Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Ulrich Troyer – Autostrada del Brennero

Posted: 2 August 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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4Bit Productions – 19th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Ulrich Troyer’s output this year has taken an interesting turn. While he’s often favoured comparatively short-form releases (NOK 2020, released in 2020, surprisingly enough, featured six tracks originally released on a 3” CD twenty years earlier, bolstered by additional material to render a full-length album, while other albums in his catalogue contain only four tracks, or more very short ones). But ‘Autostrada del Brennero’ represents this third seven-inch release of the year after four years of silence. However, while ‘Moments’, which we covered here in March was a standalone release, ‘Autostrada del Brennero’ is a companion to ‘Echoes’, released in May, and both are prefatory pieces to the forthcoming album, Transit Tribe, slated for release later this year.

As with Echoes, Troyer has brought on board guest to feature here, with reggae luminary Diggory Kenrick contributing his signature flute to the lead track, and Taka Noda bringing melodica to flipside ‘Brennerautobahn’.

Continuing his pursuit of some deep dubby vibes, as formed the basis of Dolomite Dub, and the Songs for William trilogy, ‘Autostrada del Brennero’ is four and a half minutes of spacious, echo-drenched rimshots which crack out from shuffling drums and cut through spectacularly swampy bass. It’s got groove, but it’s low, slow, and mellow, with Kenrick’s flute adding an almost trippy folk aspect, which is a perfect counterpoint to the fizzling space-rock synth details which burst like laser-beam Catherine wheels.

Either my ears are deceiving me, or ‘Brennerautobahn’, which has exactly the same running time, is the same track but with the flute substituted with the melodica, and as such, this release follows the format of the previous two, where an alternative version occupies the B-side.

This was, of course, common practice on old reggae releases, whereby the B-side would contain a dub version – often simply as a ‘version’ – of the A-side. Here, there’s a certain irony in maintaining this tradition when the A-side is already essentially a dub version, and one doubts this irony will be lost on the artist.

Both cuts are solid – sparse yet dense, confident experiments in bass frequencies and massive echo and reverb it’s difficult to resist the urge to nod along to, slow, heavy-headed, mellow to the max. Good vibes, for sure.

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Vamberator – Sleep the Giant of Sleeps

Posted: 25 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Unifaun Records – 26th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Vamberator’s debut single, ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’ (26th July 2024) is from the forthcoming album Age of Loneliness (Unifaun Records). And? Well, Vamberator is a new musical duo of some pedigree – namely Jem Tayle of Shelleyan Orphan and Boris Williams of The Cure.

This is far from a joyful reuniting: Williams had also contributed to Shelleyan Orphan, until the band’s demise following the death of Caroline Crawley in 2016.

Jem describes his transition from Shelleyan Orphan to Vamberator as follows: “After Caroline’s passing, I had been offered the chance to make a solo album. I had been writing on and off without a focus and not having someone to bounce off was new to me. Boris is family, and we have played together with Shelleyan Orphan live and in the studio on and off for years, so it felt very natural for us to work on this together. I am extremely fortunate to have a drummer of his calibre pounding out the rhythms on this album.”

Grief has a habit of manifesting and finding its channels via unexpected routes and channels, and – from painful personal experience – creative outlets can be incredibly beneficial, a form of therapy, even, and so there’s a clear sense in Tayle’s wanting to push through on this new project. And the first fruits are pretty tasty.

‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’ is a mega-hybrid of alt-rock, post-punk, and psyche. I mean it with no malice when I observe that many artists who reach a certain age lose some of their edge and start putting out kinds middle of the road rock that’s like Chris Read without the guitar breaks. There are some elements of that underpinning the form of ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’; standard guitar chord progressions tied to a fairly mid-pace rhythm. But there’s much to set this apart, too, in particular a certain sense of playfulness and experimentalism. There are some unexpected twists to the percussion, some savvy instrumental switches from guitar to piano to the fore, and some spacey whizzes and whirrs. The arrangement is layered, bold, orchestral. The video is a bit nuts.

They reference Lou Reed, and he’s clearly in the mix, but this whips together a visionary sonic cocktail which is impossible to pin down. But more significant than the wide-ranging elements and dazzling sonic experience, is the fact that ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’ is a top tune with hooks and soul and passion.

