Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

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.

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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

Eamon the Destroyer – Alternate Piranhas EP

Posted: 29 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Bearsuit Records – 31st May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

There was a time – not so long ago – when I would come home from work and struggle to nudge the front door open with my shoulder for the mountain of CDs that had been dropped through my letterbox, along with the occasional ‘sorry we missed you’ card telling me I had a parcel at the depot awaiting collection or to arrange redelivery, and more often than not it would be some vinyl, and all of it promo material for review. I had a box – which was initially a shoebox, but later replaced with something larger – which was my ‘to-review’ box, after the pile kept falling over once it reached an unsustainable height. It was a storage nightmare, and I still have boxes containing quite literally thousands of promo CDs with press releases folded up with them, in boxes in the walk-in cupboard and the end of my office, which is, in truth, too stuffed with boxes of CDs to squeeze more than a toe into, rather than actually walk in.

Working in an office as I did then – rather than at home – I would take a bundle of CDs in a jiffy in my bag, and sit and listen to them as I worked. It beat enduring the often moronic drone of the people around me, and I’d tap out notes which I’d email home to myself to flesh out into full reviews in the evening.

My working method has changed rather since then, and while still working the dayjob, I’ve barely set foot in an office other than the one in the back bedroom of my house since lockdown. I haven’t received stacks of CDs in the post for a similar length of time, if not longer. For all of practical issues around the stacks of CDs, I do kinda miss it, and this is one of the reasons I always get a thrill at the arrival of a disc in the mail from Dave Hillary, who runs Bearsuit Records. The other, and not insignificant reason I always get a thrill at the arrival of a disc in the mail from Dave is that I’m eager to discover what mad genius work the label’s releasing next. I enjoy slipping the disc in the external CD drive I have attached to my laptop and soaking in the strangeness that spills from my speakers: I’m never disappointed.

I love the fact that I still get CDs in the mail, with promo cards and handwritten notes and so on, from Bearsuit, not just because of the joy of the physicality and the personal touch, but because it’s emblematic of the label as an entity. It does what it does, regardless of whatever else is happening, and it releases music the likes of which you simply won’t find anywhere else.

Eamon the Destroyer is a classic case in point. Another typically enigmatic artist in the Bearsuit tradition, Eamon the Destroyer has enjoyed a great run of releases to date. Debut album A Small Blue Car was a work of fuzzy, minimalist , downtempo brilliance. A sad, introspective work, it was unexpectedly touching for something so overtly odd, and follow-up We’ll Be Piranhas pushed further into forging songs that straddled the dreamlike and the nightmarish, a disorientating, discombobulating work that delved deep into the psyche in a way that felt like invisible fingers creeping inside the cranium and directly massaging the brain.

And now we come to the more or less obligatory counterpart release. Instead of the standard and expected remix EP, Alternative Piranhas gives us outtakes alternative takes of tracks from the album. A cynical voice might ask why they didn’t make the album cut, but there are myriad valid reasons: an album need to cohere and sometimes even the best tunes don’t fit with the flow, and similarly, the mood of one take or mix may in fact be better objectively, but not quite sit with the context.

And so it is with the five tracks here. All five appeared on We’ll Be Piranhas. While exactly the same length as its album counterpart, ‘A Pewter Wolf’ presents a quite different mix: the organ is much more boomy, more ‘churchy’ than on the album version, while the guitar sounds, almost buried on the album blurred and hazed out low in the mix, are more up-front and gritty here.

The version of ‘Rope’ on Alternate Piranhas seems to be in a different key, and is much grainer, murkier and messier than the more polished album take, and it’s more abrasive, more aggressive, with the vocals more up-front, and the result is that I found myself hearing thee song anew and soaking in the anger which permeates it, less obviously on the other version, tempered by the more mellow mix.

Overall, the versions on Alternate Piranhas are rougher, less ‘produced’, and it’s not difficult to discern why the versions chosen for the album were the ones they were. The album worked as a cohesive set, with an even, smoothed-out sound – well, in context – but Alternative Piranhas provides an insight into the process, which is never more apparent than on ‘The Choirmaster’. It’s not radically different… but it is different, while the alternative take of ‘My Stars’ is half the length of thee album and feels like a sketched-out demo. But again, it possesses qualities absent from the album version, just as the album version has elements which are absent here, including another five minutes of sound.

