Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Christian – and knowing is half the battle

Posted: 8 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another Bandcamp Friday, and another release from Dret Skivor, Swedish microlabel specialising in noise and weird shit on super-limited cassettes. This time, they promise a ‘beast of a release with artwork by the manbear that is Christian Blandhoel’. Side A of this cassette is supposedly the ‘hard side’ and Side B the ‘soft side’, but these things are relative. Mellow it is not, and it really is a beast. I’d been forewarned that it was a long one, and landing the same day I received my copy of the new Swans live album, which clocks in at a solid two and a half hours, I kinda shrugged it off, thinking ‘yeah, it’s long, but it’s not that long…’ and while that’s true, I perhaps should have paid more heed. It’s not just about the length with this one. It’s about the intensity. For the records, Swans’ Live Rope is intense, and anyone who’s seen them live in the last couple of years will appreciate this. But the recordings simply do not capture the experience of being in the room, the decimating volume.

The thing is, there’s listening to music, and listening to music. I listen to music while I’m cooking, but it’s simply on, whereas listening to music with focus is a true commitment, and takes some energy. Listening to and knowing is half the battle takes a lot of energy.

Only a minute or two into ‘bad things keep happening’, the first of the album’s seventeen tracks, there’s some extreme panning that’s churning my guts and making me dizzy, and that’s without the feedback whistles that land just in the region of tinnitus. It’s a challenging six minutes, which culminates in a slugging blast of lung-rattling bass sludge.

‘Danger draws near to what you hold dear’ is an ominous piece of dark ambience with static and hum, crackles and horrific ruptures of noise. There’s a low-end mechanical thrum, low-end doom frequencies which flicker and throb, and nothing comfortable. Trilling feedback whistles for what feels like an age before more bass frequencies hit, and then static and distortion hums and hovers from left to right. This feels like an album designed to inflict optimal pain and anguish. ‘Loaded for bear what a nasty spectackle’ hums and drones and bursts distortion to a point at which is inflicts pain at first, before diminishing in its confrontational intensity.

Scraping strings and ominous drones and unsettling discord and dissonance are all the things one might expect from a track bearing the disturbing title ‘i always hope to find you fully dilated and bleeding’, and when it suddenly ruptures into a surge of fizzing distortion, the experience becomes quite overwhelming – and it only grows more intense and anguishing as it progresses.

‘rendering flesh’ is a horrible mess of buzzes and hums, feedback trills and screams, snarling whirls and blips and glitches. And the unpleasant frequencies, the serrated waves, the tension-building noise just keeps on coming, with the pieces packed back-to-back with no pause for decompression. At times it sounds like a bulldozer ploughing through the speakers, at others it’s more akin to the soundtrack to psychological torture or one of those anxiety dreams from which you wake, drenched in sweat, which fuck the entirety of your day.

Christian may be in pain, and and knowing is half the battle is his way of letting it out. Or perhaps he’s a sadist who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others. Either way, and knowing is half the battle is likely to stand as an endurance test which many listeners will fail. Christian seems to have a knack for finding all the frequencies which resonate in the wrong way: every throb and click is a tension-building, gut-worrying microassault. ‘Abakan hyperburst’ again exploits both wild panning and distortion to distressing effect, before ‘the current trend of selective autism’ presents a sparse but challenging question. What is he trying to say here? Well, it does seem that a certain type of person will defend shitty behaviour by claiming that they may be on the spectrum – undiagnosed, of course – or have some other issue as a justification, which diminishes and undermines those who are truly autistic, in the same way as the people who shout loudest about their mental health and take time off work for mental health reasons aren’t necessarily those who are truly suffering. It is a minefield, and a topic which goes far beyond the reach of this review, but one that we shouldn’t ignore, since Christian has raised it.

Other titles are perhaps less provocative, and instead are more surreal – such as ‘mcdelivery plush trumpet’ and ‘the wonder of phosphorous burned eyeholes’, but ‘exploding heads in peacetime’ is a blistering trill of feedback worthy of Whitehouse, underlaid with billowing bass.

This would be a tortuous work regardless of duration, as Christian remorselessly pushes all the buttons for noise which is uncomfortable, distressing, but the fact this album seems to last a lifetime only heightens the tension. and knowing is half the battle is painful, horrible in every way – so needless to say, I love it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

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Nomad Tree – I: Awakening The Ancestors

Posted: 4 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Creativity can have immensely therapeutic effects. The psychology behind it is likely complex, if it’s even fully understood, but immersing oneself in something creative, be it music, writing, or visual arts seems to uncoil the mind in ways nothing else can quite manage.

