Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Ecce Shnak – Shadows Grow Fangs

Posted: 19 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Few bands are less predictable than New York’s Ecce Shnak, and their catalogue is a veritable smorgasbord of flavours and textures. Their last release was the standalone single, ‘Katy’s Wart’, a two-and-a-half minute grungy punk rager presented in the middle of a sort of weirdy supernatural teen drama short film. Before that there as the live EP Backroom Sessions, a 4-song live set recorded at Backroom Studios in Rockaway, NJ released to coincide with a US West Coast tour with Spacehog and EMF.

Then, there was their being featured in the video for EMF’s ‘LGBTQ+ Lover’.

And now, a year on, they finally return to promote their last studio EP, Shadows Grow Fangs, on the East Coast, before hitting Europe and the UK (sadly no longer part of Europe for trade and touring, despite its continental geography), again with EMF – a band who’ve evolved significantly since they first broke in the early 90s. It seems like an appropriate time to catch up with this varied and inventive five-song set.

‘Prayer of Love’ brings together an almost trippy, psychedelic vibe and shades off prog, with a shuffling beat and an almost Cure-like bass. There’s some guitar noise kicking away low in the mix, too, and contrasts abound, although it’s nothing in comparison to ‘The Internet’. It’s 2026 (yes, the EP was released in 2025, but still) – and The Internet has become such a fact of life it’s largely overlooked as a thing. News articles quote comments made in response to posts on X or Instagram as if they have some value, and no-one considers this weird or devaluing. How is it any different from quoting some bloke down the pub or a street heckle as commentary? The track opens with layers of chatter and the scrattering of a reverby shoegaze guitar, then a shuffling beat slides in and in an instant it’s a rap / opera / math-rock hybrid. In some ways, it feels like a retro hybrid that evokes the days when sampling and scratching were innovate and it’s at least twenty years too late, but at the same time, it feel timely, in that never before has shit been stranger, more messed up, more bewildering, as the generation gap grows wider by the week and the different generations – A, Z, X, boomers – evolve their own languages which are incomprehensible to anyone other than their peers. Does anyone actually know what anyone else is saying, let alone what’s going on?

The title track is bombastic and theatrical, but also a bit post-rock and a bit chamber pop and a bit drum ‘n’ bass. The last time I heard anything quite this headspinning was when I discovered Birdeatsbaby, who veered between dark cabaret and metal, while incorporating elements of classical and prog.

The EP’s final song, ‘Stroll With Me’ marks a significant shift, as a sparse, acoustic folk song with gentle organ tones, which is disarming and genuinely pretty.

None of the songs on here sound like any of the others, and nothing on Shadows Grow Fangs sounds like ‘Katy’s Wart’ – or anything else for that, for that matter: Ecce Shnak tunes are like a box of chocolates – only better, because they’ll not rot your teeth and will give your brain something to chew on. What they’ll do next is anyone’s guess, and the live shows are certainly going to be interesting.

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TOUR DATES
MAY 07  Philadelphia, PA, USA – Nikki Lopez
MAY 08  Buffalo, NY, USA  – Town Ballroom
MAY 09  Toronto, ON, Canada – Dance Cave
MAY 10  Montreal, QC, Canada – Bar Le Ritz
MAY 11  Boston, MA, USA  – City Winery
MAY 13  New York, NY, USA  – Sony Hall
MAY 14  Millersville, PA, USA  – Phantom Power
MAY 15  Baltimore, MD, USA  – Metro Gallery
MAY 16  Hamden, CT, USA  – Space Ballroom
JUN 02  Manchester, UK – Gorilla
JUN 03  Worthing, UK – The Factory Live
JUN 04  Portsmouth, UK – Kola
JUN 05  Southend, UK – Chinnerys
JUN 06  London, UK – The Garage
JUN 07  Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club

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Watch: ‘Lucky Cloud’ by Glissandro 70

Posted: 15 April 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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The experimental electronic duo of Craig Dunsmuir and Sandro Perri reimagines an Arthur Russell track, with longtime Russell collaborator Peter Zummo guesting on trombone.

