Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Madrelarva – Tierra de Silencio

Posted: 18 December 2023 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 24th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Spanish electronic musician Julio Tornero has been producing minimal techno, IDM and experimental music since 2015. He’s one of those people who has a million different projects and as many different pseudonyms, also recording as Dark Tibet, Oceanic Alpha Axis, Sequences Binaires, with his work published by a multitude of labels including Fmur, Intellitronic Bubble, Detriti, Phantasma Disques.

I never cease to be amazed by artists who simply effuse and froth with creative output: how do they do it? How do they have the time, let alone the headspace? Given the economics of art in the 21st century, the likelihood of a life on the further recesses of obscurity in the most obscure of genres could provide a living seems improbable, but then to have the capacity to produce art after the slog of a day-job seems almost superhuman. And this, this is not just some easy, off-the-cuff, going-through-the-motions half-arsed toss-off.

Tierra de Silencio is pitched as ‘A homage to the formative years and evolution of electronic music’, with nods to Nurse With Wound and other progenitors of that nascent industrial sound, which was born primarily out of a spirit of experimentalism, and a desire to be different, facilitated as it was by emerging technology.

It’s perhaps hard to really assimilate now how the late 70s and early 80s witnessed a technology explosion, which not only witnessed the advent of new synths and drum machines, but saw them become available on a low-budget, mass-market basis. But while many bought them up and started making synth pop, some oddballs did what oddballs always to and decided to push the kit as hard as they could. And some of the results were utterly deranged. Tape loops and all kinds of messing yielded results with varying degrees of listenability, from Throbbing Gristle to NWW to Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire.

With only four tracks, this is one of those albums which would lend itself to an extravagant 2×12” release, with a track per side, since these are very much longform works, with ‘Duermevela’ stretching out beyond seventeen minutes, and the title track lasting more than a quarter of an hour. But if the expectation is for a set of compositions which are primitive, difficult, and in some way steeped in nostalgia for that early 80s noise, this isn’t that album. Despite the analogue feel, Tierra de Silencio finds Tornero exploring the spirit of the period, rather than striving to recreate the sound.

The first track, ‘Metamorph’ splashes in at the dancier end of the spectrum with some hard groove vibes. Fast, urgent, flickery, and glittery, it’s a shimmering curtain of electronica which ripples over a driving, dynamic beat that doesn’t let up. It’s got heavy hints of DAF, but it’s still not without a taste of Yello or Chris and Cosey. And it keeps on going for eleven and a half minutes. In time, the beat peters out and we’re left in a whirlpool of fizzing electronics.

The aforementioned ‘Duermevela,’ the album’s second track, draws on 70s electronica, with endless bubbling, rippling synths and incursions of altogether harsher sounds. Blasts of dark noise deluge over the bleak explosions of dankness. The beats are busy, and also metrononomic, and the effect is mesmerising.

Something dazzles for a moment. Then the lights flicker. What is this? This is likely panic. Negatividad Absoluta binks, bonks, bleeps and tweets, and the atmosphere is 70s sci-fi, something on the cusp of strangeness, jarring, alien, robotic. There are crunches and fizzes, crackles of distortion, and top-end tones ping back and forth like ping-pong.

Tierra de Silencio is very much an album which pushes an experimental vibe, while maxing out on what feels now like more contemporary dance tropes, largely on account of the rippling synths and glooping repetition. But it also incorporates elements of Kraftwerk and early Human League in its deployment of those vintage synth sounds and layerings. It’s an intriguing and entertaining work, and it passes hypnotically in what feels like no time at all.

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Plague Rider – Intensities

Posted: 15 December 2023 in Albums, Reviews
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Transcending Obscurity Records – 10th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Somehow, despite James Watts having about a dozen musical projects on the go, with each touring in support of recent releases in addition to running a label, Newcastle quartet Plague Rider have come together once more to record a new album. It’s been out a few weeks already, but now, in addition to the myriad packages which include all the merch bundles you could possibly want and more besides, from mugs to denim jackets, it’s available on some pretty lurid-looking coloured vinyl. One might describe the retina-singeing flame-coloured hues of the disc as intense, which is fitting, given not only the album’s title, but its contents.

All of the various outfits featuring Watts are at the noisy end of the spectrum: the man has been blessed – or cursed – with vocal chords which have the capacity to evoke the darkest, dingiest, most hellish pits of hell, and the ability to transform the least likely of objects, like radiators and so on, into ‘musical’ instruments capable of conjuring the kind of noise that would bring forth demons.