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Cowhause – Break it Like This

Posted: 22 July 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1st May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Once again, I’m late on this one, but also, once again, not nearly as late as the artist. This album has been a long, long, long time in coming. And that’s an understatement. As the bio details, ‘Janet Feder plays mostly baritone guitars and analogue, hand-made sounds; Colin Bricker (aka Brokerclinic) is an electronic musician and record producer known for his cutting-edge computer music, characterized by beautiful, twisted, broken soundscapes and skittering rhythms. This is their first new album in 19 years.’

19 years! Consider that for a moment. Almost two decades: there will be people who have been born, gone through school, got married and have started families of their own in this time. After such a protracted time out, it feels perhaps likes less of a return and more like starting afresh. Not that Janet has been creatively dormant during this time by any stretch (I recently covered the reissue of See It Alone by Sorry For Laughing, on which she features, and there have been numerous other releases in recent years, but collaborating with different people inspires different approaches and Break it Like This sounds and feels fresh, inspired and invigorated.

Break it Like This is brimming with ideas and range. The first composition, the appropriately-titled ‘Opening’ introduces the album’s manifold varied elements – scratchy guitar scraped and manipulated more often than picked or strummed intersect with extraneous noise and stuttering electronic beats. The volume see-saws and things suddenly break down at the most unexpected moments, disrupting any emerging flow.

Then again, there are some folksy runs of picked notes, and some heavily treated vocals, as on ‘Angles & Exits’, a crackling collision of disparate elements. Gentle guitar and clattering percussion joust it out as if two songs are overlaid in a sonic palimpsest, and what could be a beautiful pastoral tune is rendered as wreckage.

There are tangles of notes and serpentine rhythms which clamour, clatter, and crack from every whichway, and the mix is such that details spring from left and right, from the back of the room, from above your head and around your ankles, adding to the extreme disorientation of jarring pieces like ‘Blue State’. There are so many hints of songs and melodies which exist in a potential state; there are moments where something threatens to take shape, but simply never emerges. ‘Plan to Live’ offers haunting echoes of something atmospheric, splintered by rapid-fire beats which seem completely at odds with it. ‘Banjo’ reconfigures hillbilly wanderings into a postmodern, post-apocalyptic, post-everything soundscape which evokes visions of broken down cars and broken down society, a fatigued scraping out of making music after there’s nothing left but desolation, the notes ringing out into ruins and rubble, a theme which continues through the desolate flamenco-tinged ‘Heater’, before it swings into a psychopathic dance groove. It feels like the soundtrack to a bleak, Ballardian tale set amongst drifting sands, rusting vehicles, and dilapidated buildings, while the only survivors are the deranged.

A deep-running sense of ‘otherness’ runs through Break it Like This. Familiar elements, twisted and misshapen to a point that they no longer feel so familiar, and instead take on a more curious and uncomfortable form, abound. So many moments feel so close, and yet so far, in their proximity to the things we know and are comfortable with. But twisted, distorted, mangled, they take on more sinister forms, shadowy, strange.

Break it Like This is testing, nudging at the senses, piling up the discord and the irregularities of the structures and stoking a sense of bewilderment. This is experimentalism and collaboration at its best, excavating new terrain and forging something unexpected and challenging – while retaining a musicality which keeps it within the realms of listenability.

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Gintas K – Electroacoustic Space Drumming / Outsider’s

Posted: 19 July 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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May 2024 / July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is possibly one of the most-featured artists here at Aural Aggravation, and I’ve written about his work elsewhere, prior to establishing this site. I’ve often commented – sometimes flippantly, sometimes in sheer awe – at his rate of output, but it seems appropriate to make the observation once again, since a little while ago I found myself simply swamped and a shade overwhelmed by the volume of submissions I was receiving. Electroacoustic Space Drumming landed in my inbox and I failed to so much as open it, let alone download it. Then, Outsider’s appeared, reminding me I was behind on things, only to discover that a split tape release with Jacob Audrey Taves had come out in between the two.

The first of the releases, Electroacoustic Space Drumming, comes courtesy of London label Anticipating Nowhere Records, as a download and limited cassette (in an edition of 20, more than half of which have gone already).

