Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Pound Land – Can’t Stop

Posted: 15 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Pound Land have evolved, expanded, metamorphosed, mutated, from two guys cranking out two-chord dirges, to a shifting lineup of musicians cranking out some wild freeform jazz over murky two-chord dirges. And now we learn that they’ve returned to their roots for this latest offering, their third of the year, no less. As they put it, ‘Can’t Stop sees founding Pound Land members Adam Stone and Nick Harris return back to the gratifying freedom and eccentricity of DIY recordings and lo-fi audio projects. Nine diverse tracks spread over half an hour, this short experimental collection nods to Pound Land’s absurdist ‘kitchen-sink punk’ past’.

Can’t stop? Or won’t stop? Not that they should, either way: Pound Land’s mission, it seems, is to proliferate their dingy bass-driven racket as far and wide as possible, and the world – as unspeakably shit as it is, especially right now – is in some small way better for it.

“Got my joggers on / got my flapjack / got my shaven head,” Stone mumbles laconically as if half asleep, over some trickling electronics at the start of the opening track, ‘Armed with Flapjack’. Then some dirty, trebly guitar clangs in and everything slides into a messy mesh that’s neither ambient nor rock, providing a seething, surging drone by way of a backdrop to the spoken word narrative, which is only partially audible, but seems to be a gloriously mundane meandering tale involving, essentially, leaving the house and going about ordinary business.… But it actually turns out to be more of an internal monologue of an anxietised mind. “I’m alright, I tell myself that, I’m gonna be ok, I can do this… bus, and train, take one thing at a time…” It’s really quite powerful in its way.

And staying with the mundane, ‘Watching TV’ is a spectacularly sloppy-sounding celebration of the mindrot pastime that starts out sounding almost sensitive and with a dash of country in the mix, but slides into soporific sludge, before the choppy ‘Lathkill’, which clocks in at just under two and a half minutes, shifts the tone again: it’s a classic Fall rip, or perhaps Pavements ripping The Fall, a sparse, lo-fi four-chord effort which just plugs away repetitively.

Things get really murky with the pulsating ‘Stuff’, where Stone’s meandering contemplations ring out through waves of reverb, and the whole thing feels – and sounds – very Throbbing Gristle. Dark, muffled, monotonous, it grinds and clatters away, a thick sonic soup, and it’s as primitive and unproduced as it gets. It’s not pleasant, but it works perfectly: it needs to be rough, raw, unfiltered. There’s simply no way this act is ever going to have commercial appeal, and that’s perfect: Pound Land are made for limited cassette releases and playing tiny venues to audiences who will be split roughly down the middle between absolutely loving them and wondering what the fuck they’ve stumbled upon. Pound Land really aren’t for everyone. They’re the anti-Coldplay. They’re for people who relish being challenged. ‘I Spy’ brings that challenge straight away, being different again, the rawest, scratchiest, scratchiest, most abrasive no-fi-punk you’ll hear all year.

Things get even more jarring and difficult towards the end of the album. ‘Janet’s Here’ should be a breezy interlude, announcing the arrival of a guest, but instead it’s tense because the delivery is straight-up demented, and ‘Affordable Luxury’ is a rabid rant, again reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. It’s uncomfortable, the drawling vocal secondary to the warping drones and scratchy experimentalism. Stripped-back not-quite acoustic ‘EGG’ is a trick: again, it has hints of The Fall doing ‘sensitive’ – like ‘Time Enough at Last’, for example – and it’s delicate, but it’s also not.

And this is the thing. Can’t Stop is their most wide-ranging and accessible album to date. And yet… well, it’s not really accessible, for a start.

Can’t Stop is challenging in new ways, too. Working with so little, they’ve pushed the songwriting in divergent directions, making for an album that reaches in all different directions, while, of course, retaining that primal Pound Land core and purposefully simple, direct approach and aesthetic. I love it, but I expect many will hate it. And that’s the way it should be. It’s peak Pound Land.

