Posts Tagged ‘electronica’

WMTID – Finding The Ai G-Spot

Posted: 2 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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1st March 2025

Christopher Nosniboir

Richard Rouska is something of a cult legend in his own lifetime: back in the 80s he was pivotal in the Leeds zine scene, documenting the emerging post-punk movement Leeds remains so renowned for, in real-time, subsequently writing a number of books. Along the way, he’s made some music of his own, recently making Well Martin This is Different his primary focus, with some prolific results. Finding The Ai G-Spot is WMTID’s fifth since their inception in the mid-late eighties, and serves up a set of remixes, with proceeds from any donations going to the Throat Cancer Fund.

And yes, it certainly is different, and that’s clear from the get-go. WMTID’s music is essentially electronica, but draws on a host of elements which have their origins in different decades and different scenes. I will admit that I misread the title as Finding The Ali G-Spot initially. Ai-iit! But while this album draws on a huge array of influences, you won’t find any naff cultural appropriations.

‘The Prince is Dead (Again)’ is a twisted hybrid of lo-fi post-punk, 80s electronic industrial (think Wax Trax! stuff in the late 80s / early 90s), space rock, and Krautrock, a motorik groove stricken through with some wild orchestral strikes and multi-layered vocals – and this is to an extent the template: ‘03:33 Time’s Up’ is exactly the same duration as the original version (‘333’) which appeared on I Know What You Are But Who Am I? in the Autumn of 2024, tweaked to optimise the hypnotic rhythm and detached-sounding vocals. The result is somewhere between DAF and early Human League. ‘Deep Down Low II’ – again reworking a track from I Know What You Are goes full-on techno / cybergoth stomper, with industrial-strength beats pounding away relentlessly. It works so well because it doesn’t take from the original, instead simply rendering it… more. More. MORE! And I want MORE!

There are hints of both KMFDM and very early New Order about ‘It’s (Another) Lovely Day’, but then, it’s as much a work of buoyant lo-fo indie and bedroom pop, while ‘Little Bombshells’ comes on a bit Prodigy, but again, a bit technoindustrial, and a bit kinda oddball, bleepy, bloopy, twitchy, stuttery, the vocals quavering in a wash of reverb as crashes of distortion detonate unexpectedly. Elsewhere, ‘Waiting For The End…’ goes dark and low and robotic, and ‘Three O’Clock Killer’ is hyperactive and warped, and brings menacing lyrics atop a baggy 90s beat.

It really is all going on here, and the end result feels like a wonderfully eclectic celebration of music, articulated through some quite simple compositions, all of which have solid grooves providing the backbone of each.

My general opinion of remix albums is widely documented and not entirely enthusiastic, but Finding The Ai G-Spot is a rare exception, mostly because it doesn’t feel like a remix album an doesn’t offer three or four unnecessary and unrecognisable versions of each song, boring the arse off all but the most obsessive fan. In fact, if you’re not up to speed on WMTID’s output – and there’s a fair chance you may not be, to be fair – Finding The Ai G-Spot offers a neat entry point and summarises the last couple of albums nicely, too.

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Haswell & Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #23

Posted: 12 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker are both prolific as solo artists, each with numerous collaborations with other artists to their respective credits, Haswell also having been a contributor to and touring member of Consumer Electronics. The UPIC Diffusion Sessions are a long-running collaborative project which began in the early 2000s, exploring Iannis Xenakis’ UPIC system as the sole instrument.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘The UPIC is a computer music system that generates sound from visual input. The original intention of the system developed by Xenakis was to make a utopian tool for producing new sounds accessible to all, independent of formal training. One can locate footage of Xenakis and a group of children making drawings for the system in the 70’s.’ They continue, ‘The duo set off experimenting with a diverse array of hand-drawn images to feed the UPIC system including news photographs of disasters and atrocities, “food porn” through to depictions of the natural world and microscopic images of molecular structures (including ‘the blackest ever black’). The resulting eccentric audio from these images is claimed by the artists to heighten synaesthesia and is as mysterious as it is baffling.

