Posts Tagged ‘electronica’

Watch: ‘Dancer in the Dark’ by Beborn Beton

Posted: 6 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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There is more than one way to listen to BEBORN BETON’s ninth album "Darkness Falls Again": it is possible to just dance and enjoy contemporary synth pop hymns that have a solid musical based in the golden 80s with a dash of cool 90s influences. Catchy tunes and mature songwriting combine to form a sonic joyride.

Yet there is another side to BEBORN BETON, which is mostly expressed in their lyrics. On "Darkness Falls Again", the Germans wade right into the political battles and culture wars of our times. BEBORN BETON speak out against the attempts to deny and deprive women of their rights. They take a strong stand against those who try to restrict love, the freedom to choose gender, and sexuality. The trio clearly call out racists, demagogues, preachers of hate and violence, and those who destroy our planet in order to enrich themselves. In short, BEBORN BETON put their finger right on the pulse of our time.

BEBORN BETON were founded by vocalist Stefan Netschio, keyboard player and drummer Stefan Tillmann, and keyboard player Michael Wagner in 1989. The trio set out with the declared aim to keep synth pop relevant and give it meaning. Their first signs of life were three self-released works, ‘Pyre’ (1989), ‘Scythe’ (1991, and ‘Die Stahlbetontour’ (1992) that came out on tape.

Following their first two regular albums "Tybalt" (1993) and "Concrete Ground" (1994), BEBORN BETON found a label-home where they joined renowned acts such as WOLFSHEIM and DE/VISION. Having conquered home, the three electro-musicians rapidly expanded abroad and the 1996 full-length "Nightfall", followed by "Truth" in 1997, and "Fake" (1999) gained the Germans strong acclaim by critics and fans around the globe.

By the time, "Rückkehr zum Eisplaneten" (‘Return to the Ice-Planet’) was released in 2000, BEBORN BETON had firmly positioned themselves as a headlining act within their scene and toured in all the strongholds of electronic music such as Canada and the US, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and even Russia among other places. In the North of America, the Germans had scored a veritable club hit with the track ‘Another World’ in 1997. Across the Atlantic, the track’s ever-growing popularity finally led to the exclusive US release of a best-of double-album entitled "Tales from Another World" in 2002, which was followed by extensive touring in North America with APOPTYGMA BERZERK in the same year.

Yet the heavy touring and the creatively highly demanding output of so many excellent albums in quick succession started to take its toll. After the release of "Tales from Another World" (2002) and the associated touring, BEBORN BETON went on an extended hiatus.
It took 13 long years, until BEBORN BETON returned to the delight and surprise of their still huge following with a new album on Dependent Recordings. "A Worthy Compensation" (2015) was showered with accolades from the relevant magazines such as an "album tip of the month" in German Sonic Seducer and Orkus Magazine called the record an "undisputed masterpiece".

Having learned from previous experiences and not to fall back into a relentless production cycle, BEBORN BETON took their time to write another masterpiece. "Darkness Falls Again" has all the ingredients that make synth pop great. Catchy songs that make the legs twitch, a dash of melancholy, a pinch of irony, and a knife-tip of anger. Music with a meaning, welcome back BEBORN BETON!

Watch the video for ‘Dancer in the Dark’ here:

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Photo: Chris Ruiz

genCAB – Everything You See Is Mine EP

Posted: 3 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
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18th November, 2022

James Wells

Perhaps I’m sensitive. Perhaps I’m just aware, attuned. But certain phrases trip me. And on reading ‘Everything You See Is Mine’ I feel my skin crawl a little. Something about it says power trip, something about it says control, something about it says manipulation, something about it says shades of wrong. It’s not something that explicitly makes its way through the music, but then, who do you trust?

This gnarly four-tracker is a furious frenzy of high-octane, uptempo industrial that draws many cues from early NIN with snarling electronica driving things hard from the get-go, with first song, ‘Soft’ being anything but as driving electronica slams home with the kind of abrasion that blasts the chest. It’s a strong start to a release that tapers off rather after that initial blast.

‘Wasp Factory’ – which I like to think tips a nod to Ian Banks’ debut – goes a bit emo and hints a bit awkwardly at Linkin Park and then the last song, ‘Only Skin’ brings a satisfying trudging crunch but also an unexpectedly accessible vibe, as it drives the EP home to its conclusion.

It’s not as dark or hard as all that and perhaps isn’t the dominant sneer the title suggests, but Everything You See Is Mine is certainly not an entirely accessible attack either. One to explore.

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Various Artists – DRET fyller 2!!!