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The Funeral March of the Marionettes – It All Falls Apart

Posted: 11 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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14th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

While the early- to mid-80s is considered by many to be the ‘golden age of goth’, 87-88 were pretty good years, too, and saw some of the first wave of bands breaking through commercially… It was at this time, with the release of Floodland and Children that The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission, respectively, broke big in the charts, and being 12/13 at the time, this was when my eyes – and ears – were opened to a whole new world of music. And so it was, too, that things really started to happen across the pond, too, and it was in 1987 that saw the formation of The Funeral March of the Marionettes, often referred to as The Funeral March.

There may well be a whole thing about how goths are obsessed with death, as even the band’s name suggests, but this release arrives in a genuinely sad context, namely the passing of founder and front man Joe Whiteaker from pancreatic cancer in his mid-fifties. With every year that passes, it becomes apparent that the people who are dying are closer to our own age, are our peers, or close to. But the fact Joe did complete the recording of It All Falls Apart is something to celebrate. Many of us ponder our legacy: what is it that we leave behind?

The Funeral March are drawing the curtain on a thirty-seven year career with what may be their finest work to date.

They started out, like so many gothy / post-punk inspired acts, drawing inspiration from seminal English acts like Bowie, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division. The band’s name, meanwhile, was a nod to Charles Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, best known as the theme music for TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And truth be told, this is all pretty standard: marionettes seem to be part of textbook goth catalogue: There was The Marionettes, for a start who started life as The Screaming Marionettes in ’86, and when you chuck all the words into a goth band name generator, let’s not forget Screaming Banshee Aircrew… So much goth seems to thrive on derivation.

It All Falls Apart brings with it a certain familiarity by necessity, really. But this release sees them push the boundaries rather more, forging their own identity more strongly than ever before. It’s a sign of artistic growth: many artists – regardless of medium, be it music, writing, visual arts – begin by learning from their precursors, leaning on their influences, and finding one’s own voice takes time and confidence. It’s also an album of two halves – essentially an EP and a remix EP, but again, in context, it feels appropriate.

So if ‘Starts at Night’ brings hints of The Mission’s ‘Sacrilege’ or ‘Amphetamine Logic’ by The Sisters, perhaps even Skeletal Family’s ‘Promised Land’, all of which are killer by virtue of the complex picked lead guitar parts, it’s equally worth noting just how hard it blasts out of the gates. Pow! It’s the drums that really make this one. More Danse Society circa Seduction than anything else than comes to mind, it packs all the power up front, and that impact really lands strongly.

All of the ‘standard’ goth tropes are present and correct, from the loping, dynamic drums, the chiming, chorus-rich guitars, and thumping down-on-the-floor bass, but their execution is exemplary. This is the sound of a band who are intensely honed and striding confidently through all aspects of songwriting and production. It’s the thinking bass that really makes ‘Shadow Games’, but with its chiming guitars and vocal inflections, it ventures into the territory of classic contemporary post-punk, in the way that the likes of Interpol have built on the foundations of Joy Division without being a carbon copy, and the energetic chorus calls to mind White Lies at their best. It’s not that The Funeral March have abandoned their roots here, but that they’ve cut loose and taken flight.

‘Save Us’ is more driving, more hard-hitting, more overtly post -punk than goth, bit it’s also dark, snarly, proper rock ‘n’ roll, the sound of leather jeans and legs akimbo, and a contrast with the more overtly atmospheric but no less punchy ‘Bobblehead’. As for the title track… well. It feels like the finale, and, with the benefit of hindsight, the farewell. Stretching out to six minutes, it’s the perfect blend of guitars, shimmering in waves of treble an reverb, atop the phattest drums and underpinned by a thick bass. It’s goth perfection and would have been at home on the recent album by Pink Turns Blue. It All Falls Apart is appropriately titled, as it turns out.

