacking out a release that would have barely scraped the charts any other month – White Town’s ‘Your Woman’, released 13th January 1997 and hitting number one in the UK and going top ten globally – however briefly – is a classic example.

There’s no danger of Nate Wooley registering on any charts with Henry House, released on the Ideologic Organ label, curated by Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) legend, and home to a long line of truly magnificent avant-garde and otherwise most unusual musical works, of which this is very much one. That’s not because it’s not good, it’s just that the nature of charts has changes beyond recognition over the last thirty years. There is also the statistic which recently came to light that there was more music released on any single given day of 2024 than during the entirety of 1989. It’s a pretty staggering statistic, and one of many factors when considering just how difficult it is for artists to make a living from making music. Something I have touched on previously is the fact that simultaneous with this explosion of output, culture has become both more homogenised and more fragmented. In terms of the mainstream, this homogenisation has facilitated the advent of multimillionaire and even billionaire ultra-megastars like Taylor Swift – but at the other end of the spectrum, there are tens of thousands of artists releasing music on Bandcamp and Spotify with no backing or publicity whatsoever, to be heard by maybe five people.

But we need music that’s unpopular, that isn’t created with any commercial intent, and we very much need labels like Ideologic Organ to provide a platform and to point us toward the cream of those artists who may not otherwise reach the audience they so richly deserve.

And as an album containing a single composition split into five parts, described as ‘a recurring dream song’ with a running time of some eighty minutes, this is a work which is very much non-commercial in every way.

As the accompanying notes detail, this is a work which combines ‘closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice,’ providing the context that ‘this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower.

‘Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained.’

It’s ten minutes into the twenty-minute opener, ‘Acacia Burnt Myrrh’ that the poetical oration begins, with the words spoken by Mat Maneri. He speaks in a calm, not entirely flat, but level tone, of geometry, of space, of time. The words conjure abstractions, images, moods, against backdrops of elongated hovering hums, oscillator-driven quivering drones. The words are audible, but comparatively low in the mix, and it’s not always easy to stay focused on the narrative, such as it is: instead, the mind focuses on absorbing the atmosphere. There’s a lot of that, and Henry House is an immense project with near-infinite dimensions. Megan Schubert’s faster-paced, more driven-sounding delivery is quite a contrast to Maneri’s, and from these counterpoints, the album grows in terms of dynamics and depth.

So much happens: listening to Henry House is like reading a book which contains stories within the story, and illustrations in a range of styles. No two tracks are really alike, and the arrangements change across the course of each piece. It draws you into a dark fairytale, a unique world which isn’t exactly scary, but unsettling because it feels unfamiliar, dissonant. The fact that two of the pieces bear the same title only add to the bewilderment. Horns and drones radiate between the narrative segments, and the final piece, ‘Aleatory Half Sentences’ is led by some flighty piano work, which trills and flickers against a heavy, nagging, low-level hum. It’s one that really takes some time to process, but it’s very much worth the effort.

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Fear of the Object – Leaves never fall in vain

Posted: 24 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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True Blanking – 1st December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

No-one will be surprised to learn that I spend little to no time listening to mainstream or chart music anymore. I say anymore, as growing up, this was my first access to music, just as it was for anyone else growing up in the 80s. Top of the Pops, the top 40 on a Sunday night on Radio 1, The Chart Show (which even had an ‘indie chart’ rundown)… This was a time when ‘alternative’ bands scored top 40 singles. People of a certain age always hark back to the revelation that was seeing Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops, and seeing Marc Bolan. For me, I have formative recollections of Killing Joke on Top of The Pops… Divine… The Sisters of Mercy. I didn’t necessarily know what to make of these artists at first, but they made an impression. And after the Top 40 in a Sunday, there was the request show with Annie Nightingale, which played all kinds of stuff… and this was, I suppose, a route which led towards John Peel, reading Melody Maker… Now, to find anything different, outside of the mainstream takes effort – but equally, unless you’re already actively engaging with it, one has to actively seek it. Since The Internet became the dominant medium, terrestrial radio has seen its role and reach significantly diminished.