‘Lucky Cloud’ is the opening song on forthcoming album G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa out 1st May 2026.

“’Lucky Cloud’ serves to bookend the whole project in a way, since it’s the new album’s first recording chronologically (from 2004) while also containing its last recorded element (Peter Zummo’s trombone from 2025), making it simultaneously the oldest and newest track on the record. Thanks and gratitude to Peter for his key contribution, to Steve Knutson for approving our cover of the song, and to Tom Lee and the estate, memory and legacy of Arthur Russell. – Glissandro 70

Hear ‘Lucky Cloud’ here:

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20 years after its self-titled debut, Glissandro 70’s follow-up straddles the Album and Archive: a decade’s worth of recordings that were abandoned, lost in a hard drive mishap, recovered in the form of rough stereo mixes, reappraised with the balm of time, and restored/augmented/enhanced to forge a captivating new LP.

Glissandro 70 is the collaboration between Toronto musicians Craig Dunsmuir and Sandro Perri, first formed in 2003 as a mostly studio-based project of longform loop-based guitar and rhythm-driven experimentation. An eponymous (and up to this point singular) album appeared on Constellation in 2006, blending Dunsmuir’s afrobeat and Perri’s tropicalia influences through their shared reverence for Arthur Russell and dub techno.

While continuing to collaborate musically and foster a close friendship, Dunsmuir and Perri largely went on to helm their own projects thereafter. Perri transitioned from his ambient electronic sobriquet Polmo Polpo to a string of acclaimed singer-songwriter albums under his own name starting in 2007, with a side quest as ringmaster for the inscrutably leftfield electronic collaborations of Off World. Meanwhile Dunsmuir continued deploying lo-fi loops and broken beat iconoclasm as Guitarkestra and Kanada 70 (whose early tracks provided the original birthplace of Glissandro 70) and intermittent live concert Hi-life extravaganzas at the head of Toronto’s Dun-Dun Band (recently captured on wax for the first time by Ansible Editions).

G70 2: Bones of Dundasa arrives 20 years after the Glissandro 70 debut as an archival celebration, revisiting unfinished paths and re-assembling rediscovered recordings originally made between 2005 and 2015. The new album includes a cover of Arthur Russell’s ‘Lucky Cloud’ (augmented by Peter Zummo’s trombone newly recorded in 2025) and a previously unreleased Dan Bodan remix of the debut record’s ‘Bolan Muppets’, alongside 10 tracks of sample- and beat-based vignettes brimming with skittish guile.

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Abigail Snail – Rad Berms

Posted: 15 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Romac Puncture Repairs – 17th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

While Rad Berms is Abigail Snail’s debut release, the musicians behind the name have a notable pedigree, and between them, drummer Will Glaser and guitarist Stef Kett (aka Stef Ketteringham) have numerous credits on record – and for Rad Berms, they’ve joined by ‘master reed player’ James Allsopp, who gets pretty much everywhere. And for this debut release, Abigail Snail’s promise ‘avant-rock, improv, and experimental soul groove into an adventurous collection of tender, boundary-pushing songs’.

After the gentlest of intros, the first track, ‘Show Breaking to Waves’ slowly derails before the arrival of the vocals. The vibe is rather Crooked Rain Crooked Rain era Pavement, only wonkier and significantly jazzier, particularly in the percussion. The instrumentation is sparse, the feel a shade folky… then ‘Soul Berm’, the first of the ‘Berms’ crashes in, wonky, scratchy, discordant. Counterpart ‘Space Berm’ sounds like a noisy tuning up / tuning down outtake, a chaotic interlude of jarring noise rock propelled by a jazz percussion break.

I remember reading a review of Trumans Water in the early 90s describing them as ‘the real Pavement’. Well, I think it was Trumans Water and not Archers of Loaf. AoL were kinda tame indie: Trumans Water were demented and truly off-kilter, taking the lo-fi slacker thing to a level that incorporated the weirdness of Captain Beefheart, down to the sounding like they were playing different songs in different keys and tempos, but all at the same time. This is a circuitous detour to arrive at the conclusion that Abigail Snail call to mind – well, my kind, which is a vault of disorganised musical files and recollections – Trumans Water, only even further out and significantly jazzier.