The quality is consistent throughout, and the remixes are actually nice additions here, making All Falls Apart a superb addition to the band’s catalogue, we can only speculate on what they might have done next, but All Falls Apart feels like the perfect way to finish a career.

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Listen: ‘Mnemosyne’ by Papillon de Nuit

Posted: 10 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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The final song in a trilogy of time-related experimental tracks, ‘Mnemosyne’ incorporates an original song – recorded in Mayfair Studios, London, in 1975 – into poetic musings, and haunting atmospherics, dwelling on nostalgia and false memory.

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Jeugdbrand – 3 × hullo, hullo

Posted: 8 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza – LP Mar 24, DL Feb 28

Christopher Nosnibor

Most blurbs which accompany releases are either factual, unspectacular in their biographical detail, or tedious in their technicality. Some are vaguely amusing or otherwise entertaining, but the words accompanying Jeugdbrand’s 3 × hullo, hullo, courtesy of  Lieven Martens are outright deranged. I mean, there’s a narrative there, but it’s more of a slab of gonzo fiction than anything. And that’s before we get to the whole mole thing….

‘Well, it went like this: I open the glass door to the garden, the early morning coming to its midday end. That everyday anxiety that overcomes late risers from time to time kicks in. “Fuck, almost half a day wasted!” But abruptly, this sentence in my head gets overdubbed by the Queen’s English: “That shit mole, that blimey shit cunt mole!” I see the expat owner of our Airbnb punching his bare fists on his green lawn. A spotless lawn, but with here and there a few molehills. His grass, like a billiard cloth in a smoked bar, serves as a contrasting pathway to the black volcanic rocks at the back of the house. Behind these rocks, the ocean foams and growls. “Luv, get the poison! I wanna finish the bugger now and for good. Bloody hell!” I watch this scene with amusement, until suddenly, when the landlord notices me, he cleans up his act. “Ooh, these are funny little creatures, eh, these furry moles. Cheeky peng. Eh, fancy a cuppa?” The landlord’s head and belly are so ridiculously red that I can almost hear a lobster scream in a pot of boiling water. He looks like a walking can of Spam, its contents cooked by countless days under the Indian Ocean’s sun. The Indian Ocean, where sharks migrate between Africa and Australia. And where the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist bravely builds new islands of trash. Yes, the very true meaning of re-creation. Someone once told me that lobsters don’t really scream.’

I once caught some shrimps and prawns in a rockpool while on holiday in Devon. I was probably about twelve. We took them back to the cottage, and my dad cooked them up, tossing them into boiling water. I understand the sound of them being boiled alive was actually the air escaping their shells, but they did sound as if they were screaming, and I have referred to them as ‘squealy prawns’ ever since.

That I have digressed in response to an epic digression seems only fitting, and all of this seems appropriate when it comes to this album. 3 × hullo, hullo definitely falls into the category of ‘weird shit’. ‘Lonely, Sure, but It Is Getting Late and My Grandmother Is Calling’ flits between blasts of noise, stuttering percussion, jolting rumbles, whistling feedback, mumbling, grumbling, and demented yelling, yodelling and ululation. It’s a lot to pack in to less than six minutes, particularly when it’s six minutes spent scratching your head, looking around and wondering what the fuck is going on.

By the end of the album’s five tracks, I’m none the wiser. It makes me think of when I see a post on social media which is both seemingly cryptic and linguistically nonsensical, and yet it’s followed by a series of responses which bewilder not only in their equally coded babble, but in the realisation that people actually understand the initial post. It isn’t that I don’t get the way language evolves and how each generation develops its own spin, but… words. They mean what the mean, no? No. It seems I am wrong.