But from the little contemporary pop I have heard in recent years, I’m acutely aware of how songs have got shorter, how intros are abridged to the point of non-existence, how diving straight into the chorus as soon as possible is the objective. Delayed gratification? Forget it. Build-up? Huh? Albums?

Outside the mainstream, in evermore fragmented circles, artists have been pulling in the opposite direction. Albums designed to be played in sequence, containing songs with long intros and slow buildups are actually in favour.

Fear of the Object’s Leaves never fall in vain is an object which would likely strike fear into the heart of anyone unaccustomed to non-mainstream music. It’s a rumbling, dark ambient work, entirely devoid of beats, and almost of vocals (featuring as it does features the poem “Democracy Destruct” by David Henderson, produced by Kjell Bjørgeengen at Harmolodic Studios in 2003), and contains just the one track, which has a running time of over fifty minutes. There’s no ‘getting to the chorus’ on this epic slab of sonic abstraction.

Leaves never fall in vain, which takes its title from Japanese poet Chori (1739-1778), is a live recording, which documents a concert at Kunstneres Hus (Artists ́House) in Oslo October 2023. It features an expanded lineup, featuring original members Aimeé Theriot on electric cello and Ingar Zach on vibrating membrane/transducers, with the addition of Inga Margrete Aas on double bass. Not that you would know from the sound alone that there is a double bass in the mix – or indeed, any single, specific instruments. The instruments all melt together to create a free-flowing – or, perhaps more accurately, free-trickling – babble of sound, which is simultaneously busy, bubbling, with top-end activity frothing and scraping like a mountain stream, but with long, slow currents of droning mid-range flowing sedately beneath. There are passages where, perhaps, the sonorous tones of the cello are discernible, but in the main, it’s a conglomeration of sounds meshing together – layered, certainly ranging in tone and frequency, with a foam of treble which pressures the top-end of the aural spectrum at times, not to mention the nails-on-a-blackboard incidental scrapes. In places, the interweaving feedback takes on a texture like Metal Machine Music on heavy sedatives, and as much as the interplay between the performers is remarkable, so, it has to be said, is their patience. It takes a certain skill to hold your nerve and play a piece out like this. And the longer they maintain this slow-roiling, minimal-yet-dense drone, punctuated by occasional crackles and rips, the tenser it becomes.

Henderson’s poem arrives in the final minutes, a spoken-word piece which stands, stark, dry, crisp, and clear, and unaccompanied, after the instruments have died away and fallen to silence. It’s a powerful work in its own right, and placed as it is, hits with unanticipated impact. As the silence takes over the space occupied by sound for the best part of an hour, you’re left feeling affected, and somehow altered. The power of Leaves never fall in vain lies in is understatement, its subtlety. But also, its duration is a factor, being as if the entire track was an extended intro to the passage of poetry. Buildup, delayed gratification… alien to the attention-deficit age in which we live, Leaves never fall in vain stands out for existing in another world completely.

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Fibonacci Drone Organ – the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of his arse

Posted: 2 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Procter’s been at it again. The only artist I know who can go on tour and play under different guides doing different music – or ‘music’ – depending on the booking. Not that anything he does is commercial or has any kind of mass appeal: it comes down the question of if you’re on the market for harsh noise or something a bit gentler. And how he’s back from one of his excursions, here we have new studio work, which clearly didn’t make the merch table – released in a limited physical edition of just three hand-painted CDs.

One might wonder just how far it might be possible to push the concept of Fibonacci Drone Organ, but since the mathematical Fibonacci sequence is endless, so it would seem are the limits of this project. This particular outing, with a title inspired by Ken Loach, does mark something of a departure for FDO, being less droney and more barrelling bassy murky noise. It’s also more overtly political – nothing new for Dave Procter, but usually something reserved for his other projects.

‘Disenchanted with the state of the fucking world? You’re not alone’ he writes. ‘This is a synthesised reflection of the current state of my brain. I hope it brings you some peace.’