Alternate Piranhas feels more overtly rock than its progenitor, and perhaps it is, but above all, it’s a source of enjoyment to revisit these songs from a different perspective.

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Yannis Kyriakides – Hypnokaséta

Posted: 28 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Unsounds – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to being a music writer, for me, at least, perhaps even more of a buzz than getting advance listens of the most eagerly-anticipated releases is being exposed to music I otherwise wouldn’t have. And the nature of the avant-garde means that you have to be in the know to know. Being introduced to the Unsounds label and the work of Yannis Kyriakides certainly opened my eyes – and more so my ears – to a whole expanse of music I assumed must exist, but would have had no obvious means of locating or accessing while going about my ordinary life before.

Although I’ve only dipped in and out of Yannis Kyriakides’ output, more as one with a casual interest than a fan per se, his work has never ceased to impress with its range and constant questing for something different, something new, both sonically and methodologically and “Hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is no exception.

Kyriakides’ introductory notes explain both the concept and the practice behind the recording of the album: “Hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is a continuous set of 16 pieces for string quartet, improviser (playing cassettes and any instrument) and live electronics. The source material is based on dreams that I had during the first few months of lockdown, April-June 2020. Accounts of these dreams are encoded in the music that is played by the quartet and also encrypted in the sound textures that surround this.

“The pieces alternate between quartet as the foreground and electronic interludes, where solos or duos underpin the soundscape. The title of the piece (Greek for ‘sleep-cassette’) refers to a theory of dreams proposed by Daniel Dennett, that says that dreams are loaded into consciousness like a cassette tape during the night and played just before waking.”

It’s longtime collaborator Andy Moor who provides the guitar and tape work on these recordings, and together with Kyriakides’ electronics, which move between shuddering skitters and unsettling scratchiness and quite abstract sounds, when juxtaposed with the strings – which span playful to mournful to droning discord.

The sixteen pieces have been mastered as six separate tracks, but they flow as one immense composition in a continuous state of transition. Within each of the six numbered tracks, the individual segued pieces bear titles, with their time markers also noted. The titles present, if not strictly a narrative, then a guide to the theme, the idea, the inspiration.

‘Hypnokaséta I’ comprises ‘The government’s new cultural scheme’, ‘All roads to the airport are blocked’, and ‘Everyone is nervous, everyone is lost’, titles which serve to encapsulate the events and the sensations they engendered within the populace at the strangeness and uncertainty of lockdown.

‘Hypnokaséta III’ is a stunning work of contrasts, containing as it does the gentle, almost light-spirited string-led ‘The reluctant hotel manager’ and the dramatic, jarring ‘She lifts the mountain’, a dark, alien drone brimming with electronic tension that crackles and tweets. The rapid switches in mood and form recall the sudden and wild extremes I experienced myself during this time: it was impossible to keep up with the constant stream of developments in the news, while at the same time entrapped within the confines of the house, where the world outside felt so very far away, while also having to accommodate the changeable and diverse headspaces of friends, family, and colleagues. No-one knew what the fuck was going on, or how to cope.

There was an air of unreality about it all, and at times it became difficult to distinguish between the bewildering nightmarish reality of the wakeful hours and bewildering nightmarish sleep, and in drawing on dreams in the creation of Hypnokaséta (2020-2021), Kyriakides captures the essence of that abstract space forged in the mind where everything blurs. This blurring and abstraction is also reflected in the titles: ‘The concert promoter complains that not much happens in the piece’ sounds like something that could happen in one of those self-reflective semi-anxiety dreams, and ‘Bridges are being dismantled

across the city’ has an apocalyptic sense of separation, while ‘Body swap opera’, ‘Swimming pool synthesis’, and ‘Mutations on an empty grid’ are altogether more surreal in their connotations.

Throughout the album, the lister is jolted from a moment of tranquil reverie by some abrasive thud or rasp, an unexpected spike in volume, and a turn towards an altogether more disquieting atmosphere.