The titles are incomprehensible to me, but I very much doubt this will make any difference to my appreciation of this jangling, bleeping glitchfest. The six tracks do very much sound like a circuit meltdown, the digital xylophonic cadences interrupted by sudden jolts or sound and stuttering microbeats like an Action Man marching band trapped inside a jam jar half-full of water. Creaks, groans, and splashes abound and contrive to create a complex and layered work.

It’s difficult – if not impossible – to unpick everything that’s going on, and consequently, you simply sit back and let it wash over you. But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, or easy to do so.

And then there is Outsider’s, with its questionably-placed apostrophe in the title. Outsider’s what, precisely? And with twenty-three tracks, released digitally and as a colossal five disc CD work, it’s an absolute beast.

The five CDs make sense in a way which is less apparent on the digital release, as there are essentially five segments or suites, with the tracks belonging to each names with a suitable prefix: jazz, crunchy, noise, drones, and piano stuff. Each contains between three and six pieces, effectively an EP’s worth apiece.

In truth, the track titling isn’t especially helpful: the six tracks of the first set, ‘jazz’, and entitled ‘jazz good’, ‘jazz also good, jazz prolongation’, ‘jazz’, ‘jazz’, and ‘jazz.’ Spoiler alert: there’s nothing especially jazzy about the ‘jazz’ cuts, but there’s electronic percussion that cuts through foamy bubbling washes and a disarray of oddness that sounds like machine gun fire, and glitches aside, it almost feels co-ordinated. And no-one needs a jazz prolongation, although this decidedly unjazz cut, we can forgive.

The four ‘crunchy’ cuts are riots of bleeps and squips, a riot of sound that’s no more vigorous than on the first, ‘crunchy.geras greit.’ The two pieces simply entitled ‘crunchy’ combine haunting, hovering tones, and collapsing circuits and lurching synaptic stutters, like exposed wires sparking as they swing, and things become increasingly scratchy, scrapy, a frenzied buzz of fractured, fizzing, fucked electronics.

The three ‘noise’ pieces build in their noisiness, but at heart aren’t all that dissimilar from the ‘crunchy’ pieces, although perhaps quieter and less overwhelming, and overwhelming it is. Then again, the ‘drone’ pieces aren’t especially droney, and more represent explosions of frothing discord, and the final suite, ‘piano stuff’ is a cacophonous conglomeration of bubbling noise down a drain.

These recordings remind me of my early days of reviewing, back in 2018 or so as my introduction to truly avant-garde, experimental electronic works, and Gintas K – perhaps one of the first acts I discovered as an exponent of dripping, bleeping, weppling, weirdness. All this time later. he’s still proving to be a rare master of electronica. Come 2024, and Gintas K is still right there at the forefront.

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Machine Mafia – Killzones EP

Posted: 11 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, I really do feel as if my brain is my enemy. Word association and wordplay are a particularly frequent and annoying curse. Oftentimes, I keep this to myself, but midway through listening to this, it struck me, completely at random, that Killzones isn’t a million miles away from Calzone, at least when written down. So why share this? A problem shared, and all that, for one. But as much as anything, I felt the urge to purge, or moreover to crack open the challenges that present themselves as part of the creative process. Writing – and finding something new and interesting to say – about music, day in, day out, is a challenge in itself, without other factors.

Seemingly, the recording of this EP proved rather less challenging for its makers, who came together and developed it swiftly and fluidly –although the same can’t be said for listening to it. That’s by no means a criticism. In a climate where the airwaves are jammed solid with anodyne sameness and slickly-produced beige sonic slop disguised as raw or edgy on account of some explicit content and some choice language that requires beeps or asterisks in the mainstream media, anything that does something different offers a welcome challenge in the way many pit themselves against the Great North Run or similar. We’ve grown accustomed to everything being delivered neatly-packaged and pre-digested, and feeling like following a recipe from Hello Fresh makes us a Michelin chef. Collectively, we’ve forgotten how to chew – meaning that this will either kick-start your metabolism or simply make you spew if you’re unaccustomed to anything that’s this high-fibre. Just look at that cover art. It’s dark, grainy, uncomfortable. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the music it accompanies.