Posted: 26 December 2022 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 23rd December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Swedish microlabel Dret Skivor may be many things, primarily a champion of the obscure and staunchly uncommercial (hell, they even put out a split release with one of my spoken work / noisewerks this time last year), but exuberant is not one of the adjectives that comes to mind. But look at those exclamation marks in the title!

But following the customary roughly annual Procter / Poulsen collaboration, they’re putting out a bonus release – release twenty-three, no less – to celebrate the label’s second anniversary. It’s a just cause for celebration and a display of public exuberance, not least of all because the catalogue they’ve swiftly amassed is a treasure trove of wonderfully weird and dark experimental noise, and this three-tracker featuring Fern and Fåntratt is no exception.

Fåntratt’s fifteen-minute excursion into harsh noise wall sits between ‘frolics from Fern! It’s an F-macka!!’ the blurb tells us (which I assume is a good thing, since my ears tell me it is). And the contrast works well: the two Fern tracks are brief, at least in comparative terms, with the five minutes of ‘Field Trip’ pulling together dark, damp, ominous ambience and achingly spiritual choral singing which drifts and glides in and out of the nightmarish soundscape. It creaks and rumbles and thunders with deep, murky tones, the vocals rendering the experience even more unsettling. ‘Heaven in my Hands’ couldn’t be more different – a snarling blast of industrial/grindcore crossover, where everything is so mangled and distorted it’s impossible to make anything out other than the broken-sounding beats. It’s as heavy as hell.

Yet, perversely, it feels like light relief after the release’s centrepiece. Fåntratt’s ‘Morot’ is fifteen minutes of high-end hell. It’s harsh even by harsh noise all standards. And whereas many of the Dret releases have been HNW exemplars, the majority have featured subtle variations in tone or frequency: not this cut. This is pure HNW. We’re in Vomir territory, but pitch-shifted up a few notches to a pitch that drills through the brain penetrates to the core.

I did, for a moment, think I had detected some slight sonic shift, but then realised, after further exploration, that this was simply an effect created by moving my head to one side or the other in relation to the stereo speakers. Swallow, move, it sounds different for a fleeting second, but the fact is that this is solid noise, a sheer and unmoving wall of noise of the kind that will induce migraine, tinnitus, and seizures. Possibly. While some noise can be quite soothing – admittedly, I speak for myself here, but can’t be alone in finding this – Fåntratt’s ‘Morot’ is torturous, tension-building, painful-inducing. It’s powerful stuff, and the perfect party tune for Dret’s second birthday. Here’s to the next two years.

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Gintas K – Jingles With Bells

Posted: 14 November 2022 in Albums
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Birdfriend – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is at it again! Last year I was compelled to break my vow not to listen to, or write a word about any Christmas-themed releases on account of his album, Christmas Till the End, released on December 25th, and now, just when I’m getting into full foaming at the mouth mode over how there’s Christmas stuff everywhere since the week before Halloween, I discover he dropped an album bearing a title with overly festive connotations, which was, in fact, released at the start of September – and which was recorded in July!

Jingles With Bells was, like a number of other works, recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard, and controller.

Despite the album title being in English, and offering something of a play on words with jingles suggesting advertisements as well as festive chimes, the track titles are in K’s native Lithianian, and I’m not entirely sure I trust Google translate when it tells me that ‘irgi dugnai auksti ir aopacia garsai gerai visai’ is ‘the bottoms are also high and the background sounds are quite good’ – although it is a fair description of the six-and-a-half-minute opener. It begins with sparse drips and drops echoing as if in a giant cave, before Kraptavičius introduces his trademark flickering electrostatic glitches and whirs. The layers build as crunches and crackles clamour into a frenzy of fucked-up robotics.

Stammering, fractured beats collide and disperse in all directions, a wheezing, groaning, creaking array of electronic simulations and rapidfire thumps like hammers and nail guns, jazz percussion and despite the complete absence of any actual percussion, Jingles With Bells is marked by a complete absence of any actual beats, instead being driven by clattering short sounds that resemble beats and even trick the ear and mind with their (ar)rhythmic explosions. The last thirty seconds of the seven-minute ‘is to pacio tesinys geras’ (which may or may not translate as therefore the continuation is good’ is marked by silence, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the blindingly busy blitzkrieg blast.

‘istisinis is to pacio’ is a snarling drilling grind of bass, but also introduces the first jangling treble that might pass at a distance as a jingle, but it more resembles a dentist’s drill than sleigh, and the whole experience is less jingle and more nerve-jangling and uncomfortable.

