Posts Tagged ‘electronic’

13x – This

Posted: 17 June 2023 in Albums
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13th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This. It’s a statement in itself. It’s simple, direct, to the point. It might indicate the image of a finger pointing down at the thing in question, like some kind of cartoon graphic or meme in the making – but there’s no need for it, or anything else. ‘This’ requires no qualification: it simply is. Self-contained. Precise. And this… well, this is 13x

It’s been a while since we last heard from ‘Multi instrumentalist transgirl’ 13x, who melted our brains good and proper in 2019 with antiscene. And it’s been a while because reasons, as the notes which accompany This outline: ‘Recorded over a 3 year period, this difficult release was made at the start of lockdown, and remained unfinished until now. Dealing with topics such as racism, transphobia, disingenuine people, the Government, abuse, loss and isolation, it goes from manic, crushing noize to quieter, more sombre tracks.’

Many, even most, of us, have endured some truly awful times these last three years, but it’s fair to say that some have endured more and worse shit than others. This is a document of some of the aforementioned shit of the notes, and the track titles encapsulate the mood and / or sentiment pretty neatly.

The first track, ‘TERFkilla’ is largely sparse and minimal in terms of both sound and arrangement, as a dissonant synth bleeps over a stuttering beat and low, droney bass. But shrill noise breaks over the top and the anger crackles within the cloud of abrasive noise. ‘fukt’ is, well, fukt, a sprawling mess of grinding synths and scratches, and some murky snippets of vocals with something of a hip-hop feel, and they sound sampled but appear to not be. They’re so cut and mangled, that when twisting and stammering against a backdrop of a shuffling drum loop and some low-end distortion it’s hard to know what the hell is going on – and it works.

There are plenty of samples woven into the fabric of This, and from an eclectic range of sources, ranging from Nirvana to a 60s interview with a catatonic schizophrenic, via a BLM interview after George Floyd was brutally murdered and Kate Winslett from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

‘Fucking cunts’ is the looped refrain from the stomping aggrotech beast that is ‘Cistem Error vx.02’ – the most accessible and danceable track on the album, and simultaneously the most hard-hitting, while ‘brOkEnhEddz’ encapsulates the entirety of the album in just five minutes. Warped, woozy, it’s fractured and dark, whirring electronics and stuttering beats – but it builds and finds a groove, and from the chaos emerges something magnificent, an expansive, driving slab of dark synth pop.

I still find it unfathomable that we live in a world where vast swathes of society proclaim themselves to be anti-woke: if you’re anti-woke, you’re expressly pro-racist, pro-misogynist, pro-homophobic, pro-abuse, pro-anything that’s cunty. But then, we live in a world where vast swathes of people subscribe to Donald Trump’s view that ‘antifa’ is the enemy. But if you’re anti-antifa, you’re expressly pro-fa. There is something gravely wrong with this picture. ‘Truth Against Fascism’ and ‘The System Is Wrong (For George)’ are in effect a diptych of thematically-linked compositions. The former is a bleak mid-tempo trudge through mangled circuitry that reminds of the synapse-twisting impossibility of engaging in meaningful, rational discussion with right-wing shits who harp on about ‘stopping the boats’ and so on, while the latter has a gentler, more contemplative tone, laced with a wistful melancholy.

It’s this melancholy, expanded deeper into an aching sadness, which drapes itself all over both ‘Neeko’ and the album’s final track, the twelve-and-a-half-minute ‘Wintercutz’. I’m reminded vaguely of The Cure’s ‘Carnage Visors’ soundtrack from 1981, perhaps primarily because of the rolling drums of ‘Neeko’ and the expansive atmosphere which permeates both pieces. But there’s something special here: you can almost taste the nostalgia, and after the aggressive, angry start, there’s a sense that by the end of This, there is some sense of peace, acceptance, and a looking to the horizon in the hope of… something.