I appreciate that with every sentence, I’m probably alienating another ten per cent of potential listeners here. It’s probably for the best. Rad Berms is as niche as it is crazy, and it’s better to shed the ones who won’t dig it early on and save everyone the hassle of rubbing the wrong way.

A deranged howl of ‘Goooooood grief / That’s one batshit brief / Good Lord / How much shit can one chick hoard?’ delivered atop clanging, angular guitar that’s pure Shellac announces the arrival of single cut ‘Good Grief’, a raw, riotous blast of jazz and math-rock melded together. They explore a host of genre forms across Rad Berms, but manage to incorporate some jazziness into most of them.

‘Attach Bayonets’ lands in the middle of the album and brings with it a mellow psychedelic / desert rock feel, like a slacker retake of America’s ‘Horse with No Name’, only with bongos and woodwind – and no obvious hook. But you get the idea. Hopefully. It’s kinda trippy, primarily acoustic, and at times quite discordant. Laden with melody and harmonies, ‘Stay Rad’ is mellow, too, a quintessential slice of slacker indie with a dash of 60s psychedelia. There’s daftness in abundance here, and at times it does seem as if they’re just testing us as listeners while they dick about showing off their technical prowess and simply demonstrating their capacity to make music that doesn’t conform to any convention, and the fact they’re too cool for choruses, or even structure anyone can follow. ‘Yikes Bikes’ and ‘Bitchin’ Chords’ in particular feel indulgent, albeit in quite different ways. But why not? There was a time when bands would say in interviews that they made music for themselves, and it was a bonus if anyone else liked it. It became a cliché, and of course most of them were lying. But now? Who makes music to get rich and famous? Some, for sure, but the majority appreciate now that it’s not going to happen, so they may as well make music to please themselves – which is precisely what Abigail Snail are doing here. There’s no way you could accuse these guys of being predictable or lacking range.

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King Midas – Blanco

Posted: 13 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Fysisk Format – 17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

King Midas’ seventh studio album is the follow-up to their 2013 Norwegian Grammy-winning album Rosso. Thirteen years is quite the gap, although such spans between albums seem rather less unusual now than in times past. In the 90s, the five-year gap between The Stone Roses eponymous debut and The Second Coming was painted by the press as being longer than an eternity, but the last few years have seen acts return after absences of a quarter century or more. The fact is that many artists find themselves mired in life and in dayjobs, because it’s hard to make a living from music alone, and regular work and raising families aren’t compatible with creative work, and especially not with touring. And so it is that Blanco arrives more than thirty years after their first EP, From the Pipeline, in 1994, and notably, they report that the band ‘still consists of founding members Ando Woltmann and Per Vigmostad who share production credit for Blanco’.

According to the duo, ‘Blanco is an album about emptiness, partly inspired by Belgian cold wave music from the early 1980s, by the noise cancellation in BMW models from 2023/24, by New Age as a concept, by the novel Lanzarote by French author Michel Houellebecq, by Rod Stewart on his way home from a party in the wee hours and by yuppie Scandinavian businessmen in all forms’.

This seems like a curious array of inspirations, and I can only comment with any real knowledge on Michel Houellebecq’s typically bleak and anticlimactic novel and Rod Stewart, whose 80s work haunts me on account of childhood memories if my mother dancing to awful, awful songs ‘Baby Jane’ and Atlantic Crossing still got played far more often than was healthy. But then, I was also exposed to dangerous levels of Phil Collins and Tina Turner, which probably indirectly explains my immersing myself in writers like Houellebecq, who I arrived at on the publication of Whatever, which was described by Tibor Fischer as ‘L’Etranger for the info generation’.

According to their bio, ‘Blanco marks a brand new start for King Midas – a tabula rasa, a blank slate – where all methodology, instrumentation, composition and production are untried ground, and all paths have been trodden anew’.

‘Sunrise’ is a drifting sprawl of muiltitracked autotuned vocals which quiver and warble over some expansive, semi-ambient synths. It’s novel and vaguely entertaining, but you hope to dog that the album gets better, and mercifully, it does, conjuring expanses of quite claustrophobic, beat-driven electronica.

