Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Lip Critic return with two new singles ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’

Posted: 11 July 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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NYC’s Lip Critic return with their first new music since last year’s acclaimed Hex Dealer – which Consequence of Sound described as “a cannonball to the chest” and Paste compared to “the B-52s on ketamine”, while we here at Aural Aggravation  said was “Lip Critic’s definitive statement”. Double singles ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’ are out now and continue Lip Critic’s furious experimental energy, born in a flash of cosmic coincidence and baseball-fueled mysticism.

‘Mirror Match’ is a twitchy, high-octane confrontation with your doppelgänger, arriving alongside a bespoke Lip Critic-designed pinball game set in a cloning facility. ‘Second Life’ throws the chaos into bass-heavy nightmare territory, accompanied by a surreal music video styled like an off-brand cooking show episode, complete with Sandra Lee-inspired semi-homemade absurdity.

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"We were on tour near the end of 2024 and had just played our LA show. We had a two day gap before our next show in Santa Ana so we got a room at the hotel Casa Grande. That night after the drive I fell asleep watching Randy Johnson highlight reels. All the great moments from his time as a Diamondback, as well as his years on the Yankees and the Giants.

That night I had a dream I met a tall man with a body made entirely of radiant light wearing a baseball cap. He opened his arms and from them came two perpendicular rays that shot around me to form the shape of a diamond. When the tips of the rays connected I was engulfed in a thunderous sound, like that of a waterfall. It shook me so much that I woke up in a jolt. I woke to see that I had been writhing in my sleep and had completely displaced the other 3 members I had been sharing this queen bed with.

I apologized and brushed it off as another bad dream brought on by a late night binging baseball history videos on YouTube. Upon checking my phone, I saw I had received a text in the night from a number I didn’t recognize, offering us two days of unexpected studio time.

When we arrived at the studio that day, he opened the door wearing a fitted baseball cap, towering over our band with an average height of 5’8”. I instantly felt a familiarity. As he showed us around I felt a sense of having returned, like visiting your old elementary school once again for a younger siblings’ graduation. He led us to the control room which was equipped with a speaker system large enough for a room quadruple the size. He stood at one corner and I sat in a chair directly opposite. The square room shifted to a diamond by our perspectives.

He turned the speakers up and without hesitation played us through a whirlwind of different music at an unbelievable volume, and I was engulfed in a thunderous sound, like that of a waterfall. ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’ were two tracks made and completed in the two days at his studio."

Lip Critic are touring extensively across the US this summer with headline dates, festival appearances, a co-headline run with Hello Mary, and support slots for MSPAINT, Pat and the Pissers & Mannequin Pussy.

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Wevie Stonder – Sure Beats Living

Posted: 10 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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25th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

2025 continues to be the year of the comeback. My remark earlier in the week, in context of the release of the new Curse Mackey album, that ‘three years is a long time’ pales rather when considering that just a few days before I’d covered the first Red Lorry Yello Lorry album since 1992, and reviewed The March Violets touring only their second album proper since their formation in 1981. And that’s before we consider the unexpected return of the Jesus Lizard… But somehow it’s been fifteen years since the last new material from the progenitors – and likely sole purveyors of – cack pop, Wevie Stonder.

2017 compilation The Beast of Wevie provided a potted history of their exercises in perversely calculated naffness, and since then… tumbleweeds.

Sure Beats Living is every bit as bizarre as anything they’ve done previously, and successfully nudges beyond… and then accelerates over the horizon. It’s not so much cack as demented. Instrumentally, it’s a wide-ranging work, sometimes expansive, bold, ambitious, even cinematic – as the epic, widescreen ‘Piccolo’s Travels’ illustrates. But mostly, it’s a collection of lo-fi electronic dicking about with irreverent babbling in lieu of serious or meaningful lyrical content. So it’s a step up from previous outings…

It’s a sparse electro backdrop which frames the first track, ‘That’s Magic’, and no doubt fans will like it – but not a lot – as is immediately ventures into the domains of the strange, a Scots brogue narrating the steps for performing a magic trick which culminates in setting the cards alight, vacuuming the ashes and moulding polystyrene. What makes it all the stranger is that the delivery isn’t so different from that of a self-help tutorial, and reminds me of the guided relaxation CD I got given when I attended CBT some years ago.

