Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

Posted: 12 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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11th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some artists thrive on collaboration. Deborah Fialkiewicz is one of those. While she’s prolific as a solo artist, the volume of collaborative works in her discography is also noteworthy: when she’s not working as part of SPORE, she’s part of the ever-rotating lineup of BLOOM – and that’s before we touch on the frequent collaborations with (AN) EeL, the most recent of which was only released three weeks ago.

The Improvisation Sessions was recorded live May of this year, with a lineup of Dan Dolby, Deborah Fialkiewicz, and John Koser, marking an expansion from the duo which recorded the trilogy of Parallel Minor, Besides, and Hybrid in 2020. Fialkiewicz is without doubt an artist with range, but one who favours the dark end of the ambient spectrum more often than not, and this is very much the case here.

The Improvisation Sessions features two longform tracks which would quite nicely align with a vinyl release.

‘Chameleon Soul’, which spans a colossal continuous twenty minutes, begins with low, rumbling ominous drones, but soon escalates to a busy, buzzy criss-cross of sounds, interweaving and interlacing, leaving one’s head in a spin as if after trying to trace several flies flitting about the kitchen on a hot summer’s day for any period of time. It’s a morass of warping tones overlaying a ballast of churning noise, and any comparisons to Hull luminaries Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow are entirely justified.

The layers of distortion only grow denser and gnarlier as the track progresses, crashing waves of white noise blast in from one side and then the other as they really push to test the stamina. And then you realise we’re only six minutes in. This is a positive: plenty more left to enjoy… Enjoyment is of course subjective, and enjoyment of this requires being appreciative of a dizzying, disorientating assault simultaneous with a full-on white noise blizzard.

The momentary lulls, the spells where they pull back from the precipice of all-out aural obliteration, are far from mellow, as serrated spurs of hard-edged drones, wails of feedback and brain-melting extraneous noise conglomerate to seismic effect. There are some nasty high-end frequencies knocking about in the mix, moments were one has to check if the whistle is coming from the speakers of if it’s that troublesome tinnitus nagging again, and said frequencies rise from a battery of ugly distortion, bone-shattering blasts of which simple explode around the twelve-minute mark, and from hereon in, things only grow harsher, more corrupted, more intense, more difficult to withstand. We’d be inching into polythene bags on heads territory were it not for the variation, but the last three minutes or so are fractured, damaged, and agonizing – part power electronics, part circuit meltdown.

As the world becomes evermore and increasingly fucked up, I find words fail me more by the day. It’s harder to articulate, and this is where I’ve found that sound has come into its own. Sound as the capacity to convey something beyond words, something that lies in the most innermost parts, giving voice to the subconscious, even. On The Improvisation Sessions, BLOOM convey anxiety, gloom, pessimism.

‘The Dark Room’ is indeed dark, constructed primarily around a fixed but thick, distorted hum. Oscillators whine and whistle, and something about it calls to mind Whitehouse around the time of Never Forget Death, when they discovered low-end frequencies and restraint, the impact of a low undulating wave and subtle tweaks of reverb.

It rumbles and drones on, eddying and bouncing around in a shrilling mesh of dissonance. There isn’t a moment where this is an easy listen, and so often, it sounds as if the equipment is faulty, whether it’s a stuck loop or generating unexpected noise.

This set hangs on the edge of ambience, but be warned, it’s dark, and noisy at times, to the extend that it may shred your brain. For me personally, that’s my idea of fun, so it gets a two thumbs up, but for the more sensitive, this is a release to approach with caution.

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Felix Kubin – Der Tanz Aller

Posted: 9 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza –16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Much of Felix Kubin’s work since the turn of the millennium has involved radio, although film and theatre and other soundtrack works have also been a feature. Der Tanz Aller is one such soundtrack work, which was ‘created for the performance of the same title by the experimental arts collective LIGNA. The group specialized in site-specific, participatory works. Der Tanz Aller is based on Rudolf von Laban’s radical 1920s concept of ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), collective dances in public space that aimed to reimagine social order through shared movement.’

