Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

COH – IRON (Remastered)

Posted: 3 November 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

We Are Busy Bodies – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Released in 2011, IIRON by COH was one of my relatively early reviews. At the time, I was unlike anything I had heard before. It still is, if truth be told. If nothing else, this album was a major event in the way it opened my eyes (and ears) to music I never even could have imagined, or been exposed to previously. It was metal, but not as I’d ever heard it before. And it was a whole lot more. But for some reason, I never delved back to the album’s precursive counterpart, IRON, originally released way back in 2000. The arrival of this remastered edition provides the necessary prompt.

Russian-born Ivan Palvov had been working under the COH moniker for some time already: having relocated to Sweden in 1995. He debuted with the experimental BEFORE that same year, and delivered the appropriately-titled Enter Tinnitus in 1998 – a work which sits (un)comfortably alongside the likes of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire. But IRON did something different, and according to the accompanying bio, ‘grew out of Pavlov’s teenage fascination with heavy metal and the underground record-exchanging community of the late Soviet era. At fourteen, inspired by Iron Maiden’s ‘Running Free,’ he picked up a six-string guitar brought to him by his grandmother and decided that he and his friends could also play that kind of music. Before long, they were rehearsing in a Soviet youth club with whatever equipment was available, looking for the sound they heard in early heavy metal records.’

Funnily – or perhaps not – Iron Maiden put me off metal for a very long time. I began to suffer with insomnia when I was around five years old, and I would lie awake watching the clock tick… my parents usually went to bed around eleven, and being awake after that time was something I found quite scary. Come 1984, aged 8, I heard Iron Maiden’s ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’, and it would torment me as an earworm as the clock ticked on and I lay alone in the dark in the 300-year-old house we lived in, which I was convinced was haunted. But also, as I came into my teens, I would come to the conclusion that hair metal and the likes of Iron Maiden were actually a bit lame, and it wouldn’t be until some time later, when I was introduced to Godflesh and grindcore that I would find my kind of metal.

And then we have IRON, a different kind of metal altogether. There are no guitars here. There sure as hell aren’t any gratuitous solos. Nor are there any drums. Or vocals, histrionic, operatic, guttural, or otherwise. Ivan Palvov explains how ‘The album preserves traces of those early experiences through its titles and references. ‘Rubbing Free’ nods directly to the song that inspired Pavlov to form his first band, while titles like ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ and ‘Love Mites’ reference Metallica and Judas Priest. They also reference the atmosphere surrounding Western music in the Soviet Union, when exchanging records often meant running from the police, having records confiscated, and facing disciplinary consequences. It was a time when Pavlov, as a DJ, would make up a list of fake song titles for the principal to sign off on for a dance event at this school.” But IRON dissects these elements and ideas and pulls them apart to forge a fractured, flickering electronic exploration of an atmosphere, a feeling, rather than the sound of metal itself.

There is, then, an element of nostalgia woven into the heavy construct of this album, which is anything but representative of the metal scene at the time, sonically. Instrumentally, it’s a world away. And IRON is heavy. It opens with the harsh, yawning drone of ‘Annum Per Anum (Pärt 2)’. The extreme stereo panning is nothing short of mind-frothing, and with its stutters and breaks, it makes for a challenging first six minutes. But then, this is a challenging album. ‘East.er.Okay.Hell’ is fabricated around some stop / start heavy synth drones which squelch and stutter, with abrupt halts and lurches, and ‘Love Mites’ evolves from a crackle of static to a cranium-compressing electrical storm. ‘Now [4’19” into 2000]’combines the sound of later Throbbing Gristle with what feels like a panic attack. It’s intense, and not entirely pleasant, but articulates in sound something words simply cannot.

And the way the album is mixed is positively scary. The frequencies pop in a way that is like experiencing something heavy live and at high volume: you can actually feel your nostrils quiver, and your skin crawl and treble while listening to this. feedback and crackling electronica froths and fizzles, and ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ is built around a sonorous mid-range drone and stuttering beats which flicker and glitch in a furious spilling of flange, and ‘Rubbing Free’ is a surging, sloshing, swampfest whereby the stereo extremes reach a new peak in derangement. It’s little short of mind-melting, and the bass-loaded close, ‘Spiegel I’m Spiegel’ is anything but a gentle wind-down, instead cranking up the dense bass oscillations and piling on the panic.

IRON is an album that make you feel. It makes you feel uncomfortable, tense, panicky, claustrophobic, suffocated. But that’s its success. It hits heavy, and hits hard.