‘Carpet Squares’ pitches the old-skool groove of Mr Oizo against crunching industrial beats… while providing detached directions for carpet-laying amidst a looping reverb-heavy collage of commentary on carpet. But then the urgent wibbly wobbly ping-pong bloopery of ‘Vanja and Slavcho’ takes things to another level. There’s storytelling, there’s cheesy Japanese-influenced pop and a whole lot more, and it’s quite bewildering – but then, so is the stomping glam beat of ‘Tiktaalik’, which kicks in hard and with all apparent intention of bringing something serious… As if these guys have a serious bone in their collective bodies.

In fairness, quirky humour and an overt lack of seriousness should never be seen as corresponding with a lack of ability to be serious. It’s often reported that comedians are in fact depressives who use humous as a way of deflecting their inner sadness, and clowns are often masking. And something in the title carries hints of a clowning subterfuge: you can almost picture a downbeat character in a US sitcom turning to the camera, breaking the third wall, with an exaggerated shrug, and declaring, ‘Well, it sure beats living’. And so it may just be my own state of mind which colours my perception of this, or maybe there really is something darker beneath the surface. ‘Push It’ inches towards funk, but ends up elsewhere completely, and in seemingly taking some of its lyrical inspiration from the game ‘Bop It’, it’s the epitome of irreverence. ‘Customer Services’ is a perfect pastiche of corporate phone line hold hell, down to the frustrated ‘shut up’ and tossing aside of the phone. Because beneath humour usually lies truth.

However you look at Sure Beats Living, this is a different kind of nuts. The core of the album is constructed around bleepy, shuffling electronica and spoken word… spoken word what? They’re not diatribes, they’re not really narratives, either. They’re words, often detached from meaning, or otherwise, where not abstract, designed to be daft, and Wevie explore words because they can.

Sure Beats Living is perverse, it’s stupid, and it know it is, because that’s what it sets out to be. And in these dark, depressing times, we need the wild irreverence of Wevie more than ever. Welcome back, you barmy buggers.

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Me Lost Me – This Material Moment

Posted: 9 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Upset The Rhythm – 27th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s rare to be presented with something that has no immediate or obvious reference or context in terms of other music. But this is where I find myself with This Material Moment, the sixth album by Me Lost Me. And so it proves necessary to delve into the creative process for what Newcastle-based experimental artist Jayne Dent describes as “the most emotionally raw album I’ve ever made”. And so it is that for this release, she utilised ‘the automatic writing techniques she developed during a workshop with Julia Holter, and in the process has spun her music in different directions that draws on poetry, psalms and using mesostic poems and phonetic translations to generate words.’

And in this context, This Material Moment makes sense – at least in its own way. While automatic writing has a long history, dating back to the 16th century, it grew in cultural awareness via Dadaism, before becoming synonymous with Surrealism, and that fact that the results have yielded Dent’s ‘most emotionally raw album’ should not necessarily be a surprise – the theory is that that the process is dissociative, enabling a free passage between the subconscious and the page, with the mind freed from the constraints of self-censorship and linear thought. And This Material Moment very much seems to present an explosion of unfiltered, often free-flowing ideas, untethered by the conventions of form or structure.

The cover art alludes to the album’s quirkiness, but in a way which rather too easy, a shade gimmicky, perhaps, failing to convey the level of nuance and complexity contained therein.

It’s on the second track, ‘Compromise!’ that the level of ‘otherness’ which defines the album. The drumming is weighty, serious, and Dent’s voice adopts an air of detachedness which is hard to define… there’s both a folksiness and elements of Eastern influence in the way it quavers against the dramatic, expanding backdrop which comes to resemble something of a mystically-hued, almost abstract, Burroughsian psychological interzone.

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And so Me Lost Me leads the listener through a succession of dreamscapes which are often simultaneously idyllic and nightmarish. There’s a shanty-like tone to ‘Lasting, Not to Last’, but there are shrill, terrifying wails of strings or feedback which conjure images of dead souls trapped within this dimension. ‘A Painting of the Wind’ presents a sense of the unheimlich. It’s a lilting folk song… but something sits just to the left of centre, the instrumentation isn’t readily recognisable as anything, there are layer and something about is not of this plane. ‘I want to be carried away’, she intimates, and yes, perhaps so do I, I find myself thinking.

The clamour of church bells on ‘Still Life’ chimes a cord of an historical nature, evoking times past with a certain sepiatone sensation, but ‘A Souvenir’ strips everything back to an acapella – albeit multi-layered – delivery, with folk-influenced harmonies conjuring a sense of a bygone era which in many ways contrast with much of the album’s lyrical content.