The context and objective behind the composition are particularly useful to be aware of when listening to this album in isolation, as Kubin sets out: ‘When the performance group LIGNA approached me in 2012 to compose music for a play based on Rudolf von Laban’s revolutionary kinetic theories and so-called ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), I thought of a soundtrack that would be both rhythmically engaging, abstract and mechanical. I knew there would be pre-recorded voices talking about his philosophy and guiding the audience via headphones. So, I had to leave some “air” in the arrangements, allowing the visitors to concentrate on the spoken words, while simultaneously becoming dancers. In LIGNA’s conceptual works – just like Laban’s idea of the movement choirs – the audience members become the performers.’

I shan’t dwell too long on the conceptual aspects here, beyond noting that this predates John Cage’s 4’33” by more than two decades, and while Cage’s silent work was on many levels a quite different proposition, the way in which any sound made by the audience – be it a cough or the shuffling of feet or the creaking of a chair – immediately becomes part of the performance indicates clear common ground. Likewise, William Burroughs’ cut-ups, which invited ‘creative reading’ whereby the engagement of the reader and their experience and perception was integral to their success, arrived some thirty years later. As such, ‘Bewegungschöre’ represent the cutting edge of avant-gardism, belonging to the era which brought us Duchamps’ readymades and – perhaps more pertinently – Tristan Tzara’s directions to make a Dadaist poem.

For the most part, the ‘air’ in the arrangements is apparent: there is space, separation, and while we can only imagine the prerecorded voices talking about Laban’s philosophy through headphones, it’s possible to get a sense of how it would work. But then, occasionally, Kubin’s compositions get father more busy, as on ‘Dämonen der Zerstreuung’, with big band percussion and noodlesome orchestration that’s of a strong jazz persuasion, but has a whole lot happening, and often simultaneously. There’s drama with orchestral strikes, and creeping, urgent glockenspiels that bring a noirish, detective movie feel – not a chase scene, but a cat-and-mouse scenario.

There are some spoken-word passages, in German, as on ‘Raumstunde Vera Skoronel’, accompanied by evolving sonic backdrops, the likes of which I find hard to imagine inspire dancing, but spasmodic twitching and erratic lurching, while the title track is a slice of jerky, and quite insular and intense, Kraftwerkian synth bleepery, and ‘Rotes Lied’ is a perfect exemplar of sparse, spaced-out, glooping, blooping, reverby weirdery with occasional chimes and stuttering shot of snare. There is plenty of air here, as you sit and wonder what exactly is going on?

Who knows? And does it even matter at this point? The percussion builds from all sides, and the nagging away – until suddenly it doesn’t.

The unpredictability of Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is its strength. It is weird, unexplained in many respects, beyond simply the initial onboarding awkwardness. We should probably celebrate this weirdness, this sense of separation. Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is never dull, but always strange and alien – and these are reasons to appreciate it.

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Sicker Man – Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed

Posted: 6 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Limited Edition 7" Dubplate / DL Blank Records – 13th June 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Tobias Vethake aka Sicker Man has spent a quarter of a century doing things differently – differently from other artists, and differently in terms of his own sound and approach to making music.

As his bio points out, ‘as our world changed a lot during the last 25 years, so did his music. On his last release, KLOTZ WENZEL VETHAKE, the interaction with other musicians and the political dimension of a musical wake-up call became a main focus… The single „Gravy Train / Hollowed“ marks a new and fresh look at both, his musical history and present. It features Sicker Man’s love for dub, noise and electronic music as well his passion for classical composition and spiritual jazz… ‘Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed’ feels like a collaboration of Moondog and The Bug’

It certainly does. For these two pieces, Sicker Man has enlisted saxophonist Matze Schinkopf, and

How many ideas is it possible to pack into four and a quarter minutes? With ‘Stop The Gravy Train’, Sicker Man manages more ideas per minute than it’s possible to even begin to count. The piece starts with a low, grinding bass and industrial hums, before the saxamaphones enter the mix, interweaving through and across one another. They trickle smoother, teasing with points and counterpoints, laid-back and mellow over the simmering rhythm section, the bass and the beats building currents beneath. Around the midpoint, the piece makes a change of trajectory, the gentle jazz giving way to something altogether more urgent and driving, locking into a robust groove with low saxophone punching rhythmically and in syncopation with the whip-cracking snare and palpating kick drum.