As an exploration of emptiness, it works well: the vocals are largely sampled and / or looped, creating an atmosphere of detachment, human sounds without the human presence, while the instrumentation is minimal in its arrangement. There’s no comfort to be found here, no human warmth, just stark monotony, beats that thud on, and on, and on… I never really took to dance music because it felt… impersonal, is perhaps the word which summarises the experience. And that’s despite being a fan of late 80s and early 90s electronic industrial music. Anyway. Blanco seems to take those elements and turn a mirror on them. It is repetitive, impersonal, monotonous… and that’s the comment. And there are flickers where there’s a near-silent acknowledgement. ‘Look’ brings a strongly eighties feel, and things fall into place around the BMW comments with ‘Blaupunkt’. A friend of mine bought an 80s BMW in the early 90s and thought he was flash as hell with his aircon and bangin’ stereo, although we’d be freezing our tits off while he burned fuel at an alarming rate with the aircon on and the stereo sounded shit. I’ve digressed again, but this is what happens with albums which are largely instrumental, and ‘Blaupunkt’ sounds like Kraftwerk nabbing bits of Ennio Morricone and chucking in a bit of New Order circa Movement. It’s pretty cool, and also hypnotic, but also intense.

The eight-and-a-half-minute closer, ‘Infinite Sadeness’ is slow, deliberate, expansive, the pulsating beats which define the album as a whole replaced by altogether sparser, more minimal, and subtler percussion, and with the introduction of flute it adds a new dimension to the sound.

Blanco is varied, and takes some time to come around to. The indefinable absence is affecting, and reverberates around these taut compositions, which emanate a sense of emptiness, assimilating all aspects of its dominant theme. But patience is the key. It’s as a whole that Blanco works.

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Zero Swann – Ones Who Love

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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8th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Six months on from Benefactor, and Washington D.C. improvisational psychedelic outfit Zero Swann are back again with Ones Who Love. This marks quite a step up in output following a two-year gap after 2023’s Amon Zonaris.

Once again, it’s a set built around theatrical, gothic vocals, drones and cacophonous percussion, feedback, and more drones, all wrapped in layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of reverb.

On first hearing the album’s first song, ‘Chrisom’, I had to hit the pause button a few times to check there wasn’t some other music playing on one of my open browsers. There wasn’t. One might reasonably draw parallels to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, which to my ear (an ear which has been exposed to one hell of a lot of strange experimental shit) sounds like people playing different tunes in different rooms of the house, with the doors all open while you’re standing in the hallway. But the experience is truly more akin to MySpace circa 2007, when every post and profile would be playing music and you’d spend an age trying to figure what you needed to mute while slowly going mad. The drums don’t seem to be in time with themselves, let alone the abstract instrumentation, and the vocals float around in that sea of reverb as if in another dimension entirely. It’s not only disorientating, but quite quease-inducing.

This is – as anyone familiar with Zero Swann will know – the template for the album. The hectic, multi-layered percussion on ‘White Lips’ splashes around in a swirl of treble, reverb, and phase or flange, while amidst a stuttering bass throb and chaotic mess of noise. This is lo-fi to the max: black metal production values applied to Batcave-era goth with a heavily experimental edge.

It’s all going on with ‘Shrine Slavery’: drum ‘n’ bass beats put through the mangle and a thousand effects are paired with haunting, howling layers of shoegaze guitars, while Jeremy Moore comes on like Michael Gira in his messianic mode circa Children of God, calling the end of days while all burns around him. The title track is a towering, hypnotic monster of sound on sound, and it feels huge, not to mention apocalyptic and terrifying.

The derangement continues on the murky ‘Pig Scalder’ with echo-soaked guitars to the fore – the quintessential US ‘death rock’ sound (something that very much separates the UK and US interpretation of ‘goth’) – but with swirling chaos behind it all. With so much going on, and in all directions all at once, it’s virtually impossible to concentrate on or otherwise pick out the lyrical content, and while this may be detrimental in some respects, the fact of the matter is that this is Zero Swann’s sound – messy, multiplicitous, discontiguous. And it’s best approached by simply letting it all happen, immersing oneself in the mayhem. It’s impossible to pick apart the separate elements – and equally impossible to piece them together.