I find myself flailing here: how to articulate the disconnections and disparities which are the very essence of this album? These disconnections and disparities are nowhere more highlighted than on ‘Ancient Summer’, where Steeleye Span style trad folk meets prog with a darker, almost goth vibe, with a dash of jazz and trip-hop thrown into the mix. ‘A Small Hand, Clamped’ may offer so many meanings in terms of its title: the words aren’t easy to decipher, but the atmosphere… Oh, the atmosphere. It billows and breezes, while a strolling bass… strolls.

Sometimes, albums which are ‘awkward’ to place are a turn-off in their ‘wrongness’, but This Material Moment is so absorbative, compelling, it’s impossible not to be dragged right into its very heart.

This is art which more accurately reflects our lived realities. No conversation really exists as a straightforward back-and-forth whereby each participant delivers a neat line of dialogue, and there isn’t a second in anyone’s life where their thoughts take for form of clear-cut, structurally-sound sentences. And so it is that Material Moment speaks not in a way we can readily pinpoint or identify, because it reaches us through deep, subconscious channels. It’s not an accessible album, and it’s certainly not an easy album to hail for its commercial potential. But it is an understated and yet immensely powerful album – beautiful, crafted, a folk album in many respects, but also an experimental work that seeks to explore dark psychological spaces.

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Cumsleg Borenail – 10mg Citalopram

Posted: 4 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 27 June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The cover within a cover artwork is only the first example of near infinite layers when it comes to this complex and inventive work from the truly demented experimentalist who records under the moniker of Cumsleg Borenail.

This latest effort promises ‘a collision of methods—part LLM-based sampling, part MPC assembly, part human lyrics—stitched together into something fluid and unpredictable. AI scavenges random prompts, returning garbled errors and fractured phrases, while voices and instruments drift in from nowhere, guided by no fixed direction. Each track begins as one idea and mutates into another, warping its original design into something unrecognizable yet strangely intentional.’

Oh, and it delivers on that promise, alright. This is truly a derangement of the senses, a collaged cut-up, an uncompromising mash-up, a smash-up, if you will, where absolutely nothing is off limit, and it all gets tossed, unceremoniously and indiscriminately, into the blender and churned up into a mess of the most mind-blowing chaos imaginable.

To provide a detailed analysis of this would be to unpick the threads in a way which would reduce the album to less than the sum of its parts. 10mg Citalopram works precisely because it’s an exercise in brain-pulping loop-heavy derangement.

‘You mean nothing me!’ a female voice repeats, and repeats, against a clattering, springing backdrop of twangs and poings throughout ‘You Mean Something To Me’. My head’s a shed by the time we’re midway through the second track, ‘Denizen Invocation Via Lunar Phase’ – because this is a work that goes off in all directions, all at once, and it’s really not pretty. It is, however, weird and frantic. It’s a mess of noise and samples and glitchy electronic samples and frantic breakbeats. Later in the album, there’s a companion piece of sorts, ‘Now I Know I Am Nothing Because You Said’.

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In some respects, I’m reminded of early Foetus, JG Thirlwell’s crazed tape loops and cacophonous noise bursts, and the way Cabaret Voltaire took the tape experiments conducted by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and the ideas outlined in The Electronic Revolution as their starting point – but it’s also a bit Trout Mask Replica, in that it’s like listening to several songs being played at the same time, only it’s got bust-up techno beats exploding all over the shop and frankly, it’s impossible to know what the fuck’s going on most of the time. Too much, for sure. But that’s the point.

For context, Citalopram is a widely-prescribed antidepressant, described on the NHS website as ‘a medicine that can help treat depression and panic attacks’. This album, however, sounds more like a prolonged panic attack or all of the listed possible side-effects being experienced at once, while the numerous references to being ‘nothing’ appear to allude to the inner voice of low mood. Then again, there are other medical matters of an altogether different sort which provide the reference points for tracks like ‘Clostridium Difficile’ (a bacteria which causes diarrhoea) and ‘Snifflers, Nostril Pickers and Dribblers’. All of it is utterly batshit wonky and wildly arrhythmic, and certainly not for anyone who’s feeling tense or jittery or suffering from any kind of psychosis. For anyone else… proceed with caution. May have unwelcome and unpleasant side effects.