‘Hollowed’ is different again: a swampy surge of seething electronica, a morass of meshing noise – at least to begin, and then it melts into a rather pleasant swaying jazz work, a clip-clip beat nodding along nicely. Swells of noise bubble and surge, but don’t quite break through, and industrial grooves settle in while the saxes tootle off in different directions, hither and thither to brain-melting effect.

‘Genius’ is a word which is chronically overused and often severely misapplied. Is this a work of genius? Maybe not, but it’s got to be close. There’s no question that it’s wildly inventive, and unexpectedly listenable, while challenging every musical preconception.

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Deborah Fialkiewicz / (AN) EeL – Compelled by Nature

Posted: 24 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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19th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz’s neoclassical album Ad Vitam Decorus, has been in Bandcamp’s neoclassical ambient bestsellers chart for fully five years now, although she’s hardly been resting on her laurels and basking in the success since it’s release, having released a slew of works in a range of genre styles, with this, the latest, being a collaboration with (AN) Eel, who describes himself as ‘An Experimental Vocalist & Full Bodies Inhabitant of this Colorful universe’. His output is also remarkable, and his catalogue consists mostly of collaborative efforts, this being his second with Fialkiewicz (the first being Inkworks in April 2022)

Although the words are (AN) Eel’s work, those which are published on the release’s Bandcamp page could easily be about Fialkiewicz’s friendly foxy visitors, who she feeds and often photographs and writes of online:

Two Foxes, Out of Boxes,

In Your Garden

Seven Tales

Shape Shifter, Sun & Moon

Shadow Dancers, Rod & Womb

Silk and Cobwebs,

Perhaps this is simply an indication of how closely attuned this collaboration is.

Compelled by Nature contains two longform pieces, each hitting that magical twenty-three minute mark – meaning it would be ideally suited for a vinyl release, but in its digital form, has the feel of a ‘classic’ experimental electronic album, the likes of which you’d find on Editions Mego or Ici, d’ailleurs. The two compositions break down the title: ‘Compelled’ and ‘By Nature’, bringing an element of linguistic play into the frame.

‘Compelled’ offers up some fractured drones which crack and lurch in volume and frequency. As the piece progresses, looping, repetitive motifs emerge, atop of which gurgling, chattering, insect-like scratches emerge, chittering and bibbling, rising and falling, and when these incidentals fall to silence, the repetitive underlying sonic skeletal frame of the composition sits sparse and alone, becoming thoroughly hypnotic. The experience isn’t dissimilar from watching waves lap the shore on a calm day with a gentle tide. In time, 16-bit bleeps reminiscent of 80s arcade games ripple through an ever slower, evermore dolorous droning of a slow-strummed bass guitar. The vocalisations are eerie, ethereal, haunting – spiritual, but somehow detached from the world as we know it, a keening, crooning, mewling. It may or may not be wordless, but is in some ways similar to Michael Gira’s wordless articulations during the immense, immersive sonic expanses which have defined Swans output and performances in recent years – it’s not about song, or structure, but transcending sound and language. And in this context, the title, ‘Compelled’ takes on a clear and specific meaning: this is not music made for entertainment, or with an audience in mind, but music made because it needs to be made, the product of creativity as an outlet, a necessity as a means of getting through life in this insane world.