I suppose the potential outputs for the UPIC are as infinite as the inputs, and this alone makes for a fascinating project, and the results here are, indeed, mysterious and baffling. The recording from this session is represented by a single track, just over half an hour in length.

Immediately, trilling oscillator tones rise in pitch – and keep rising, until you feel the pressure build inside your skull. There are glitching spasms of sound which flash across like subliminal messages. The pressure drops and the siren wails fade out, before scuttering blasts of seemingly random noise collage and intersect across one another, buzzing and fizzing, humming and thrumming… the forms move quickly, and shift from dark to light, hard to soft instantaneously. Shimmering sprays of abstract sound burst like fireworks, short interludes of harsh noise wall, microtonal bubbles and ZX Spectrum like babbles and bleeps all intersect or pass within mere seconds of one another. It is, very much, a sonic collage, the audio equivalent of William Burroughs’ cut-ups, an aural articulation of the simultaneity of experience of life in the world. Burroughs’ contention was that linear narrative is wholly inadequate when it comes to representing the real-world, real-time lived experience, whereby overheard conversations, snippets of TV and radio, and all the rest, not to mention our thoughts and internal monologues, overlap, and to present them sequentially is not true to life.

Leaping disjointedly from one fragment to the next at a bewilderingly rapid pace, listening to this is rather like the way the mind, and often conversations, skip from topic to topic without ever seeing any single train of thought to a defined conclusion, bouncing hither and thither in response to triggers and associations which often seem to bear no logic whatsoever.

There are thick, farting sounds, buzzes like giant hornets, choruses of angry bees, weird sonic mists and transcendental illuminations… of course, these are all conjured in the mind in response to these strange, sometimes otherworldly, sci-fi sounds, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop, part tinnitus and nightmare of imagination. Unpredictable isn’t even half of it as alien engines and spurs of 80s laser guns crossfire against earthworks, roaring jets, explosive robotics, skin-crawling doom drone, whispers and whistles, proto-industrial throbs…it’s a relentless blizzard of sound.

‘Experimental’ has become something of a catch-all for music that draws on eclectic elements or perhaps incorporates a certain randomness: this, however, is truly experimental, given that there is no way of knowing how the programme will interpret the input provided. And as much as the output involves oscillatory drones and the kind of synthy sounds associated with analogue, and with woozy, warping tape experiments, it evokes the drones of collapsing organs, wild sampling and everything else your brain could possibly conjure.

At once exhilarating and exhausting, UPIC Diffusion Session #23 is… an experience.

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History Of Guns – Little Miss Suicide (25)

Posted: 29 January 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Liquid Len Recording Company – 28th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I suppose I lost track of ‘new goth’ bands at the end of the 90s, and am still a way behind even now I’m a bit more back on it, and so History Of Guns, described by Mick Mercer – the authority on all things goth, who’s Gothic Rock Black Book was a bible for be when I was 13 and discovering the scene, as “By far, the most inventive UK band to have got their hands caught in the Industrial threshing machine” – bypassed me.

As the parenthetical numerals in the title suggests, this is a remixed version of their debut single, released twenty-five years ago, and it’s accompanied by a brace of new songs by way of B-sides, in the way things used to be done back then, when you had 12” and CD singles – and while I don’t get nostalgic for much, there was something special about these formats. Then there’s the fact a 12” single used to cost about £3.50 and a CD single a couple of quid – which probably sounds as incredible as a £1 pint or 3p tin of beans (Kwik-Save, No-Frills, c1995) to anyone under 35 – meant they were affordable, accessible.

But while we’re talking nostalgia and the passage of time, the accompanying video uses footage, originally filmed by Danni Cutmore on a VHS camera, of the band writing and performing the song at Earthworks studio in Barnet in 1998. It’s grainy, fuzzy, saturated, and looks like it could just have easily have bene shot in 1988, or even 1978. On the one hand, digital technology means the quality of video footage, even when shot on a cheapy mobile phone, is usually crisper, and isn’t prone to deterioration – but on the other, it’s so commonplace, it has less currency and less buzz about it, somehow.