Echoic droplets and sounds reminiscent of jangling jamjars trickle through the album, and the ten-minute monster that is ‘varpeliai noiz bugn bosas neblogai’ (‘bells noiz bugn boss not bad’ – yeah… nah) begins with what sounds like a bath being run down the plug and a crackling blast of blocks of distortion against – finally – chimes. But against a creaking croaking, cracking low end like the bow of a wooden ship breaking against rocks in a storm, those melodic tinkles soon build to forge an oppressive, head-compressing sonic torture; it’s simply all too much. But too much is never enough, and as such, it all adds up to another album that bears all of Gintas K’s quite unique hallmarks forged from some mangled laptop machinations, manipulated in real time.

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Watch: ‘Lacerations’ by Curse Mackey

Posted: 1 September 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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On September 9, darkwave artist Curse Mackey will release his highly-anticipated new full-length album, Immoral Emporium, the follow-up to his 2019 industrial masterpiece, Instant Exorcism. Curse will also embark on a North American tour as a special guest for darkwave legends, Clan of Xymox.
Immoral Emporium is an intense, dark electronic music experience. Curse emphasizes, “This is a NEW album for modern times, in the here and now.”

True to his word, Immoral Emporium pushes the boundaries of genre with a vast dynamic range, from a tortured whisper to a triumphant howl. The first single, “Lacerations” is a dancefloor stomper with hypnotic vocals, a hard-hitting chorus with wailing synths and bin-shaking beats.

The album moves into poppy, upbeat club territory with the earworm ‘Dead Fingers Talk’.  The buildups are big, such as in ‘Omens and Monuments’, with monstrous synths that bring Immoral Emporium to a goosebump-inducing, cathartic end leaving the listener looking forward to the future.

Curse says, “Immoral Emporium was created under very remote, unusual, stressful conditions. This record is a dangerous listen. By the time it reaches the last song, I, as the protagonist, am essentially already dead. However, my last words are meant to give hope to the listener, my friends around the world…that you can live to fight another day, knowing you don’t have to give in to the fear, pain, and worry. These things will pass and you are not alone."

Clocking the William Burroughs reference in ‘Dead Fingers Talk’, interest in the album is piqued here at Aural Aggravation, and never more so than by the promo clip for ‘Lacerations’, released as a taster for the album, which you can watch here:

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Listen: ‘Assassins That Run On Faith’ SINthetik Messiah

Posted: 9 July 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Louisiana-based industrial bass artist SINthetik Messiah has unleashed a provocative new single.  ‘Assassins That Run On Faith’ takes aim at violence and abuse in the Vatican.

"For 1,000s of years inside the Vatican a covenant of nuns exist solely to rid the evil of this world. Through sheer violence, this covenant was able to bring the Vatican to its current day power." – Bug Gigabyte

Included in the recording is an authentic recording of Pope Francis apologizing to nuns for abuse.

The release includes a remix by none other than Tom Shear of Assemblage 23.

Listen and download here:

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Perverts in White Shirts – Meaning What Exactly?

Posted: 27 June 2022 in Albums
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Misanthropic Agenda – 20th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ll admit, I was struck by the name when this landed in my inbox. Success! With an insane number of submission emails day, I don’t even open most, let alone play the albums attached. But then I learned that PWIS is Nathalie Dreier – who’s interesting for her visual work as well as her audio – and Dave Phillips, who’s To Death I covered last year – which deepened my intrigue. And it’s one hell of a cover, too.

Meaning What Exactly? is quite a different proposition – from pretty much anything, in truth. Presenting four lengthy compositions, it’s fundamentally an electronic album, but it’s far more than that, or anything. The title is a challenge, a query, a – what I keep hearing as a phrase in my corporate dayjob – a ‘provocation’. It comes down to ‘exactly’. The word is weighted; even without explicit emphasis, it feels emphasised, vaguely stroppy even. The addition is the lexical equivalent of a hand on hip, a raised eyebrow, a scowl, a sneer of condescension to a worker from another department who has no facts. ‘Yeah, do your research, bitch’, is what it says.

And who really knows what it means, or what anything means? Exactly. And what this album means – exactly – I can’t quite fathom. The titles conflict with the contents, at least, based on my lived experience, on my reception. They say it’s a ‘dialogue mixing treated field recordings with organic acoustics and digital sources, brought together in long trance-inducing sessions of meticulous audio de/construction and philosophical debate’. But how much of that is apparent in the end product? Well, that’ debatable.