Whereas Lump Hammer are devotees of relentless, repetitive riffs, and Friend are heavy buy dynamic, Plague Rider are… Plague Rider.

This isn’t just about Watts, though: guitarist Jake Bielby is of Dybbuk, and ex-Live, Lee Anderson (no, not that one) on bass is ex-Live Burial, and ex-Horrified), as is Matthew Henderson on drums. They make for one mighty unit, who, according to the accompanying notes, exist to weave together ‘vile, repulsive, and challenging death metal music whose original influences are now twisted and decomposed beyond recognition. Sure, you can find bits and pieces here and there, traces of hair, fingernails, broken teeth fragments, but overall their music is too far gone for any obvious comparisons. And that’s only remarkable because it adds an element of uniqueness and unpredictability in their music, a rare thrill to be derived from this style these days.’

There is so much going on all at once, it’s brain-blowing. It’s not technical metal, because it’s simply too raw, to ragged, and it’s not jazz, because, well, it’s just not – but they apply the principles of jazz to extreme metal, resulting in a mess of abrasion that’s… I don’t know what. I’m left foundering for marks and measures, for adjectives and comparisons and find myself grasping at emptiness. ‘Temporal Fixation’ explodes to start the album, and within the first three minutes it feels like having done six rounds in the ring. It’s as dizzying an eight minutes as you’ll experience. When I say it’s not technical, it’s still brimming with difficult picked segments and awkward signatures – but to unpick things, the technicality is more jazz-inspired than metal, the drums switching pace and fitting all over. The vocals are low in the mix, lurching from manic frenzy to guttural growling at the crack of a snare.

And at times, those snare shots land fast and furious, but not necessarily regularly. The rhythms on this album are wild and unpredictable – but then the same is true of everything, from the instrumentation to the structures. The mania and the frenzied fury perhaps call to mind Mr Bungle and Dillinger Escape Plan, but these are approximations, at least once removed, because this is everything all at once.

It’s as gnarly as fuck, and if ‘An Executive’ is all-out death metal, it’s also heavily laced with taints of math rock, noise rock, jazz metal and grindcore. It’s a raging tempest, an explosion of blastbeats and the wildest guitar mayhem that sounds like three songs all going off at once, and that’s before you even get to the vocals, which switch between raging raw-throated ravings and growls so low as to claw at the bowels. The sinewey guitars and percussive assault of ‘Modern Serf’ are very Godflesh, but in contrast, immediately after, ‘Toil’ is rough and ragged, and dragged from the raw template of early Bathory.

The lyrics may be impossible to decipher by ear, but thanks to a lyric sheet, it’s possible to excavate a world that’s broadly relatable to the experience of life as it is: ‘Psychically exhausted / Yet still plugged in and wired’ (‘Temporal Fixation’);

‘An Executive’ nails the way corporate speak has come to dominate everyday dialogue:

‘Chant the slogans

With conviction

Doesn’t matter

What we tell them

All that is solid melts into PR’

Fuck this this shit and capitalism’s societal takeover. As if it’s not enough to dominate the means and the money, the cunts in suits are taking over the language, too. But they’re not taking over Plague Rider. No-one is touching them as they lay convention to waste with this most brutal album. ‘The Refrain’ takes the screaming noise to the next level and brings optimum metal power for almost ten minutes before, the last track, the twelve-and-a-half minute ‘Without Organs’ is grim and utterly relentless.

With Intensities, Plague Rider deliver a set that lives up to the title. It’s utterly brutal, frantically furious, and devastatingly dingy. It’s almost impossible to keep up with the rapid transitions between segments, and it’s likely many will move on swiftly because it’s simply too much. But that’s largely the point: Intensities spills the guts of dark, dirty metal. Utterly deranged, this is the best kind of nasty.

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Splat R. – Kill Spill Thrill

Posted: 8 December 2023 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

What better way to mark the start of advent than with a new release on Newcastle’s Panurus Productions, home of noisy and weird shit on tape, eh?

This latest offering covers both bases, being noisy and weird, but predominantly weird.