How much peace one can expect from longform tracks entitled ‘war war death death’ and ‘american client state’ it’s hard to really know, but I for one can relate to Proctor finding solace in the cathartic release of creating dense noise. Because there comes a point where words are not enough: indeed, there are no words. In fact, I derive some comfort – small as it is – from this release. It does indicate that the state of Dave’s brain isn’t the best, but with the US election looming and the very real possibility that Trump could become president again, I can’t help but feel a combination of gloom and outright terror. In recent months, as the war in Ukraine has rumbled on, and the hell on earth in Gaza has escalated, and escalated, and escalated, and Israel’s nauseating genocidal mission continues to be funded by the West, it’s felt like a growing weight in the atmosphere. I’ve found myself tense and on edge. Everything is wrong. ‘I find no peace,’ as Thomas Wyatt wrote.

It feels as if the world was waiting for the pandemic to pass, and as if during the successive lockdowns, world leaders were simmering, festering, building their fury to unleash the moment restrictions were listed. Recent years have been painful, and as Procter’s brief notes indicate, there are many of us who are struggling, powerless, as our governments continue to push the line of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. No-one would deny that right, but no rational person would agree that a death toll of almost 44,000 – with many tens of thousands of women and children, not to mention other civilians in that figure – is proportional, or merely self-defence. While news outlets do report these figures – which are, it has to be said – beyond nauseating – there is no compassion in the reporting. Deaths are but numbers, the words ‘humanitarian crisis’ but words. The images of smoke and dust and devastation are horrifying, but to actually be in the midst of it, with no safe places to go, as schools and hospitals are targeted, is beyond imagination.

It’s in this context that Procter has created two grey, grating, heaving and ugly tracks, one fifteen minutes in duration, the other over twenty-three.

‘war war death death’ is bleak, and dense. There’s the heavy whip of helicopter blades at the hesitant start of the track, which gradually emerges as a long, wheezing, churning drone, resembling the rumble at the low end of the mechanical grind of the first Suicide album. And this is pretty much all there is. And from this minimal piece emerges a sense of desolation, particularly as the end, which concludes with just rumbling static – and nothing. Devastation. Dust. Annihilation.

‘american client state’ is again, heavy a serrated edged, humming drone that hovers, panning and circulating like a malevolent drone. It’s pitched in the range that really gets under your skin and penetrates the skull, not in an exhilarating way, but instead slowly wears down the spirit, dissolving any sense of motivation. The monotone hum seems to somehow articulate, in ways that words cannot, the sense of powerless I personally feel, and suspect others do, too. There’s something empty in the monotony, not to mention a squirming discomfiture. What can we do?

All digital sales money from this release will go to the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and while it may be a drop in the ocean, and while what needs to happen is for aid to actually be allowed to be delivered – something which will require an intervention which is long overdue – something, anything, is better than nothing.

Often, there’s a droll humour to Dave Procter’s work, but apart from the title, the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of his arse is a bleak work, and a depressingly droney as it gets. But it provides an outlet, an expression through which to focus that release, and reminds us that we must hope against hope for better ahead.

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BMH – Sink Techno Song

Posted: 31 October 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Some time in the last decade or so, genre distinctions simply exploded to the point of obsolescence. People – many people, and I won’t deny that I’m not immune or above doing so – will spend endless hours quibbling over categories. Is it post-punk or goth? It is doom or stoner doom? Country, or Western? Or both? It does seem that the ever-fragmenting microgenre, once the domain of dance, with its infinite focus on detail, has more recently become a battleground within metal – but then, a friend recently described an act as being ‘Jungle adjacent’ and I felt my brain begin to swim. What I suppose I’m driving at is that artists themselves are breaking out of genre confines and the place we find ourselves now is a point at which anything goes. But listeners – not to mention labels and journalists – or perhaps especially labels and journalists – find themselves clawing desperately to define whatever it is. There have to be benchmarks, touchstones, comparisons. We’re simply not attenuated to music which doesn’t conform to some parameters or others. This is one of a number of reasons that I tend to try to focus my attention on what a work does, what it actually sounds like, the sensations and emotions it elicits and other more tangential provocations – because the way we respond to music tends to be personal, and instinctive, intuitive. One may react immediately, and enthusiastically to a punch in the guts from an overdriven guitar, or may instead feel a greater emotional stirring from something soft and delicate, be it an acoustic guitar, a harp, or a flute. In summation, one’s first instinct is not to assess whether or not those opening bars belong to a specific microgenre, at least when it comes to a ‘blind listening’ experience.