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Gintas K – Breakcore

Posted: 22 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K’s latest offering was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard and controller in January 2025, and first released by Japanese label Static Disc in May.

It’s worth perhaps mentioning that ‘Breakcore’ is – and I shall shamefully quote from Wikipedia here – ‘is a style of electronic dance music that emerged from jungle, hardcore, and drum and bass in the mid-to-late 1990s. It is characterized by very complex and intricate breakbeats and a wide palette of sampling sources played at high tempos.’ In the main, not really my personal field of expertise, or particularly within the remit of Aural Aggravation.

But this is a Gintas K album, and the nine pieces are typical of his style, combining experimentalism and the application of software and midi / laptop setup, producing a range of glitchy, frothy, gurgly sounds which stop and start intermittently, unpredictably. His live and improvised works always come with a sense of unpredictability, of spontaneity, while bearing his distinctive sounds. One of the key focuses within K’s work is on detail, zooming in on microtonality, granularity. When I say it sounds ‘bubbly’ or ‘frothy’, I mean it’s the sound one might consider the equivalent of the visual experience of slowly swirling a latte or a pint of ale, or hyperfixating on the bubbles in a bath. This is not, however, the gentle swill and flow of currents, but a frenzied effervescence, like the reaction between bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. And look long enough and hard enough, and patterns begin to emerge.

Listening to the bubbling blitzkrieg of digital clicks, beeps, and fizzing of any work by Gintas K can be stimulating to the point of eye-popping discombobulation. It’s almost too much – and this is nevermore true than the experience that is Breakcore. There are beats present – but they’re composed not of beats in the conventional sense, being neither rhythmic nor percussive, either from an analogue source or a digital sampled source or emulation. These are flickers, pulses, rapidfire stutters, hard sounds which replicate the essence of a beat without being a beat, per se. For example, those of a certain age may recall the successive ‘pink-pink-pink’ chattering digital babble of dial-up. Few would necessarily consider those sounds beats in context, but… yes, they have a certain beat-like quality. And this is how the beats often emerge from the clicks and pops, moans and drones or another quintessential Gintas K demonstration of circuit meltdown as an artform.

I had never considered his work in a ‘dance’ context before, and still wouldn’t: one feels as if the title is perhaps a shade ironic. But the tempo is certainly high and the beats are complex and intimate, emerging as they do from the thrum of what sounds like a revving engine, the whirr of an old hard-drive, the click of a CD driver whirring into action. Every second of this release sounds like some kind of digital or mechanical malfunction, as tempos whirl and blur, drawl and slow. Scrunching, crunching, twanging, springing, stammering and stuck, it’s a relentless attack of wrong sounds. But emerging from all of it, there are erratic beats, like a succession of deliberately jarring jazz fills and simply wild judders.

It is relentless, and it’s complete overload. The nine tracks run for a total of twenty-nine minutes: its intensity is such that you feel as if your brain is starting to melt after the first ten. In short, Breakcore is truly wild, and it’s not remotely easy or accessible – but it absolutely encapsulates everything that defines what Gintas K’s does.

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M-G Dysfunction – Mista Self-Isolation

Posted: 20 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Panurus Productions – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

You’d think that cassette labels would be not only niche, but few and far between, and in the main, they are, but Newcastle is home to not one, but two labels who provide a near-endless supply of releases to satiate the need for weird shit the world over, with Cruel Nature Records being one, and Panurus Productions being the other. The labels have a considerable amount in common, too, not least of all in that they both favour music that’s of a quality, rather than a style.

The latest Panurus release is a perfect case in point. The label’s previous offering, a split release from Belk and Casing was a raw blast of guitar overdrive. In contrast, the third album from M-G Dysfunction is of an altogether more experimental bent, leaning toward hip-hop and beat-driven electronics, but once again marking the close connection between the scenes in Leeds and Newcastle, both of which have become significant spawning grounds for the offbeat, the difficult, the wilfully obscure.

According to the blurb, ‘Mista Self-Isolation is the fullest realisation of the M-G Dysfunction project to date – a record of trepidation and humour, of lopsided passion and warped poetics. This album is about surveying the wreckage of monoculture and navigating the act of making music amidst a land-grab of rights, melodies and rhythms by people who never liked music in the first place. It’s about properly honest artistic expression – what “keeping it real” looks like, sounds like, feels like in 2024. It’s about getting some official beats and saying fly shit over them.’