There’s often a significant disparity between the lived experience and its articulation in any medium: such is our wiring that even the most accomplished and attuned artists spend lifetimes striving to find the method that best suits them in their quest to convey what’s in their head to an audience who exists outside of their head. Sometimes, it’s not even about the audience: sometimes, the creation of art is a process by which to make sense of and deal with all of it. By purging the shit from the mind into something constructive and creative, however unappealing it may be to the masses, and there’s a strong sense that This is as much about purging and process as it is about communicating. But what This achieves is, in fact, both. This speaks without words, and says much, while at the same time, leaving substantial room for the listener to pour their own experience and frames of reference into the shifting sonic spaces. Over the course of ten pieces, This achieves a considerable amount: This has range. And This, while drawing on a host of elements from different places, sounds quite unlike anything else. This is This.

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HENGE – Alpha Test 4

Posted: 29 May 2023 in Albums
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Cosmic Dross – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to spaced-out, trippy conceptual stuff, I can’t help but wonder if large quantities of drugs are involved, or of the creators are just a bit crackers. Their debut album Attention Earth! Featured a song called ‘Mushroom One’, which makes mee think drugs – or perhaps just the image they want to portray. The members of HENGE, Mancunian purveyors of self-styled ‘cosmic dross’ go by the names of Zpor, Goo, Grok and Nom, and Zpor, their ‘front-being’, explains of the new album: “Alpha Test 4 is our third Planet Earth LP release. With each record we have sought to fine tune our extraterrestrial sounds for human ears, optimising these alien frequencies in order to more effectively access the pleasure sensors in the Sapien brain…We believe that the wisest lifeforms are always open to new learning, and we have been conducting our own studies on the human beings that we’ve encountered on Earth so far. We have discovered that exposure to this alien music can have a profound effect on the human nervous system, and have recorded an average increase of 72% in the happiness levels of human specimens attending our experiments”.

If you’re going to do performance, you need to commit to it completely: there can be no half-measures, no stepping out of character off stage, and HENGE clearly live and breathe being HENGE, and one would like to think they’re entirely aware of the absurdity of it all, but happy with the trade of preserving the identities they enjoy at home and in their dayjobs or whatever. I’m going to at least hope that Zpor doesn’t insist that his wife and kids and colleagues address him as such.

Alpha Test 4 is noodly, doodly, silly fun that harks back to the 70s with its cheesy, wibbly synths and tinfoil futurism that was retro even at the time. It’s not so much prog in its primary inspirations, so much as ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’

‘DNA’ brings stupid funk and daft robotix vocals and it’s probably fun if you’re into it, but mostly it’s annoying: their space-age daft Punk shtick just feels obvious, derivative, passé. And yes, everything is just recycling now: that was postmodernism, where we accepted that originality was dead and celebrated that the future was built on assimilations and permutations of the past. Progress lay in the innovations of new hybrids and how genres were intermingled, and we reached a point, I’m not quite sure when, where it all came down to the execution. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it… and HENGE do it, and with wild abandon and great enthusiasm.

But great energy does not make for a great record on its own. Alpha Test 4 is bursting with energy and brimming with bubby synths: ‘Ra’ is exemplary, an explosion of Lucozade and Red Bull-fuelled 8-bit twitchy pop that crosses XTC with D‘n’B, and spins in a dash of Eastern promise alongside a swirl of experimentation. The worst excesses of YES are tossed into the mix along with Jean Michele Jarre and Yello. It has its moments, but most of those moments are indulgent and rather corny. But HENGE likely know this and don’t care, because unless they are from another planet and spent their time hovering in space, they’re aware and self-aware, and grasp the absurdity of what they do with both hands before jettisoning the junk, and no doubts regardless of my views – and likely because of them since the chances are everything I dislike is everything fans love – Alpha Test 4 will go stratospheric.