But then there’s always a spoiler, and here I find myself facing a ‘spontaneously-created acoustic punk techno EP made with a dripping tap’. What the hell do you do with that? How do you prepare for listening to something so far beyond the outer limits? Personally, I start by pouring a large vodka, and putting the light off.

The EP features four tracks; two versions of the title track, plus two versions of the longer ‘Water Sink Song’. The former centres around a relentless thudding beat, clearly derived from a dripping tap, with swishing, swashing, gurgling watery noises and other scraping and thumping and crashing incidentals. There’s nothing quite like taking the sounds from one’s surroundings and manipulating them in order to forge new sounds, and new sonic experiences. It’s life, but not was we know it. Or, perhaps it’s too close to life as we know it.

“Matt Jetten and I made the track in the sink at work,” says BMH’s Kate Bosworth. “The tap was leaking and we managed to get to it minutes before the engineer did. The original is in mono, but our mate Stuart Chapman (Terminal Optimism) suggested we ‘do a Beatles’ on it and bring it into stereo by duping and layering and adding effects etc. All in all, the process was very quick.”

‘Water Sink Song (End Dark Train 21st October 2024)’ features a haunting vocal which drifts mistily over a swampy swell and a thick wash of static, as well as more watery sounds, like heavy rain and swashing, glooping, the disconcerting sounds of ingress in a storm. The shuddering electronic rhythms call to mind Suicide, but with an esoteric folk twist; one can almost picture the performance of a pagan ritual at a stone circle in a torrential storm – but then stammering vocals cut through in a rising tide of mains hum and buzzing electricals. Synths buzz and crackle at the fade. The ‘Original’ version (17th October 2024) is more heavy rainfall and water running from a roofs onto gutters – or the sound of a number of men urinating hard onto a corrugated shed roof. Thuds, clatters, clanks, trickles and sprays, a bottle or jar filling at pace; the incidental sounds, the additional layers, are wet and uncomfortable.

It may be that my response is as much coloured – a hazy amber – by my recent experiences of a trip to Castlerigg stone circle in a saturating downpour, and a train journey whereby the train was rammed solid with rowdy football fans, who, unable to make their way to the broken toilets, resorted to urinating in water bottles and Costa coffee cups, which they left on luggage racks and on tables, while cheered on by mates passing more cans of cheap shit lager and a bottle of lager along the carriage.

Jetten’s vocals are breathy, semi-spoken, and there’s a sense that they’ve been recorded quietly in the bedroom of a flat or terrace, trying not to disturb the neighbours. There’s an element of triumph in the tone as Jetten announces the title, as if he’s utterly pumped by the experience – or something seedier.

As an experimental work that encapsulates the DIY ethos, this is a quality example of the kind of weirdness that can only happen independently. It’s perverse, and imaginative, and it’s different. Oh, and all proceeds go to Kidney Cancer UK.

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Lush Worker – Sear

Posted: 19 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Mike Vest’s output continues to be nothing short of staggering. He’s played with a host of bands – great bands at that – Bong, 11Paranoias, Drunk In Hell, Blown Out – to name but four, and Discogs records a total of one hundred and sixty credits, with a hundred and nineteen of them being for instruments and performance.

Sear is the latest album from Vest’s ongoing solo project, Lush Worker. The accompanying notes promise a work ‘Blending smouldering guitar explorations with old-school noise psychedelia,’, and an album which ‘showcases Vest’s signature maximalist guitar sound mixed with heavy riffs and drone-rock atmospherics. A blissful yet intense listening experience.’

With stoner doom merchants Bong, Vest explored, in detail, droning riffs over longform formats: 2018’s Thought And Existence contained just two tracks, each just shy of twenty minutes in duration. Around the same time, Vest released Cruise as Lush Worker, a half-hour long behemoth, and he’s continued to pursue epic soundscapes.

Sear is perhaps the most epic yet.