‘By Nature’ begins with distorted, distant babbling voices over a low, ominous drone, reminiscent to an extent of the start -and end – of ‘Pornography’ by The Cure. It’s dark and oppressive, not to mention somewhat disorientating. There are fragments of sampled narrative, but there are glitches, fractures, which disrupt it, and against this infernal, churning drone, chiming bells and similarly innocuous sounds take on a disturbing sense of portent, a certain horror-like suspense. Anyone familiar with the tropes of horror as a genre will be aware of how the most successful horror works because it transforms mundane situations to a source of fear by adding an undercurrent of the unknown, and / or a foreshadowing of nightmarish events ahead. This brings that quite specific sense of something bad about to happen. The digital bloops, computer game chimes and laser bleeps of ‘Compelled’ return, but this time against an altogether more sinister backdrop, a drone like a black hole opening up to swallow the entire solar system.

So many of the sounds are familiar, even if only vaguely so, but their collaging and recontextualization strips them of meaning by contextual connotation, and so what we find ourselves facing is something quite alien, and as such, uncomfortable, unsettling, even scary. What is this? What does it all mean? Only Deborah Fialkiewicz and (AN) EeL know – or perhaps even they don’t, really – perhaps – and it seems likely – Compelled by Nature is a work of instinct, something which happened because it simply came to be, and is as it is by happenstance. I can believe this is most likely, and that Compelled by Nature is more about process than product. It’s a compelling work. It is not, however, an album to be listened to in the dark.

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Ancient Psychic Triple Hyper Octopus – Put Emojis On My Grave

Posted: 24 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Not Applicable – 23rd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

For about five minutes, AI looked like it may provide some entertaining diversions in terms of creative potentials. It wasn’t so long ago that it produced glitchy, idiosyncratic writing and wild art that was so wrong it was hilarious, and lame synth-loop electronic music which had neither style nor substance. It didn’t look like the threat to humanity that dystopian sci-fi novels had portrayed.

But then more information began to emerge about how AI was ‘learning’ by essentially stealing from all available sources. AI is the worst plagiarist imaginable, and nothing is safe or sacred. Then there came the reports of the vast amounts of energy, and water, required to power it, and it started to look like AI will doom the planet by sapping its resources instead of going rogue and obliterating humanity. But then…AI evolved, and fast. In no time at all, people stopped having additional limbs and appendages, the writing transitioned beyond repetitious babble, and people have begun to use to AI chat as a substitute for expensive therapy, despite reports of rogue AI advocating suicide… and as its usage accelerates and it morphs into the nightmare of sci-fi dystopia we’d dismissed just a few months ago, so the use of energy and water increases exponentially. One way or another, it does now look very much like AI will finish us.

And so there’s a certain discomfort in approaching Put Emojis On My Grave by the spectacularly-monikered Ancient Psychic Triple Hyper Octopus, an album which is sold on the way it ‘boldly explores AI and improvisation on an album of freely improvised, experimental electroacoustic music’.

It features, as the press notes put it, ‘a new lineup of celebrated, British musicians’ (Alex Bonney (trumpet, bass recorder, Strohviol), Will Glaser (drums and percussion) and Isambard Khroustaliov, aka Sam Britton (electronics), and ‘ claims to forges ‘a new musical language’, with an album ‘which eschews traditional musical composition, seeks instead to “adopting the language of AI’s deep learning failures and glitches”, attempts to imagine how AI could make a positive contribution to the creative process’.

It’s hard to know how to really assimilate this. The six compositions which make up Put Emojis On My Grave are fine examples of exploratory jazz, with wandering trumpet tooting in meandering lines across clanking, clattering abstract percussion which sounds like cutlery and wind-chimes being knocked about while bleeps and bubbles interject seemingly at random. It has that avant-jazz, experimental, iprov feel which is in some ways quite familiar in its own strange way. That is to say, while it’s niche, the sonic experience is very much representative of a certain field. A field filled with jackrabbits, apparently.

‘Goats on Helium’ is bubbly, bibbly, scratchy, scrapy, wheezy, groany, a splatter and clatter of sounds piled up and colliding all over, and it gets pretty messy over its six and a half minutes. Warping drones and scratching, gargling abstract drones twist around deranged brass tootlings and crashing cymbals on ‘The Adiabatic Flux Differentials of the Id’, and I would challenge anyone to find a title that’s posier, more wankily intellectual than that this year. And while it’s a bit jazz-jizz in places, it’s certainly better than the title suggests.