‘Pangolin’ is otherworldly eerie: a booming drum echoes out through a shifting reverberation of spine-shaking synths. It doesn’t readily evoke aardvark-like creatures, apart from perhaps in the final minute or so when Drier’s monotone vocals are replaced by snuffling barking sounds. It’s weird, but then, what did you expect? I don’t know what I expected, if I’m honest, but probably not this. This is dark, disorientating, disturbed and disturbing, and even more challenging for the absence of context. Meaning is the end product of intent, of purpose, and there’s no clear indication of where this is coming from, meaning we’re left to face the strange with no guidance.

A grinding bass and muffled, muttering voices, whispering about fish all build to a hellish tumult of murmurs and doom-sodden low range hums and thrums, and nothing feels right. It’s awkward, and unsettling. You – certainly I – don’t really tune into the words delivered by Drier in her suffocating spoken word passages, not out of disregard or disrespect, but because all of it comes together to create a claustrophobic listening experience. Meaning What Exactly? is not an album you sit and dissect, or sit and comfortably disassemble or analyse. I find myself, instead, contemplating the meaning of meaning.

‘Us vs Us’ plunges into deeper, darker territories, with a grinding, driving bass worthy of Earth, propelled by thunderous sensurround drumming, with purgatorial howls echoing all around. It’s heavy, harrowing, and it’s that simple, tribal drum style that defines and dominates the eerie eleven-minute closer, ‘The House is Black’. The house is black and the atmosphere is bleak: the vocals are mangled and distorted and play out against a murky, fragmented, fractured backing, to unsettling effect. The beats are sparse, subdued, distant, yet taut, crashing blasts and ricochets. You make it want to stop. The clock is ticking. Your chest tightens. The nerve rise, jangling, fearful. It’s like walking through a graveyard at night, knowing there’s someone lese shuffling around nearby. Make it stop, make it stop!

A crackle, a crunch. What is this, exactly? Perverts in White Shirts don’t only excavate darker domains, but scour and gouge their way into the darker, deeper territories where tension pulls tight and tighter still. It’s the sound of trauma, of suffocation. Meaning it feels like a direct passage to the depths, meaning it’s dark, uncomfortable, like it’s almost unbearable at times. Meaning it’s good.

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Acid Youth – Reverse Darkness EP

Posted: 19 June 2022 in Singles and EPs
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MFZ Records – 24th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Conceived and recorded between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, this set reflects ‘the everyday troubles Davide [Nicosia, aka Acid Youth], deals with as an individual but also as part of a community’.

The title refers to his ‘desire to get out of the gloom and seek for a reassuring light’, and explores this theme by the vehicle of dance music exploiting the vintage Roland TB-303, produced only for a short time between 1981 and 84. It was supposed to sound like a bass guitar. It didn’t. Of course, it would later come to be appreciated, and Reverse Darkness is a concise encapsulation of the appeal of these vintage analogue machines.

Against shuffling drums – heavy echoed with some thudding bass beats – there are simmering synths that drift and wash, and a flock of fluttering tweets, all underpinned by a thick, bouncing bass groove, ‘Vibrato Brilliance’ is simultaneously sparse yet dense, and Nicosia really starts to warp things up on the dislocated retro-futurist title track.

Acid Youth very much captures not only the sound but also the feel of those early 80s dance cuts, the kind of meandering, gloopy synth works that appeared on soundtracks of movies where computers had green text on little monitors and neon lights were synonymous with the future. Being nine or ten in 1985, it felt exciting; with hindsight, it feels like the future we ended up with is a whole lot less of a rush, but hearing this inspires a kind of nostalgia, not for anything specific, but for a feeling, a sense of a near future, thanks to rapidly evolving technologies, that held near-infinite potential. Setting aside any gloom over the disappointment that those potentials now feel chronically unfulfilled as we stumble through every dystopia ever envisioned rolled into one colossal morass of shit on shit, Reverse Darkness tugs me back to the crackle of excitement that once coursed through culture.

He goes really deep on the uptempo ‘Modded Dub’, full-on bass squelch wobbling and rippling atop an insistent kick drum – but it’s toppy, and really packs a punch towards the chest rather than the gut, and in context creates a different kind of tension by way of the contrast with the thick, bassy bass, and it’s true – they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

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The Utopia Strong – International Treasure

Posted: 7 June 2022 in Albums
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Rocket Recordings – 10th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

International Treasure is the second album from the ‘collaborative collision’ of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi, and Mike York. And, of course, much has – and will – be made of the Steve Davis factor: he may have kept his musical interests largely under wraps during the lengthy heyday of his snooker career, but the fact is that he’s long been a fan and supporter of ‘interesting; music, and this is a musical unit that stands on the strength of its work – and its work is (utopia) strong.