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Gintas K – Resonances / Fluxus +/- / Sound & Spaces #2

Posted: 4 May 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been busy’. We’ve probably all heard it: and most of us have probably spoken the phrase. I’m guilty, too, and hate myself for it. Everyone is fucking busy. Too busy to text, to open a message even, too busy to reply to emails, catch up with friends, too busy to fucking live. What is everyone so busy doing, and why is it that in a time when technology was supposed to make our lives easier, and in supposedly affluent western cultures, people are both fiscally porr and time-poor?

Naturally, I blame the current strain of capitalism: keep everyone too busy to live, to breathe, and too skint, and they’re not going to be protesting, they’re going to be too busy wondering where the next meal is coming from to fuck shit up. After everything, they’ve only got the juice to be ‘busy’ bingeing Netflix or the new season of The Mandalorian.

Admittedly, I have been genuinely busy parenting, publishing stuff, and writing a review a day while battling through an evermore overwhelming volume of submissions, but is that really a reason, or just an excuse? Right now, I’m not sorry either way. I keep myself to myself and I write when I can when I’m not doing laundry or cleaning or paying bills or feeding the cat

Gintas K is always busy, and he’s been having albums released at a ratee beyond that at which I can even download them, let alone listen and digest. And so it is that March and April have seen the release of three – yes, three – albums by the prodigious Lithuanian.

I must have been absolutely nuts to have set myself the task of reviewing all three together. The idea was to soak it all in with an evening of electronica, and report on what I expected to be an immersive experience. But knowing Gintas K’s work over the years, this was, in hindsight, an unlikely outcome. The headline here is that there is no overarching theme, there’ s no evolutionary trajectory, and nothing to really take hold of. But that in itself is K’s selling point: his work is exploratory, varied, sometimes playful, and often difficult.

Resonances, the first of these, ‘was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard & controller on Autumn 2021’ and has been released by Sloow Tapes in an edition of 70 copies. It spins slow-swirling vortices around hovering hums and low-humming drones over the course of its ten, comparatively short (only a couple extend beyond four minutes), ponderous tracks. It’s perhaps one of his more varied works, both sonically and atmospherically – and Resonances really does explore atmospheres and cavernous swampy echoes.

Resonances

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Fluxus +/- is a split collaborative release, which finds him working with Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau on a longform track, while a piece by Wolfgang Kindermann & PAAK occupies the other, and what we get here is just shy of eighteen minutes of really weird shit, bubbling swampy noise and loose collage layering of all sorts of snippets and a mish-mash of all kinds of everything that’s not easy to digest.

And then April saw the arrival of Sound & Spaces #2, which is perhaps more Gintas K’s standard fare of bubbling, foamy froth and stuttering, stammering glitch-heavy sonic mayhem. It stutters and scuffs, bleeps and wibbles, and at times sounds like the speakers are shredding, the cones torn and flapping in the blasts of random noise bursts, while at others… well, at times it’s a foaming froth and as others, it’s really not very much at all. The pieces run into one another to create a continuous stream of crackling distortion and bibbling trickles of tweeting and twittering, and while the effect is the most incomprehensible and difficult to digest, it’s by far the most quintessentially K. If it’s what I’d expected, then what this trio of releases demonstrates is that Gintas K continues to defy expectations and to produce work that’s different and diverse.

Sound & Spaces #2

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Mho – Blueprint

Posted: 30 April 2023 in Albums
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Sinners Music Records – 15th May 2023

On reviewing the debut EP by Fashion Tips recently, I commented that the northern noise ‘scene’ was, in effect, more of a community. I suppose this is something that is true of many more niche corners of the musical world, and it’s certainly true of the electronic scene, particularly that which has grown up around the EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) nights that take place around the country as a platform for all strains of all things electronic based (several of which I’ve reviewed, and a few of which I’ve performed at). These nights are a broad church, and have not only welcomed me, but opened the doors for myriad collaborations, as well as providing a safe space for testing stuff out as well as an opportunity for seasoned performers and novices alike to connect with an accommodating audience, and this release comes courtesy of Sinners Music Records, established by Ian J Cole, another face familiar to attendees of the York EMOM nights, who also streams the Audiophile radio podcast showcasing weird and wonderful exploratory electronica.