Panurus releases always come with cracking explanatory notes, and they’re worth quoting for this one, too:

‘Glitching and laced with interference from its temporal transit, Splat R. intercepts nine broadcasts of lo-fi noise drenched beats from a possible future. Hooks lead you through what could be samples, generated electronica or interference noise, that at times meshes and augments the beat and others swells over and underneath it with a sense of menace. There’s a sense of retro-future to the album in its tones and the recognisability of some of the sound used, but presented as if those ideas were carried further forward before being thrown back towards us, warped and distorted; as if it was constructed from pieces of culture scavenged in the aftermath of some distant cataclysm.’

My work here is done.

Of course, I’m not being entirely serious, but whereas many press releases bring a heap of hype, much of which is a world apart from the product being presented, or otherwise fails to really explain what the release is about, Panurus always absolutely nail it in their summaries.

But of course there is more. ‘Kill Spill Thrill’ is a murky, messy mash-up which evokes The Last Poets, Dalek, and RZA’s Bobby Digital, as well as glitched-up, chewed-up, mangled elevator music. It’s chilled-out hip-hop, trip-hop, and ambient tossed together, melted down, and left to fester and ferment for a while. ‘peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it’ adds a whole load of wrecking bass and distortion to the bubbling dingy mess, lurching into the territory of dirty experimental industrial noise in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, only with samples thrown in hither and thither. ‘reality denied comes back to haunt’ is plain fucking horrible: lurching booms of thunderous noise and trills of feedback and wailing synths pushed to their limits in a power electronics meltdown suddenly segues into a crackling mess of club-friendly dance, but distorted in a nightmarish way.

‘authentic creation is a gift to the future’ lurches so hard as to reach the pit of the stomach, before ‘there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns’ pumps a beefy beat that’s pure nightclub – but obviously, the vibe is anything but buoyant or euphoric. It’s bad trip, apocalyptic, the dance dynamics distorted to the shade of a nightmare, fizzing sparks and subsonic detonations occurring simultaneously, like a nuclear blast landing a direct hit on a night club.

I can’t decide if I need to puke or shit as the messy mass of stuttering overload stammers and rolls and lurches onwards. This is glitch of the highest order: the briefest, almost imperceptible of stammers are amplified to the most uncomfortable, blurring, bilious horrors which emulate the worst post-binge room-spin.

Kill Spill Thrill is a splurging, intestinal-churning, head-shredding sonic attach that lands thick and heavy. For all of its touchstones, it doesn’t sound quite like anything else, and it rips the ground before it to devastating effect.

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Palmer ++ Procter – what does the fjord say and what do we say in reply?

Posted: 1 December 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Yes, that’s fjord, not fox, meaning you won’t find these collaborating sound artists bouncing around the woods dressed as furry animals, making daft, random sounds. Well, you won’t find them bouncing around the woods dressed as furry animals, anyway, although Dave Procter did spend many years performing while wearing a latex pig’s head, but he put a stop to that after David Cameron started turning up at his shows.

This latest collaboration between Martin Palmer and Dave Procter is, in fact, inspired by the site of previous experimental audio tests in 2019, namely the sculpture “what does the fjord say?” in Trondheim harbour. As they tell it in the accompanying notes, ‘Armed with percussive sticks, contact microphones, audio recorders and the occasional toy and synth, they set about a full exploration of the sculpture and their own sonic ideas in and around the sculpture, using created and environmental sounds to answer the question posed by the sculpture. These recordings are Palmer and Procter’s replies.’

The first reply ‘støyende arbeider’ is more of a lecture than a simple reply, with a running time of twenty-one minutes. Consisting of random clatters, crashes, squidges, squelches and shifting hums which ebb and flow amongst an array of incidental intrusions, it’s more of a non-linear rambling explication, and exploration of the rarely-explored recesses of the mind than a cogent conclusion. But then, why should a reply necessarily be an answer. This, then, is a dialogue, a discussion, not an interview constructed around a Q&A format. It’s nothing so formal, and all the more interesting for its being open-ended, evolving organically. There are points at which the thuds, clanks and scrapes grow in their intensity, creating a sense of frustration, as if attempting to unravel a most complex conundrum and finding oneself stuck and annoyed by the fact that there is something just out of reach, something you can’t quite recall. And at times, this is also the listener’s experience. The way to approach this is by giving up on the expectation or hope of coherence, or anything resembling a tune, and yield to the spirit of experimentalism.

‘Moose Cavalry’ and ‘Mock Paloma’ are both significantly shorter pieces, the former being atmospheric and evocative, the animalistic calls conjuring images of beats roaming moorlands in the mist. Plaintive, droning moans and lows transmogrify into warped, pained cries and needling drones. The latter is different again: dark, tense, shrill tones scratch and scrape, flit and fly, reverberating from all directions. It’s unsettling, uncomfortable.