‘Tidal Skull’ again brings a dingy, doomy, gloomy gothy morass which is hard to penetrate and even harder to decipher and unravel, and ‘Storage Organ’ is a riot of sludgy, sepulchral darkness. Ones Who Love is hard going. And I actually dig it – but it’s one seriously challenging listening experience. The last song, ‘What You Never Wanted’ lurches and lumbers its way through five and a half minutes of sludge that stands practically waist-deep, and you slosh and crawl and trudge your way to the end. There are no short cuts, no easy routes, no alternative directions.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s no other act around which sounds like Zero Swann. On Ones Who Love, Moore goes deep and goes dark. Spectral structures emerge from thick fogs of noise and reverb, very like ruins looming through gloom. Gloom and ruins essentially summarise what Ones Who Love gives us. As was the case with its predecessor, Ones Who Love is not an easy or accessible album – to the extent that it often feels like a test, a challenge: enjoyment and appreciation are not the same thing.

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Gintas K – Merzmania

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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gk. rec. – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s a clue in the album’s title as to what Gintas K’s latest musical venture is about, and while neither Merzmania nor anything else in Gintas K’s catalogue comes close to the harsh noise of Masami Akita, there are clear connections and parallels between the two artists, in particular the prodigious output, and their propensity for taking experimentation to its absolute limit. Oh, and the occasional pun. Merzmania very much seems to echo Merzbow’s revelling in self-referential ‘Merz’ prefixes with album titles like Merzbeat, Merzdub, Merzbear, and Merzbuddha. It’s by no means an homage or stylistic lift, but a simple and seemingly sincere acknowledgement of a thread of influence. But anyone familiar with the work of Gintas K will already be aware that he is a unique presence within the field of experimental electronic-based audio works.

As he explains regarding this release, ‘Merzmania is electroacoustic live electronics pieces made using my own instrument made from a computer, Plogue Bidule software & midi controller assigned to VST plugins. All software parameters controlled, altered live in real time during performance using knobs & sliders of midi controller attached to VST plugins parameters. Performance made from synthesized sounds. Merzmania is a piece connecting classical music skills with today’s noise music (slight allusion to noise icon – Merzbow). Merzmania’s main playing method is real time interaction with the computer which I am using on all my live compositions’.

The tech stuff goes over my head, if I’m honest – but I’m more interested in the output than the input, and Merzmania provides 75 minutes of sonic mayhem. From swarming, skittering microtones which crowd in a dizzy delirium, through warping drones and groans, fairground organ sounds, and the occasional subaquatic detonation, it’s all going on, and often simultaneously, as is very much the case with the first piece, the 9:41 ‘merzmania#1 main’. Five minutes in and my head is spinning and I’m experiencing a huge anxiety spike and a sense of being overwhelmed. ‘Mania’ is very much the word here.

‘merzmania#2’ is the sound of a thousand digital hornets clustering around a dial-up modem struggling to connect – for nearly eight minutes, while ‘merzmania#3 dreaming’ makes you wonder what kind of dreams this guy has. It’s by no means nightmarish, but the rush of discord very much instils the sensation of rising panic, the palpitations of an anxiety dream. There’s something that fleetingly resembles a break from some drum ‘n’ bass, and again, the fact that there’s so much going on, all at once is… headspinning. And I mean… holy shit. Just when you think it couldn’t get any wilder, any more frenzied, any more overloading or intense… Gintas K manages to take it up not just another notch, but another two or three.

‘merzmania#5 slow’ does offer some respite from the insanity, but its syncopated toots and scratches and hums and crunches are far from soothing, and the space becomes increasingly sonically crowded as it progresses. The stereo panning is nothing sort of brain-melting, and nowhere more so than on ‘merzmania#6’, tinkling chirps and motorised hums and drones, the sound of a piano being played by a dozen cats while an engine revs… the hum of the power lines…

While employing much of the same technology and largely the same performance techniques of previous releases, something about Merzmania feels like a step forward for Gintas K. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what, but that’s likely because my head is swimming with a tonal assault. But also, it is different: many of the sounds are more piano-like, more overtly ‘keyboardy’, in place of the bubbling froth which dominated many of his past works.