Mho – that’s ohm backwards, and pronounced ‘mo’ – is the musical vehicle of Dave Walker, who’s been a regular face at the EMOM scene, and has become established as being instantly recognisable for his stagewear, with neon-splatter t-shirt and hat. Obviously, these visual props don’t translate to the recordings, which must stand on their own merits – and they very much do.

Over the course of ten tracks, Walker showcases a broad span of styles and sounds, and the compositions are all accomplished and considered. As his bio states, he ‘began his foray into making electronic music at school when he built a Transcendent 2000 synthesiser and a ETI String Synth, as the Polymoog synth cost as much as a house back then’. He’s since switched to more contemporary kit, but his years of experience have led to a nuanced approach to musicmaking: there’s a lot of detail, but nothing’s overdone. Every drop, every time the beats bang back in, every layer, every stutter, every new sound and sample, is perfectly placed – but not in such a way that the precision leads to sterility. Walker’s tunes flow with a rare naturalness, and there are no jarring jolts or awkward lurches between segments.

Predominantly, these pieces are built around conventional piano sounds and broad strokes of synth which fill out broad spaces, and there’s a lot of analogue-style pulsations, too, cut from the cloth of Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream.

There’s something familiar that I just can’t quite place about the melody of ‘Nie Rozumiem’ (which will undoubtedly annoy me for days), and elsewhere, ‘Chorale’ brings ambience with low-key beats that washes along nicely, being largely undemanding but pleasant. ‘Eternal’ brings a hint of Eastern promise and a vaguely operatic vocal carried on a soft breeze of shuffling beats and rippling piano.

‘Contact’ and ‘Moon’ appear to be thematically linked, the former bursting with samples and laser-beam bleeps, and it does have quite an 80s feel to it. This, though, is true of much contemporary electronic music which isn’t overtly dance – or EDM and the encroaching Americanism would have it. The latter is a seven—minute sonic exploration that expands through time and space with crackling radio transmissions from the lunar landing of 69.

‘Take it Easy’ is pure 80s retro tootling melting into 90s euphoric trance, and while well-executed, it’s perhaps the least engaging or enticing tracks on the album, but it’s but a brief weakness in an otherwise solid album which concludes with the surprisingly light and accessible spin of ‘I Am With You’ which practically skips along.

With EMOM sets providing just ten to fifteen minutes for artists to showcase their style (these nights are absolutely bloody packed, to the point that despite being ‘open mic’, all slots are usually taken a full month in advance), it’s good to hear the full span of the elements which feature in an Mho set, and even better to hear that Mho has the material for not only a longer set, but a full album which is at once diverse and cohesive.

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Ky – Power Is The Pharmacy

Posted: 30 April 2023 in Albums
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Constellation – 12th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ky Brooks’ solo work is, on the face of things at least, a very far cry from her output with noise-punk trio Lungbutter. This, of course, explains why it’s her solo project rather than the new addition to the Lungbutter catalogue: sometimes things just don’t belong together under the same banner.

That said, there was always a slightly experimental / arty bent to Lungbutter’s work, and it’s this which stands to the fore on Ky’s solo album. The title track is exemplary – and ultimately, fucking weird. Entitled with ‘teeth’ in parenthesis, it features a robotically-delivered monologue about ‘the integrity of the teeth’ and some weird shit over a gently gliding drift of warm, fuzzy synths. Teeth often make me think of Martin Amis, and specifically Dead Babies, but also my late grandmother who had all of her teeth removed when she was nineteen, to be replaced with false teeth she would wash with soap. I suppose you might say I’m easily triggered on account of my randomly-tripping memory which tends not to be my friend. But if it seems like an epic tangent, bear with me: it’s relevant because this is what music does: it sends you places. They’re not always good places, they’re not always or even often the places you expect, but it can open doors to recollections.