Machine Mafia is quite the collaborative paring: Adam Stone of gritty northern grimsters Pound Land and Jase Kester of ever-evolving experimental noisemakers Omnibael / Omnibadger have come together to do something different. Very different.

As Jase explained to me, the EP features ‘no live instruments, leaning into the way dub reggae was so embraced by punk right in the early days.’ And there’s no question that it has both – simultaneously – the spaciousness of The Ruts (D.C) and the density of early PiL. It’s a formidable combination, that’s for sure.

The title track assembles sampled snippets as its foundation, drawing parallels with the collaging methods of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, evolved from William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s late-50s tape experiments – in turn a progression from the cut-ups on paper. Atop of this slice ‘n’ splice selection of political speeches and an almost subsonic, floor-shaking bass, Stone delivers a mumbling, drawling semi-spoken spiel. It’s like Sleaford Mods on Ketamine, a heavy trudge of ever-degenerating sound which eventually collapses to a low-end buzz and a crisp sample that makes the pair’s political position clear through antithesis.

On ‘Faces’, scrapes of discord, distortion, and a thudding beat half-submerged in the mix grinds out the opening before a dark, dense bass groove starts a gut-shaking growl. The drawling, atonal vocals, too, are distorted and low in the mix, and I’m reminded of some of the more obscure Ministry offshoots witch Chris Connelly – the vibe is dingy, sleazy industrial, a bit early Pigface, and sounds like it was recorded in a damp mould-stained basement on a salvaged reel-to-reel.

The songs get slower and heavier – and longer – as the EP progresses. ‘I Am Not You’ comes on as if Dr Mix and The Remix had done dub, while ‘Lecture 0.3B’ goes all out on transforming a simple spoken-word piece into a cut-up tape experimental headfuck with loops and delays and effects galore, all laced with crackles of distortion and sonic degradation fuzzing and fading the edges. It lands somewhere between the JAMS, Max Headroom, and Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ – weird, unsettling, dystopian, with near-familiar elements twisted and recontextualised in an ugly mash-up collage work.

Conceptually, Killzones is far from new – but then, there’s no claim to innovation here, explicitly drawing a line from the past. But the kind of reference points and influences in evidence here are not the ones you find often, if ever – independently, perhaps, but the whole point of intertextuality as a method of creating is the nexus of divergent touchstones and the way in which they’re combined. With Killzones, Machine Mafia deliver a crash course in experimental music 1976-1994. It’s a mangled, messy cognitive assault. It’s knowingly, and purposefully, difficult, unpleasant, and a complete creative success.

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The Incidental Crack – No More Bangers

Posted: 26 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 28th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a perennial complaint around the passage of time, an oft-tossed-out remark with each month that everyone churns out as a space-filler, especially when speaking to someone they haven’t seen in a while – ‘I don’t know where’re the year’s going!’ But 2024: what the fuck?

I recently read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman after a friend kindly sent me a copy after I’d been bleating about how I always had too much to do and too little time to do it in. I almost simultaneously had a heart attack and shat myself reading the opening chapters which explained the book’s premise – namely, that the average human lifespan is around 4,000 weeks. Somehow, I’ve blinked and missed about 20 of them already this year. And whenever I receive an album in advance of its release, I add it to the list, and think ‘Hey, I’ve got a while on this one, I can take my time and still get a nice early review in.’ Because getting in early is satisfying – and, being transparent, brings traffic. I don’t make any money from doing this, so hits don’t equal quids, but there’s a certain pride involved – not to mention a sense of duty.

On learning of there being a new release imminent from The Incidental Crack – longstanding regulars at Aural Aggravation, an occasional collective who’ve managed to maintain a steady flow of releases in recent years, I was immediately enthused, but the end of June was a way off, and life… and here we are at the end of June. In no time, it will be the end of the school year, and once we hit August bank holiday the nights are shorter and it’s time to think about jumpers and central heating and the end of another year and being another year closer to death.