There’s distortion and fizzing static and pure noise on ‘merzmania#8 spare’, and ‘merzmania#10 hum’ essentially speaks for itself. And even with all of the live demos posted on his YouTube channel, just how Gintas K conjures this wild mash-up is difficult to assimilate. Because, but really, how…? It’s a lot to process. Life, the world, everything, really. And this latest Gintas K album does not help. But if it wasn’t this, something else would assault the senses, in other ways. Gintas K’s work will never offer a diversion or escape, but it does provide a different kind of mental overload. The final track, the second ‘slow’ is very much more gentle in the main, a tinkling taking the lead, but some roars like the revving of a motorbike overtaking, and explosive noise obliterating the finale.

Merzmania finds Gintas K at his experimental best, and pushing beyond the parameters set out on previous works, which were in themselves boundary-pushing. This, then, is the outer limits… but there’s a sense that he’ll still go on from here, too.

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Exit Void – Void of Escape

Posted: 7 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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3rd April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Exit Void represents the coming together of no fewer than six notable names from the Austrian scene. Some may even designate them the title of ‘supergroup’. Their bio spins it that ‘EXIT VOID functions as a spontaneous search for sound, where the distinct artistic signatures of Manfred Engelmayr (Bulbul), Katrin Euller (Rent), Alex Kranabetter (Drank), Wolfgang Lehmann (Voyage Futur), Anja Plaschg (Soap&Skin), and David Reumüller (Reflector) collide in productive friction, giving rise to music that remains open to the unpredictability of the moment.

For context, they first played together in September 2025 at Dom im Berg in Graz, and first came together to work on a soundtrack for a video installation, and we learn that ‘the ensemble combines electronic and acoustic instruments with structured compositions and open improvisational passages’.

There’s little room for experimental passages on this single release, though, with ‘Void of Escape’ clocking in at just over four minutes, and virtual flipside ‘Residual Breed’ at a minute and a half.

The former is an off-kilter and intriguing composition that builds – from a lone, mournful trumpet, subsequently joined by slow drumming which is simply immense, positively industrial… but is nothing compared with the powerful vocal performance. The lyrics themselves are sparse, but Anja Plaschg’s delivery is nothing short of devastating in its power.

Lately, I myself have struggled to articulate the thoughts circulating – or moreover frothing in a wild frenzy – about my mind. I can’t keep pace with the news. I lived through and watched – compulsively – the Falklands War, and the first Gulf War. I was a kid, and it felt exciting, especially living near an RAF base and during the Falklands I would the planes take off over the back garden, and later see them on the news. But right now is the worst and most scary shit we’ve ever seen unravel in real time on TV, streaming live 24/7, and then there’s social media… It’s hard to find the words.

On ‘Void of Escape’, Exit Void keep it simple and focused ‘War in the East… War in the West…’ Plaschg sings, with all of her lungs. And that’s it – succinct, simple, direct: there is war everywhere: the world is at war.

‘Void of Escape’ hits hard, a powerful musical experience and a statement of… of what, exactly? It feels like music for the apocalypse. It’s music of the moment.

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Abel Autopsy – uunder

Posted: 6 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With his debut release, Abel Autopsy makes his ambition clear, announcing that uunder is envisioned as a journey within a three-part series, with the next two releases in the series being overr and outt, and promising ‘dark, melancholic, shapeshifting worlds that slide between light and shadow’. Although the inconsistency of the double letters on this first release from those projected to follow disturbs my sense of necessary balance, I can close my mind to it while opening my ears and concentrating on the music.

The nine tracks take the form of layered, atmospheric synth-dominated compositions, and Abel Autopsy sets out the context for these thereal works, which evoke haunting (super)natural landscapes by electronic means.