I suppose this makes the joy of music something of a double-edged sword, something I hadn’t always appreciated. You want it to open the channels and provide conduits for emotional connection, to evoke and provoke – well, at least some of us do. It’s not always comfortable or easy, but it’s about feeling something, and that emotional resonance simply cannot be found in the oil slick of mainstream middlingness, where everything is processed and pre-digested. Power Is The Pharmacy is anything but.

‘All the Sad and Loving People’ does rippling, pulsating ambience before whappy automated vocal wanders around all over it and things go strange. It’s pinned together by a slow, clacking beat that’s murky and subdued, evoking the spirit of Portishead with a smoky trip—hop vibe, which is in stark contrast to the sharp, stark spoken word of ‘Work that Superficially Looks Like Leisure’ which is unsettling in its Stepford Wives pro-conformity zeal which we instinctively understand to be false long before it turns rabid, both in its vocal delivery and crashing jazz drum explosion that rides in on a swell of expanding noise.

‘The Dancer’, released as a single is hypnotic, entrancing, and detached, deranged, with a looping synth blip bubbling along through sonorous scrapes and driven by an insistent, impersonal beat. You can probably dance to it, but you’re more likely to feel a growing tension as it cyclically bubbles its way over the course off nearly five minutes.

But then what do you do when immediately presented with a song like ‘Revolving Door’? It’s like Jarboe-era Swans and Big |Brave, with crushing chords providing the backdrop to a breathy, haunting vocal. You certainly don’t find a comfortable category for Ky or her work that’s for certain. ‘Dragons’ brings next-level intensity, and while there numerous comparisons which float into my mind, perhaps it’s better to highlight a unique talent rather than tame it with contextualisation.

There are so many details and textures here that make Power Is The Pharmacy an album that requires repeat listens in order to absorb them. That’s a challenge in itself, because it’s not an immediate album, and it’s a record that leaves you feeling like you need a break, to sit and stare into space for a bit after.

And perhaps that’s the way to approach this: with space, to allow it to breathe, and with no concrete expectations. The spoken word passages are very much akin to David Bowie’s Outside, I realise, and Power Is The Pharmacy could be described as a concept album of sorts. It’s certainly a strange album, but it’s interesting.

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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.

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Various Artists – Spectrum

Posted: 17 April 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 20th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Regular readers – or even more casual ones – will likely have noticed that Cruel Nature releases have received a fair bit of coverage here. The Newcastle-based cassette label, and brainchild of Steve Strode, are now celebrating a decade of their existence, releasing non-conformist, way-outside-the-mainstream music, and they’re celebrating with a compilation of 23 (of course, it has to be 23) exclusive tracks recorded specifically for this release, on a label who can now boast the tagline of ‘Channelling sonic diversity since 2013’.

Spectrum very much succeeds in showcasing that sonic diversity, presenting a collection that spans ambience to brutal metal. In times past, no-one who would listen to one would listen to the other, but my own musical journey over the last decade and a half means that whereas once I’d have sneered at one and hesitated over the other, I’m now on board with both. And why not? Cruel Nature Records has spent a decade now giving a home to music that doesn’t really fit, and doesn’t conform to a specific genre.

Of the 23 contributors, a fair few of them have previously featured on these pages, so new material from them is most welcome. VHS¥DEATH are among them, and ‘Sacrifice’ is a relentless industrial hardfloor disco banger, which couldn’t be more different from the mellow jazz ambience of Aidan Baker’s contribution, ‘Grounded Hogs’. And in a nutshell, the contrast between the two tracks instantly encapsulates the ethos of Cruel Nature. Anything goes as long as it’s different and interesting.

It’s great to hear snarking antagonists like Pound Land in the same space as Nathalie Stern’s haunting atmospheres and the spare folk of Clara Engel. Pound Land deliver a gloomy grinder in the form of ‘Flies’; despite its minimal arrangement, it’s dense and oppressively weighty, not to mention really quite disturbing in its paranoid OCD lyrical repetitions.