That it’s quirky may be obvious, but it’s a necessary headline observation. On the one hand, it’s white rap, so there’s an awkwardness, but on the other, there’s some dirty experimental electronic noise layered over the beats, and this is an act that shared a stage with Benefits, a band who may have made their reputation by being angry, shouty, and noisy, but who aren’t without humour or an appreciation of nuance.

As tracks like ‘Roger Daltrey (Permanent Record)’ illustrate, M-G Dysfunction are multifaceted – something likely to leave many quite nonplussed. How can they do jokey, daft, a bit random and be serious at the same time? In truth, the answer is simple: because human beings are complex creatures, capable of a vast range of emotions and infinite ways of expressing them. It’s something we seem to have lost sight of in recent years, when everything has been boiled down to binaries, and everything is a conflict because the lines have been marked in such either / or terms. It’s no longer possible to be a woolly socialist: suggest that, I dunno, people on disability benefits are right to receive free prescriptions, and you’re labelled a left-wing extremist, a communist, and by the way, disabled people should get back into work or die. Something is severely fucking wrong with this picture.

Back in the early 90s, genre crossovers were all the rage, and the Judgement Night soundtrack was a real watershed moment that took the idea of rock / rap crossover, first witnessed in the mainstream when Run DMC and Aerosmith did ‘Walk This Way’ to the next level. At that time, it felt like a new future was emerging, and perhaps, even a future where boundaries and differences were dismantled. But here we are, and times are bleak.

But with Mista Self-Isolation – an album which is by no means an exercise in buoyant pop tunes – M-G Dysfunction show that in 2025, there is still scope to create something that speaks of what it is to be human.

The structured, beat-led songs are interspersed with self-reflective spoken word segments, spanning CBT meditation and contemplations on experiences and life in general. It is truly impossible to predict the twists and turns this album takes.

’50 Words for Blow’ comes on like a hip-hop-inspired barber’s shop quartet, while ‘John Wick’ is a critical memo, and the title track is abstract, minimal, dreamy but quietly intense. ‘Junglists Only’ is a perfectly executed pseudo-banger which knows it’s absurd and works because of it. The last song, ‘All that is Solid Melts into Deez Nuts’ evokes both humour and at the same time draws attention to M-G Dysfunction’s hip-hop credentials. If you know, you know, as cunts say, but for those who don’t, it’s a reference to Dr Dre’s ‘Deeez Nuuuts’ from The Chronic in 1992.

Postmodernism is alive and well after all, at least in some quarters, and it’s very well in the world of M-G Dysfunction. There is a lot going on on Mista Self-Isolation – and it’s all good.

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Hampus Lindwall – Brace For Impact

Posted: 19 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Ideologic Organ – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

In his liner notes, Robert Barry suggests that ‘Brace for Impact might just be the first album of post-internet organ music’, and goes on to explain that ‘it is a record weaned on networked processes and algorithmic thinking, a suite of tracks which build their own systems then push them to the point of collapse. Lindwall is not a programmer, but he will wield whatever technology is ready to hand much as Chopin made use of the richer, fuller sound of an Erard piano. From the software subtly weirding the interior textures of ‘Swerve’ and ‘Piping’ to the juddering, kernel panic of ‘AFK’ and ‘À bruit secret’, these are works of music unthinkable without the ubiquitous experience of life lived online. Imparting that hypermodern aesthetic sensibility through the austere sound of a baroque organ only heightens the anachronistic sense of temporal disjuncture characteristic of days spent rabbit-holing through ever-multiplying stacks of browser windows. The vernacular of Web 2.0 is here re-transcribed in the ornate script of a medieval illuminated manuscript.’

As Barry also suggests, the organ has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years, and cites a number of significant organs which have been recently restored, including the grand organs at the cathedrals of St John the Divine and Notre-Dame (New York and Paris respectively, and, not so much closer to home but on my very doorstep, York Minster, which ‘heralded a “once-in-a-century” refurbishment of its own 5,000-plus pipe instrument’.

It marks something of a shift from an album I reviewed around maybe fifteen years ago, the details of which elude me now, which was recorded on a series of broken-down and dilapidated organs from around Europe which wheezed and groaned as if gasping out the last breaths from their collapsed lungs.

Brace for Impact is an altogether more vibrant work, although as much as it celebrates the organ and the instrument’s sonic magnitude, it also reaches far further into exploratory sonic territories over the course of these five compositions.