These three compositions are so different from one another, it superficially makes for a somewhat disjointed set, but on deeper reflection, what Palmer and Procter have forged a work which demonstrates how it’s possible, and even desirable, to approach a subject from multiple angles and perspectives. I still don’t know what the fjord says, but I do know that Palmer and Procter have posed some interesting musings in response.

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Jim Haynes – Inauspicious

Posted: 30 November 2023 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 8th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s often difficult to keep up with artists’ outputs, especially the super-prolific ones. Jim Haynes not quite make the super-prolific category, but having first written on his work with a review of The Decline Effect back in 2011, I’ve covered three albums between 2017 and 2021 alone. I tend to take a particular interest in albums released through The Helen Scarsdale Agency, which despite sounding rather prim and literary, is a label which has a particular knack for platforming music of an experimental and often difficult and noisy nature.

Haynes’ work has become progressively harsh over time, and the press release for Inauspicious notes that this has been particularly true post-pandemic, while acknowledging the cliché that the pandemic marked a pivotal point for many musicians. Crucially, it notes that ‘The tools for Haynes’ work remain limited: motors, electronics, shortwave radio, found objects, all applied with considerable pressure. Compositionally, Inauspicious is a very rough moire pattern from overlapping elliptical structures that can negate and obfuscate just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. The album surges and collapses upon the two twenty minute chunks of controlled noise that follow an internal logic that snakes from brooding power drones, spectral radio transmission, and an aktionist demolition cast upon metal, glass, and unfortunate wooden objects. Rupture and release. Purge and pulse.’

As such, while the output, and the dynamic may be different, Haynes’ fundamentals remain unchanged, and this matters, in that it demonstrates that more often than not, the end product is not so much dependent on the input and the raw materials, but their application and the process.

Inauspicious features just two compositions, ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ and ‘Variant, Number Fifteen’, which each run to precisely twenty minutes apiece. It’s a work that’s seemingly designed for a vinyl release, with each piece occupying a side of the LP, and I daresay that the dank ambient rumblings have their greatest impact when rolling from the grooves of a thick chunk of vinyl. Still, it works digitally when played through some decent speakers which afford air to the album’s slow, granular churnings. It’s not that fat into ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ that it’s built to a brain-shredding blast of drilling noise. Beneath the ear-destroying mesh of treble and shredding abrasion, there are swells and surges of lower-end noise. It’s easy to overlook the slight details in the face of such a wall of abrasion, but it matters. While Haynes is bringing a relentless assault, it’s important to pause by the details, and Inauspicious is abrim with them, although ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ spins into a restless ancient howl in its final minutes and tapers into a dank rumbling that brings a heavy tension.

‘Variant, Number Fifteen’ brings more of the same: heavy drone, grainy texture, harsh noise, spluttering and droning,  a deep sense of ominous foreboding, only with lower, deeper, more resonant bass, the tone of which drags on the lower abdomen among the swishes and swirls. And then grating mid-range abrasion. It’s hard to know how to react to this truly painful grind. By turns, I feel as if I need to defecate and vomit, although in the end I do neither as I simply clench my stomach during passages of this dark mess.

This is an album that brings noise and it brings pain. It’s a relentless grind and growl, and not for the first time, Jim Haynes has tapped into a sense of awkwardness which really grates and grinds.

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ZAHN – Adria

Posted: 19 November 2023 in Albums
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Crazysane Records – 24th Nov 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The press release describes Zahn as a ‘German post–modern noise rock ensemble’, while their bandcamp bio offers ‘A bold escape from your daily life through technicolor transmissions of post–rock, krautrock, dark jazz, noise–rock, post–punk and electronic music. Influenced by the likes of TRANS AM, THE JESUS LIZARD, METZ, THE MELVINS and TORTOISE’, adding that ‘Adria is a compelling soundtrack to a 1980’s anti–utopian road movie!’

As a prospect, it’s head-spinning, sounding like an everything-all-at-once hybrid, and the actuality isn’t much different. There are plenty of driving grooves, largely propelled by solid bass and insistent drumming, but there are also some angular riffs and big splashes of noise.