This is, in my opinion, a fair summary of the album, a work which is concerned with space and time – not outer space, but inner space, the space which our minds explore in reflection like the clatter of 1,000,000 bongos, the space – or distance – between concept and execution, and virtual space, those our other selves occupy, both in the moment and, subsequently, leaving echoes and traces in infinite corners of the virtual world. It’s impossible to discern where the musicianship cedes to AI intervention here, which is certainly in its favour – and if Put Emojis On My Grave is used to train generative AI, then it could confuse it for a while, making for some interesting results. And Put Emojis On My Grave is certainly interesting.

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Ashley Sagar – M/A/R/R/S tools

Posted: 18 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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3rd February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This one may have started at the beginning of the year, but is an open-ended project which has been added to over the subsequent months, meaning that there’s more to absorb now than there was previously, and some five months in, it seems like a reasonable point to take stock of the progress so far. Although released under his Sunday name and therefore perhaps not a release that leaps out, Ash Sagar has been operating as Meanwoood Audio for a while, as well as being involved in numerous Leeds / York based collaborative works, notably The Wharf Street Galaxy Band and Neuschlafen, and perhaps notably the one-off experimental improv collective Beep Beep Lettuce, who will one day be hailed as a 21st century Big in Japan or Immaculate Consumptive. Well, we can but hope.

M/A/R/R/S tools is one of those albums that could only ever exist in the digital age, consisting as it does of some fourteen experimental pieces with a running time of around a hundred and eighty-five minutes. Yes, that’s over three hours – even longer than recent sprawling Swans releases.

Sagar’s notes are succinct – or scant, depending on your perspective – summarising M/A/R/R/S tools as ‘Audio recording from tests of building tools in SuperCollider for Meanwood Audio Recording & Research Services {"M/A/R/R/S"}.

My instinct is – because my instinct is dictated by my brain, which is brimming with stupid nonsense and is excessively prone to misfired associations – is to ‘pump up the volume’. But this proves to be rather unwise, as the release contains an endless stream of unsettling discordant rumbling, hovering hums, and fizzing extranea which is just around the tinnitus range.

‘Audio_25_01_20_1’ makes me feel tense: it reminds me of a ‘breather’ in a Teams call – there’s always one freak who positions their unmuted mic right in front of their open, gasping mouth, and the sound is like a gale on a mountain top.

Dripping, dropping, dribbling electronic abstractions dominate, with microtonal bibblings running on and on, sounds like twanging elastic bands and scratches and scrapes, atonal strings and R2D2 malfunctioning. I recall running my nails along an egg-slicer as a child. It’s a memory I had largely forgotten until hearing this remined me. M/A/R/R/S tools offers up an oddball array of sounds, and it feels random in the extreme. Oftentimes, it’s barely there, or it’s nothing more than the rumble of passing traffic or a distant radio. Occasionally, there are stuttering drums. Other times, there is not much at all.

This is a work which has been a long time in development: there are two full live sets, recorded five years apart, with a set recorded in London sitting at the midpoint, and another live set, recorded in Leeds, drawing the curtain on this colossal release. The fifteen-minute London set is a challenging work, which confirms what anyone who has seen Ash live will already know, and that’s that he in unafraid to test an audience with monotonous, woozy oops which are as uneasy on the intestines as they are on the ears. This is reinforced by the thunder-filled, sample riven discomfort of the Leeds set – something that his set in Leeds just this last weekend extended still further. Distorted, heavily reverbed and practically impenetrable vocals spitting out randomly sequenced words cut through the speakers, and it’s almost too much, too disorientation. A derangement of the senses. Both John Cage and Brion Gysin would have been proud. It’s dark and murky, and droning notes quaver in the background.

M/A/R/R/S tools is not an easy listen, not only on account of its duration. Despite its superficial minimalism, there is a lot going on. And none of it is kind, comfortable, or particularly easy on the ear or mind.