AA

a2412008082_10

AA

coh-by-quentin-le-joly-1

Pic: Quentin le Joly

Earth Mother Fucker – Do Not Resuscitate

Posted: 31 October 2026 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Antigen Records – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Old bastards make confrontational noise album nearly forty years in the making. That’s the headline, or the boiled-down version of the biography which accompanies the debut album from Suffolk noise-rock merchants Earth Mother Fucker. Formed in 1988 – long before the EMF who stormed the charts with their hook-laden dance-tinged indie songs – they’ve gigged hard and frequently, but worked on recording at a pace that would make a snail look like Usain fucking Bolt, with the sum total of their output standing as one EP, a live album and ‘a couple of collections of demos recorded in a barn in Holbrook in the late eighties’. As if they could care less. If they were even remotely fussed about being a commercial proposition in any way shape, or form, they wouldn’t have stuck with calling themselves Earth Motherfucker all this time. Even if they had a catalogue stacked with slick pop tunes and smooth r’n’b, they were never going to find themselves dominating the playlists of Radio 1. Even when the station had Mark and Lard in the breakfast slot – can you imagine that happening now? – spinning Radiohead, Placebo, and Depeche Mode babbling about Crispy Ambulance, there’s no way a band called Earth Mother Fucker would be making the airwaves.

Six years ago, their eternal traversing of grassroots venues saw them come to the attention of UK Independent Venue Week, who selected their no-cock rock anthem, ‘I Fuck Therefore I Am, as one of their top nine live performances of 2020, including it on the Independent Venue Week Live 2020 album with Self Esteem, Sleaford Mods and Anna Calvi. You couldn’t make this shit up, but this event prompted them to finally get it together to complete their first full-length studio album, Do Not Resuscitate. As there seems little likelihood of resuscitation by the time they get to that ‘difficult second album’, we should probably celebrate the fact that it’s happened at all.

It’s ‘I Fuck Therefore I Am’ which raises the metaphorical curtain on this eleven-track magnum opus, which has a run time of almost an hour. It starts with some zany slide guitar, but swiftly latches into a filthy groove and comes on like The Stooges. It’s wild, and builds to a frenetic climax which leaves you feeling dazed after just four and a half minutes.

They describe themselves as pioneers of ‘a mash-up micro-genre of one, delivering death country murder ballads and bleached-out retina-detaching noise rock’ – and it’s all here, in spectacular, ear-bleeding glory. ‘Crooked Path’ sounds like the best song The Gun Club should have written, while ‘A Good Man’ introduces Fall-esque vibes with its clanging guitars – although the distorted spoken word narrative takes it somewhere else entirely.

There isn’t a duff track on here. Nor should there be, they’ve had bloody long enough to figure out the tracklisting. But the magnificence of Do Not Resuscitate lies in its rawness, which encapsulates the band’s uncompromising nature. ‘Uncompromising’ is a word which has come to be chronically overused, and we know that nearly every band, every artist in every medium, makes compromises. Sign with a label or publisher, engage a PR… essentially, anything that could potentially further the career and increase audience reach involves a degree of compromise, unless you’ve already sold out before embarking on a path of placing creative works in the public domain. Not these guys.

In a parallel universe, Earth Mother Fucker would be massive. Because there have been other, similarly ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging’ bands who’ve broken through, ranging from the Jesus Lizard to Sleaford Mods – although I’d contend that the latter sold out and bought their own hype, and while the Jesus Lizard’s first UK tour in an eternity saw them playing venues like the 450-capacity Brudenell in Leeds, Sleaford Mods have taken their one-trick gimmick to arena-level, playing to 10,000+ people. Fuck that. And fuck them.

‘Cobalt Blue Climax’ is a disorientating, discordant slice of psychotic gospel country noise rock, and after that, we’re into the frenzied ‘Roadfucker’, where The Stooges and The Cramps and The Screaming Blue Messiahs crash headlong in a crossroads collision, before ‘Happy Shopper’ goes Sonic Youth on dirty speed.

There are no specific standout tracks on Do Not Resuscitate – but that’s because it’s simply relentless and the standard is consistent throughout, despite the stylistic variety. ‘Topper’ is a bot jangly, a bit pub-rock even, and lands with something of a swagger and – but equally, it calls to mind ‘Container Drivers’ by The Fall, before it collapses into chaos. ‘Ips’ is perhaps the album’s most accessible track, straying into post-punk/ indie crossover territory, and hinting at a certain level of songwriting nouse with a solid chorus – which, naturally, they obscure with the scuzzy, lo-fi production. Some would likely charge them of self-sabotage, but this is the very essence of Earth Mother Fucker – a band who refuse to play the industry game on any level.

When bands say they make music for themselves, and if anyone else like it, it’s a bonus, they’re lying. It’s false modesty and pre-emptively providing cover should they fail commercially. But not these guys. It’s impossible to fail commercially when you have absolutely no regard for commercial endeavours or the industry as an entity. Do Not Resuscitate is here as a document of a career spent crossing the road and taking every detour possible to avoid industry shit, and not to win them new fans or any of that shit. But it’s undeniably a fantastic album – and the last track, the six-minute ‘Junkie Faghag’ is something else.

