Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Beige Palace – LIVE For The Very Last Time (2016-2024)

Posted: 28 August 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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27th August 2024

Christopher Nisnibor

Just read that bio, and reflect for a moment:

Beige Palace was a band from 2016 to 2024. During that time we released two albums, an EP, a split 7" and some other miscellaneous bits. We toured the UK a bunch, we managed to play shows in France and Belgium, and we opened for some of our favourite bands like Shellac, Mclusky and Dawn of Midi. It has been lovely!

These are no small achievements. But for all of them, Leeds’ leading exponents of low-key lo-fi have been humble and kept it DIY throughout their eight-year career. Fans inevitably feel a sense of loss at the demise of any band, but as someone who was present at their first ever show and having followed their progress through the years, this feels like a particularly sad moment. It shouldn’t: the members have moved on to become Solderer, with the addition of Theo Gowans, a Leeds luminary, gig promoter, purveyor of mad noise as Territorial Gobbing, and one-time member of Thank, another of Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe’s vehicles, and of course, they’ve all received coverage here along the way.

So we shouldn’t feel sad. Instead, we should celebrate the achievements of a band who seemingly set out with no ambitions other than to make music for themselves. But still… I was in attendance at their first show, and as I documented at the time, and as I’ve mentioned in subsequent reviews, they were ace. Unassuming, a shade awkward, perhaps, but warm, human, and appealing in the way they presented their set of sparse, minimal tunes, Young Marble Giants were my first-choice reference point.

How YMG, a band whose album was released on Rough Trade and who have been the subject of a number of articles, not to mention being referenced and covered by the likes of Hole, remain obscure, I will never comprehend. But no matter: Beige Palace picked up their baton and, er, hid it under the settee.

In contrast to the wildly flamboyant dayglo-sporting Thank, Beige Palace were always the introspective, introverted musical counterpart who hung back, heads down as they looked at their shoes. Beige Palace’s successes happened almost in spite of the band themselves. That’s no criticism. They were a great live band, and they released some great music, too. I’m reminded of one of the other great DIY Leeds – via Bradford – bands, That Fucking Tank, who bookended their career with recordings of their first and last shows. Without the documents, the events would be but myths and legends.

This looks like being the first of two retrospective releases, and as a recording of their last live show – which neatly bookends my experience of the band, having attended their first – makes my case about the quality of their performances.

LIVE For The Very Last Time (2016-2024) presents a career-spanning set, with opener ‘Mum, Tell Him’, ‘Dr Thingy’, and ‘Illegal Backflip’ representing their 2019 debut album, Leg, and a fair few cuts from Making Sounds for Andy packing out a varied set, which culminates in single ‘Waterloo Sublet’.

But there are a handful of unreleased songs here, too: like Thank, Beige Palace were always focused on the next project, the next release, and as the very naming of ‘Waterloo Sublet’ illustrates, irreverence was their thing. ‘Local Sandwich’ is a perfect illustration of their quirky irreverence, as Vinehill-Cliffe rants about, yes, a local sandwich shop.

LIVE For The Very Last Time (2016-2024) captures everything that was great about this trio. Awkward, honest, slightly disconnected between-song chat is integral to the experience, and there’s plenty of that – including comments on someone’s wind – on this warts-and-all, as-it-happened recording, captured in Leeds in the intimate but awesome grassroots venue, Wharf Chambers, where the sound is always good – and loud – the audiences are friendly, and the beer is cheap.

There are no overdubs, there’s no polish or pretence, and LIVE For The Very Last Time (2016-2024) is all the better for the fact. The mix isn’t always balanced – the vocals are half-buried and times and the guitars are way loud at times, but what you get is a feel for being in the room.

The music is gloriously wonky, skewed, angular math-rock with some valiant forays into noise. The vocals and guitar both veer wide of melody; it’s the lumbering, loping, rhythm section that keeps everything together: without them, it would be a complete disaster. But this is how some bands work, and Beight Palace always sounded like a band on the brink of falling apart, in the same way Trumans Water always sounded like they may or may not make it to the end of the song as they jerk and jolt their way through waves of chaos.