With I: Awakening The Ancestors, described as ‘a profound journey through sound, blending experimental folk, noise, and shamanic practices’, Stuart Chalmers, under the moniker of Nomad Tree, presents ‘the culmination of an 18-month exploration from burn-out and self-doubt to discovering a new voice. Using feedback techniques, contact mics on frame/bass drums, amplified dulcimers, gongs, and percussion made from natural materials, the album creates a dark, hypnotic soundscape. Recorded in unique locations like Cathedral Cave and Luds Church, the tracks evoke a sense of ancient connection to the land and spiritual practice. It’s a cathartic release aimed at healing and altered states of consciousness’.

And so it is in Chalmers’ case, perhaps, that the creative process, paired with reconnecting in some way with nature, and with places which inspire a sense of ancient history, a time before religion as it now exists, before civilisation as we know it, even, has provided a sense of escape from the all-pervasive shit of the now.

I: Awakening The Ancestors consists of three longform pieces, each over ten minutes long, and these are compositions laden with dense atmosphere. ‘On Sorcerous Wings Take Flight’ is so dense as to be oppressive: heavy, thunderous percussion rings out across barren moorland and reverberates around thick forests. Winds blow and the very earth moans and mumbles. Darkness creeps ever closer, growing ever heavier. There is a sense of a presence, but, at the same time, the absence of anything which feels overtly human is conspicuous. Although the track’s evocation is ancient mists, my mind takes me to a most contemporary on-line discussion around the hypothetical question ‘If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?’ It’s a talking point around women’s safety, but in the last year I have taken to going on ever-longer walks in a quest to be in nature, but away from people. As Brion Gysin said, ‘man is a bad animal’, and as unnerving as the unknown and the unseeable may be, the prospect of encountering other people is considerably scarier.

‘Seeking Through Deepest Fears’ careens into dark space with droning, melancholic string sounds, wheezing, rumbling, polytonal tension and low, slow-building layers, to which primitive percussion eventually joins. There’s an oddly psychedelic sheen to this piece as it settles into a hypnotic groove overlayed with what sounds like scrawling, scraping walls of feedback, and it lands somewhere between Black Angels and latter-day Swans in terms of the listening experience: intense, almost overwhelming, but also uplifting on account of the complete immersion it engenders.

If the liner notes imply a sense of progression, a narrative arc, or any sort of linearity, the actuality of I: Awakening The Ancestors confounds that expectation in its merciless gloom. With tribal beats bashing away, hard, ‘Amongst Forest Spirits Or Wild Beasts’ conjures a sense of tapping into something elemental. It eventually tapers away to silence amidst a clamour of chimes, leaving a sense of emptiness, and much to reflect on.

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Ian J Cole – The Fraser Syndrome

Posted: 27 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sinners Music Records – 3 November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The line ‘hell is other people’ comes from the 1944 play ‘No Exit’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, and it’s something that many of us find relatable. Indeed, it’s a line which more or less summarises my world view. One of the few settings I feel comfortable with multiple ‘other people’ (I’m on with one on one or very small groups, at least in moderation) is in a live music setting, because I can choose whether or not to interact, can limit interaction to the brief times between acts, and – and this is significant – the kind of people I find myself sharing a space with tend to be less representative of the general population. Most of us do have ‘our people’; the only trouble is finding them.

Ian J Cole’s latest work is a concept album based on No Exit ‘whereby Three damned souls, Joseph Garcin, Inèz Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet. They had all expected torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead, find a plain room with no windows, mirrors and permanent strip lighting. They are all afflicted with fused eyelids or Fraser Syndrome where they can’t ever close their eyes and must spent [sic] eternity in this room and in this state.’

The Fraser Syndrome, from which the album takes its title is a rare genetic disorder characterized by fused eyelids.

Sartre seems to have essentially inverted the effects of the condition, but being unable to either open or close one’s eyes is a terrifying prospect. What’s worse: see nothing, or see everything? Cole’s album is based on the latter scenario, and presents a disturbing soundscape from which there is no escape.

The album opens with the immense sixteen-minute opus ‘Frightened of Cliches’, a heady blend of light-night jazz, erratic beats, and swirling ambient tension. There’s very much a filmic, soundtrack quality to it, and over its expansive duration, there are gradual shifts. The beats dissipate, there are creaks and groans like the rusty hinges of big metal doors being swing shut.

‘A Beauty Diamond Lipstick and No Mirror’ plunges deep into dark ambience. There are some synth incidentals to be found, wandering, lost, amidst the murk and the chimes, the muffled samples and layers of distortion and dissonance, but this is not an easy listen. It is, however, an intensely focused and coherent work.

‘Thelema’, created in collaboration with The Wave Prophets’ offers some light, and reintroduces the faux sax synth sound that was a central feature of Cole’s live sets a while back. But that smooth 80s vibe is now twisted into an altogether darker concoction, a conglomeration of sound that’s unsettling – and no more so than on the sparse feedback drone and hum of the eight-minute ‘Night Never Comes’: it’s a restless, uncomfortable space which it occupies, echoes and metallic clanking reverberations reverberating through the slow wailing undulations.