The Incidental Crack have a knack of conveying the pessimism that pervades the futility of the everyday, the way in which those small, mundane disappointments mount up and slowly sap your soul. Look no further than titles like ‘The Kettle Broke’, and ‘There Was No Path At the End of This Field’ on this latest offering for evidence of microcosmic gloom and frustration. The impact of small – almost non-events – can never be underestimated in the context of a stressed and overloaded mind. And people aren’t in that headspace simply don’t get it. Kettle broke? Just get a new one, they’ll say. No, no, that’s not the point. The kettle broke, the cat was sick on the rug, the bread went mouldy, I spilled my drink and it’s an absolute disaster and my life sucks.

The fact is that sometimes, when life feels intense, the smallest details count for a lot: it’s not making a mountain out of a molehill when simply getting through a day feels like an epic battle, and walking to the corner shop feels as daunting as a marathon. And No More Bangers – a title which is equally ironic and carries a tone of sadness, of defeat – is detailed, with infinite nuance proving integral to these five minimal – and lengthy – compositions.

The pieces are constructed around nagging electronic loops, scrapes, drones, hums. There’s nothing dominant, sonically, or structurally. Ten-minute expanses of trickling dark ambience create brooding soundscapes and a tension that sets in the jaw, the shoulders. Insectoid chatters and clicks, stutters and scrapes build the fabric of the sound. Clamouring echoes and rapid repetitions evolve internal rhythms without percussion, with surges and swells driving the second half of the twelve-minute ‘The Springtails Love It.’ But it’s a nagging tension and feels more like being poked repetitively while trying to rest than an inspiration to get up and dance.

‘The Kettle Broke; is largely a hum, a room ambient sound which does next to nothing other than play back the sounds in your head and your kitchen when you’re trying a new recipe and find it requires digging the blender out from the back of the cupboard.

Sometimes, late at night – but also during the day, as I work from home – I find myself acutely aware of the quietness. There will be spells with no traffic, no planes or helicopters overhead, no dogs barking, no pings alerting me of new messages, no meetings. During these often unexpected moments, I will become aware of the whir of the laptop fan, the constant hum of the dehumidifier in the bathroom adjacent to my office, my own circulation.

This is the soundtrack that No More Bangers presents. Low-ley, low-level ambience which sounds like the boiler running through a maintenance cycle, like the throb of the fridge, the fizz of extractor fan. Delivering 100% on its title, this album is absolutely banger-free. But more than that, it feels strangely familiar, and yet familiarly strange.

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Photographed By Lightning – Music for Strangers / Music from Nowhere

Posted: 22 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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8th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

This release is as intriguing – and strange – as its enigmatic and beautifully-crafted handmade packaging.

Music for Strangers continues the reissue programme for releases from underground experimental duo Photographed By Lightning, and arrives on the heels of NO, Not Now, never which represented their first new material in twenty years. For this one, we dive back twenty years, to 2004, the most prolific year of their career, until, suddenly, it halted.

While Blood Music (also 2004) consisted of a large number of comparatively brief pieces, Music for Strangers is a very different proposition, featuring as it does four longform tracks, with a couple around the ten-minute mark and a couple around the twenty. Each simply bears a numerical title.

The original release – produced in a CD edition of 100 – was disseminated not for sale on line or anywhere, but by covert means, with copies being left at random in public places. This was quite a thing in avant-garde circles for a time in the years after the turn of the millennium, particularly when MySpace was at its peak, and something that I myself participated in, leaving various pamphlets in pubs and the like, and slipping A5 leaflets various books in WHS and Waterstones. Why? Because.

Dave Mitchel and Syd Howells – aka Photographed by Lightning – are very much part of that avant-garde milieu. Something has been lost over time, and now there’s a certain nostalgia for it, meaning that the arrival of this reissue carries a certain resonance beyond the thing in itself.

There are bits of vocals interspersed here and there – abstract enunciations and discombobulous jabberings – and they emerge for fleeting moments amidst sprawling expanses of strange, otherworldly instrumental passages.