AA

a2044693343_10

Watch: ‘The Man Laid Low’ by Pharaoh Overlord

Posted: 29 October 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Defying convention and expectations once again, Pharaoh Overlord’s upcoming album 7 is to be released via Rocket Recordings on 20th November. They have just shared a video for ‘The Man Laid Low,’ a continuation of the story which began in ‘Arms of None’.

“We wanted to continue with the idea where somebody else is playing the fictional Pharaoh Overlord character. In the ‘Arms of None’ video it was a band called Modem, and in this video the character is played by Julius Jääskeläinen, anarchitect and the other half of the Jääskeläinen guitar twins of Circle,” says Tomi.

The video pays homage to the likes of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ by Massive Attack or ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve. Speaking on the concept, Tomi adds, “Walking in an environment like a city centre brings in an element of chance that cannot be controlled. Lots of things are happening at the same time, yet nothing is scripted and everything falls perfectly in place. It’s also a little time capsule of what the environment and the people looked like in that exact day it was filmed.”

AA

Pharaoh Overlord album release shows:
20.11. Stockholm / BATA
21.11. Malmö / Brogatan
22.11. Copenhagen / RUST

Pharaoh Overlord’s 7 rides in auspicious, possessed of the gleaming high octane euphoria that transforms a dreary everyday into a triumph-over-adversity movie montage, swaggering in with high-saturation synth-rock, dressed in a custom satin bomber jacket for euphoric big-screen moments that never existed, salvation narrated by the death growl of Aaron Turner and guest falsetto from Richard Dawson. 

The number 7 is a cross-cultural signifier of good luck and divine completion, and if this promises much, 7 delivers, as Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen’s self-proclaimed "dream album". "This is, finally, the real Pharaoh Overlord," promises Jussi, “I can generate demos easily, but working with a producer, it’s reached a destination we really wanted.”

Now, over 20 albums deep, Lehtisalo proclaims Pharaoh Overlord ready to breakthrough, having brought in big guns on the buttons for the first time, with notable Finnish experimental black metal band Oranssi Pazuzu‘s Juho Vanhanen on production, and Niko Lehdontie mixing. Together they have polished the chrome of this synth-driven death-metal hyper-rock into a high-gloss mirror-shine, to "something like Justice’s debut album with the raw and disturbing atmospheres of Scott Walker’s Drift-era sound", says Vanhanen.

Pharaoh Overlord are consistent in one field: nailing the joyful thrill of being utterly unpredictable. Reliably unreliable when it comes to sticking to a genre, they are magpie-like music heads without a care for the stultifying brand-building best practice of dullard music industry proscriptions, describing their process as "like playing the Oblique Strategies but without the cards". This tracks with the anti-strategies of their parent band Circle, who once loaned out their name to another band for a year, corrupting their own legacy. Beginning as a full group, they now have two permanent members, but in their time have rendered glossy synthwave, whitewater motorik, idiosyncratic overdriven art rock, bombed-out psychedelia and more, always dancing fleet-footed across genre, as parent band Circle do, too. "They simply go wherever the music needs to go," says Dawson, who is both collaborator and superfan. "If the surface-sound of the albums change from record to record the spirit remains the same."

AA

Pharoah Overlord

Photo credit: Mika Taanila

Little Window – Red Ant

Posted: 29 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

27th October 2027

Christopher Nosnibor

The name Little Window conveys almost childlike, playschool connotation. Or, certainly something vaguely idyllic, a sense of the safe, the cozy. Meanwhile the band describe their debut album as ‘a cure for societal heartburn’. Who hasn’t been suffering from that of late? It’s been absolutely relentless for six years now. It seems as if the world was biding its time during lockdown – which was nuts – to go full-blown crazy, and none of it has been pleasant.

And, indeed, it so happens that Red Ant emerged from some pretty dark places, as the band’s bio outlines: ‘Written through cycles of insomnia, grief and self-destruction, Red Ant embraces the horror and chaos of death and transmutation. “Explorations of the fracture and intensity of death’s confrontation had given way to a sort of expansiveness”, explains Eli. “I had not had that kind of levity in a long time, and it triggered a childhood memory of climbing up a steep rock face with my siblings barefoot. We climbed to the highest ledge, feigning the courage to jump into the lake below from the extreme height. Crowded on the small ledge together, we all looked down with sudden shock. Dozens of red ants were stinging our bare feet, having disturbed their nest under the moss. Our eyes locked for a millisecond in midair. A euphoric moment of synchronized recklessness, all having made the same ridiculous decision to immediately jump.’

It’s a common scenario. Traumatic and challenging experiences inspire the best art. For some, creativity is the best therapy – or perhaps, for some, the only way of dealing with such things. On a personal level, it’s relatable, too. I only specifically recall wearing shorts other than for PE on three occasions. On one of them, in school, I received a major telling off because the teacher didn’t like the way I had completed a design project. On another, my legs got so badly sunburned, the skin peeled for weeks. And on the other, I stood on a manhole cover by the front lawn. I’d have been about four. And suddenly, red ants were crawling all up my legs, like a scene in a horror movie.