‘Update Hello Blue Bag Black Bag’ which lands mid-set making its debut and final appearance is unexpectedly evocative, and the eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Dinner Practice’, also unreleased, hints at the trajectory they might have taken on their next album.

Beige Palace were never going to be huge: they were cut out for cult fandom, and comfortable with that, being one of those bands who made music for fun first and foremost. It’s the sense of fun that come across here. Even in the most downtempo songs, what comes across is that they’re enjoying playing. They will be missed, but we look forward to their next incarnation.

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Album review and video exclusive: ‘I Cocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend’ and ‘Hashish (The Yelling Song)’ by ShitNoise

Posted: 19 August 2024 in Albums, Previews and Editorial, Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 11th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

For those unfamiliar with ShitNoise, their bio describes them as ‘a noise punk band hailing from Monte-Carlo (Monaco). Formed in February 2022, the band has undergone several lineup changes. Currently, it consists of Aleksejs Macions on vocals and guitar, Vova Dictor on guitar, and Paul Albouy on drums.’ What’s more, they reckon their third album, I Cocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend, ‘showcases their most energetic and mature work to date… Departing from their previous noise-centric style, the band blends grungy guitar riffs, metal-influenced double-kick drums, and a more polished production. The album explores themes of confronting the harsh realities of society and the lasting psychological impact of traumatic events. Through gritty soundscapes and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, it paints a raw portrait of present-day existence and the enduring human spirit in the face of adversity.’

I’m often wary of bands and artists who claim to have matured: all too often it means they’ve gone boring, that they’ve lost their fire and whatever rawness, naivete, edge, that made them stand out, drove them to make music in the first place. But these things are relative, and ShitNoise isn’t just a gimmicky moniker, but a fair summary of what they do. Here, they’ve stepped up from no-fi racket to lo-fi racket and evolved from the trashy punk din with dancey and electronic elements that at times sounded like a Girls Against Boys rehearsal recorded on a Dictaphone, toward a more wide-ranging and experimental approach to noisemaking. As for the album’s title… well. Was the act an accident, one of stupidity, gross negligence, or intentional? Either way, as the adage goes, with friends like these… ShitNoise are certainly not the friend of sensitive sensibilities, or eardrums.

So sure, they’ve ‘matured’ inasmuch as they’ve broadened their palette, but in doing so, they’ve discovered new ways of creating sonic torture.

‘Ho-Ho! (No More)’ launches the album with shards of shrill feedback and distortion: it’s two and a quarter minutes of nails-down-a-blackboard tinnitus-inducing frequencies and deranged yelping that’s somewhat reminiscent of early Whitehouse, minus the S&M / serial killer shit. Not that I have a fucking clue what they are on about, and the noise is so mangled it’s impossible to differentiate any of the sound sources from one another – guitars sound like screaming synths, and there’s so much dirty mess in the mix everything sounds so broken you begin to wonder if your speakers are knackered.

Proving just how much they’ve ‘matured’, ‘Brown Morning’ barrels into churning noise driven by thunderous beats as the backdrop to a rappy / spoken word piece, after which the arrival of the fairly straightforward punk tune ‘Gum Opera’ feels like not only light relief, but somewhat incongruous. But then, in the world of ShitNoise, anything goes, as long as it’s noisy shit. And keeping on with the noisy shit, there’s the gnarly Jesus Lizard meets Melvins gone rockabilly slugging sludgepunkfest of the oxymoronic ‘Pleasant Guff’ to go at, and it’s abundantly clear that they’re absolutely revelling in following their curiosity in every direction when it comes to exploring any and all avenues of racketmongering. I Cocked My Gun is wild, and wildly divergent, stupid, chaotic, and fun.

If the off-kilter grunge of ‘X-Ray Phantom’, with its incidental piano tinkling along behind crunchy guitars hints at something approaching a kind of sensitivity – and a closet ability to write songs – ‘Endless Void’ demonstrates their capacity to step back from noise completely, and venture into near-ambient territories, and with remarkable dexterity.