The title track features ‘a highly saturated and distorted electric guitar, performed by collaborator and SUNN O))) founding member, Stephen O’Malley’ – and ranges from tectonic crunches, machine-gun rattles and alienated whines rising from the kind of dissonant dronescape only O’Malley can conjure. And so we brace… and then we swerve. The collision fails to materialise during the ten-minute dark ambient swirl of the second track, spreading ominous overtones and watery, echo-heavy plips and plops. The muffled beats are akin to listening to a minimal techno set overlayed with a piece from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, performed in the Blue John Cavern, and it shimmers accordingly, slipping into off-kilter fairground trilling in the final minutes.

The final diptych of compositions rally ventures out: both ‘AFK’ and ‘Piping’ extend beyond twelve minutes. The former brings jolting discord and drama, lurching stabs that manage to bring a crazed dance feel to the sound of the organ before swinging into a circus-type jive. It stands out as perhaps the most playful track on the album. There is a playfulness to ‘Piping’, too, but it feels more like it belongs to a film soundtrack or theatre performance, and it whirls and winds and spins and pirouettes it way to a pretty but perhaps confused conclusion.

Brace For Impact is very much a non-linear work, and one which stands, uncertain of where it’s going next. But is it unquestionably interesting, not to mention disorientating, and it’s a work which seems to bend time as well as notes. It’s an album to lose yourself in.

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Psychic TV – A Prayer For Derek Jarman

Posted: 15 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cold Spring Records – 23rd June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a heretical stance, particularly as a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, but Psychic TV never really did it for me. They felt a bit meandering, wanky folky, in the same way as a lot of David Tibet’s stuff does. This may be to my detriment, and I may be missing the joys and benefits of a huge catalogue, but… I can shrug it off, and I will live.

TG and seminal filmmaker Derek Jarman were kindred spirits, provocative, avant-garde, and testament of their reciprocal artistic respect is cemented in their 1980 collaboration, where TG soundtracked Jarman’s movie Under the Shadow of the Sun (with the soundtrack being released some four years later).

A Prayer For Derek Jarman was recorded later, on LP in 1985 by Temple Records and subsequently reissued as an extended CD version by Cold Spring in 1997. As the accompanying text explains, ‘Unavailable for almost three decades, this collection from the Cold Spring archive has been repackaged and remastered with new artwork. A documentation of the soundtrack work created by Psychic TV for the film-maker and artist Derek Jarman, it serves as a demonstration of why PTV were one of the most important groups in the underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s.’ The material on this disc was – as far as I can discern – last available in 2011 as part of the Themes six-CD box set, also released via Cold Spring, and this represents a solo release of disc two.

There’s no mistaking that both Jarman an PTV were important, although I would personally rank the former above the latter – that may be a rather subjective position to take, though, and there is no denying the immense shadow Genesis P Orridge would cast over the scene for many a year and perhaps an eternity.

The titular ‘Prayer For Derek’ is intended as an invocationary prayer and is based on Tibetan rituals; a collage of sounds including field recordings of the lulling waves running aground on the shingle beach opposite Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, home of some of the UK’s best preserved ‘sound mirrors’ – alongside bird song, crying babies and massed ritualised chants to aid the late director in his after-life journeys. It follows the seventeen-minute churning abstract noise whorl that is ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ – and which is, on balance, as good as any of Throbbing Gristle’s expansive dark noise works, and ‘Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2) on which the promo for the album is predominantly pitched, and the ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’. These compositions are piano-led and border on neoclassical. Dainty, charming, and musically eloquent, they certainly mark a departure from the work more commonly associated with Orridge or PTV, as well as evidencing the reasons why they are such a difficult act to pin down, or even distinguish the ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ works in their immense and wide-ranging – and variable – catalogue. With its echoed, looped vocal layers redolent of Gregorian chants, it’s not so hard to determine why ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’ is not mentioned in the promo, although it’s entirely captivating.

As the accompanying text observes, ‘Other tracks feature elongated drones, washes of dissonance, melancholic guitar chime, evocative piano scoring, Burroughs cut-ups, gothic chants and snarling dogs.’ ‘Rites of Reversal’ marks a clear contrasts from the delicate piano-led compositions, diving in with some hard-edged grinding oscillations, which, again, lean more toward the kind of dark noise that was the TG trademark.

A Prayer For Derek Jarman is broad in scope and mood, and this is as appropriate is it is likely deliberate. It certainly presents the more experimental aspects of Psychic TV, and as varied as it is, the quality is also there.

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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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