Working through trauma by focusing and interrogating it by means of creative processes can be immensely beneficial. And Red Ant deals with those real-life experiences head-on, in that Little Window make some crunchy, riff-driven noise. And make no mistake, while some of the titles may on the surface seem twee, there’s nothing twee about anything on this album.

The album’s first track, ‘Dirty Bookshelf’ starts low and grungy with a dash of wonky math-rock and a vaguely jazz slant. It’s largely innocuous in real terms, but then Eli Howey’s tremulous vocals arrive, and suddenly, he’s an undeniable force of nature everything changes, and the result is something like a heavy psychedelic Melvins-inspired outtake from Bleach. This is very much the angle that pervades the album as a whole – raw, urgent, and driving, and with production to match the low-budget values of the early days of grunge before it got co-opted by major labels.

It’s by far the album’s longest song, meaning that following the slow-burn, the floodgates open for a succession of sub-three-minute riff-heavy cuts. But that isn’t to say they’re lacking in emotional depth or any sense of softer feelings: moreover, Red Ant is an exploration of contrasts and juxtapositions: the breakdown moments in ‘Weeks’ are poignant and emotionally resonant, Howey confiding ‘I can’t go to sleep / ‘cause sleep makes me weak / I can’t go to bed / ‘cause bed makes me sad’. And instead of the throaty roar which is commonplace in this kind of context, he swoops and soars. But nor it his style really emo, although it is disarming in its unpolished immediacy, its quavering tones almost folky in places – something perhaps most apparent on the haunted-sounding ‘Get You Good’, a tense, acoustic-led sliver of a song.

‘Goldenrod’ is a decorative yellow plant, and the title again connotes something delicate and wistful, contrasting significantly with the sonic manifestation of this full-throttle guitar blast. It’s all leading toward the bass-booming, blown-out fuzzfest of the title track, which rips through like a forest fire in under two and a half minutes, crashing straight into the wild and desperate ‘So Many Times’.

AA

I suspect that for some, Howey’s voice may be an obstacle for some, simply because it’s not the conventional style for this kind of big guitar noise. But then I remember as a teen struggling with Dinosaur Jr at first, because J. Mascis’ voice seemed so weak and reedy against the backdrop of so much loud guitar. It was only when I tuned into the way this almost piteous whine, coupled with such expressive solos, carried so much more emotional weight than the more overtly masculine rage of other guitar bands that it all made sense. And while Little Window sound nothing like Dinosaur Jr, it’s this rare quality, the emotional openness and fragility, which gives Red Ant its unique impact.

AA

LWPhoto_horizontal_2 (Credit- Starlyn Lu)

Pic: Starlyn Lu

Deafkids / Kombi / Error Control – Boom, Leeds, 18th October 2026

Posted: 19 October 2026 in Live, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

Doors opening at 7 suggests an early start and early finish, and sure enough Error Control is on at 7:30. It’s very quiet in terms of attendance – so quiet initially I’m wondering if I’ve got the wrong night, but the beer’s decent enough and there’s some pounding, beat-heavy industrial noise pumping from the PA.

There’s a pattern emerging here: bands on respected underground / independent labels landing in Leeds to play to small but enthusiastic audiences play some of the most outstanding gigs I’ve witnessed all year. This was true of Might and Noisepicker when they played the Duck and Drake, and the same is true of Deafkids, who have brought Kombi, also from Brazil, along as the main support. It’s the tenth night of a world tour which has already seen them play mainland Europe, UK, and Ireland, with a stack more UK dates before heading back across Europe and onto Japan before a final haul round South America. These guys work hard. I do wonder if Angine de Poitrine’s long-sold out (and probably oversold) show at the O2 may have pulled some people away, and likewise the Ambient Leeds night at The Fox and Newt, but it doesn’t seem all that probable. So where the hell is everyone? Still, those present make up for number in terms of enthusiasm, and get to witness something special.

Error Control, playing blindfolded, creates a punishing wall of noise worthy of Merzbow. He begins by tentatively locating the monitor and draping the mic on it to generate a sustained feedback, which then goes through a succession of pedals and bits, which he tweaks and bashes to evermore brutal effect. It’s the kind of noise that’s both exhilarating and immersive, the harsh blast rendered even more intense by the use of only red lighting, which strobes. As he climbs up onto his bench in front of the stage, a potential health and safety nightmare reveals itself, but he gradually returns to the ground, where he proceeds to hail his pedal board onto the floor, and the set ends abruptly while he’s standing on the pedalboard and everything cuts out.

DSC06358DSC06400

Error Control

It’s only after I get home that not only have I seen him perform in person once before, but that performing with …(something) ruined, we’ve also featured alongside one another at two virtual gigs during lockdown.