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Ava Rabiat – Elektro Erotyk

Posted: 14 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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23rd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It seems that Ava Rabiat can turn her hand to practically anything: in Gdańsk and based in Berlin, her work spans sound, experimental electronic music, visual arts, production and costume design for film and theatre. Elektro Erotyk stands as her debut album, and is the first instalment of a projected trilogy

We learn from the notes which accompany the release that ‘In her artistic process, fleeting thoughts and inner sensation transform into sonic reality, creating a space for interaction – a communication beyond conventional language.’

‘AVA’s texts oscillate between self-dissolution and physical intensity. She maps the boundaries of the self, explores extreme states and the longing for connection—directly, without detours, in raw immediacy. She deconstructs sound and reshapes it until it resonates with her physical experience.

‘Polish, AVA’s mother tongue, serves as the primary language throughout the album—a deliberate choice to explore her origins and emotional vernacular. The melodic qualities and sonic characteristics of spoken Polish become instruments themselves, with words valued as much for their sound as for their meaning. Breath becomes an instrument connecting inner and outer worlds.

‘True to its title, Elektro Erotyk embraces the erotic dimension of composition—found in the unity of mind and body, in moments of excitement and elation, and in intimate contact with one’s own self. The erotic emerges not merely as a sexual force but as a deep life energy—a creative power that drives artistic expression.’

She breathes and whispers, and speaks in low tones – sometimes her voice tracked multiple times – over a curious conglomeration of sounds of unplaceable origin. Clanks thuds and chimes, ominous hums and subtle, almost subsonic undulations. ‘Toi at Moi’ certainly has a sultry, erotic overtone, not to mention an almost dubby vibe, but there’s an undertone of something dark and hidden, too. A droning organ wavers its way through ‘Cofnij Czas’, accompanied by a simple bassline which wanders about hesitantly. Ava croons, soulful and seductive, over an increasingly tense and eerie oscillation, while elsewhere gloopy synths and backwards tapes stutter and jolt amidst collage-like layers of sound and fractured fragments of vocal. “There is still hope”, she murmurs on ‘Fool’s Fire’. “Hope… hope… hope…” With each repetition, this assertion feels less convincing.

Everything is swathed in cavernous echo, and everything feels vaguely surreal, dream-like, with glitches and flickers behind curtains and withdrawing into dark shadows as if making their presence known but without wanting to be fully seen. As such, an air of mystery hangs over Elektro Erotyk, each scene viewed only through fleeting glimpses, hints, allusions. It’s an intriguing set of pieces. Sometimes unsettling, often strange, Elektro Erotyk is always compelling.

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Beige Palace / Lo Egin – Beige Palace / Lo Egin

Posted: 14 May 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Cruel Nature Records – 30th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

First things first: Beige Palace were ace, and their departure has left a gap in the musical world, especially in Leeds. In a comparatively short timespan, the trio produced a respectably body of work, evolving from their minimal lo-fi beginnings to explore musical territories far and wide, and this final release, split with another Leeds act, Lo Elgin, who, in contrast, have released precious little.

The accompanying notes provide valuable context for the final recordings laid down by Beige Palace, recorded at Wharf Chambers, one of Leeds’ finest DIY venues by Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe (guitar/keys/vocals)… and now helming the mighty Thank.

Taking a step back from the discordant post hardcore of ‘Making Sounds For Andy’ and the freewheeling experimentation of ‘Leg’, Beige Palace’s side largely favours the repetition and extreme dynamic shifts found on their 2016 EP ‘Gravel Time’. The production here also returns to the lo-fi, DIY approach from that EP, eschewing the more polished sound of their two full-length albums. Through returning to their roots, Beige Palace manages to drag their sound to new extremes, with these three tracks bringing to mind artists as disparate as US Maple and Sunn O))).

‘Wellness Retreat’ is dense and discordant, low-end synth drone and bass coalescing to a eardrum-quivering thrum over which scratchy guitars and vocals come in from all sides to forge a magnificently disjointed and angular two minutes and twenty seconds. Too chaotic to really be math-rock, it’s a squirming can of worms, a melting pot where Shellac meets Captain Beefhart at a crossroads with Trumans Water. Or something.