The first track, ‘Zebra,’ boasts a bulbous bass with some big low-end and some easy, noodly synths which wibble and wander agreeably and mellifluously… and then towards the end it builds and distorts and things get altogether more twisted and less pleasant. And this is a feature characteristic of the compositions on show here. They don’t mash everything into every second simultaneously, and there’s none of that jazz / Beefheart kind of stuff that sounds like each band member is playing a different tune in a different key and time signature all at the same time. There are times where that kind of avant-gardism most definitely has its place, and works, but this isn’t what Zahn are doing here. In keeping with the road movie concept, the pieces are constructed around transition.

The ten-minute ‘Schmuck’ is a magnificent example of their ability to do mellow, with clean sounds and even a tinge of a country twang, it swings along breezily and evokes sunshine and expansive vistas. Then, near the seven-minute mark, the bass steps up to a crunching grind and things get a whole lot noisier, from where it builds into a big, driven riff which crackles with energy. ‘Yuccatan 3E’ is another colossus of a cut, running to almost nine and a half minutes and manages to take it time in pushing outwards and working a single passage for a fair while, but equally packs in at least three or four songs’ worth of ideas.

The changes feel organic, and sometimes emerge gradually, and at others there will be a sudden and unexpected swerve, and there’s so much happening that the absence of vocals barely registers.

Because the mood, tone, and tempo differs so radically between songs – and between sections – Adria very much does feel like a journey, through space and time. ‘Apricot’ is a sparse synth work with crispy vintage drum machine snare cutting through quavering analogue synth sounds – then, without changing the instrumentation or the simple repetitive motif, it goes massive. A post-rock Depeche Mode chronically undersells it, but it’s as close as I can get, at least off the top of my head. The final minute is an extravagant climax, and truly magnificent.

The majority of the album’s eleven tracks run past five minutes, with the majority sitting more around the seven-minute mark, but the eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Faser’ is the album’s megalithic centrepiece. It blasts hard with a fuzzy, scuzzy repetitive riff cycle with stoner rock tendencies, and it’s dynamic and exhilarating. Dropping down to bubbling synths in the breakdown around six minutes in, the threat of a re-emergence of the heavy lingers suspensefully. When it does land, it does so with a vengeance, before transitioning once more into something altogether different again, skittering its way into Krautrock territory.

The power blast of ‘Tabak’ hits square between the eyes and feels unexpected however expected it actually is. These guys are absolute masters of the unpredictable and varied structure, and conjure some highly evocative and atmospheric passages, and while the playing is technical, it’s not technical for its own sake: there’s nothing showy or extravagant, and the focus is very much on the compositions, the structures, and the impact. ‘Amaranth’ piledrives a full-on doom riff, slogging away at it for what feel like an eternity. It’s a heavy trudge, and really hits the spot – again, when you least expect it.

Adria straddles many, many genres, and does so in a way that’s incredibly imaginative. The key to its success is its execution, which balances precision with passion.

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Sun Color Sound – Ritual One (Climbing the Fire into the Sky)

Posted: 17 November 2023 in Albums
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Mind Altering Records – 13th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Back at the start of 2021, I penned a pretty positive review of the solarminds album Her Spirit Cracked the Sky. The combination of ambience and extreme weight was a thrilling proposition. And it was – and still is – monumentally epic. It feels a long time ago already, and much has happened in the interim. If emerging from the pandemic was trailed for a long time by the release of myriad ‘lockdown’ projects, we’ve subsequently trickled into a ‘world’s turned to shit’ phase, and like the pandemic, it feels like there’s no end in sight. Trump may be out of office, but he still looms large and continues to pose a threat in the arena of world politics, and it’s a world at war, and a world where alternately wild fires and floods decimate swathes of land. Slowly but surely, the planet is becoming less inhabitable. And yet, still, people jet off on skiing holidays and bemoan the lack of snow despite being the cause of the lack of snow, and whenever it rains, people take to their cars to make five-minute journeys to avoid getting wet, thus ensuring it will rain an awful lot more in the time to come.

And since the release of Her Spirit Cracked the Sky, after more than a decade, Chris Miner has put the project to bed. But, like the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes, he now returns with Sun Colour Sound, and the first in a projected trilogy of releases. On the evidence of this first one, it will be something special.

Ritual One (Climbing the Fire into the Sky) consists of a single piece, which runs just short of half an hour, and it shares many elements with solarminds – namely a fair bit of noise, some hefty guitars and punishing percussion, at least in the first two thirds, and it’s heavy, harsh, noisy, and it crashes straight in with some grating, heavy drone, twisting feedback and thudding drums.