The piano-led ‘Hell is Other People’ is unsettling and chimes and tinkles against minor chords, before the album’s second ‘big’ piece, the twelve-minute ‘Three Damned Souls’ looms large in every way. It’s richly atmospheric, and while the atmosphere may not be overtly gloomy, it certainly is unsettling in places. Echoes and eerie whispers reverberate amidst trilling organs, bleeps and trickling electronica.

The final track, ‘Hell is Dead People’ is a live recording, and in some respects feels a bit bolted-on, but it’s a strong piece – piano-led, atmospheric, with discordant cadences playing throughout. It rounds off a solid and focused work. While concept albums can be a bit corny, or feel somewhat forced, The Fraser Syndrome finds Cole immersing himself in the themes and going deep into the psychologically difficult spaces that the source material necessitates, and the result is a strong suite of compositions, and quite possibly Cole’s strongest and most engaging work to date.

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Fear of the Object – Leaves never fall in vain

Posted: 24 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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True Blanking – 1st December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

No-one will be surprised to learn that I spend little to no time listening to mainstream or chart music anymore. I say anymore, as growing up, this was my first access to music, just as it was for anyone else growing up in the 80s. Top of the Pops, the top 40 on a Sunday night on Radio 1, The Chart Show (which even had an ‘indie chart’ rundown)… This was a time when ‘alternative’ bands scored top 40 singles. People of a certain age always hark back to the revelation that was seeing Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops, and seeing Marc Bolan. For me, I have formative recollections of Killing Joke on Top of The Pops… Divine… The Sisters of Mercy. I didn’t necessarily know what to make of these artists at first, but they made an impression. And after the Top 40 in a Sunday, there was the request show with Annie Nightingale, which played all kinds of stuff… and this was, I suppose, a route which led towards John Peel, reading Melody Maker… Now, to find anything different, outside of the mainstream takes effort – but equally, unless you’re already actively engaging with it, one has to actively seek it. Since The Internet became the dominant medium, terrestrial radio has seen its role and reach significantly diminished.

But from the little contemporary pop I have heard in recent years, I’m acutely aware of how songs have got shorter, how intros are abridged to the point of non-existence, how diving straight into the chorus as soon as possible is the objective. Delayed gratification? Forget it. Build-up? Huh? Albums?

Outside the mainstream, in evermore fragmented circles, artists have been pulling in the opposite direction. Albums designed to be played in sequence, containing songs with long intros and slow buildups are actually in favour.

Fear of the Object’s Leaves never fall in vain is an object which would likely strike fear into the heart of anyone unaccustomed to non-mainstream music. It’s a rumbling, dark ambient work, entirely devoid of beats, and almost of vocals (featuring as it does features the poem “Democracy Destruct” by David Henderson, produced by Kjell Bjørgeengen at Harmolodic Studios in 2003), and contains just the one track, which has a running time of over fifty minutes. There’s no ‘getting to the chorus’ on this epic slab of sonic abstraction.

Leaves never fall in vain, which takes its title from Japanese poet Chori (1739-1778), is a live recording, which documents a concert at Kunstneres Hus (Artists ́House) in Oslo October 2023. It features an expanded lineup, featuring original members Aimeé Theriot on electric cello and Ingar Zach on vibrating membrane/transducers, with the addition of Inga Margrete Aas on double bass. Not that you would know from the sound alone that there is a double bass in the mix – or indeed, any single, specific instruments. The instruments all melt together to create a free-flowing – or, perhaps more accurately, free-trickling – babble of sound, which is simultaneously busy, bubbling, with top-end activity frothing and scraping like a mountain stream, but with long, slow currents of droning mid-range flowing sedately beneath. There are passages where, perhaps, the sonorous tones of the cello are discernible, but in the main, it’s a conglomeration of sounds meshing together – layered, certainly ranging in tone and frequency, with a foam of treble which pressures the top-end of the aural spectrum at times, not to mention the nails-on-a-blackboard incidental scrapes. In places, the interweaving feedback takes on a texture like Metal Machine Music on heavy sedatives, and as much as the interplay between the performers is remarkable, so, it has to be said, is their patience. It takes a certain skill to hold your nerve and play a piece out like this. And the longer they maintain this slow-roiling, minimal-yet-dense drone, punctuated by occasional crackles and rips, the tenser it becomes.

Henderson’s poem arrives in the final minutes, a spoken-word piece which stands, stark, dry, crisp, and clear, and unaccompanied, after the instruments have died away and fallen to silence. It’s a powerful work in its own right, and placed as it is, hits with unanticipated impact. As the silence takes over the space occupied by sound for the best part of an hour, you’re left feeling affected, and somehow altered. The power of Leaves never fall in vain lies in is understatement, its subtlety. But also, its duration is a factor, being as if the entire track was an extended intro to the passage of poetry. Buildup, delayed gratification… alien to the attention-deficit age in which we live, Leaves never fall in vain stands out for existing in another world completely.