The music itself… yes, it’s got that vintage post-punk feel to it, spun with an industrial edge, and pitching the band alongside Alien Sex Fiend, Cabaret Voltaire, Nitzer Ebb, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, Deathboy, The Prodigy, and LCD Soundsystem is all quite fair enough.

The classic spindly goth guitar sound spins spidery webs across a thumping drum machine, and there’s that quintessential low-slung bass groove… not to mention Del Gilbert’s theatrical baritone which looms powerfully over all of it. But then there are shuddering laser synth blasts which bubble up from nowhere, fizzes and whizzing and bleeps create the sensation of listening to two songs at the same time. Perversely, it somehow works, not least of all because there are strong hooks and the beat hits just right.

First B-side, ‘i am defective’ shows how they’ve evolved: it’s a dubby instrumental which leans far more into the electronic territory which only coloured their debut single. It’s also harder-edged and more overtly industrial, too, not just with the electronics, but the crunching, serrated guitars which cut in and threaten speaker damage. ‘LMS (Deep Mix)’ – a radical reworking of ‘Little Miss Suicide’ is in the vein of Rosetta Stone circa The Tyranny of Inaction – at least to begin with, but then swerves hard into the kind of electronica that qualified as technogoth or even cybergoth and reminding me why I drifted from the goth scene at the time. Now, I’m a bit more open to these things, and as an example of hard-edged industrial goth, it’s solid.

This release presents a neat straddling of the band’s formative years and their current sound: a clear win for fans, and a neat introduction for the unfamiliar.

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CEL – Five minutes to self-destruct

Posted: 15 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Gagarin Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

You might be hard-pressed to call CEL a supergroup, but Felix Kubin has been creating sound here, there, and everywhere for a long time now, and Five minutes to self-destruct is definitely a coming together of established creative forces, containing as it does five recordings of live tracks performed by longstanding Kubin and longstanding collaborator Hubert Zemler, remixed by Warsaw sound engineer Jan Wroński.

And the thing about creative collaborations is that they often rely on spontaneity, immediacy, the frisson between the individuals in proximity, feeding off one another in the moment. And so it is here, as the accompanying notes set out: ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

To make a small sidestep, we hear endless decrees that employees need to return to the office in order to foster the spirit of collaboration and all the rest. We know that this is bollocks, and is simply about working the instruments of control. Collaboration and the coalescence of energy for creative ends is not something which cannot be forced, and it happens, regardless of distance, time, and space, given the right connection and chemistry. Hearing the performances on Five minutes to self-destruct, it’s immediately apparent that this is not something that could ever be created by desire or will alone.

As the accompanying bio notes, ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

The title track ‘Five minutes to self-destruct’ is a quote from Michael Crichton’s sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain, which describes a research team’s fight for survival against an accidentally triggered self-destruct mechanism, underpinned by trigger impulses and increasing panic.

My own experience of the modular community may not be on quite the same scale or the same higher circles as theirs, but it does feel primarily the domain of the middle-class, middle-aged white male these days, and there’s a certain air of ease and the satisfaction of hobbyism about it. Needless to say, not so here. There’s a tension that runs throughout the entirety of the release. ‘Krakenwaltz’ cartwheels and loops in jittery circles, head-spinning rhythmic cycles with no small degree of attack, with some sharp, aggressive snare sounds and a frenetic, frantic undercurrent which grows increasingly disorientating over its near-six-minute duration.

‘Eskalacja’ is dominated by hectic percussion and a whirl of fairground bleeps and toots running in ever-tighter concentric circles. It some respects, it calls to mind the frenzied looping and wild, vaguely manic excesses of early Foetus 12” singles, seeing just how far they can push the concept, and themselves in the creation of hyperactive sound.

The seven-minute ‘Blauer Dunst’ which sits as the album’s centrepiece marks a distinct shift in tone and texture, a rumbling dark ambient piece that invites comparisons to some of the more abstract works of Throbbing Gristle. It predates the rest of the set by almost four years, having been recorded in October 2020.