Momentarily, on noting the title, I thought of the Swans album, which spans a full two hours, and its monumental title track. But a single letter makes all the difference. While a ‘seer’ is one who sees, a visionary, with all of the connotations of spirituality and mysticism, ‘sear’ is to scorch, burn, or to fry meat at a high heat. And over the course of thirty-eight monumental minutes, Vest spins forth guitar work which blisters and peels, the sonic equivalent of white-hot sheet metal. At first, drums thump away, almost submerged as if engulfed by a flow of molten lava. The squalling wall of noise heaves and howls, while sibilant sounds like whispering voices of the dead burst like pockets of has rupturing from the seething sonic miasma.

Long, meandering lead work emerges over time, the most spaced-out trippy solo seeping out over a thick, grainy backdrop of droning overdrive, from which strains of feedback break through, before everything gradually sinks into a swirling soup of feedback and distortion, the rhythm having collapsed.

The experience is somewhat akin to listening to Metal Machine Music and Earth 2 simultaneously, but that’s only an approximation of everything that’s going on here. While there’s no overt structure to Sear, there is a strong sense of ebb and flow, and each time the immense sound tapers off for a time, it gradually rebuilds to a point that seems even denser and more intense than before. Around the twenty minute mark, the percussion is back, and there is later upon layer of yawning drone which swirls into an eternal vortex. And the fact that it does go on for what feels like forever is essential to the fullness of the experience. A burst of this may give a flavour, but ultimately, Sear is designed as a fully immersive work, and indeed, it is.

For all the detail here – there are so, so many layers and textures to this – it’s the immense drone that sucks you in and leaves you staring into space. It’s like the cyclical growing hum of ten thousand didgeridoos, amplified and reverbed, and over time, the sounds seems to bend and twist, and it feels as if your very perception is warping as it slowly melts out of shape.

After half an hour, the drums once again stop, and an eight-minute wind-down begins. It’s another lifetime of slow-shifting blurring shades as darkness gradually descends and silence finally follows.

AA

cover

BØESWINE– bøeswine

Posted: 4 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1

Dret Skivor – 4th October 2024

Christopher Niisnibor

Unlike Record Store Day, which has been hijacked by major labels and swamped with overpriced reissues to the point that it no longer benefits any of those it was initially intended to, Bandcamp Friday is something I wholly endorse.

Bandcamp’s model is rather different from other streaming services in that it provides a platform whereby people can pay to actually own the music, be it in digital or physical format. While purchase is available through some – Apple, Amazon – rates for artists aren’t great. Many people have ditched physical media form reasons of convenience and space, but the trouble with streaming – and this doesn’t only apply to music – is that it can be removed from a platform at zero notice, which is irksome when you’re halfway through a series or really want to watch a particular movie… or want to listen to an album. The Internet is not the infinite, permanent archive of everything ever we were promised it would be around twenty-five years ago, and the reason for this can essentially be summarised in one word: capitalism.

Maintaining a site costs. Everything costs. The Internet and – especially streaming services – do not exist for the benefit of either artists or end users, at least not anymore. But here, Bandcamp Friday represents the best of the Internet, in that all proceeds go to artists. And artists deserve, and need, to be paid. Because we need art. It may be massively underappreciated and taken for granted as wallpaper, but humanity needs creative art to survive. It does not need capitalism: if anything, capitalism is strangling culture and, moreover, killing the planet. Art predates not only capitalism, but houses, farming, even language.

This does mean that every Bandcamp Friday finds my inbox even more swamped than usual with notifications of new releases, and the run-up means a significant influx of emails for review of simply notification, and it can be quite overwhelming.

It’s with almost clockwork consistency that Swedish obscure noise label Dret Skivor drop a new release on Bandcamp Friday, and this one is no exception, arriving in the form of a collaborative work between the notorious cult noisemaking vehicle that is Legion of Swine and bøe under the portmanteau moniker of BØESWINE.