As the accompanying notes explain about the origins of International Treasure, ‘All three musicians here found themselves operating outside of their comfort zones – Torabi’s purchase of a guzheng (a Chinese plucked zither) led to Shepherdess’s lambent allure and York’s spectacular and evolving array of pipes and wind instruments contributed just as much as his ruthless editing. Davis meanwhile, whose speciality lies in rich tapestries of modular electronics, sums up their relationship in characteristically self-effacing fashion: “I see myself as a strong midfielder, or a centre back. Kavus and Mike are like the Lionel Messi or Ronaldo of the equation, and I’m setting situations up for them”.

Davis’ application of an extended football analogy is amusing in context, and one suspects it’s an intentional slice of drollery. The music itself is not amusing – as in, there are no chuckles to be found here – but instead is intensely focused, with magnificent results. There’s a tangible sense of an intuition flowing between the three of them on this album as the sounds ebb and flow and weave and quaver, the elongated drones and meandering organs melting together like a stream of butter.

There are some odd samples – probably animal, rather than vegetable or mineral – flow together into a soft mass, with no hard boundaries, no distinct edges… ‘Shepherdess’ is spacious, meditative, but shifts over time to emerge as a more pulse-based modular synth work, and ‘Disaster 2’ brings all of the various elements together perfectly, as well as bringing together ambient, post-rock, and folk. It’s a beautiful and uplifting experience, and one which acknowledges the pains, trials, and tribulations of life, how it may not be possible to function all day every day.

There’s something soothing, even soporific, about the slow, mellifluous tones that drift together smoothly, seemingly effortlessly, to coalesce into some form, however cloud-like and abstract, to create International Treasure. Even when deep, resonant notes hang like the slow decay of a chimed gong, as on the title track, the darkness is always tempered, by light.

It’s not ambient and it’s not Krautrock – but International Treasure finds the three musicians drawing on elements of both to conjure something magical, something mystical. The final track, ‘Castalia’ is a calypso party party, and if it at first feels somewhat at odds with the rest of the album, it’s worth bearing in mind that the album exists at all because the players are keen to explore different terrains and territories. And explore they do: International Treasure mines many seams, and excavates a wealth of listening pleasure.

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Watch: ‘Acheron’ by CODE

Posted: 29 May 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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UK electronic quartet CODE earned their stripes in the electronic scene of the early 1990s and were championed by the likes of John Peel, John Digweed and Kiss FM presenters Colin Dale and Colin Faver. Their debut album, The Architect, was issued on the Third Mind label in 1995 just as that company folded, but has often been cited as a cult classic. Its follow-up, Ghost Ship, finally arrived in late 2020 after a 25 year journey and was enthusiastically received by critics and fans.

Like that album, Continuum has been assembled by remodelling material from archived studio sessions and sounds like it could have been made yesterday. Emotionally engaging and exquisitely produced, it is timeless music that, although carrying traces of influences such as Kraftwerk, The Blue Nile, Talk Talk, David Sylvian and Depeche Mode, also has a romantic techno intensity all of its own.

‘Acheron’ is the second single to be teased ahead of the album. An instrumental, it sits in contrast to its predecessor, ‘Pleasure’, which was a slinky slice of pop existentialism. Acheron is known in Greek mythology as the ‘river of lost souls’, although sci-fi fans are likely to be more familiar with ‘Acheron LV-426’, one of three moons orbiting the gas giant Calpamos. It was here that a crew member of the USCSS Nostromo first discovered the eggs of a species of alien that would go on to spawn a highly successful movie franchise.

CODE had embraced the tactile nature of analogue tech from the outset and often jammed ideas as their DAT machine recorded, with each band member presiding intently over one or more pieces of kit, including their pre-MIDI SH101 and Korg PolySix synths, slightly newer Roland drum pads, guitar, 16 channel mixing desk and cassette deck. One of these sessions saw them focus on a version of an existing piece entitled ‘Atlantic’, with the resulting new track being entitled ‘Acheron’.

The band explain that “the challenge was to retain the warmth and idiosyncrasies of the original recording whilst subtly enhancing definition and clarity. This primarily involved reshaping the original nine minute jam into a more concise form whilst enhancing key elements to create a more dynamic soundscape.”
‘Acheron’ appears on the CD and digital formats of Continuum, with the 2xLP release featuring a remixed/remastered version of ‘Atlantic’, which had been included on their debut album.

Watch the video here:

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