In fairness, I do understand the words and the narrative Jeugdbrand offer, it’s just that the narrative is crackers, and it’s fitting because the album is also crackers, a collage of craziness from beginning to end. ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow? I’m Talking About Now, Forget about It!’ starts with a ticking clock and then goes haywire, making for a head-spinning eleven and a half minutes of tribal percussion, drones, discordant church organs, surges of sound add rapid depletions, hollers, yells, grunts, and yelps. Elongated notes quaver, quiver, and fade in and out, while there are twangs of guitar and the occasional, incidental thump and scrape. ‘There’s No Word for Ambient in Dutch’ is dark, haunting – at least after its strange, murky start, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s noisy, oddball experimentalism.

‘Motorcycle Oil on Canvas’ is eleven and a half minutes of spooky, spaced-out woozy, warping drones and oddity, again with snippets of chants, record scratching, clicks, pops, crackles, toots and parps and, amidst the rumble of engines and the snarl of prehistoric reptiles, one finds oneself completely adrift and perplexed. It ends with anguished wailing atop a tempest of noise. There is a lot going on. Much of it is hard to process.

I’m accustomed to all shades of avant-garde and experimentalism, and I’m even more accustomed to my friends defining my musical tastes as ‘weird’, but this is far and away some of the weirdest shit I’ve heard – period.

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Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one

Posted: 26 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one

zeitkratzer productions – 28th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Reinhold Friedl has been a significant contributor to the world of avant-garde music for a long time, not only as a leading explorer of the potentials of the prepared piano, as pioneered by John Cage, but in excavating the works of historical composers and reconfiguring those of more contemporary ones, leading the zeitkratzer ensemble through performances of Metal Machine Music and selected cuts from Whitehouse’s catalogue.

This particular collaboration coalesced during the pandemic, after which, as we learn, ‘Costis Drygianakis recorded Reinhold Friedl’s special piano sounds on a Blüthner grand piano with a bunch of extremely diverse microphones, ranging from a beautiful old Neumann U67 to a cheap tape cassette machine and even a Dictaphone. The resulting recordings have been classified, selected and processed at his home studio in Kritharia, Greece. No other sounds have been used.’

ta amfótera en is one continuous piece, just over an hour induration, and it’s a journey, to say the least. By ‘journey’, I mean torturous experience. It’s dark, punishing, pulverising, scraping, nightmarish. The first two minutes alone are a soundtrack to extreme horror – fear shaking amidst tremulous piano, heavy discord rumbling low and disconcerting to the point of spiking anxiety, after which there are protracted warped drones and rumblings which drag on, scraping and twisting, sonorous and uncomfortable. Amidst rolling, swirling, churning ambience and awkward, uncomfortable noise, random piano notes spike, seemingly at random. Gongs chime, crash, and clash.

When I was a child, the warping, discordant intro to ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran intrigued me. It created a palpable tension which affected me inexplicably at the age of nine. Perhaps this brief snippet of sound, dissonant, metallic, paved the way to my later obsession with musical otherness. The specific reason I reference this formative experience is that lengthy segments of two into one sound almost exactly like those opening bars of ‘Rio’ – scraping, discordant, a little like twisting metal.

two into one warps and hums, scrapes and drones, and occasionally plonks and thunks, the sounds rising from a random and seemingly unarranged twisting spill of sonic strangeness. There are chimes, and chsllenges.

There is much space – just as there are whistles and feedback – on two into one. The experience is, perhaps inevitably, disorientating, vaguely bewildering, even. There is something about this work which lifts you off the planet: to attempt to pin it to the particulars of contemporary rock music seems to be missing the point. Explore this release… and discover.

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PIG – Wrecked (2024 Remaster)

Posted: 25 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 7th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

As Metropolis continue with their run of PIG reissues, the arrival of the remastered Wrecked reminds us of the run they had in the 90s. Having hardened up the sound showcased on debut album A Poke in the Eye… and follow-up Praise the Lard, and having toured with Nine Inch Nails in the Downward Spiral tour, PIG found themselves signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing label for the release of Sinsation (1995), which melded the more experimental aspects of The Swining and Red Raw & Sore from a couple of years previous and cranked up the guitars – and the sleaze and depravity – to eleven. And after Sinsation came Wrecked, and having returned to Wax Trax!, in the US at least, the album was released first in Japan in ’96 and the US a year later with a substantially different tracklisting – and was an absolute bastard to get here in the UK in either form.