‘K Of Arc’ by TV Phase’ is a punishing, percussion-led trudge through darkness, while Charlie Butler’s ‘Eagle’s Splendour’ which immediately follows couldn’t be more different, it’s rolling piano and soft, rippling chimes providing six and a half minutes of mellow enchantment.

Petrine Cross bring a rabid howl of utterly crushing, dungeon-dark black metal that’s as heavy and harrowing as anything they’ve done, making for a most welcome inclusion here. Offering some much-needed levity, Empty House’s ‘Blue Sky Dreamers’ is a wistful slice of breezy indie with a hint of New Order, not least of all on account of the run-filled bassline, while Katie Gerardine O’Neill swings something of a stylistic curveball with some quirky deconstructed jazz.

Also worthy of mention (although in fairness, there isn’t a contribution on here that isn’t, had I the time for a track-by-track rundown) are Aural Aggravation faves Whirling Hall of Knives and Omnibadger, with the former whipping up a mangles mess of glitching distortion and the latter – these buggers get everywhere, having featured on the Rental Yields compilation I covered only last week – mixing up a collage of hums, thunderous drones, and a cut-up melange of feedback and miscellaneous noises to discombobulating effect. Then again, the final two tracks, courtesy of Lush Worker and Lovely Wife respectively bring some mangled reverb-heavy drone-orientated avant-noise and eight and three-quarter minutes of demented, downtuned, downtempo sludgy space rock. Both are truly wonderful, and this is a superlative compilation that perfectly encapsulates the eclecticism of Cruel Nature. It’s also the perfect illustration of why we need these small labels who aren’t driven by commercialism or profits or shareholder value. For disseminating all of this weird and wonderful music – music which often challenges the very idea of music – the world is a much better place.

Fans of the label with absolutely love this, and for those unfamiliar with the label, there couldn’t be a better introduction. Here’s to the next ten years of Cruel Nature.

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Various Artists – Rental Yields Volume Four

Posted: 7 April 2023 in Albums
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Front & Follow – 14th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

These are shit times to be alive in Shit Britain, UK Grim: having taken back our borders, this green and pleasant isle is floating in a sea of shit – literal shit – that we’ve pumped out onto our beaches for our domestic holidaymakers to swim in, and we have 16-hour quest to leave the country to go on holiday for those who want to escape for a bit – damn those French bastards for checking the passports off non-EU visitors. But hey, at least we got rid of all of those foreigners working on coffee shops and bars for minimum wage and those doctors from overseas, right?

And yet, while the cost of living is spiralling, major corporations – and not just energy providers – continue to push up prices, not to cover the cost of paying their workers, but to preserve profit margins. It’s not that they can’t afford to increase wages, they simply won’t because capitalism is built on maximising profit. Fuck the staff, look after the shareholders. And of course, rent continues to rocket: landlords, too, need to protect their rental yields

An investigation undertaken in behalf of The Guardian late in 2022 found that ‘asking rents on new listings are up by almost a third since 2019, and some people are facing increases of up to 60%. Prices in 48 council areas are now classed by the Office for National Statistics as unaffordable when compared with average wages’.

The trouble is, capitalism is based on exploitation, and invariably, the wealthy become wealthy and grow their wealth through the exploitation of the less wealthy.

There is an irony here: in nature, the most successful parasites achieve a symbiotic relationship with their host. Under capitalism, the parasites seem determined to kill the host (the poor) on the premise that there will always be more. But then, the same is true of the human relationship with the planet: only, the resources are finite and there isn’t another planet, so we’re fucked.

The accompanying text pulls no punches in explaining the context:

“As we travel further into the year of our overlord 2023, the cold snap that had enveloped the country no longer seems to mock us as we struggle to complete the simplest of daily tasks. With public services at a standstill as the people actually doing the jobs fight tooth and nail for honest payment and work prospects, the rest of us eke out a little more of the heat reserve to keep us going as the ice finally begins to thaw. But the Rental Yields do not stop. The opportunity to make hay while the sun refuses to shine carries on as if no one was suffering. The money continues to be made and the towers in space continue to be built. Dark shadows now dominate the skyline of a city that has been forgotten to the wishes and demands of the few. Some will say this is the progress promised by those in charge of levelling up. But many others will suffer as the bankrolls of the rental yielders grow ever fatter. Still, the spring brings promises of its own.”