“This started in my youth – pulling apart various musical instruments (battery powered) while in the woods of Appalachia. There was an eerie, ethereal vibe almost like something ‘other’ in the wilderness with me. That permeates through all of the songs and is woven in the mental tapestry throughout. This album is an exercise in capturing that – the balance between light and shadow, feeling another ‘presence’ with you that is not entirely from here.”

The vocals on ‘ghostride’ are muffled, indistinct, the words – if there actually are any – indecipherable, serving more as another instrument than anything else. The pieces are bold, sweeping, cinematic, the ambient tendencies given form by solid mechanised beats which are up in the mix. ‘unfound’ and ‘gates’ land in the space between later Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, the latter also spinning in dance tropes and the haunting monasterial sounds of Enigma music.

He is very partial to the big thunderclap blast when making a change in key or tempo, or simply stepping up the drama – perhaps excessively so, as there are moments when things do feel a bit formulaic – something compounded by the comparative uniformity of the track durations, which are all within the range of 3:01 and 3:37 (three of the nine have a run time of 3:37).

‘mycenae’ tweaks the template to accentuate the contrasts between light and dark and thanks to a super-full, extra-low bass, goes darker than anywhere else on the album, and the crackling static which fizzes through the introduction of the heavier, more distorted ‘nihill’, which concludes the set, brings a sense of decay and a doomy finality.

There are some neat ideas spread across uunder, and the execution is similarly neat, with a clear attention to detail. More variety, particularly in terms of tempo and dynamics would likely create greater impact, but it’s a promising start, and it will be interesting to see how Abel Autopsy evolves over the next instalments of the trilogy.

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Melvins with Napalm Death – Savage Imperial Death March

Posted: 5 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 10th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What better pairing could there possibly be than the gods of grindcore paired with the supreme lords of sludge? It’s hard to think of one. They’ve toured together under the Imperial Death March banner in 2016 and 2025, but this is their first release together – and it’s not a split album, but a truly collaborative work, featuring members of both bands. It was recorded at the Melvins’ Los Angeles studio, with Buzz Osborne (vocals/guitar) and Dale Crover (drums) joined by Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway (vocals), Shane Embury (bass), and John Cooke (guitar).

And as advance single releases ‘Tossing Coins into the Fountain of Fuck’ and ‘Rip the God’ forewarned, so it is that Savage Imperial Death March is one absolute fucking beast of an album. It’s ‘Tossing Coins’ that kicks it off, a rabid overload of guitar mayhem, grindy riffery and wild guitar breaks underpinned by dingy riffs, all played at breakneck speed. Greenway gives guttural growls all the way and it’s nothing short of a sonic blitzkrieg. It’s very much a positive to summarise it as being a sum of the parts.

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The nine and a half minute ‘Some Kind of Antichrist’ is much more Melvins – with the weight of Bullhead, but as if the 33rpm album was being played at 45: thick, megalithic, speaker splitting riffs, but on Red Bull, and Buzzo’s hyper vocal countered by Greenway’s salivating growl. It’s a wild, filthy mess, and it goes on, and on, and it’s fucking fantastic – even when, or especially when, it goes weird about four minutes in. because weird is, good, and Melvins are good at being weird. Sometimes, they’re not quite so good at being weird, as the Prick and the ‘Cowboy’ single attest, but like they give a fuck. Melvins have always pleased themselves, and that’s reason enough to love them, if not necessarily all of their releases. You could hardly call Napalm Death crowd pleasers, either, and their lineup’s as been as evolutionary as their sound.

‘Awful Handwriting’ is a brief experimental electro-led interlude that’s daft and noisy in equal measure, and stands in total contrast to the grungey post-metal crossover of ‘Nine Days of Rain’ which immediately follows. Credit where it’s due, this album brings some stylistic surprises which sound like neither band, let alone what you’d expect from the two combined, and this is very much one of those songs.