The composition is nuanced, the placing of the switches and transitions perfectly timed to achieve optimal impact, never allowing the listener to truly settle, to relax, to sit back and enjoy, and the moments of tension are indeed tense; but credit must also go to the performers: the strings are played with a keen awareness of the importance of both dynamics and detail, and Moor, in his capacity of ‘improviser’ brings texture and tone delivered with an infallible intuition. The album’s structures may be subtle, almost invisible, but they’re affecting, and as a whole, Hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is an experience which permeates the psyche in unexpected ways.

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Crushtrash & Nicholas Langley – Prosthetic Self

Posted: 27 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It seems as if every album of the year has been released on this date, May 24th – and by every album of the year, I mean all of the releases have landed at the same time, but also that this album and the other ‘best album’ contenders have all landed simultaneously, too. It’s meant that I’ve been absolutely swamped, and struggling to listen to everything, let alone formulate thoughts and render them coherent – something I fear I struggle with at the best of times.

Surveying this release, I learned that ‘Prosthetic Self is a collaboration between CRUSHTRASH & NICHOLAS LANGLEY that seamlessly blends the energy of early ‘80s dark industrial synth pop with the mesmerising allure of ’90s electronica. Drawing inspiration from iconic acts like Coil, The Associates, Depeche Mode, Björk, and Portishead, this album is a sonic journey that transcends time and genre boundaries.’

It does feel as if every electronic act with a dark leaning wants to be Depeche Mode, and every electro-based Industrial act is essentially wanting to be Pretty Hate Machine – era Nine Inch Nails – who in turn sounded a fair bit like Depeche Mode if truth be told. That’s no real criticism, as much as an observation of the extent to which those two acts broke ground and created new templates in the 80s. However, the industrial elements of Prosthetic Self hark back to a time before Nine Inch Nails, and presents a more experimental form.

The tile, Prosthetic Self Connotes a sense of falseness, the fake exterior we apply to ourselves in order to deal with people and society. Workplaces – particularly offices – tell us to ‘be ourselves’ at work, while at the same time telling us we need to leave our problems and personal baggage at the door, but at the same time seem incapable of dealing with non-conformity. Well, come on then: what do you want: individuals or clones? Prosthetic Self is an exploratory work which presents a multitude of facets, and it’s a fascinating journey which leads one to the question as to what is real and what is construct, artifice. The cloak, on the cover, with its empty hood feels like a representation, not necessarily for this collaborative project, but the album’s themes, searching for what lies beneath the prosthetic self: is there, indeed, anything at all? Then again, how much here is style, and how much is substance?

There’s certainly a lot of well-studied style on display. ‘Bring Some Change’ is dark but also soulful, and their referencing The Associates hints at the almost operatic stylings of the vocals at times, and against some stark backings prone to some unexpected sonic ruptures and moments of heightened tension and drama, I’m also reminded of Scott Walker.

‘Claustrophobia’ is appropriately-titled. ‘In my dream, something’s wrong, caving in…’ Crushtrash croons with hints of Dave Gahan in his delivery against a slow-moving murky throb. But there’s a really attacking percussive loop that knocks on the top of your skull which makes it tense rather than soothing, and before long, panicked breathing gasps in the darkness, and you’re drawn into the nightmare.

Elsewhere, glitching, knocking beats shuffle and click, and the production really brings these to life in a way that makes you clench your jaw and tense your shoulders. ‘Selective Memory’ has something of a collage structure about the way the sounds are brought together and overlaid, with sampled snippets woven in alongside the bubbling vintage synth sounds.

In places, the kind of retro vibes which permeated 90s trip-hop seep into the shadowy atmospherics, and ‘Subtle Fetish’ comes on like Marc Almond in collaboration with Tricky, spinning lascivious wordplay along the way.

Prosthetic Self creates a lot of atmosphere with minimal arrangements, and they work because of the close attention to detail, the multiple layers of percussion which pulse and snake through spartan synths, more often than not with a simple, repetitive bass overlaid with subtle details, in a fashion which adeptly recreates the sound of the early 80s. In doing so, it recalls a time when so much was new, innovative. Coming at a time when there is so much sameness, and production and mixing has come to be all about the loudness, to hear a set of songs which really concentrate on dynamics and detail, it seems unexpectedly different.

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