‘One’ (denoted as ‘I’ on the CD version) combines swampy abstraction and space-rock bleeepery to disorientating and atmospheric effect, which descends into dense murk in the final minutes before silence descends for a full minute. The silence is even more disconcerting than the sound which preceded it. The truth is, silence unsettles us, scares us even. It’s the reason some people can’t stand to be alone, and the reason many simply can’t shut the fuck up for a moment: they can’t handle silence, and find silence more terrifying than darkness. I suppose that while both are forms of sensory deprivation, in the modern world, while darkness still feels like a natural phenomenon – if your blinds or curtains blank out light pollution and you switch off your electricals – silence is almost beyond comprehension. There is always traffic, a distant siren, a phone vibration, the wind, rain, the babble of one’s own internal monologue. When was the last time you can honestly say you experienced true silence? That isn’t to say that with the hum of the hard-drive and my laboured hayfevery breathing, in connecting with this album I did, but the abrupt end of sound emanating from the speakers, in a time when a minute feels like an eternity, really struck me, left me feeling… what?

But at thirteen minutes, this is merely a prelude to the second track, a plunge into the subterranean swamps which drags the listener deeper into suffocating darkness for an immersive but uncomfortable nineteen minutes. There’s dadaist quirky playfulness in evidence here, the sonic equivalent of shooting water pistols and throwing overripe windfall berries at random passers-by, which redresses the balance against the backdrop of tetchy, grumbling noise created first and foremost to antagonise – which is course it does. It tests the patience and challenges the senses, with bubbles and ripples echoing as if from within a cave – for extended periods, as the sounds gradually mutate. For a spell, it sounds like water-filled lungs laboriously respiring, which makes for more difficult listening than it may appear on paper, drifting into something resembling the relentless rock of nodding donkeys at an oil drill site, and creeping into ‘Three’, it’s like sneaking down into the sewers to escape one threat only to be confronted with another.

Music for Strangers is certainly their darkest, most suffocating work, stretching dark throbs and abstract sound to the absolute limits and nudging beyond.

The bonus disc which is part of the physical release, containing Music from Nowhere, offers further insight into their prolific and prodigious experimentalism at the time, providing jut short of an hours’ worth of additional material. That it’s essentially more of the same only heightens the effect.

Given the varied and experimental nature of their output, there isn’t really a definitive release which encapsulates the work of Photographed By Lightning, and Music for Strangers isn’t really an entry-level release – but this does very much encapsulate their experimental spirit, their singularity – their awkwardness – and knack for creating difficult soundscapes.

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Beak> – >>>>

Posted: 5 June 2024 in Albums
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Invada Records – 28th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this one landed out of the blue. A boon for fans, a shock to everyone, necessitating a reshuffle of review diaries for the likes of me.

It’s been six years since the last Beak> album. There are good reasons for this, as they explain: “After playing hundreds of gigs and festivals over the years we felt that touring had started to influence our writing to the point we weren’t sure who we were anymore. So we decided to go back to the origins of where we were at on our first album. With zero expectations and just playing together in a room.”

This is a remarkable slice of honesty about the effects of touring on the creative process, and band relationships. Most bands start at home – in some sense – with writing songs and the aspiration of touring those songs. But the dynamics change with success, and when touring relentlessly, time to write new material is squeezed. Over time, particularly with a pandemic interfering with, well, everything, many bands evolve their methods to operate over distance, and there’s always a risk that some of the dynamic is lost and stuff gets dialled in. It’s true that it’s now possible for bands to operate at distance, intercontinentally, even, but that’s not the Beak> way. They thrive on that instant interplay, the interaction, and without it, there’s simply no Beak>.

When they do come together they work fast. Single ‘Oh Know’ was ‘recorded on the only day the band could physically get together during the winter lockdown’ and released in October 2021. They really do make the most of their time, and their music – particularly this latest effort – froths with the urgency of pressured time. The urgency which has always permeated their music is banged up a couple of gears here, and as a result, >>>> is a frenzied explosion, with perhaps a desperate edge.

This being a Beak> album, it’s brimming with experimentalism, oddness, woozy psychedelia and persistent Krautrock pulsations, relentless beats. This being a Beak> album, it’s bloody great, and a lot of fun.

But that said, much of >>>> actually feels pretty bleak. Yes, Beak> turn bleak. It’s like a band having a blast while staring into the abyss, conscious that the end is near, but carrying on because at some point…

Of the album’s sudden and unexpected release, the band say in their statement, “At its core we always wanted it to be head music (music for the ‘heads’, not headphone music), listened to as an album, not as individual songs. This is why we are releasing this album with no singles or promo tracks.”