What makes life in this endless torrent of shit in which we’re all sinking is that there are some people who aren’t cunts, and who go out of their way to make the quality of life better for others, as well as themselves. The guys who run Front & Follow are among them, as are the many, many artists who have contributed to the Rental Yields compilation series, of which this is the fourth, showcasing tracks by myriad underground acts, remixed by myriads more in an exercise in infinite cross-pollination.

Featuring 26 new tracks and 52 artists, all money raised from this release will go to SPIN (Supporting People in Need), whose purpose is to feed, shelter, clothe and generally support the homeless and people in need of Greater Manchester.

As with the previous instalments, Volume 4, is very much geared towards ambient and more sedate electronica. With so many tracks and such an epic duration, and given the nature of the material, Volume 4 is a wonderfully immersive experience.

The overall quality is, again, excellent – meaning it’s consistently great across the duration and there’s nothing that makes you feel inclined to hit skip. There are, as always some names that leap out for a range of reasons: Kemper Norton. Yol, Omnibadger, The Incidental Crack, Field Lines Cartographer, Sone Institute – but the main point of this is not the names, but the merits of collaboration and collectivism.

Some tracks do stand out, notably ‘Acid Bath’ by BMH vs Lenina for it’s pumping beat, and CuSi Sound vs Robbie Elizee’s ‘I’m Not A Tourist, I Live Here’ for its overt wibbly synth weirdness, for starters. ‘The Enamel Hamper’ by Cahn Ingold Prelog vs The Ephemeral Man is a nine-and-a-half-minute dark psychological drift, while Omnibadger vs Grey Frequency’s ‘Speeding Ground (Part iii)’ is a glitchy, collaged morass of disorientation, with layers of noise, tribal drumming, and disembodied vocals, and ‘Home on the Whalley Range’ by Opium Harlots vs Yellow6 combines dark ambient, murky noise, and a hint of The Cure’s ‘Pornography’ to forge something intensely claustrophobic.

Solo1 vs yol’s ‘Black Spoons And Crosses’ is a collision of ambience and noise that will twist your brain, and the sonorous drones of Laica vs Learn to Swim’s ‘High Yields, Low Prospects’ is a doomy post-punk affair with an agitated drum machine hammering away amidst a sea of murk, and both the title and sound encapsulate the sentiment and the message of the album as a whole.

It is, once again, a triumph, not only artistically, but socially: the Rental Yields series is the epitome of community. And while our government speaks of community while acting in every way to destroy it, promoting division by every means, and social media has become a warzone whereby the goal is achieved, musicians are showing the way. This, this is how we will survive the shit and create a better future.

AA

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Tim Hecker – No Highs

Posted: 1 April 2023 in Albums
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Kranky – 7th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I had been warned. A fellow reviewer who received this before me had said that this album had made him feel ‘unwell’. It was a compliment, of course. This comes as little surprise: Tim Hecker is an artist capable of creating the most intense and all-encompassing experiences, and while the live performance I attended in 2014 may not have made me feel ill, it did make me feel pretty weird, detached, disorientated. As the only artist I have ever known to use more smoke than The Sisters of Mercy and Sunn O))) combined, filling the room to the extent that it was impossible see your own hand in front of your face, let alone the person next to you, Hecker made me feel uncomfortable, and in some way a little scared in a claustrophobic way.

I’ve had a few records which have had a physical effect on me: listening to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me for the first time with a brutal hangover is one standout experience, its raw and up-front lurching guitars punching my head and stomach simultaneously with puke-inducing results which went far beyond the post-booze discomfort. Because listening to music is not a passive activity, and as well as requiring focus, it would seem also degree of compassion – you feel its force physically as well as psychologically.