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Hungry Ghosts – Segaki

Posted: 23 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Nakama Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Is there such a thig as music-listening burnout? Probably not, but reviewing a new album on a more or less daily basis is knackering. There’s listening to music, and then there’s listening to music: one is passive, while the other is very much an active pursuit. But engaging – and fully engaging – with different forms of music can be strong and vigorous exercise for the mind, and when presented with music which is overtly challenging, there is a sensory workout involved, too. And Segaki, the second album by the Norwegian-Malaysian trio Hungry Ghosts, consisting of Malaysian tenor saxophonist Yong Yandsen ‘accompanied by the Norwegian powerhouse duo of Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums’ is most certainly challenging.

As their biography attests, ‘their debut record has been described as an album with an ‘unstoppable energy’ and like actual hungry ghosts (my italics) — the unfortunate souls who are reborn as pitiful creatures into their own miserable realm, punished for their mortal vices — the trio has an insatiable appetite for more… This appetite was temporarily quenched during their European tour in 2022. As part of this tour they played in a small Austrian town by the name of St. Johann in Tirol. That concert was recorded, and that recording became the raw ingredients for this release. Now, after having gone through a rather extensive two year long digestive system of listening, mixing, listening, mastering and listening again, the trio has brought us their second dish of hard hitting improv.’

The digestive system must be in quite a state if the album’s first track is anything to go by: ‘In search of filth like vomit and faeces to eat’ is sixteen sprawling minutes of frantic percussion and discordant sax frenzy. The title conjures an array of disturbing scenarios, from the dog, driven by stress, boredom, or anxiety to eat bodily waste, to something altogether more depraved and disturbed. The music itself provides no answers, only a crazed sprawl of rabid jazz which wanders and lurches in all directions, but amidst the mania, the phrase ‘shit-eating grin’ pops into my head uninvited. Of course it did. Some swear by various narcotics to open the mind, but for my money, music is the most powerful gateway to making unexpected associations and triggering recollections and reminiscences from almost out of nowhere. It’s not a grin I’m wearing by the end of this wild excursion, though, but a grimace, white knuckles gripping the sides of my chair as I exhale slowly. My head’s swimming, and I’m dizzy from the rollercoaster ride, and it’s the phrase ‘eat shit and die’ which bubbles up into my mind from my churning innards.

The viscerally continues on the altogether shorter ‘Small bits of pus and blood’ which completes side one. It’s sparser, atmospheric, uncomfortable. The percussion is altogether more restrained, yet dominates the minimal arrangement, and rhythms fleetingly emerge from the erratic clomps and clods before petering out to a lone trilling whistle.

Flip to side two and ‘Mountain valley bowels full of grime’ starts quietly but soon builds to a sustained crescendo, and keeps on crashing and braying away with a cranium-splitting intensity for almost twenty-two minutes. The drums explode in a perpetual roll, the double bass runs… run and run beneath sax mania that sounds like a jet engine.

‘A great decomposing odour’ delivers the final blow: at a minute and fifty-three seconds long, it feels like a jazzed-out sucker punch which takes unfair advantage of the dizzy, bewildered state one finds oneself in having seemingly, unknowingly, fallen down the mountainside into the valley and into the grime head-first.

The titles feel as if they belong to a gritty, grimy, sludgy metal album, but what Hungry Ghosts evidence on Segaki is that darkness, weight, intensity, and befouled viscerality are not exclusive to the metal domain, and that it’s possible to articulate sensations with a rare physicality without the need for distortion or snarling vocals – or, indeed, any vocals at all. With Segaki, Hungry Ghosts achieve a level of intensity and a power which is intensified by just how unexpected it is.

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Vamberator – Age of Loneliness

Posted: 5 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Imagine having your album release scheduled many months in advance only to find the release date crashed by The Cure’s first album in sixteen years. Imagine you’re not only an act likely to appeal to Cure fans, but your act features a former long-serving member of The Cure. This is the true story of Vamberator, the duo consisting of Jem Tayle, formerly of Shelleyan Orphan, and Boris Williams, Cure drummer from 1984 to 1994, and sometime contributor also to Shelleyan Orphan.

The album’s title is telling and possesses a certain resonance. Much has already been written on the contradictory impact of social media, and the idea that while we’ve never been more connected, we’ve never felt more isolated. Scrolling through endless snaps of people’s holidays, parties, nights out is a hollowing experience, and one that’s anything but inclusive. Of course, you want to be pleased and happy for these people sharing their experiences as they live their best lives, as is the parlance, but inside, you’re being eaten away as you’re confronted with your own mundane, grey existence.