Kombi’s set is a fine example of exploratory, experimental music, which reveals different facets as the set progresses. Billowing dark ambient with guttural growls gives way to fractured guitar and crackling contact work, a convergence of avant-garde and industrial. On the third piece, he unleashes Sunn O))) -like power chord drone. The second half of his set is a continuous extended piece built around dank loops and drones and wailing feedback, whereby the low frequencies bother the bowels and the shrill squall of treble terrifies the eardrums.

DSC06409DSC06418DSC06446

Deafkids are having some technical issues and start twenty minutes later than advertised. Oh, but they’re more than worth the wait. And if they’re disappointed by playing to around twenty-five people, they don’t let it show, and their set is an absolute blinder.

They’ve not only captured the sound and feel of new album, CICATRIZES DO FUTURO (SCARS OF THE FUTURE), but take it to a whole other level live. Not for the first time, I’m amazed that there are just two guys up there: with a combination of pre-recorded drum loops, prerecorded and live guitar and extraneous noise loops, infinite delay on everything, especially the vocals, and some truly remarkable drumming, they conjure a dense, powerful sound, dominated by a thunderous barrage of percussion.

DSC06450DSC06508

Marian Sarine’s drumming is something to behold, often playing the congas with one hands while working his way around snare, toms, and cymbals with a stick, effortlessly switching to two sticks, and occasionally two hands. He smiles a lot, too. The resulting battery lands like Test Dept meets Swans, but with some techno breaks and a Latin twist. Oh, and there’s some looped beatboxing, too. Because they need more beats. It all builds to a head-shredding wall of noise. This ultra-percussive explosion is paired with abstract guitar work and vocals swathed in cavernous reverb and endless echo. It’s totally hypnotic, propulsive.

DSC06503DSC06550

With so much percussion, it’s got groove. It’s techno, trance, dub, shoegaze, and noise rock all at once. And some flute. It all makes for an intense fifty minutes. And it’s all done by ten past ten, which is ideal on a Sunday night.

Matt Rösner – Lost Meridians

Posted: 16 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Room40 – 16th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on Lost Meridians, Jonathan Wilson observes that ‘traditional instrumentation is manipulated, twisted, stretched and weaved into endless webs. Recorded with whatever was at hand, like a phone or single mic, these short and sharp moments have been pushed far beyond their original convention. Sparkling highs and low sub sonics seem to linger throughout asking more questions than offering answers,’ adding ‘this is music to pause to, this is music to slow down to, this is music to dream to… But mostly, this is music to remind us that sometimes the unexplained things around us are just as important as the things inside us’.

The unexplained has – at least for those of us who are a certain age – connotations of The X Files, but also, to an extent, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Twilight Zone, resurrected post-millennium.

Now, some of the things – at least where the titles are concerned – on Lost Meridians are quire easily explained, not least of all the first composition, ‘Mountains, standing steadfast’. It’s gentle, slow, contemplative, hazy, and in many ways reflects, in sonic form, the experience of gazing up at peaks, partly obscured by cloud, in a moment of calm.

Each autumn, I make a trip with my daughter to the Lake District. We stay in a cottage on the shore of Windermere. The cottage has a private jetty, and we scattered some of my wife’s ashes there the first year we went. Looking across the water towards the ridge on the far shore, and, behind that, Coniston Old Man, I have felt that sense of stillness that comes from being in nature, and also the sense of insignificance. The mountains, the lakes, were here millennia before us, and will remain for millennia after. We’re just passing through, and all we can really do is make the most of the time we have, however brief – and for some, it’s briefer than others. I find comfort and solace in the fact she knew and loved this magnificent landscape, and we shared time in it, as a family, and that consequently, our daughter feels a deep attachment to these surroundings, too.

‘At First Light’ features almost unfiltered folk elements, with a gently-strummed classical guitar standing in the foreground against a vague, eddying background, which at times tapers off to nearly nothing, while the immense, nebular drift of ‘A Vastness, unresolved’ mirrors the connotations evoked by the title perfectly. Indeed, we exist as dots within a vastness that’s beyond comprehension, and as such can never be resolved.

‘Across a line’ consists of two parts, the first of which chimes and rings but briefly before fading out to be replaced by a droning roar – heavy rain? a waterfall? wind? static? – which in turn fades beneath a soft watercolour wash of sound, and it’s remarkably soothing. The pairing of the final two pieces, ‘Fractures in Silence’ and the title track, are each six and a half minutes in length. The former takes the form of a long, slow undulation, which sounds in some respects like the dying wheeze of a broken church organ, culminating in what sounds something like an elongated cymbal crash and frozen-frame electronic glitch. The latter gradually fades in, a low, rumbling hum which hangs like a dense, churning sonic cloud.

Over the course of the album’s forty-one minutes, Rösner creates some richly atmospheric moments, the elements interwoven into a magnificently textured tapestry.