It’s back to more upbeat, stomping percussion-led synth work on the DAF-like ‘Neustart Generation’ – but don’t mistake upbeat for uplifting: it clatters and bangs with a clipped, regimented, Germanic feel, and the grooves are taut and tense, and it’s simmering tension which crackles beneath the lumping, shuffling, organic rhythms which underpin the sparse, tetchy title track. A couple of minutes in, a loping percussive cycle breaks out and the repetition of this and the dominant synth motif, amidst a swell of extraneous sounds – samples, sirens – makes this one of those tracks where you can feel your blood pressure increasing as it progresses and the pace quickens to a blur. It ends before reaching the point of inducing an aneurysm, and the assurance to the applauding audience, “We’re still alive, it’s ok,” at the fae injects some unexpected humour to proceedings.

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Rupert Lally – Interzones

Posted: 30 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Because life experience creates linguistic associations, for me, it’s impossible to see or hear the word ‘interzone’ without immediately thinking of William S. Burroughs. The title of a collection of short stories and ‘routines’ penned in the mid-1950s, Interzone was the working title of the seminal breakthrough novel Naked Lunch (1959), and the collection, published in 1990 consists of segments which failed to make the final cut. The pieces were written while Burroughs was living in Tangier, something of a haven for expat writers, including, perhaps most notably, Paul Bowles, but also polyartist and true inventor of the cut-up method, Brion Gyson. Burroughs described the city as an ‘interzone’, and it was indeed both an ‘international zone’, as the portmanteau implies, and a space between zones, outside of any single culture or jurisdiction, its administration divided between the US, French, Spanish, and English sectors, where ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’. Of course, there are numerous other connotations, but this is what I’m bringing in terms of prececeptional baggage to this.

The accompanying notes certainly indicate that the album’s content holds up to these parallel positions: ‘Like its name implies, these are place of transiency. Intermediate places. In-between locations. Melting pots of different people and different ideas, constantly evolving as one thing collides with another, and another, and another.’

The album was initially recorded in 2022 as a solo work, but subsequently scrapped and rerecorded with a different collaborator on each composition. Collaborations do tend to bring out different aspects of an artist, and it should therefore be of no surprise that this suite of nine pieces, recorded between 2022 and 2024 in Switzerland, England, Luxembourg, France and Zimbabwe, is eclectic in its take on electronica.

As the bookending pieces, ‘Entry Visa’ and ‘Exit Visa’ indicate, travel, movement, and transition, are the key themes here. But this is not some pan-cultural pick ‘n’ mix grab-bag, and instead creates an experience which replicates the disorientation of travel. It’s difficult to articulate just how this sonic patchwork works, or quite how the experience feels. It’s not as if it lurches from techno to grunge, to opera, to thrash, and in this respect Lally’s works represent his ‘two inches of ivory’, so to speak. But within the realm of electronica, Interzones covers substantial ground.

‘Play Position’, featuring Salford Electronics, is a sample-packed exploratory work with a prominent beat, which contrasts considerably with the near-ambience of ‘A Stealth Approach’, featuring Scanner; contrasting further, Simon Fisher Turner brings a sort of drawling space-age country aspect to ‘Calmer’, before things take a spin toward out-and-out trance on the title track, and Karen Vogt’s airy, soft vocals on ‘Running Circles’ pull the album gently into hypnotic shoegaze territory. The album continues on this trajectory, sliding deeper into dark, gothy electropop with ‘Ripples’.

The insistent beat and overtly dance style of ‘Exit Visa’ makes for an unexpected change in direction – despite the fact that, by this point, nothing should be truly unexpected. The effect, however, is disorientating, and you find yourself wondering how you came from A to B over the duration of the album. It’s testament to both Lally’s compositional skills and his selection of contributors – as well as the album’s sequencing – that somehow, it flows and the transitions themselves are seamless, which only heightens the sense of moving between spaces with no real sense of how it came to pass. Vitally, Interzones is a subtly detailed work, with hidden depths and moments of genuine beauty.

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Bloom – The Season – Xmas mouse mix

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

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz has been keeping busy – as usual. Composer of contemporary classical, ambient, and dark noise works both as a solo artist and in various collaborative permutations and guises, she’s back with a new BLOOM release in collaboration with Daniel James Dolby. And it’s a Christmas single.