In classic Dret form, bøeswine offers two longform tracks – ‘bøe’ and ‘swine’ – each of which runs for approximately twenty minutes and occupies a side of the ultra-limited cassette release. And so it is that ‘bøe’ groans and drones and groans and clanks and clatters out an amorphous mess of noise with sparks of tinnitus-inducing treble cutting through the endless hum and scratching distortion for a full nineteen and a half uncomfortable minutes. It’s pretty harsh, and darkly uncomfortable. More than harsh noise, this level of churning grey noise is hard on the ear: it’s like standing next to a cement mixer at the edge of a demolition site as every window is smashed by a wrecking ball. Once ‘bøe’ has assaulted the eardrums and left you in a state of physical and psychological ruination – and it will, it’s that dingy, grindy, mangled, abrasive – we come to the twenty-one-and-a-half-minute ‘swine’, another monster epic driven by dark noise, strains of feedback and fizzing electronics, and this time it’s amped up to the power of eleven to render THE nastiest noise.

It’s a relentless force, as harsh as an atomic detonation in your back yard. So much noise, and so relentless. And I love it. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, unyielding, positively painful. But musical experiences are simply entertainment of they don’t test. This is like the ultimate test, a work of the darkest, most fucked-up, unstructured noise. Any comparisons to Throbbing Gristle are entirely valid. Bøeswine is equally punishing and magnificent.

AA

boeswine for bandcamp

Microtub – Thin Peaks

Posted: 14 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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0

Thanatosis Produktion – 30th August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Reconnecting with Microtub via their new album takes me back: a year or two into doing this reviewing thing, I began to find myself with access to a whole array of experimental music the likes of which I never knew existed, as released on labels like Editions Mego and Room40. Revelation is an understatement. It was the opening of the doors to a whole new world – a world where albums would contain a single track of ten to twenty minutes on each side, or otherwise a raft off really short snippets of what sounded like digital code, or… well, anything.

I thought I’d heard it all, having explored Metal Machine Music and picked up a stack of grindcore releases where a 7” EP packed in anything up to a dozen tracks and still had more playoff than a three-minute pop single. Pah. I knew nothing, and my tastes were so, so narrow.

Suddenly, my eyes were opened to new vistas, and I even learned that I didn’t actually hate all things jazz, and I lapped up all of these crazily inventive exploratory releases. Among them, Microtub stood out because I was simply blown away – and also somewhat amused – by the very idea of a microtonal tuba. What even is that? What does it look like, and who came up with the idea? And how on earth were there three players off this instrument who managed to find one another and come together to form a creative unit?

I still don’t have all of the answers to these questions, but Thin Peaks is the sixth album by Robin Hayward (UK/DE), Peder Simonsen (NO), and Martin Taxt (NO), and it contains five pieces: the four comparatively short compositions, ‘Andersabo’ (parts 1-4), which occupy side A, and the seventeen-minute title track which fills side B.

As ever with such works, the process is both interesting and integral when it comes to appreciating its evolution and final emergence, as well as the timespan from conception to release:

‘Initially developed during an artist residency in Andersabo, Sweden, the two pieces ‘Andersabo’ and ‘Thin Peaks’ underwent several adaptations before being recorded in 2022. The pieces draw on the acoustic phenomena of half-valve combinations, creating distinctive timbres and harmonic spectra based on the unique half-valve signature of each tuba. Whilst ‘Thin Peaks’ hockets between the pitches arising from a single half-valve combination, each of the four movements of ‘Andersabo’ results from a different half-valve combination, sometimes resulting in surprisingly consonant harmonies.’

A fair bit of this sounds quite technical to me, but technical knowledge and ability isn’t essential when it comes to listening – it may help, but I suspect many ‘technical’ musicians would find the way in which they use their extreme technical skills to create sound which doesn’t necessarily confirm to many people’s concept of ‘music’. The pieces on Thin Peaks are droney, often a shade atonal, a little dissonant, and almost completely without structure when compared to either conventionally-shaped rock, pop, etc., or even jazz or classical. There are no crescendos, no hooks, no… no nothing to grab a hold into. It’s a whole other realm when it comes to conceptions of what constitutes music. It isn’t an easy in. Abstraction is simply not part of musical convention or what our brains are generally attenuated to process. But if you can open your ears and enter this other sonic realm, it can be enriching in the most unexpected of ways.

Thin Peaks is intriguing, its sparse arrangements and contrasting tones acting simultaneously like a scarification and soothing of the faculties. Breathe slow, and go with the flow…

AA

THT35 front

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