If anything, the pandemic heightened the agony for many: half the population was basking in being work-free, spending days baking bread and discovering new hobbies and bingeing on Netflix, while the other half was battling their way into work, or juggling work and home schooling, or simply trapped indoors on their own – or worse. Virtual drinks via webcam and group WhatsApps and streaming gigs were poor substitutes for the real thing.

And now we’re supposedly back to normal, but it feels as if something has been lost, and possibly lost forever. Our lives have become more distant, more disparate. In my own experience, it simply seems harder to co-ordinate meeting with people, and while some people seem to be so busy with their social lives it’s a wonder they can remember what the interiors of their own homes look like, their busyness leaves some off us at home, disconnected for weeks at a time. I am not alone in being alone: for many, the creeping sense if isolation and loneliness weighs heavier than ever before. This is truly The Age of Loneliness.

I’ve begin with the digression in order to contextualise the point at which I arrive at this album, having spent the last few days – like a lot of people – immersed in the melancholia of the new Cure album, having not seen proper daylight for the best part of a week and struggling against the urge to hibernate.

The single release ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’, which came out in the summer, showcased an energetic embracing of myriad firms, and I myself described it as ‘a mega-hybrid of alt-rock, post-punk, and psyche.’ It set a level of expectation for the album and despite being born from a place of comparative darkness, the spark of experimentation and joy of creating illuminates the recesses of Age of Loneliness.

‘I Used to be Lou Reed’ kicks the album off in a flurry of strings and takes flight with a quite poppy flavour. It’s got horns and string and synths bursting all over, and there’s a slick funk groove which emerges after a minute or so… but despite being there, there, and everywhere, from James Bond to crooning 90s indie all in the space of five minutes, nothing feels forced or corny. Wish-era Cure meets Pulp might not sound like the ultimate pitch, but prepare to be pleasantly surprised.

Shades of negativity colour songs with titles like ‘I Need Contact’ and the title track, as well as ‘I Don’t Want to Cut the Grass’, a paean to lethargy which drifts and lilts like a Kraftwerk piece, but with the drollness of late Sparks. ‘Pilgrim’ brings tints of Beatles-esque twanging and some Eastern shades alongside elements of psychedelia. With loping rhythms and layered instrumentation, the title track slips into a groove worthy of late 80s Wax Trax releases then swerves unexpectedly. ‘I Need Contact’ is a sparse piano-led ballad, and its simplicity in itself is affecting. ‘Creature in My House’ begins haunting and ominous, before swinging into an electropop glam stomp which shouldn’t work, but does. This is true of much of Age of Loneliness.

Being predictable is not an accusation one could level at Vamberator: Age of Loneliness is ambitious, and bold. Sometimes it goes over the top, but it’s forgivable, because instead of playing it safe, as musicians of their experience often do, Tayle and Williams have tested their limits here, and they’ve emerged victorious.

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Ashley Reaks – The Body Blow Of Grief

Posted: 4 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

As is the case with his collage artworks, there is a sense of physicality about Ashley Reaks’ recorded work. His album titles tend to be brief but evocative, visually or otherwise: Compassion Fatigue; Track Marks; Growth Spurts; Winter Crawls… these are titles which evoke a sensory response – a shudder, a shiver, a skin crawl. The Body Blow Of Grief – Reaks’ fourteenth solo album – lands with an impact before you even arrive at the music itself.

I suppose – as is often the case when it comes to any music – there’s a personal element to my response here, and I make no apology for this. As I have touched on elsewhere, art is personal, in that it elicits a response which is unique based on a multitude of factors, ranging from life experience to emotional state and the mood of the moment. But the very phrase, The Body Blow Of Grief, lands like a punch in the stomach, and I’m aware that, while recently bereaved, having lost my partner of twenty-two years and adjusting to life as a single parent to a twelve-year-old, I am acutely sensitive to things which many others wouldn’t be. And yes, grief hits like a body blow. It knocks you, hard, socks the air out of your lungs and leaves you feeling weak, dazed.

Reaks’ music very much sounds like his artwork looks: a collage, a collision of styles, disjointed elements overlayed unapologetically; instead of smoothing over the joints, Reaks revels in the ruptures. Because this is where the vitality of life is found.

‘Home is Where the Hurt is’ may be a fairly obvious piece of wordplay, but the album’s opener digs deep into this seem, one which is a rich source of material in Reeks’ exploitation of trauma and its effects. ‘I can’t really feel what’s real’, he confesses against a backdrop of dubby bass and honking horns, before a shuffling beat settles into a tidy groove. It’s a bit Interpol meets Madness before lurching into post—rock territory and tapering out in a rippling tingle of layered guitar.

While the topics may be heavy, The Body Blow Of Grief is remarkable for its levity, its musicality, it’s easy tunefulness. I don’t mean necessarily that it’s all air and light – because it really isn’t.