After the sludge-grunge of ‘Rip the God’ which marks the start of the album’s second half and is very much on the side of the Melvins’ style, there’s a rush into the fast and furious, and while it’s wild and heavy and full-on and loud, it’s also fun, and entirely serious, it is not. With operatic vocals and bold, cinematic synths, ‘Comparison is the Thief of Joy’ leans very much toward the experimental side, while the final track, ‘Death Hour’ just goes all out of the riffery and guitar overload, with raving raw-throated vocals courtesy of Greenway sitting alongside Buzzo giving it his most Ozzy, before once again, shit gets weird. It’s as if they can’t help themselves. Ach, we’ve done some riffs, let’s fuck shit up and go weird… yeah, man. And why not? Neither band has anything to prove after all this time. And now it’s time to embrace the strange… but the keyboard riff from Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ played limply at the end…? That might be a step too far.

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Stine Janvin / Morten Joh – Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway

Posted: 4 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza  – 24th Match 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, it is Good Friday, so it seems an appropriate time to settle down with a large whisky and some candles to engage with an album of funeral procession music from Ryfylke, Norway. And as the title suggests, this is actually what this collaborative album contains:

Rooted in the bygone custom of ‘Liksong’ (literally ‘corpse song’) that was once sung by small groups of singers who guided rural funeral processions, Janvin and Joh tap into its uncanny, unbearably slow intervallic structures, reanimating the practice as a kind of ancient electronic microtonal devotional music. Voices and vocal effects, synths and melodic percussion seep into the cracks between major and minor, and the whole thing carries the creaking weight of ceremony, yet glows with an otherworldly modernity, as if a forgotten liturgy had been retuned for a dimly humming chapel of circuits.

The duo, with Janvin on vocals and electronics and Joh on synths, tape machines, and percussion, also enlisted Lucy Railton (cello) and Jules Reidy (electric guitar).

The nine tracks present a remarkably structured, linear funeral journey – and while the premise of the album is already most uncommonly literal, so is the linear structure, which begins with ‘Leaving Home’ and concludes with ‘Postlude’, which it arrives at via ‘Pasing neighbours’, ‘Before the burial site’, ‘By the grave’, ‘Lowering the coffing’, and ‘Processing grief’, among other almost instructional titles.

The pieces them selves are quite minimal in their arrangements: drones, hums and haunting, folk-inspired vocals, bathed in reverb and surrounded by echo come together to create soundscapes which are haunting, and, at times, other-wordly. ‘Pasing Neighbours’ is a slice of detached, rippling electronica, which on the surface couldn’t be further removed from ancient Nordic rituals… and yet Janvin and John succeed in subtly manipulating the sounds to conjure something which reaches deep into the psyche with its rippling dissonance.

There’s a gravity to this album which underlies the twisting, processed electronic experimentalism which is befitting of the subject and the context, and while ‘Passing neighbours’ does amalgamate shoegaze with robotix 80s electro, it doesn’t feel disrespectful to the source.

‘Rest – Bordvers’ which features Jules Reidy) is a sliver of ghostly folk which sounds like spirits ascending over an early Silver Jews outtake, and ‘Before the burial site – Jeg Raader Eder Alle’ is a heavily processed, almost space-age reindentation of a folk incantation – but it’s the haunting, eight-minute ‘By the grave – Akk, Mon Jeg Staar I Naade’ which really grips the attention with its ghostly wails and insistent pulsations and expansive, arcing drones. The dronerous ‘Lowering the coffin’ features vintage spacemuzak ripples and reverberating ululations contrasts sharply with ‘Processing grief’, which begins hymn-like, before swiftly transitioning to shuffling, fractal synthiness reminiscent of Tangerine Dream.

One suspects that in this modernisation, in this translation, something has been lost. But at the same time, this interpretation serves to keep an ancient heritage alive. And this is the sound of dark woodland, of glaciers, of spartan spaces – ice-dusted woodland. Often, it’;s trult beautiful, and this is nbowhere more clear on ‘Acceptance – Kom, Menneske, At Skue Mig!’, another piece which is more than seven minutes in duration.

The final track, ‘Postlude’ is gentle, and even alludes to a brighter future on the horizon. For mem it feels a little soon, although there s no use of timescale by which to orientate oneself available in the immediate entrance of the accommodation.

Having spent the last three years processing – and documenting – grief following the loss of my wife, Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway is a difficult album to approach on a personal level. But there are times in this expansive, exploratory work, that death, in all its suffering, has been muted and spun into niceness – if not a palatable, packageable sound.

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