AA

RM4276 front

AD Ozium – Body Without Organs

Posted: 14 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

15th October 2026

AD Ozium is the musical vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Moore, based in Washington DC – a vehicle for what he describes as ‘a fractured, hallucinatory convergence of freak folk textures, dark ambient, and no wave dissonance.’ That’s a lot to digest, just on paper. What’s more, this second album, which follows just four months after In The Style Of Dead Sparrows, ‘confronts themes of dehumanization, economic exploitation,

revenge, and systemic collapse. It argues that dehumanization functions as a gateway to sustained, trans-generational cruelty, and that societies built upon the denial of another’s humanity ultimately cultivate the conditions for their own destruction.’

That’s a pretty bleak proposal, but we live in bleak times – potentially the bleakest of all times. The last few decades have seen an ever-widening wealth gap. But the propensity for conspicuous consumption and status symbols which defines the 80s pale in comparison to where we are now. Billionaires simply didn’t exist then: now they’re a class. And instead of aspiring to owning yachts, these uber-rich fuckers – who each individually could eradicate world poverty and still be richer than anyone else can really conceive – choose to send rockets into space, not in the interest of expanding human knowledge, but in the sole interest of self-interest. Space travel is the Rolex and Hummer for the mid-2020s. Meanwhile, as we burn through ever diminishing supplies of fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate and the seas are rising more quickly than ever, it feels like we’re accelerating towards a cliff that has no bottom, just an abyss of incomprehensible proportions.

We live in a sick society, with an ageing population. And it’s that ageing population who seem determined to ruin any possible future for future generations. What the fuck happened? Where is the humanity? What happened to the adage ‘you can’t take it with you’? Now, it seems that the mega-wealthy and the boomers – I refuse to use to term ‘elites’ here, because they have no claim to superiority – have set a course for total annihilation and are determined to take the rest of us with them.

So yes, I feel passionately about the positioning of this album. And the fact it’s landed so soon after its predecessor indicates a sense of urgency where Moore is concerned. There’s a palpable sense that he’s doing this because he feels driven, is motivated by a compulsion to act in the only way he knows, the only way he can control.

The title, Body Without Organs hints at a deep-seated sense of detachment, and this translates into the sonic experience: as I said, it’s a lot to digest just on paper. As a listening experience… well, it does feel like the slow – but rapidly accelerating – end of everything. A stentorious baritone vocal rings out through a clamorous clatter of churning discord on the album’s second track, ‘Acceleration’, on which, contradictorily, time slows to a doomy crawl. One might call it industrial goth, or gothic industrial: it’s dark and has all the hallmarks of sepulchral drama, against a dingy backdrop or gnarly metal-griding and wailing moorland wintering ambient noise. Moore sounds as if he’s lost and wandering, not just in a barren landscape / soundscape, but in a psychological desert. New sonic ruptures burst unexpectedly, only adding to the sense of discomfort.

‘Thug Bait’ is a dirgy, purgatorial crawl through subterranean depths: the vocals are low in the mix and swathed in reverb, swimming through a dank swamp, dense enough to drown in.

The production values are positively black metal: Body Without Organs sounds like it as recorded on a Walkman positioned in the room next door on a well-used tape. But it wouldn’t work any other way. The heavy, soul-dragging atmosphere, which is so integral to the experience, simply couldn’t come from a nice clean, crisp recording made in a plush digital studio. ‘Curse of 39’ is a particularly woozy, abstract piece, whereby Moore’s vocals float amidst a slow drift of slow-building tide of flotsam and debris, and ‘Space of Flows’ is a fractured, dissonant wail. And the debris is strewn across this album – the debris and wreckage of human existence. Body Without Organs is the sound societal collapse and the slow dawning of the reality of what this means.

Shit only gets weirder as the album progresses., with grinding earthworks and tectonic ruptures churning and dredging away, spun across slow-drifting sonic clouds and warping. There’s a mesh of static which drapes itself over ‘Capitulation’, while at the same time untuned guitars twang and unravel with a complete disregard for musicality or structure. ‘The Illusion of Completeness’ borders on the surreal, as guitars scrabble against notes like elastic bands and so much rumbling ambience and lurching noise. The seven-minute ‘Most Beloved’ is dark folk and quite nasty noise, and again, Moore’s voice floats around vampirically, like the very essence of of doom, to be afraid of.

The experience of listening to Body Without Organs is not an easy one: it slowly drags the listener down into murky waters and a troubled headspace, one where confusion and dissonance reign. It’s great, it’s powerful – but it’s probably not for everyone.

AA

AA

a1467024112_10

Listen: ‘Brothers at the Wheel’ by Caulbearers

Posted: 29 September 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Manchester-based outfit Caulbearers return with ‘Brothers At The Wheel’, an urgent and uncompromising single that confronts the structures of power governing modern life, while ultimately offering solidarity and collective action as an alternative to despair. It’s is a rich and timely preview of their forthcoming album Come Back Home, out on October 30th via Single Cell Recordings.