I’ve never been rabid about Christmas, and the last three years have seen a succession of difficult Christmases for me personally. In December 2021, my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. We weren’t even sure if she would be home for Christmas. She was, but was incredibly weak after three weeks in hospital, and that she was able to sit at the table for Christmas dinner felt like a miracle. We were in shock, and she was clearly unwell. Having made substantial improvements in rebuilding her strength through 2022, she deteriorated with the onset of winter, and again was weak and struggling over Christmas. It still doesn’t seem real that she only had another three weeks. And so Christmas 2023 was the first with just me and my daughter, aged twelve. We made the best of it, but it wasn’t the same. I detail this not for sympathy, but purely for context. It means that while around this time of year it becomes nigh on impossible to avoid festive fervour, with adverts depicting happy couples and radiant nuclear families, all the usual Christmas tunes and an inbox busting with new ones clamouring for coverage, and Facebook friends and work colleagues are dizzy with excitement over getting their decorations up, sorting secret Santa and planning social activities, I’m not feeling much enthusiasm, concerned primarily with getting through it and hoping distant relatives don’t think I’m rude or twatty for not sending cards out for the second year in succession.

When writing about music, I am often – and perhaps increasingly – aware that how we engage with it, how it affects us, is intensely personal and involves multitudinous factors. Sometimes, it’s something as arbitrary as the mood we’re in when we hear a song that will determine our response. And the chances are – and I’m no doubt not alone in this – hearing chirpy tunes when I’m down isn’t going to cheer me up, it’s going to really piss me off, or set me off. It’s impossible to predict. To be safe, I tend to try to avoid Christmas songs, which involves avoiding TV and radio – which is surprisingly easy if you spend large chunks of your time in a small room reviewing obscure music – avoiding shops – manageable – tacky pubs – easy – and ignore review requests for Christmas singles.

But there is always space for an exception, and Bloom’s ‘The Season’ is it. Deborah may have been posting pics on Facebook of the ‘festive mouse’ in the studio to mark this release, but said mouse is looking over a piece of kit called ‘Psychosis Lab’ made by Resonance Circuits. The cuddly cartoon cover art for this release is misleading, and for that, I am grateful.

It’s five minutes of deep, hefty beats melded to a throbbing industrial synth bass. Atop this thumping dance-orientated rhythm section, there are synths which bring a dark 80s synthpop vibe. In combination, the feel is in the vein of a dance remix of Depeche Mode circa ‘85 or ’86, around the point they began making the transition from bouncy pop toward altogether darker territories. It’s repetitive, hypnotic, pulsating, big on energy. But there are eerie whispers which drift through it all, distant wails like spirits rising from their graves. These haunting echoes are more evocative of Halloween than Christmas – and this is a significant part of the appeal. It’s a curious combination of ethereal mists and hefty, driving dance groove, which is simultaneously uplifting, tense, and enigmatic. It is not schmaltzy, cheesy, twee, or saccharine. It’s the season, alright. The season to be weird, to be unconventional, to accept those darker moods and remember that they will pass. It’s a Christmas anthem for those who aren’t feeling festive. And I will most certainly drink to that.

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dEddGvRL – Anhedonic Succubus

Posted: 14 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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11th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

13x is reborn – or perhaps reanimated, resurrected, something – as dEddGvRL, and the title of gives a hint as to its tone and themes of this this seven-track release.

As she summarises in the accompanying notes, Anhedonic Succubus is ‘More a collection and recovery from extreme trauma over the past couple of years. Fake friends, S.A, declining mental health, alienation, despair, suicide, revenge….’ As such, this is music that’s issuing forth from a dark and difficult place, and there’s not only no escaping the fact – it’s necessary to take this head-on. There are doubtless many who will find these subjects triggering, but life does not come with trigger warnings, and a key function of art is to get to grips with life in all its complexities, all its pain and ugliness. And in connecting with art which does this, we strive to find ways to navigate life and the traumas it puts us through.