This is one of those tracks which stars like the end of many sets, and it feels like it’s winding down from the offing. This is by no means a criticism, simply an observation that what in the context of many works is a climactic, tempestuous crescendo finale, is simply the start of a ferocious sonic storm. It does very much call to mind Sunn O))) and the epic, swirling instrumental passages of contemporary Swans, although the guitars are very much geared towards generating howling feedback rather than crushing, clashing chords that sound like buildings being demolished. Therte’s something of a psychedelic twist in the spacey delivery, too. As whining, whistling notes ring out, the percussion builds from the occasional roll to a relentless thunder. The combination is immensely powerful, and assails the senses with a real physicality. Buy around the thirteen-minute mark, it’s reached wall-of-sound levels, a dense, shimmering sonic force which shimmers and ripples while coming on like a bulldozer, at the same time as hand drums fly at a frantic pace and evoking something spiritual in the midst of a hypnotic frenzy. And still, it goes on, surging forwards.

The shift in the final third occurs subtly: the percussion continues to clatter away, but the guitar abrasion tapers away, to be replaced by altogether softer strings.

Ritual One (Climbing the Fire into the Sky) is more than just a really long piece of music: it’s an ambitious piece in every way, and its scope and scale are immense. There is so much depth and detail here, and it takes repeated listens to really appreciate just how much is happening, especially given that the first reaction is simply to bow to its sheer sonic force.

But the last ten minutes belong to a different world from the first portion. Hypnotic, soothing, graceful, the tension dissipates and Eastern vibes radiate through the gauze-like layers which drift and float over the busy but altogether more subdued percussion.

So while it is an ambitious work, it also delvers far above any expectations, and it’s both unique and special.

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Listen: ‘Schmuck’ by ZAHN

Posted: 2 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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German post–modern noise rock ensemble ZAHN will release their second full–length album Adria on 24th November. Adria offers a bold escape from your daily life through technicolor transmissions of post–rock, krautrock, dark jazz, noise–rock, post–punk and electronic music. Influenced by the likes of TRANS AM, THE JESUS LIZARD, METZ, THE MELVINS and TORTOISE. Adria is a compelling soundtrack to a 1980’s anti–utopian road movie!

Adria was mixed and mastered by Magnus Lindberg (RUSSIAN CIRCLES, CULT OF LUNA) at his Stockholm studio. The cover artwork, based around photographs by Lupus Lindemann(KADAVAR), was designed by Fabian Bremer (RADARE, AUA).

The album is a testament to the incredible power of this trio and its ability to effortlessly ensnare your attention for the duration of a ten minute–song of purely instrumental music. Over the course of the album’s 11 tracks ZAHN emerge as a form of PINK FLOYD of noise rock, relentlessly pushing the envelope on what’s already accomplished while remaining tasteful and tasty at every corner.

Listen to ‘Schmuck’ here:

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Gintas K – Catacombs & Stalactites

Posted: 2 November 2023 in Albums
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Antenna Non Grata – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Bloody hell, he’s at it again: Lithuanan soundmachine Gintas K has yet another album out – and this one is different again. While Catacombs & Stalactites does, almost inevitably, feature rapid, bubbling, bibbling, watery electronic skitters, which sound like flurrying insects, bubbling water racing around a drain., and R2-D2 fizzing in malfunction, the dominant sonic feature here is not the microtonal bleeps which have been the focus of many of his albums, but heavy, grating synth sounds which buzz, scrape, and distort.

Things begin comparatively gently, but by the third track, ‘Into deepness’, we’re into pretty heavy territory. There are hints of tune to be found in places – dark, gothic synth motifs briefly emerge from the thick haze. It feels loud, and the listening experience is oppressive, like pressure being applied to either side of your skull, and the track really tests your mettle over its six minute duration, because there’s simply no let up, and the thick buzz presses at your brain relentlessly. It’s the same thick, hazy sounds which blare forth on the next piece, ‘Somewhere’ – only rent with tearing laser blasts and distortion which scratches and scrapes at the speaker cones, threatening damage, before it culminates in a crackling blast.

‘Wandering Joy’ wanders through dissonance and discord, warping and scraping through tearing walls of noise and aberrant glitches, spiralling around and spinning through territory shared with power electronics and the more experimental end of industrial (in the Throbbing Gristle sense, not the latter-day Industrial metal of Ministry et al). For all of its wandering, whether or not it brings joy is a matter for discussion, I suppose.