Bringing hints of Silver Jews, the lo-fi crawler ‘Good Shit Fizzy Orange’ does math-rock but with an experimental jazz element, the sparse picked guitar and slow-rolling cymbal work juxtaposed with what sounds like the strumming of an egg slicer before sad strings start to weave their way over it all. The lyrics are, frivolous and stupid, and we wouldn’t want things any other way. Because much as one may value well-crafted, poetical lyrics, sometimes dumb, trashy, meaningless words work just fine. Better than fine, even.

There’s a hint of later Earth about the spartan folksiness of ‘Update Hello Blue Bag Black Bag’ – a song which sounds serious but as the title suggests, isn’t quite so much, but around the midpoint, all the pedals are slammed into overdrive and suddenly there’s a tidal wave of distortion, a speaker-busting cascade of heavy doom-laden drone. And as it tapers to fade, while we mourn the departure of a truly great band, we get to rejoice that during the span of their career, Beige Palace did everything. It’s a solid legacy they’re leaving, and one which may well expand in the years to come. There will be people in five, ten, fifteen years asking ‘remember Beige Palace?’, and other people will be replying ‘Yes! I saw them at CHUNK!’. Well, I will be, anyway. And we still have Thank to be thankful for.

The two pieces which represent Lo Elgin’s contribution mark a sharp contrast to those of Beige Palace. The first, the eleven-minute monster that is ‘Beneath the Clock’, is a thunderous blast of doom-laden rage and anguish. The barking, howling vocals are low in the mix of droning, lurching, lumbering noise, through which strings poke and burst, and as the noise sways and sloshes like a boat tossed hither and thither on waves in a storm as it attempts to guide its way through the entrance to the harbour, the listener finds themselves almost seasick with the unpredictable movement. Around seven minutes in, the tempest abates and the piece meanders into altogether mellower territory, where again I’m reminded of Earth circa Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light. And then, right at the end, there’s a massive jazz segment, backed with crushing guitars. I did not see that coming. And then ‘Abomination’ is different again- a gritty, gnarly, gut-spewing blast of noise that is simply too much…. But too much is never enough as we’re led through a racketacious swamp that starts out Motorhead and toboggans down to a crazed morass of manic jazz.

The two very different sides belong to completely different worlds, at least on the surface. But they are both staunchly strange, keenly experimental, and dedicated to inventive noisemaking, and as such, compliment one another well. And this also perfectly encapsulates the essence of the Leeds scene: diverse, noisy, weird, and wonderful.

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Merzbow – The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue

Posted: 7 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 9th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Merzbow is an artist who requires little to no introduction, and one with a catalogue so immense – with in excess of five hundred releases credited – it’s beyond daunting for not only a beginner, but even a keen noise-lover. This is the reasons I personally own very few releases, and have only picked up a few incidentally along the way.

As Masami Akita approaches seventy, and Merzbow marks forty-five years of noise, this output shows little sign of abating, but it does seem an appropriate time to reflect on some previous releases which may be considered either ‘classic’ or ‘pivotal’. 1994s Venereology has been receiving some retrospective coverage of late, revered largely on account of its reputation for being the loudest, harshest thing ever, ever.

But here we have a reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue, released a couple of years later, a much lesser-known work, but still during what’s broadly considered to be the golden era of the 90s, and, as the accompanying notes suggest, it’s ‘one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented.’

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds.

Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades’s Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice & Les Infortunes de la vertu, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings.

Completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions, this reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue presents nineteen blasts of noise and rumbling and shrieking, scraping discord and dissonance. Many of the pieces are brief – a couple of minutes or so – and there is so much texture and tonal rage here, its sonic vision is remarkable. To many, of course, it will just ne noise – horrible, nasty, uncoordinated noise. But listen closer, and there is a lot happening here. The noise is, indeed, nasty, and the output is, brain-blasting chaos, for sure. But what these untitled pieces showcase is an intense focus and an attention to detail which is so much more than brutal noise. The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is, comparatively speaking, not that harsh – although when it is harsh, it’s absolutely next-level brutal with shards of treble exploding in walls of ear-shredding punishment. It contains a lot of clattering and crashing, like bin lids being dropped, and cyclical, thrumming rhythmic pulsations. There are tweets and flutters, bird-like chirrups flittering above cement-mixer churning grind with gnawing low-end and splintering treble, overloading grind and would oscillations.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the sound of a man pushing all the buttons and turning all the dials at once and seeing just how far he can tweak them. There are moments of minimalism, of slow, stuttering beats, of mere crackles, passages one might even describe as ambient – a word not commonly associated with Merzbow. But the way in which The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue explores these dynamics, and contains quieter more delicate segments, not to mention some bleepy electronica that borders on beat-free dance in places, is remarkable: while so much noise is simply repellent to anyone who isn’t attuned to it, The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue offers engagement and offers openings to listeners with a broader interest in experimental music.

Eclectic is the word: we hear a chamver orchestra at the same time we hear strings being bent out of shape and what sounds like a Theremin in distress. While a fire alarm squawks in the background. This is everything including the kitchen sink. Imaginative and experimental, it’s noise with infinite dimensions.

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David Best (feat. The Electrowhisperer) –Skyrocketing

Posted: 6 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 25th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The twenty-eighth instalment of the truly epic project by the Mortality Tables label, now in its third season, whereby artists respond to ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events [which] are shared with a range of artists working across different disciplines’, and where ‘Those artists are free to respond to the recordings in any way they like’ is one of the shorter ones, consisting of just the one track, with a running time of just over eight and a half minutes.

For this work, the source recording was ‘made by Mat Smith at SkyForce, Flambards amusement park, Helston, Cornwall on 16th August 2021.’

I don’t envy him gathering this, and in his shoes, returning home with some audio would be a significant victory as something salvaged from a day of personal hell. But there is more to this – a tale of dilapidation and of capitalism in decline.

There’s a certain grim fasciation in following the history of theme park rides. Rollercoasters have a habit of being relocated, renamed, repurposed, even reborn in the wake of accidents. The Beast at Alton Towers was tweaked and relaunched as The New Beast, and was later shipped to Mexico , where it became Divertidoi, and it then made its way to Columbia.

A bit of delving tells us that SkyForce ‘operated at Pleasure Island Family Theme Park from 2003 until the closure of the park in 2016 under the name Pendulus’, and reopened at Flambards in 2017. Then, according to coasterpedia.net. ‘on 5 June 2024, Flambards announced that Sky Force, along with Hornet, Sky Swinger, and Thunderbolt, had closed and would be removed… On 22 August 2024, Flambards announced that the decision to remove Sky Force was reversed as they were able to replace the main motor. Sky Force reopened after this. Just little over two months later, Sky Force closed with the park as Flambards Theme Park announced that the park would permanently close on November 4, 2024…The ride is now currently listed for sale after the park’s closure.’ And shit: once again I’ve spent in excess of an hour delving down rabbit-holes while reviewing just a few minutes of music.

But this.. this is a slice of history. But no, there are layers to this, too: it’s a reinterpretation of a slice of history. This is how history forms and reforms and mutates as events are subject to endless critiques and commentaries. There is no irrefutable truth, no one concrete history… although there are verifiable facts, a topic which is worthy of a deep interrogation elsewhere.

Skyrocketing is perhaps not the rush its context may seem to offer, but a gently bubbling electronic piece that has a soft, bubbling analogue vibe. It has that vintage synth feel and evokes Kraftwerk , rippling and wafting, skipping and drifting., sometimes occasionally skippering and twittering, before the pulsing beats, stuttering, erratic, pulse and punch us that it’s time to wake up. And it is. Wake up to all the shit. Don’t think that just because a work is mellow that isn’t strong – because this is both.

AA

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