The notes which accompany Tim Hecker’s latest album are bold, to say the least, describing the Canadian composer as ‘a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive capitalist ambient currently in vogue’ and continues, ‘Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers – this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.’

Clearly, this is exactly what I need, having felt tense and on edge, unable to catch my breath properly for several days now. If the album’s title sets the initial expectation, the track titles reinforce the album’s mood: ‘Monotony’; Pulse Depression’; ‘Anxiety’; ‘In Your Mind’; ‘Total Garbage’ – all the shades of dark, of bleak, of miserable, of self-questioning, panic.

The aforementioned ‘Monotony’ pings a single note back and forth for almost eight and a half minutes. Drones build sonorously behind it and swarm the mind as the volume grows and then shrinks again, and the buzzing and extranea become siren-like. And so, there is movement behind the tedious repetition, but it’s tense and unsettling. Moments of levity which appear to suggest tranquillity is within reach prove to offer nothing but false hope as we’re soon plunged into the gloaming, or otherwise into glitchy, lurching passages of unease. Soft sounds which ought to be mellow and soothing are rendered uncomfortable, or mournful, or both.

‘Lotus Light’ initially intimates a Krautrock pulsation, but some bending frequencies and melting notes swiftly take this trip on a rapid descent. If the lotus flower is supposed to signify rebirth and enlightenment, then this is one which is wilting, poisoned, and if eating the lotus is supposed to provide a conduit to pleasure, this is the soundtrack to picking the wrong plant, as everything rushes forward too fast and you’re not in control. You don’t feel right: you feel drugged, delirious.

‘In Your Mind’ picks and stabs away with tempo changes galore, surging and sweeping this way and that, echoing reverberations around the cranial cavities before booming stabs of synth blast through the drifting haze, before ‘Monotony II’ returns like a waking memory of a traumatic dream from the night before. The trilling saxophone does nothing to calm the mind or the mood. And over the course of more than eight minutes, ‘Anxiety’ recreates the experience if that increasing heartrate and the clenching of every muscle perfectly. That is to say, it’s brilliant, and also brilliantly difficult, and potentially triggering to some. The flickering, fluttering electronic throbs are practically Jean Michelle Jarre reimagined as a fibrillation.

No Highs is a difficult album, but how difficult depends on our headspace: from a certain perspective, it’s a cinematic electronic set, but from various others it’s the soundtrack to being unable to settle, to relentless tension, to jitters and fretting, and worse. The notes oscillate and you clench; sudden spurts of sound burst and you jump momentarily., before ‘Sense Suppression’ pulls you down, slowly, into a sea of sound, before the album drifts away to nothing on the drifting tides of ‘Living Spa Water’.

No Highs is sad and dark and deeply affecting, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Listen and share the suffering.

AA

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Watch: ‘We Feel Alright’ by Girls Under Glass

Posted: 29 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Girls Under Glass unveil the black and white video ‘We Feel Alright’, which is also the first single taken from the forthcoming album Backdraft. After a long hiatus the Hamburgian gothic rockers return with fiery new tracks that take the best elements from the band’s past and shapes them into an album that leads the way to the future. The release date of Backdraft has been slated to June 2, 2023.

‘We Feel Alright’ is also available as a digital single with two Girls Under Glass remixes entitled ‘Who the F*** Is Killing Joke?’ and ‘Into the Shining Light’ through the regular platforms.

The electric noire clip ‘We Feel Alright’ is now available to watch here:

Girls Under Glass comment: “The original version of ‘We Feel Alright’ was already introduced for years ago live on stage, but ever since we have continued to work on the song until it was just perfect for us”, synth player Axel Ermes explains. “This track comes with the vibe of our classics, yet it is also moving forward. It was fun to work on the two alternative mixes, which will be available as bonus tracks.”

RECkWRFE

Girls Under Glass by Bianca Chang

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