This version brings together the tracks which featured on both the original Japanese edition – which was criminally missing ‘No One Gets Out of Her Alive’ and ‘Contempt’ – and the American edition, which brought ‘The Book of Tequila’ and ‘Fuck Me I’m Sick’ in their place.

Wrecked very much represented PIG at their wildest, most wide-ranging, and arguably their heaviest. The title track drifts in on some mellow steel guitar country vibes and ambient chilling… and then gets gnarly with gritty industrial rigging and snarly vocals that are quintessential PIG. Raymond Watts may not have been in the best place during this period, but creatively… the music he was making was something else, and Wrecked stands up just as well now as it did on release. I’ve mentioned previously that PIG stand apart from their contemporaries, and while Watts was a touring member of Foetus in the late 80s and worked with JG Thirlwell when PIG was born, as well as being a member of KMFDM for a time, as much as those elements of aggrotech and industrial metal are core to the sound, Watts took it somewhere else entirely. Where? It’s hard to say: PIG’s work simply doesn’t conform to any genre forms or models – PIG just are PIG. While a couple of tracks had been previously released in different forms – the original versions of ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ and ‘Blades’ appeared on The Swining, released only in Japan in 1993 (prior to a 1999 US reissue) – it would be wrong to suggest that their inclusion on Wrecked suggested a lack of material, given just how radically different these versions are. The same is true of the reworked version of ‘My Sanctuary’, which appeared on Praise the Lard: expanded, more grandiose, more everything, the ‘Spent Sperm Mix’ taking the track to preposterous heights while audaciously combining industrial, techno, and gospel with orchestral strikes galore.

Since the US and Japanese editions included various alternative mixes, it would have been nice to see this version feature all sixteen tracks featured on the 2017 tour edition, which is arguably the definitive edition. But what we learn here is that you can’t have everything, and this edition at least has the majority of the prime cuts. Sequentially, it follows the Japanese edition, with the tracks which featured on the US release at the end.

The drumming on this album is brutal, choppy, the guitars cutty, stuttering, heavily distorted, but with a bright, clear, digital crispness that really slice hard. Watts growls, snarls and sneers, dark and salacious, and everything about Wrecked is harsh and ugly. ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ is a full-throttle beast of a track, with a sample-laden breakdown in the mid-section, with snippets of reports on American obesity and the like (in place of the sped-up snippet of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the original), and it’s pretty dark and unforgiving.

‘Blades’ is one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by PIG or anyone – it’s one of those songs that just does something to you. The ‘Slash Mix’ on here may not be the best version – for my money, I prefer the more orchestral original, but this rendition is dense and girthy, and fits with the sound of Wrecked. Then there’s ‘Save Me’, the album’s slowie, and so, so powerful. It takes ‘anthemic’ in a whole new direction.

Watts has always made music with a boldly theatrical approach to the industrial template – and Wrecked really turns up the dial on everything – density, volume, aggression, intensity, and this expanded reissue is an essential document in the broader industrial oeuvre. It’s also an outstanding album in its own right.

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Haswell & Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #23

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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D L F – Korset i Röjden

Posted: 8 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I do like an album with a story. With Korset i Röjden by D L F, we get half a story, but one which builds a sense of mystique, enigma, a sort of allusion to local folklore, set out in the notes which accompany the release:

‘There’s a place in the forest, in the shape of a cross, where nothing grows. No one knows how it got there, or why.

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The two recordings on Korset i Röjden capture sounds and vibrations in and around the cross. A geophone, a few contact mics, an H6, a smartphone, and a broken cassette recorder. Track two, ‘Den onda ska pressas ur’, features samples from a 1963 television documentary, an old Finnish lullaby, and taped interviews with locals from the 1990s.’