There’s some quite tight, choppy, indie guitar on ‘No Place In The Nature Of Things’, a song that squirms and twists its way through almost seven-and-a-quarter minutes.

‘Somewhere To Hide Among The Swarm’ takes the bold step out into the swarm to offer some-full-on progressive rock flavours.

Across the course of the album’s eight tracks, Reaks walks through the familiar territory of previous albums with leaning toward dub and post-punk, but ventures into altogether newer territories with some spaced-out prog-inspired explorations, and ‘Hobbling Like A Refugee’ has an eighties feel that unexpectedly delves into electropop and AOR. It’s not polished to the levels of the 80s rolled-up jacket sleeve bands, but it alludes to the slickness of the era, but the dark lyrics are a stark and uncomfortable contrast. ‘Mongrel Nation’ is a slice of chunky post-punk laced with the bombastic excesses of Muse and a few jazzy twists.

The last track, the eight-minute epic ‘I’m Not a Fossil’ is a multi-faceted, multi-headed monster propelled by some strong technical dtrumming.

As always, Reaks presents us with an album that’s complex and layered, but The Body Blow Of Grief feels like a step up in the ways it opens horizons to new levels of boldness and ambitious sonic vistas.

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‘It’s going to be epic…’ The Foenale is near: JG Thirlwell interviewed by John Wisniewski

Posted: 2 November 2024 in Interviews
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Intro: Christopher Nosnibor

Interview: John Wisniewski

Images: individually credited, via Foetus.org

It’s been over forty-five years since Melbourne-born James George Thirlwell washed up on English shores, and having played some keyboards on the album No Cowboys by post-punk act PragVec in 1980, he embarked on what would become a truly remarkable and lifelong musical journey of his own.

Along the way, he’s released no fewer than eleven studio albums under an array of variants of the Foetus moniker, not to mention quite literally dozens of other musical vehicles from big band (Steroid Maximus) to more experimental instrumental work (Manorexia) and almost everything in between, not to mention powerful collaborations with Marc Almond (Flesh Volcano), Jim Coleman (Baby Zizane), Lydia Lunch (Stinkfist), and the late Roli Mosimann (Wiseblood), to name but three of many. And then there are the numerous scores… and yet whatever he turns his hand to, his work has a certain distinctive style, a sense of drama.

Foetus may have been on hiatus since 2013, but at the age of sixty-four, Thirlwell is showing no signs of slowing down. John Wisniewski managed to catch a window in the man’s relentless schedule to ask about his myriad projects past, present, and future…

JW: Did you formally study music, JG?

JGT: I briefly learned cello and percussion when I was a kid. But I was very slow with sight reading.

Later I just taught myself everything from instruments to recording, programming, scoring etc.

Tell us about your first music project, Foetus. What did you want to present?

The initial catalyst for Foetus was to create something totally by myself, where I played wrote and produced everything, as a reaction to the democracy of playing with other people. I wanted to make the music in my head and the music I wanted to hear. I also wanted to create artifacts, a work of art as a multiple where everyone owned an original. It took me a long time to be able to fully realize what was in my head. I’m still not always successful with that transfer process.

How did the Lydia Lunch collaboration come about?

I knew Lydia’s work and was introduced to her when she moved to London in about 1982 through the Birthday Party. At first she asked me to write her a press bio as I had been writing fanciful bios for the Birthday Party! First I played sax with one of her projects which we toured with in Sweden. Then we started writing songs for something called The Hard Diamond Drill, which was never realized. Then we created Stinkfist and went on to make Immaculate Consumptive. We became involved romantically and moved to NYC together. I was with her until about 1989 / 1990.

Any favorite music artists?

Many favorite artists, it changes daily. I become obsessed with someone for an afternoon. I like to hear new things all the time. I am a cultural sponge. I publish a monthly playlist on my Tumblr blog. https://jgthirlwell.tumblr.com/

What inspires you to create?

Everything. I have so many ideas, it is an infinite renewable resource. I also have a hungry legacy and I have to make sacrifices to its insatiable maw.

Another legendary early collaboration was with Nick Cave. How did that one come about?

The Birthday Party broke up. Nick was looking to work with other people and we were friends. We wrote the music for one song together, which was Wings Off Flies on the first Bad Seeds album. When he came to record that album I went to some sessions, but drifted away as I was in the midst of a big bout of recording of Foetus material, the sessions that became the Hole album. A bit later we had the Immaculate Consumptive project – Oct 1983.

Do you like collaborating with other artists?

I have gotten better at it.

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Photo by Marylene May

What was the experience like working with Marc Almond and Trent Reznor’s material?

Marc is very open minded and works very fast and is excited by music that challenges him and stretches the boundaries of what he has done. So that is stimulating. For Trent I remixed two of his songs, “Wish" and "Mr Self Destruct". I did my work on it, mutating the original material. he wasn’t involved. He liked what I did.