From a creative perspective, many artists channel their own experiences – however painful – into their craft as a channel of catharsis, a release, a way of comprehending or coming to terms with things. All of this is clearly an oversimplification of a complex relationship between an artist and their art, the nature of the creative process, and the way an audience – an infinite array of individuals rather than a collective with a single, fixed perspective – receive and respond to said art, in whatever medium. But I tentatively step towards Anhedonic Succubus with this preface because it’s particularly pertinent.

As has been the case with work as 13x, dEddGvRL channels considerable pain and anguish into these works – something which represents a continuation of the inspiration behind much of the previous work as 13x. But dEddGvRL plunges deeper into those dark places, and the eclectic sample credits feature some illuminating inclusions:

Drums on "Ophelia: Drained" taken from Tool "Die Eire Von Satan"
"Deathbearing Machine: Killng December" contains a segment from Charles Manson’s interview with Dianne Sawyeri
Cock Speech on "Sterben, Kranke Fotze" – "Female Trouble" (John Waters – 1974)
"Scared Of This Place" – Johnny Depp in Court
Catwoman (1968) appears on "Valenbitch"

‘Ghosts of My Body’ starts the set off quite gently, as it happens: dark, atmospheric, yes, but not without a certain levity, with hints of early-80s Cure B-sides and a dash of Disintegration, until the fizzing, distorted spoken-word vocals bring a more unsettling aspect. It creates a sense of detachment, which is likely almost entirely the objective, given the context.

Slow, sparse, murky, ‘Ophelia: Drained’ is reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails circa The Fragile. The tension builds and the percussion tears through the surface of a swirling wind and things start to get darker fast from hereon in.

Based on the context and the content, one may be forgiven for expecting more rage, more abrasion, more visceral noise, more attack. But Anhedonic Succubus is harder and heavier in its absence: instead of exploding outwards with a brutal sonic assault, dEddGvRL keeps things contained, introspective and seething. The effect is disturbing and menacing. Electronics buzz and hum around distorted vocals, and the percussion, too, is restrained, subdued. Things crackle and glitch, stutter and clatter, and the atmosphere is claustrophobic, oppressive.

When things do get noisier, on ‘Fuck What You Kill’, it really hits hard, and that’s before one reflects on the perverse implications of that title and hookline. But even then, the noise is sociopathically restrained, and pinned to a hypnotic repetition. The technoindustrial stomp of ‘Scared of This Place’ is by far the most accessible – and uptempo – track on here, and it works well and is well-placed, providing a late – and unexpected – rush of energy, before ‘Valenbitch’ leads the way to the exit in a relentless churning grind.

Anhedonic Succubus is heavy, but not in overt or conventional ways: instead, as the title threatens from the outset, it slowly sucks the air and energy, dragging the listener into dEddGvRL’s hellscape. It’s a tough listen, but artistically, it’s a success, delivering on its promise.

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Listen: ‘Dick’ by Unit:187

Posted: 30 October 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Founded in 1994 by the Vancouver, Canada-based duo John Morgan and Tod Law, Unit:187 spent less than a year in their studio and playing live at local clubs before landing a record deal with 21st Circuitry Records. A solid debut album entitled Stillborn followed in 1997, with the promotion for it taking in several west coast tours that gained the band a respectable fanbase throughout North America.

Loaded followed a year later, featuring new band members Jed Simon (guitar) and Byron Stroud (bass) of Strapping Young Lad and produced by that band’s leader (and future prog icon) Devin Townsend. The album yielded instant industrial classics that included the title track and a remix of the song ‘Stillborn’ by Rhys Fulber (a member of Front Line Assembly and the producer of Fear Factory at that time).

The third Unit:187 album, Capital Punishment (2002), utilised the electronic programming and production skills of Chris Peterson (also of Front Line Assembly) on several tracks. Its title song kicked off proceedings with a killer groove and mix by Anthony Valcic (a producer of both Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly), the group’s trademark synth riffs, movie samples and driving guitars blazing full-tilt from the start right through to the conclusion of the album.