‘Brothers At The Wheel’ traces a journey of political awakening – from a naïve plea for those in power to change course before disaster hits, to disillusionment at the resulting hollow words and empty promises that leave the status quo intact.

“If we truly consider humanity as a brotherhood and sisterhood of equals, it seems the ultimate betrayal of our family to exploit, to oppress and to victimise others whilst creating structures that concentrate wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller, unaccountable minority,” explains Damien Mahoney.

“The ‘wheel’ in the title is that system — a machine built to keep turning for profit and power, regardless of the cost to people, communities, or the planet.”

The song’s resolution isn’t despair but solidarity: a call for unity at the grassroots level, recognising that the same struggle echoes in other streets, other words, other languages. In resisting the forces intent on dividing us, the lyrics point to real power within the collective — like a seed that can grow into something more balanced, harmonious, and connected.
The song’s urgency isn’t just lyrical — it’s built into the music itself. ‘Brothers At The Wheel’ comes straight out of the traps with an unrelenting groove: strings, bass, and keys locked into a single insistent pattern, guitar answering in the gaps, percussion driving it forward, while the vocal melody cuts its own path in short, sharp phrases that swap between landing on and off the beat.

Past the tempo shift, the song opens into a second movement: a soaring, wordless lament from ethereal folk artist Ruth Blake — beautiful and mournful, yet defiant, a celebration of the human spirit. Underneath, the arrangement builds in waves — guitars layering, cello and violin rising, keys, bass and drums gathering weight — swelling to a crescendo before dissolving.

AA

A collective of musicians formed in 2007 and led by Damien Mahoney, Caulbearers are known for blending diverse musical styles, including soul, funk, hip-hop, dub, nu jazz, folk and post-punk influences. With contributors hailing from around the UK and Europe, their DIY ethic has coursed through every element of their releases, from design, production, videos and gigs to the recording process itself.

AA

Caulbearers

Sly & The Family Drone – With Love

Posted: 25 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Time has a habit of evaporating, and life has a tendency to obstruct plans, and so it is that the latest offering from twisted jazz weirdos, with the slightly slushy, smushy loved-up Clintons Cards connotations of its title was intended to land on Valentine’s Day. Oh well, it’s perhaps for the best. I’m picturing a scene where a couple are enjoying a romantic evening in, a candlelit dinner with some nice food, a glass of wine, and after maybe a Rom-Com they’re getting in the mood, but instead of Barry White or something smooth and sultry, one of them says “I know just the thing. There’s this new album by Sly and the Family Drone…” Fuck knows how the scene ends, but it’s certainly not with the blissful soft-focus union of an 80s romance – more likely indescribably carnage, likely unspeakable gore, probably even at least one death.

As ever, most of the titles are random or otherwise inexplicable, although I’m sure they have their reasons, but unusually, the crazy puns and wordplay are largely absent, suggesting perhaps a newfound seriousness – although that seems unlikely. And what of ‘Cloth Control’, the album’s final piece? There’s probably something wrong with me that I’d leap to ‘touching cloth’, but from a band with songs with titles like ‘Handed Cack’ and ‘Sunken Disorderly’

‘Psychic Surgery’ begins innocuously enough, although, being Sly and the Family Drone, it’s more dark atmospheric sax and swampy drone with a reverb-soaked abb and flow, than it is smooth, seductive sax: there’s a noirish hint to the opening minutes, before supernatural skitters begin to creep in at a low level, and the percussion begins to clatter with unsettling irregularity – but increasing urgency – a couple of minutes in. It conveys the sense of a gathering storm, and noise begins to swell… but it passes without breaking. However, any sense of relief is but brief, as things get weirder and more tense with the more electronic ‘The Guts of Albion’. It starts with a murky, muffled-sounding pulsation, and a metallic clatter that calls to mind Neubauten or Test Dept. It’s against this tense backdrop, with heavy hints of another growing tempest, that the sax arrives – and this time, it is actually pretty smooth. I mean, it’s hardly 80s Tina Turner, or Dave Brubeck for that matter, but it’s by no means disagreeable. But as the beats build, and the sonorous drone sustains, so sax becomes more fragmented and the tension grows, and around halfway through the track’s seven and a half minutes, a plateau is attained, and you feel a shift as static and distortion creep in… and finally, it hits like a tidal wave. It’s the perfect release.

As a title, ‘Over the Rainbow’ instantly calls to mind the song from The Wizard of Oz. A ballad, but one flavoured with hope and optimism for another place, a brighter future. But while that motif is actually present, it’s distorted and stretched and played against a backdrop of three and a half minutes of crackling distortion: it’s more like hearing a lullaby or the tinkling of a child’s music box when it appears on the soundtrack to a horror movie. The context shifts, and something light and innocent becomes something dark and ominous. And here, we feel that disconnect, that discomforting disjointedness. Here, it’s quite subtle, but in some respects, that renders it all the more unsettling.