‘Oh Know’ isn’t included here, but the album does, however, include flipside ‘Ah Yeh’, and it does slot in nicely with its downtempo, lo-fi Pavement on sedatives vibe. It’s kinda loose, with rattling drums and drags out with a quivering organ drifting over a tense bassline, and it works something of a trance-inducing spell over the course of six minutes. You get the sense that however long and far part these guys are, they share a magical intuition, and whenever they do manage to get into a room together, creative sparks fly.

The band continues, “the recording and writing initially began in a house called Pen Y Bryn in Talsarnau, Wales in the fall out from the weirdness of the Covid days. Remote and with only ourselves and the view of Portmeirion in the distance we got to work.”

“With the opening track, ‘Strawberry Line’ (our tribute to our dear furry friend Alfie Barrow, who appears on the album’s cover) as the metronomic guide for the album, we then resumed recording, as before, at Invada studios in Bristol, whilst still touring around Europe and North/South America.”

‘Strawberry line’ makes for fairly a low-key opener, with a trilling organ and psychedelic reverby-drenched vocals rippling atop a bubbling bass before a shuffling beat enters the scene. But it stands as an eight-minute statement of intent, with that statement being that >>>> packs density to equal its melody. ‘The Seal’ delves into Krautrock, with a relentless groove centred around the rhythm section dominating. It grows dark. It grows tense. It’s sparse, minimal, but it persists, and four and a half minutes in, there’s a taut, jangling Joy Division guitar part.

Chilly synths and a robotic, rolling, repetitive bassline dominate the slow-melting ‘Denim’, a hazy psychedelic downer which delivers delayed gratification with the bursting of a monster riff. ‘Hungry Are We’ is delicate, reflective, post-rocky, with vocal harmonies which again allude to 60s pop and perhaps a bit of prog.

‘Bloody Miles’ marks a stylistic shift towards groovier territory, with a nagging bassline that borders on funk, but the tone remains doggedly downbeat, without getting depressing. With one foot firmly in the early 80s new wave sound, there’s no shortage of weirdness and warpy, brain-bending discord here, not least of all in the shadowy vintage-sounding electropop of ‘Secrets’, that brings together elements of Soft Cell and The Associates with the atmosphere and production of New Order’s Movement.

>>>> is often stark and claustrophobic (and nowhere more so on the eight-minute closer), and it’s always intense and brilliant. Beak> have surpassed themselves – again.

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Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal – SHIR

Posted: 31 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sub Rosa – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Yet another 24 May release… It really does feel as if the world had conspired to release 75% of the years albums on this one day. So I’m still working my way through them. And this release from some known names is not what I was expecting. I can’t recall precisely what it was that I was expecting but certainly not anything as heavy or as percussion-led as this.

They describe SIHR as a ‘sonic manifesto by a post-anything quartet’, a work that offers up ‘new folklore for a devastated planet’. Within these words, there’s a sense of nihilism and gloom, but simultaneously an undercurrent of ‘fuck it’ and of quintessential avant-gardism, the principle ethos of creating anew only being possible from the destruction of that which came before. There’s a sense here that the destruction – the devastation of the planet – clearly isn’t something they’ve chosen, but in the face of apparent futility, they’ve come together to create, perhaps in the hope of a brave new world, or perhaps, more likely, something to be discovered among the ashes and the ruins of society and life as we know it.

The way in which they document their coming together and the creation of SIHR has all the hallmarks of the first stages of developing a mythology, which has the potential, in time, to grow its own legend: ‘The first sonic moves of this eclectic quartet, made in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin, urgently took the form of a quest, that of a neo-folklore for troubled times, a music seeping with many kinds of atavism and experimenting in all directions. A fertile no-man’s-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma. From the possible emergence of a Babelian language to the shared desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial act, this encounter took place over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia, the phases of which were all recorded by Benoit Bel.’

The first track, ‘Oui-Ja’aa’ is a nine-minute colossus of a cut, drawing together elements of electronica and ‘world’ music with a dash of Krautrock and the sensibility of Suicide, with a throbbing rhythm melting into a hypnotic bubbling sonic cauldron. The tempo twists and seems to quicken as drones and jazz horns warp this way and that as if blown by the wind and everything builds to a frenzy before collapsing, exhausted in the dying moments.