But mostly, these deviances only serve to bolster the impact of the manic racketmaking which dominates the album, which brings us to the epic penultimate track, ‘Hashish (The Yelling Song)’ – a ball-busting seven-and-a-half-minute stoner-doom slammer that slaloms its way through some heavy drone and some explosive psychotic episodes… and we’re immensely proud to be able to present an exclusive premier of the video which accompanies this mammoth slab of sonic derangement right here:

Get it in your lugs. Let it permeate every cell. Bask in the insanity. With I Cocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend, ShitNoise have really gone out on a limb, and while teetering on a precipice of madness, have proved that artistic fulfilment lies on the other side of mania. It’s a far more enjoyable place than the everyday in which we find ourselves of late, so why not dive on in?

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Gwennaëlle Roulleau & Reinhold Friedl – strata & spheres

Posted: 3 August 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 9th August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Reinhold Friedl was one of the composers / musicians who provided an introduction to new musical forms to me when I started doing this ‘properly’ late in 2008. I’d done bits and bobs of reviewing in local and regional inkies in the mid- to late-nineties, but at that time, I was very much preoccupied with a fairly narrow spectrum, not that I realised at the time.

While I had got into the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire at that point, it was while researching my PhD on William Burroughs’ cut-ups that I came to appreciate John Cage and the prepared piano, meaning that when I was introduced to the work of Reinhold Friedl, I was finally ready.

I certainly don’t want to perpetuate a sense of elitism around this kind of music or art; quite the opposite. I feel that comprehension grows from exposure, and that what’s needed is wider exposure to art which is considered niche. Anyone who has studied the avant-garde will have likely come to understand that much of what is mainstream has evolved from the avant-garde, the underground, before being repurposed, repackaged, commodified and marketed. This is the nature off the avant-garde; this is the nature of capitalism.

But like Burroughs, like Cage, Friedl has remained fringe, underground. The same is true of Gwennaëlle Roulleau, whose biographical details seem rather more obscure.

strata & spheres is a quintessentially experimental collaborative work, which brings together the elements of both contributors in equal measure, with squelchy, microtonal rivulets running through the channels which lay open between slow, ponderous chimes of almost piano notes. Surges and scrapes, like factory workings or excavations, rub against glitchery insectoid flickerings and harsh polar winds.

More often than not, albums such as this, even when released as a download, tend to feature compositions of a similar length, broadly corresponding with sides of vinyl, be it two or four. This seems to be something that many avant-gardists have ingrained in their creative psyche, a certain connection to physical formats – which is rather strange, when one considers the function of the avant-garde, and, simultaneously, the way in which physical formats are now inherently entwined with nostalgia. But strata & spheres is unevenly weighted, and conspicuously so, with ‘Papillon’ having a duration barely over five minutes after the ten-minute ‘Tectonique’, before the two ‘side two’ pieces each spanning a solid fifteen minutes.

In context, the discordant scrape, the buzzing discord, the rattle and crash of piano abuse and broken mic distortion of ‘Papillon’ feels like a mere interlude – albeit a chaotic, violent one. But then, the elongated drones and sighs of ‘Entre les vides’ and ‘Frottements’ are far from mellow; these are difficult, disjointed compositions, full of twangs and scrapes and sounds which simply set the teeth and lungs on edge, and you find yourself, on the edge of your seat, neck muscles tense. The former flits between doomy drones and hyperkinetic movements like liquid mercury rolling as if shaken around a maze.

Clattering, clanking, chiming, and slow liquid bubbling conclude the track before heavy drones and fracturing, snapping strings split apart the arrival of the woozy, droney, fragmented ‘Frottements’. Twangs and scratches pass through low hums and hovering feedback, creating a haunting, atmospheric effect.

While violence and chaos breaks out around the country, strata & spheres may be far from an exercise on calmness and blissful relaxation, but it is immersive and a work which offers a certain escape from reality and the every day. The fact that it’s sonically quite weird at times is welcome.

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Ulrich Troyer – Autostrada del Brennero

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vamberator – Sleep the Giant of Sleeps

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cowhause – Break it Like This

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gintas K – Electroacoustic Space Drumming / Outsider’s

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Machine Mafia – Killzones EP

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Incidental Crack – No More Bangers

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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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.

AA

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