‘In The Oils’ goes for the low, heavy drone – and you feel it in our gut, a slow churn. There are some vocals swimming low in the mix, and there are moments where if feels like listening to Throbbing Gristle where the speaker’s submerged in a domestic aquarium. Plus, the final three minutes bring more drumwork than anyone would ever need in a lifetime. It’s not beats, it’s an explosion. But it feels good, because yes, finally, we get it: a climactic, pummelling blast of tribal drums and a rising drone that feels more like a jet engine warming up for take-off. It’s a climax which is a mind-bending crescendo that feels like the end of days.

The last track, ‘Cloth Control’ is built on a slow, rolling drone and reverberating, echo-swamped sax hum and grinding electronics which lead the listener into an otherworldly space of abstraction and strangeness. And what’s strangest of all is that feels like a different album with every play, and different layers, different aspects, reveal themselves.

Overall, the percussion is much less prominent on With Love than on many previous releases, but the abstract jazz meanderings and overall sense of musical exploration is significantly greater than ever. The only thing that’s really predictable about Sly and the Family Drone is their unpredictability, and With Love ventures into new realms of weirdness.

AA

WithLoveDigiArtwork

Push For Night – That Porous Line

Posted: 13 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Three years on from Lasped Gasps, their collaboration with Jon Mueller, experimental duo Push For Night, consisting of Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott, decided they needed to take a slightly different approach and pull back on the intensity a tad and allow some hints of light into the darkness for the follow-up.

They write in the accompanying notes – as if offering reassurance to anyone who may be concerned that this means that their new album is some kind of breezy pop fun – that That Porous Line ‘is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play.’

Compared to Lasped Gasps, pretty much anything would be lighter and less tense. But the first composition, the nine-and-three quarter-minute ‘A Good Hosing Down’ immediately makes clear the difference, opening with some scratchy strings and chiming notes which ring through a soft static and ambient mist. There’s no real sense of danger or threat here, and you don’t immediately feel as if you’re suffocating. But around seven minutes in, the atmosphere does change, and shit does get weird. Warped, spongy electronics rub against one another as they twist and turn in unpredictable directions.

The underlying structure of ‘Fang Vendor’ is a low, slow beat and swampy bass that’s almost a desert rock reimagining of Suicide, but over these are strains of retro-futurist space-age synths and random glitches and all kinds of sonic incursions that disrupt the flow.

At the centre of the album stand a brace of monolithic works: ‘It’s Sure To Be Dark If You Shut Your Eyes’ and ‘Idler’s Reward’ both pass the eight-minute mark, and place the collage nature of their approach to the fore. On the former, fragments of processed, glitched-out vocal samples and random snippets intersect with a piano motif which fades in and out while flickering beats flit around subtly in the distance, by no means driving or propelling the piece forward, instead adding further distraction to a palette already overloaded and blending to indistinction. Heavy drones, elongated organ sounds, ominous rumbles, and electronic explosions fizz and spark all over. Cymbals crash and tension builds. The latter provides some respite, with a slow, gradual glimmering change of hue accompanied by a sparse pulsation. I start to envisage the deep sea, the gentle, fluid movements of jellyfish… but then there’s a corrupted proggy synth break that utilises an awful farting synth sax sound or something, and further on, there’s some trilling jazz-infused woodwind. No two ways about it: That Porous Line explores experimentalism to the max. Asserting that the duo apply the collaging of materials indiscriminately may sound like a harsh criticism, but I make the observation more in the context of William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, which brought collage to the page, and, shortly after, audio works, with the intention of creating art which was closer to life, and the way we experience an array of sensory inputs simultaneously. That Porous Line may be a fair bit smoother in its application of the methodological principles than early adopters of sound collaging – from John Cage to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but ultimately, this is about applying a technique established a long time ago in art to other media, specifically sound. And the aim is to be disorientating, to overlay fragments to achieve a certain effect.

‘Bait is Lowered’ is a dark, rippling wash of unsettling layers of sound, creeping, thrumming, before sputtering beats burst amidst a wail of siren-like sounds and everything dissolves into a panic-infused morass of sound. In many ways, it’s low-key: there are no brain-shredding walls of white noise here, but nothing about it is right, nothing about it is easy, comfortable.

That Porous Line isn’t one of those albums where you find yourself praying for it to finish, and it doesn’t suck the life out of you – but it’s no party, either. Culminating in the wall of static wash that is the final minute of ‘Turned Slowly and Slowly Turned’, and the somewhat proggy, somewhat Krautrock, somewhat ambient title track which draws the curtain remarkably gently. It’s a journey, and no mistake.

AA

a3365526305_10Push For Night

Older Entries