2010’s Out For Blood saw adjustments to the group line-up, with Chris Peterson becoming a permanent member and guitarist Ross Redhead (Decree) also joining. The album marked a turning point, as they worked tirelessly in the studio to produce raw heavy music that punched fist-first through what they perceived as ‘goth euro-cheese’ by coming up trumps with a solid dose of old-school industrial that hadn’t been heard in years. Mixed by producer Kent ‘hiwatt’ Marshall (another Skinny Puppy cohort), Out For Blood pulled out all the stops to sonically pound eardrums into a memorable pulp, while simultaneously offering its listeners sweet melodies to sing along with long after their sound systems had failed from transistor overload.

Unit:187 singer and frontman Tod Law sadly passed away in 2015, but left a legacy of music that has inspired the band to finally move forward. Now fronted by former backing singer Kerry Vink-Peterson, their upcoming KillCure album continues to pack attitude and punch, albeit with a dancefloor friendly edge. An opening salvo from the record, ‘Dick’, has been made available today as its first single.

Listen here:

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Album Review and EXCLUSIVE Video Stream: Empty Cut – Allens Cross

Posted: 24 October 2024 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

In the debate of nature versus nurture, it’s noteworthy how many artists find themselves influenced in no small way not only by their formative years, but also the place or places where they grew up. There’s an entire thesis to be made from this, but here I make the observation because on Allens Cross, Empty Cut – a duo consisting of Douglas Fielding-Smith and Robert Bollard – have forged a work ‘Inspired by their childhood growing up in Birmingham they blend together all their experience and inspirations to create a noise that holds a heavy solid groove mixed with harsh noise and fuzzed out reverbed bass, topped with psychedelic synths, and chopped and screwed vocals.’

Birmingham, the city which gave us Black Sabbath and UB40, the second largest in England, with a population of over two and a quarter million, and has long been renowned for its diversity, and is a truly multicultural melting-pot. It’s perhaps unsurprising that cities like this – in contrast to so many predominantly white, often middle-class towns – are the source of musical innovation: throw in an element of social deprivation, the frisson of frustration driven by class and cultural disparity, and inevitably, this backdrop will fuel the fires of those with a creative bent.

Allens Cross is exemplary: as the blurbage summarises, ‘mixing together drums, bass, samples, effects and vocals they have created a sound that incorporates punk, hardcore, electronica, jazz, drum’n’bass, experimental-industrial and shoegaze.’ It’s one of those that on paper probably shouldn’t work, but thanks to the dexterity if its creators, works far beyond imagination.

It grinds in on a sample looped and echoed across a dirty bass and slow-building beat… and then everything slides into a doomy, sludgy sonic murk. ‘Bloodline; makes for a dank and difficult opening, five minutes of feedback and dinginess sprawling and lunging this way and that, culminating in a manic howl driven by frantic percussion and driving bass.

‘Fidget’ whips up a howl of feedback against a juddering stop/start bass, and with shouty vocals low in the mix, it brings a quintessential 90s Amphetamine Reptile vibe with a hint of Fudge Tunnel… until things take a detour into dub territory in the mid-section. When the noise blast returns, it hits even harder.

With none of the album’s eight tracks running for less than five minutes and the majority straying beyond six, it feels like there’s an element of slog, of punishment, inbuilt. ‘The Well Beneath’ certainly mines that dark seem of metal that plunges underground, but with the contrast of jazz drumming and some quite nifty bass work, at least until they hit the ‘overload’ pedal and everything blows out with booming distortion.

If ‘Fluff’, by its title sounds cuddly, like a kitten, or a bit throwaway, like that which you’d sweep up from the corner or the room, the reality is quite the opposite: a six-minute seething industrial sprawl, it’s slow-burning, dark and menacing, and a clear choice of lead tune… Not, but then again, with an echo of Eastern promise and a certain ambience, and the strains of feedback a way in the distance, it perhaps is the most accessible cut on the album.