This has got it all: mythology, mystery, co-ordinates – a map, in other words – and the kit, the foundations for a sonic retake of The Blair Witch Project, perhaps. There is a strong sense of there being something hat isn’t right. Granted, I get that from simply breathing the air, from turning on the news – but this is quietly unsettling. Very quietly, in places: the first two minutes or so of ‘Korset’ are almost the sound of silence. Turn it up, and there is the sound of air, a soft breeze, perhaps, some kind of background noise. Insects? Footsteps? The rustle of leaves? Perhaps, but just as nothing grows in that unexplained cross marked in the forest, so it seems there is little sound. No birdsong, no… nothing. Has anyone ever run a metal detector over the sight? Considered digging?

I mention digging with caution. There is a wood close to where I live, a portion of which has been decimated in the last three years or so by dirt bikers who have turned the space into a track with jumps and ditches. It’s clearly not just the work of a couple of kids with spades: these are proper earthworks, excavations, the likes of which have involved adults turning up with mini-diggers. I once witnessed a woman challenging a family who had turned up with motorbikes who were revving around and scaring pedestrians and dog-walkers being met with aggressive verbal abuse. My email reporting the matter was of no consequence. Rather like this narrative detour.

‘Det onda ska pressas ur’ offers another ten minutes of haunting dark ambience – unsettling, disorientating. It rumbles and echoes around infinite subterranean corridors, leading to who knows where? There are sounds – possibly the pushing through undergrowth, possibly almost anything else. Wraiths whisper through the clicks and crackles, hums and pops… is that breathing or simply the breeze?

Korset i Röjden tells us nothing, other than that the world is a dark and unpredictable place. It’s a dark and unpredictable album. But it hints that we should fear, and fear the worst. There are dark forces all around, and while the insanity of the world right now is more than reason to take cover, it’s worth remembering that there are other things a play.

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The Legendary Pink Dots – So Lonely in Heaven

Posted: 4 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 17th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of So Lonely in Heaven marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the existence of The Legendary Pink Dots. And it’s a concept album. Edward Ka-Spel sets it out as follows: ‘Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast.’

It’s their second post-pandemic album, and it’s weighted with a sense of impending doom and biblical destruction spun in a suitably grand fashion whereby prog meets avant-garde and electronica.

It can be a bit of a gamble opening an album with a long song – the risk being losing the listener before things have even got going. But it’s a calculated risk, on an album where most of the songs are pretty long.

Some of it’s Ka-Spel’s tone and enunciation, but the title track which is that first long song, carries hints of an electronic reimagining of Suede, circa Dog Man Star. That is to say it also sounds a bit Bowie, and a bit Kraftwek, and with some weirdly bits of glitchy noise and reverby piano, it has echoes of Outside.

Thereafter, there are big sounds and big moods and big concepts in abundance, and it’s by no means an easy album to pigeonhole. Space and environmental issues are woven through the twelve tracks, which, as I fumble for a context, evoke equally the whimsical hippy trippiness of Gong and the inventiveness of The Young Gods. ‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ delves into tense electro territory, and presents a rather harder edge than the preceding songs, and it’s here we really begin to feel the sense of the ‘machine’ which is a central focus of the album’s thematic content:

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely…

This is nowhere more apparent than on the sparse, acoustic-guitar centred neofolk bleakness of ‘Wired High : Too Far To Fall’, which swells and soars and expands to immense proportions, as well as plunging to dark, sonorous depths over the course of its seven minutes. Elsewhere, ‘How Many Fingers In the Fog’ has a more post-punk feel to it, but still spun with a proggy haze, and there’s a lingering wistful melancholy which clings to it.