Do you like to work within different genres of music?

You may have noticed one of the hallmarks in my music, is that I combine multiple styles often within one song.

What are you working on now?

New Xordox album Terraform, Venture Bros Volume 3 and Foetus HALT should all be out in 2025.

Also under way are two albums of symphonies for chamber orchestra, and album of soundtracks I have written for Ken Jacobs. An EP with Laura Wolf, a triple box of music I created for sound and art installations. Hopefully another Archer soundtrack album. And much more.

Why do you have so many projects on the go (and how do you manage it)?
I like to work in a lot of styles and on a lot of projects in different forms – solo pieces, ensemble pieces, multi channel, electronic, acoustic, vocal, instrumental. Concert works, classic songs, scoring. I have a lot of ideas to get out of my system. There’s no one project that can harvest everything. There are things that I get out of my system with Foetus which are totally different to the place I am in when I create a sound installation, or a soundtrack,

My projects are usually staggered, which is to say a lot of projects in different states of completion. So I shunt them all along and they get completed in different paces. Then new ones sprout up. I couldn’t just work on one thing.

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Do you ever take time out and what do you do to unwind?
Yes I stop to watch movies, see art and travel. But my work is perpetual motion, I don’t need to unwind from it. I believe in being creative every day. That’s also manifested on ideas I have for visual art, photography etc
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I’ve read elsewhere that the upcoming Foetus album, as the title alludes, is slated to be your last. What can we expect from it?
Tying up forty five years of Foetus is no mean feat and I have been working on it for seven years. There are parts that make it seem like a continuum and other parts that have never been done in the Foetus context. It’s going to be epic.

AA

Catch up on JG Thirlwell’s output on his Bandcamp page.

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Howie Reeve and Friends – Leaf in Fog

Posted: 1 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Innis Orr / UR Audio Visual / Redwig / Bar Marfil – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Glasgow’s Howie Reeve could never be accused of being predictable, or dull. His musical output is eclectic, experimental, and more than that, it’s often spontaneous, energetic, and in-the-moment. His last release, in 2022, was a set of songs created with his (then) ten-year-old son. Before that, there was a live recording of Chassons (that’s Cathy Heyden on alto sax, practice chanter, tin whistle, and Howie Reeve on electric bass) performing at Le Maquis de Varielles, a document which captures ‘Both of us grabbing whatever else is to hand and occasionally ululating.’ This time around, there’s a whole host of accomplices doing more or less the same to lead the listener on a wild ride. Indeed, Leaf in Fog finds Reeve working with a substantial number of friends in order to realise this ambitious and wide-ranging work.

The title – and cover art – carries connotations of the natural world, perhaps a sense of drifting autumnal melancholy, but the actuality is something altogether more jagged, dissonant, tense and disorientation. There is an earthiness to the songs and their performance, but it’s rent with the kind of twists and spasms that tear the fabric like a psychotic episode.

‘Microscopic Liberties’ starts out – and concludes – as a work of ramshackle lo-fi acoustic folk that’s not quite folk but not quite anything else one could pin down as belonging to a specific genre either. In between, there are blasts of howling noise and slanting guitar slaloming askew across a wandering bass groove. There are moments where it goes a bit Pavement, others more They Might be Giants… and it’s only two and a half minutes long. ‘Water Catalyst’ follows immediately, and tosses in elements of prog, neofolk, medieval minstrel folk and jazz.

‘Apotrope’ may be but an interlude with a running time of a minute and twenty seconds, but it’s a sharp honk of straining horn, a fragment of dissonant jazz swirling in an ambience of voices and then some sing-song poetical narrative… it’s hard to keep up. The compositions, the song structures, border on the schizophrenic, or the aural equivalent of Tourette’s, but instead of being unable to hold back the ticks and sputter ‘tits, fuck, cunt, wank’, Reeve can’t leave a song to just drift along comfortably, and it’s always just a matter of time before spasmodic bursts of all hell break loose.

From among chaos, occasionally, moments of quite affecting musicality emerge: the pick and strum opening of ‘Shop Window’ is whimsical and at the same time somehow sad, and continues to be so even when chaos and discord and bleeps and whistles collide like a speeding juggernaut travelling in the wrong carriageway, obliterating the acoustic serenity. ‘Evidence’ begins subtle, slow, a dolorous bass trudging through lugubrious strings and a sparse, simple clip-clop rhythm. The vocals veer between light and lilting and wide-eyed and tense as the instrumentation switches and slides through a succession of unpredictable transitions, before ‘Trouser Tugger’ goes full Trumans Water, but with a more muted, bedsit indie feel, leaving you dazed and bewildered at the end of its clanging, jolting three minutes.

The songs on Leaf in Fog are predominantly folk songs at heart, and the core elements expose moments which are often quite touching and pluck at emotions which are just beyond reach, beyond articulation, obscured, perhaps, by fog, but equally obscured by fret buzz and crackles and crazed strings and horns and an endless array of additions and interruptions.