We’re proud to share a video exclusive of ‘Fluff’ here:

AA

Elsewhere, ‘Hymn to Then’ pitches cold synths and rolls of thunder to conjure dark images, a stormy backdrop to an eye-opening hybrid of prog rock, industrial, and krautrock: the result isn’t only epic, but conjures images of Dracula and unseen horrors with its icy atmospherics, while the last track, the eight-minute ‘Shatter’ begins with an eerie take on Celtic folk

Allens Cross is a highly imaginative work, an album that draws together a broad range of styles in a cohesive form. Its impact lands by stealth, building as it does across a range of styles, often creeping under the skin, unexpectedly, to register its effect. Sparse synths laser-cut across distorted, arrhythmic percussive blasts, as a low-level crackle and hum of distortion hovers around the level of the ground. Fractured vocals add to the disorientation, and the experience is uncomfortable. You cower, and will for release, not because it’s bad, but because it’s intentionally claustrophobic, torturous, and so well executed.

This is perhaps a fair summary of Allens Cross as a whole. It is not, by any means, an easy listen. Enjoyable would be a stretch. But it is utterly compelling.

AA

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The Royal Ritual – Pleasure Hides Your Needs

Posted: 19 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Welcome… to The Royal Ritual! I simply felt the urge to open with that. It felt necessary, if only to me. But if you can’t please yourself…

In my case it’s something of a belated welcome, having been aware of the act and its founder, David Lawrie for quite some time, but having only recently come around to the actual music, with my introduction being their recent show in York. There’s something to be said for hearing a band live first, without knowing the songs, rather than the other way around: if they can grab you in that twenty minutes or half an hour, when you’re not necessarily primed to absorb songs and details, then there’s a strong chance they’ve won a fan, provided the recordings are up to scratch.

Where The Royal Ritual really stand out live is with the use of live guitar, which brings the benefit of not only an immediacy and human aspect to the predominantly digital music, but an additional body on stage, which creates not only a visual balance but a greater sense of movement.

Recorded, these elements are less essential, and the songs here are clearly the product of extreme focus and a meticulous attention to detail. When I wrote in my review of the York show that The Royal Ritual sound ‘produced’, I observed that ‘their approach to production owes more to the methods of Trent Reznor as pioneered in the early 90s on Broken and The Downward Spiral, balancing gritty live guitars with synths and fucked-up distortion and harnessing their tempestuousness in a way that creates a balanced yet abrasive sound.’ And so it is on record, also.

Pleasure Hides Your Needs is The Royal Ritual’s second full-length release, following MARTYRS in 2022. A lot has happened, and much has changed since then, and the project, born in lockdown, has evolved significantly – as have many of us. Life is different now: that’s a fact.

We learn that ‘Pleasure Hides Your Needs sees David contemplate his own life and experiences, adopting a distinctive, more personal tone than the expansive and outgoing approach of MARTYRS: “Pleasure Hides Your Needs is much more introspective when compared to the social and political commentary of MARTYRS,” says David. “For me, it is about the closing of three distinct chapters of my life. Finding the common threads through each of those chapters in order to represent them sonically, and in a consistent way, was a really interesting challenge – if at times quite emotionally exhausting.”

Life is exhausting, in every way, but there’s a tense energy to Pleasure Hides Your Needs. It builds from the instrumental intro piece, ‘Shadow Self’, where crashing waves erupt from soft ripples, dark rumbles and inaudible muttering contrast with chimes, before ‘Vantage Point’ opens a broad sonic vista paired with a solid kick drum beat. Just as it’s leaning into the proggier end of alternative rock, a gritty guitar kicks in and the mood immediately turns darker.

‘Fifteen 14’ lands as an unexpectedly pop tune, with a solid chorus, which softens the arrival of the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute centrepiece, ‘Sinner Gambler Fugitive’, which really does run the gamut for range, a sonic and emotional rollercoaster. It’s ‘Modes of Violence; that goes full industrial, with a metallic smash of a snare and snarling bass providing the backdrop or Lawrie’s wrought vocal as he wrestles with a veritable tempest of emotion, before he hollows himself on the bleak, minimal title track.

The album as a whole is more geared toward tension than release, always simmering but rarely bursting the floodgates. Muted isn’t the word: it’s more a case of clenching tightly to maintain a grip of control for fear of what may erupt otherwise.

Pleasure Hides Your Needs is dark and exploratory, but still eminently listenable. As The Royal Ritual evolves its sounds and expands its horizons, there remains much potential to explore myriad paths in the future, and recent touring will likely serve to open new avenues of exploration.

AA

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