While conjured in a bunker studio, SIHR sounds as if it was improvised around a fire in the middle of a desert while string out in an hallucinogenic haze. I suppose in some respects, the two scenarios bear numerous similarities in terms of their psychological effects: while one setting is a vast expanse of space with a huge sky vista and a distinct absence of other people, so the other, equally devoid of other people, forces the contemplation of the infinite realms of inner space.

‘YouGotALight’ is slow, smoking, soporific, a crawling, sprawling, mellowed-out meditation, before the glitchy whorl of bleeps and jitters that define the sound of ‘OhmShlag (Quake Tango)’ sees things take a very different trajectory at the album’s midpoint. A pulsating, seething miasma of sonic swampiness, punctuated with a metallic tin clatter of a snare that cuts through the murk, it’s like slowly sinking, not only in boggy terrain, but in a mental fog.

‘Babel Cedex’ eliminates the fog and just goes for the mental, beginning as another slow, serpentine, hypnotic exploration before building to a deranged frenzy of frenetic percussion and howling horns and chaotic discord that’s truly brain-melting. Eastern vibes and glitchtronica ripple through the woozy ‘Black Powder’, and you find yourself marvelling and utterly bewildered by the whole experience.

My earlier visions of desert campfires dissipate life vapourising mirages during the second half of the album, and I come to conclude that SIHR is indeed the sound of bunker life: one envisages the collective huddled in semi-darkness, hunched and half-crazed after months below ground in the wake of a global catastrophe, trying to keep it together in the hope of one day being able to return above ground. How will they know when it’s safe, when the coast is clear? Or is this a scenario akin to Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth?

We live in perilous times, and likely closer to the brink than any of us know or can even compute. In this context, SIHR feels like a document, and a message to future times.

AA

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EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: ‘The Last Remaining Punk Band’ by OMNIBDGR

Posted: 31 May 2024 in Previews and Editorial, Recommended Streams and Videos
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First they were Omnibael, then they were Omnibadger, and now Omnibdgr… but under whatever moniker they operate under, they make interesting noise. And for that reason, we’re proud to present ‘The Last Remaining Punk Band’ by Omnibdgr from the forthcoming split release from Omnibdgr and Ye Woodbeast, which you can check out here:

Opening with an atmosphere that feels like a clammy version of the N64 Goldeneye music, Ye Woodbeast and Omnibdgr’s forthcoming split comes with a sense of dread that draws a common thread between the two sides of the 12". Heal Thyself is a murky, dub-inflected pulse that calls out to the dregs of society, and ‘At the Mercy of the Flea’ continues into further depths of nightmarish gloom with voices speaking out from shadowy corners. Track 3, the driving ‘Tony Lazarus’ is a character exploration that straddles psych-rock and desert blues. The textural complexity that Woodbeast fans love is still very much present, but some of the brighter, pop playfulness found on releases like ‘Music to Sink Ships to’ has drifted towards a darker, but tighter, pulse. This works fantastically in tandem with their lyrics which still continue along the band’s "usual obsessions: death, god and all the cunts we hate".

Side 2 is the domain of Omnibdgr. The duo ramps up the dread even more with 4 tracks of drones and gut-punch industrial noise rock. Feverous Earth opens their offering with 3 minutes of subtly textured drone that conjures images of abandoned container ships and space hulks. ‘Heavy Mist Pounded Our Eyes’ is a mechanical array of looping drum-machines, black metal vocals and samples about dopamine – sounding like huge, rusting wheels rotating and grinding. Finally, a discernible human voice (Jase Kester) emerges on ‘The Last Remaining Punk Band’ for a snotty, riff-led assault. The vocals move back into the machine for the final track, which is a relentless wall of drums and murky noise.

If you hadn’t guessed it yet, this is a dark, brooding release that showcases both bands at their bleakest. Within this, though, is a vast array of sonic approaches, smart songwriting and a clever juxtaposition of industrial and human unease. As the release slowly unfurls, the journey remains full of surprises at every turn. Don’t look behind you.

(Words by Nick Potter)

Out on 28th June 2024 via Dead Music Club as a lathe cut 12”.

OMN

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