It would be impossible to pretend that Leaf in Fog is in any way immediate or especially accessible, and the truth is it’s likely simply too much for many. Like Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, there’s so much going on its dizzying and difficult, and requires a lot of focus, and energy, to listen to. But Reeve – with more than a little help from his friends – has conjured a bold work, brimming with charm and mysticism, imagination and madness. Venture into the fog and explore, but do tread carefully.

AA

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BMH – Sink Techno Song

Posted: 31 October 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Some time in the last decade or so, genre distinctions simply exploded to the point of obsolescence. People – many people, and I won’t deny that I’m not immune or above doing so – will spend endless hours quibbling over categories. Is it post-punk or goth? It is doom or stoner doom? Country, or Western? Or both? It does seem that the ever-fragmenting microgenre, once the domain of dance, with its infinite focus on detail, has more recently become a battleground within metal – but then, a friend recently described an act as being ‘Jungle adjacent’ and I felt my brain begin to swim. What I suppose I’m driving at is that artists themselves are breaking out of genre confines and the place we find ourselves now is a point at which anything goes. But listeners – not to mention labels and journalists – or perhaps especially labels and journalists – find themselves clawing desperately to define whatever it is. There have to be benchmarks, touchstones, comparisons. We’re simply not attenuated to music which doesn’t conform to some parameters or others. This is one of a number of reasons that I tend to try to focus my attention on what a work does, what it actually sounds like, the sensations and emotions it elicits and other more tangential provocations – because the way we respond to music tends to be personal, and instinctive, intuitive. One may react immediately, and enthusiastically to a punch in the guts from an overdriven guitar, or may instead feel a greater emotional stirring from something soft and delicate, be it an acoustic guitar, a harp, or a flute. In summation, one’s first instinct is not to assess whether or not those opening bars belong to a specific microgenre, at least when it comes to a ‘blind listening’ experience.

But then there’s always a spoiler, and here I find myself facing a ‘spontaneously-created acoustic punk techno EP made with a dripping tap’. What the hell do you do with that? How do you prepare for listening to something so far beyond the outer limits? Personally, I start by pouring a large vodka, and putting the light off.

The EP features four tracks; two versions of the title track, plus two versions of the longer ‘Water Sink Song’. The former centres around a relentless thudding beat, clearly derived from a dripping tap, with swishing, swashing, gurgling watery noises and other scraping and thumping and crashing incidentals. There’s nothing quite like taking the sounds from one’s surroundings and manipulating them in order to forge new sounds, and new sonic experiences. It’s life, but not was we know it. Or, perhaps it’s too close to life as we know it.

“Matt Jetten and I made the track in the sink at work,” says BMH’s Kate Bosworth. “The tap was leaking and we managed to get to it minutes before the engineer did. The original is in mono, but our mate Stuart Chapman (Terminal Optimism) suggested we ‘do a Beatles’ on it and bring it into stereo by duping and layering and adding effects etc. All in all, the process was very quick.”

‘Water Sink Song (End Dark Train 21st October 2024)’ features a haunting vocal which drifts mistily over a swampy swell and a thick wash of static, as well as more watery sounds, like heavy rain and swashing, glooping, the disconcerting sounds of ingress in a storm. The shuddering electronic rhythms call to mind Suicide, but with an esoteric folk twist; one can almost picture the performance of a pagan ritual at a stone circle in a torrential storm – but then stammering vocals cut through in a rising tide of mains hum and buzzing electricals. Synths buzz and crackle at the fade. The ‘Original’ version (17th October 2024) is more heavy rainfall and water running from a roofs onto gutters – or the sound of a number of men urinating hard onto a corrugated shed roof. Thuds, clatters, clanks, trickles and sprays, a bottle or jar filling at pace; the incidental sounds, the additional layers, are wet and uncomfortable.

It may be that my response is as much coloured – a hazy amber – by my recent experiences of a trip to Castlerigg stone circle in a saturating downpour, and a train journey whereby the train was rammed solid with rowdy football fans, who, unable to make their way to the broken toilets, resorted to urinating in water bottles and Costa coffee cups, which they left on luggage racks and on tables, while cheered on by mates passing more cans of cheap shit lager and a bottle of lager along the carriage.

Jetten’s vocals are breathy, semi-spoken, and there’s a sense that they’ve been recorded quietly in the bedroom of a flat or terrace, trying not to disturb the neighbours. There’s an element of triumph in the tone as Jetten announces the title, as if he’s utterly pumped by the experience – or something seedier.

As an experimental work that encapsulates the DIY ethos, this is a quality example of the kind of weirdness that can only happen independently. It’s perverse, and imaginative, and it’s different. Oh, and all proceeds go to Kidney Cancer UK.

AA

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