That there are whimsical, light-hearted moments of plinky-plonky keys and segments of So Lonely in Heaven sound more like wide-eyed stargazing in pure awe shouldn’t trick you into thinking this isn’t a serious album. The medium is the message, and entertainment is a diversion, a distraction, the ultimate lie that it’s ok to sit, sedated, and forget the world. The shit that’s gone down in America is the absolute proof of this: while everyone has been entertained by the circus, a coup has been taking place. This isn’t hyperbole, and this isn’t simply some scuffle in a small third-world republic. Meanwhile, people, especially here in the UK, are largely preoccupied with the current season of Love Island or whatever instead of trembling in fear for the future.

For all the buoyancy and quite enjoyable moments – ‘Blood Money : Transitional’ offers a quite accessible, easy groove beneath its darker surface – ‘business is business’, Ka-Spel sneers over a quite Depeche Mode-like accompaniment.

So Lonely in Heaven is varied, and sometimes sounds as if belongs to another era – but at the same time, it’s unexpectedly and shockingly relevant and now, and is well worth your time – whatever time you have left.

AA

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ILINX – Flipperen

Posted: 30 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza – 27th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some years ago (like about seventeen years ago), when I embarked on my reviewing journey proper, I was introduced to whacky experimental work and the world of microtonality. It was an absolute revelation. Just as, growing up in the 80s and raised on the Top 40 singles and Now That’s What I Call Music, discovering goth, alternative, John Peel, and Melody Maker completely changed my head, so did entering this new world. Onje thing that completely spun me was the way in which some artists extrapolated and academicized some pretty stupid or mundane stuff. This is a reasonable example. To quote: ‘Flipperen takes the randomness of pinball and turns it into music. Using recordings from old pinball machines, the music mixes chaos and structure, reflecting the Fluxus spirit of play and chance. It’s a wild ride through sound, where things don’t always make sense–but that’s the fun of it.’

Flipperen began as a lockdown / COVID project, of course. As they detail, ‘During the quiet and strange Covid days, Suzana Lașcu, Robert Kroos, and Reinier van Houdt began a recording project based on the soundbites of pinball machines. They visited the empty Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam and captured field recordings of machines from the 1960s to the 1990s. From these, they selected 28 samples to serve as thematic starting points for what they called ‘game pieces,’ recorded in two sessions at Sonology Studios in The Hague. The recordings were then shaped into sound collages using cut-up techniques and probabilistic processes.’

These processes mean that the end product is a very long way removed from the actual sounds of metal balls pinging and rolling about inside a glass-covered case. Instead, landing between Brion Gysin and John Cage, we get a collection of weird and woozy fragmentary pieces – compositions would be something of a stretch – ranging from awkward ambience to crashing and banging that sounds like a prepared piano fitted with lump hammers. There’s playful, whimsical sighing and trilling, psychedelic trippery and some fairly straight jazz-flavoured piano in the mix. There’s Clangers-like whistling and clattering and clanking, pops and thuds, explosive industrial noise and frenzied country. There are moments which sound like someone grunting through a comb with greaseproof paper, others which sound like the strumming of an egg-slicer, others still which create the impression of a piano being dropped down a flight of stairs.

The final cut features twenty-six tracks, the majority of which are around a couple of minutes long, or even significantly shorter. But there are a couple which run to around six and a half minutes of uncoordinated chaos, and it’s a lot to take in.

The appeal from a sonic and experimental perspective is that ‘Pinball is a game that combines control and randomness—each action leads to an unpredictable result, and the outcome is always uncertain’, and as such, the patterns which provide the material for these pieces are erratic, unpredictable, and ultimately, not really patterns at all. And so it is that Flipperen shunts forwards and backwards, crackles and pops with zany snippets of this, that, and everything, conjuring a wild collage of disparate elements and all kinds of discord.

As much as pinball machines lie at the heart of Flipperen, it’s really a wide-ranging collage work with randomness at its heart. It’s fun, it’s fascinating, it’s brain-bending – and one might say it’s a work of Flipperen genius – but you definitely have to be in the mood for something quite this far out.

AA

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