The bold, buzzing, abrasive synths sounds are broad and bassy, and the grinding lower-end oscillations are evocative of Suicide, only amped up to eleven. ‘Atmosphere / Voices’ crashes in on a wall of feedback and overloading distortion. At this point, things reach a new intensity, and the crackling, fizzing buzz at the edges of this enveloping blanket of noise simply adds to the tension which rips from the speakers.

There are lighter moments, which are more quintessential K: then flickering flutters, clicks and pops of ‘Mystery’ are almost playful, sounding somewhat like the pouring of carbonated mortar with twangs and deadened thwaps creating a muggy texture, and ‘Local Beings’ brimming with zaps and squelches which fly every which way before trickling down to a dribble resembling a fast leak.

This is very much Gintas K’s way: his approach to ‘composition’ is very loose and geared toward improvisation.

The album’s title derives from the ninth and tenth tracks, ‘Catacombs’ and ‘Stalactites’ which both in their way evoke the subterranean, darkness, tunnels, claustrophobia. ‘Stalactites’ shutters and reverberates, grates and gyrates, the frequencies registering around the navel amidst another squall of fragmented, glass-like shattering, and ‘Stalactites’ hangs heavy amidst blasts of noise. ‘Catacombs’ fractures and disintegrates as it leads the listener down, down, down. In my mind’s eye, I’m drawn towards recollections of the Paris catacombs – endless miles of tunnels lined with bones, neatly stacked, row upon row of old skulls, fibulas and tibias piled high and all around to forge cavities of death. Few things hold a mirror to mortality more powerfully than infinite piles of dank bones, and K leads – or moreover drags – us through these gloomy tunnels, while still electronic sparks skip and flash like damaged lighting or split cables before explosions of sparking white noise collapse into nothingness.

We’re grateful for a few light splashes and bubbles near the end, but the chances are the trauma has already taken hold.

Catacombs & Stalactites is a harsh and heavy album, and one that isn’t easy to lay to rest, to move on from.

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Polwechsel – Embrace

Posted: 26 October 2023 in Albums
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Ni Vu Ni Connu – 2nd November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

While the late 80s and early 90s saw the absolute peak in format-driven consumer exploitation, with the major labels finding evermore extravagant and ostentatious ways pf presenting a single or an album to boost its chart position by milking hardcore fans who would buy every format for the sake of a bonus track, a remix, or a poster, there’s been a strong return for physical releases in recent years. Admittedly, the days of CD singles packaged in tri-fold 12” sleeves, cassette singles in album-sized boxes, 12” boxes in which to house a series of CD singles, albums released in boxes as six 7” singles, and the like are well over, the fetishisation of the object is very much enjoying a renaissance, most likely as a reaction to the years when everything became so minimal and so digitised that no-one actually owned anything.

This was a bleak period. As someone who had spent a lifetime accumulating books, records, CDs, even tapes, I found it difficult to process. I had grown up aspiring to own a library and a wall of records, and found myself foundering, drifting in a world where entire lives were condensed to a playlist on a phone and a few kindle picks. I’d walk into houses – admittedly, not often, since I’m not the most sociable of people – and think ‘where’s the stuff?’ Stuff, to my mind, is character. It’s life. People would endlessly wave their Kindles and tell me ‘it’s just like a book!’ and rejoice at their Apple playlists on their iPods because they had their entire collections in their pocket and no clutter. I suggesting I should clear out my ‘stuff’, these techno-celebrants were missing the point, and continue to do so. Rifling through a collection, finding lost gems, engaging in the tactility, remembering when and where certain items were purchased is an integral part of the experience. My collection isn’t simply a library of books and music, it’s a library of memories.

In more underground circles, the existence of the artefact remained more consistent, perhaps because more niche artists and labels always understood the relationship between the artist and the consumer as conducted via the medium of the object. The release of this epic retrospective as a 4-LP box set is, therefore, less a case of getting on board with the Record Store Day vinyl hype in the way that HMV are now carrying more vinyl – at £35 a pop for reissues of 70s and 80s albums you can find in charity shops and at car boot sales for a fiver (and you used to be able to pick up in second-hand record shops until they died because no-one was buying vinyl), and more a case of business as usual.

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Vienna- and Berlin-based ensemble Polwechsel have a thirty-year career to reflect upon, and with a substantial back-catalogue to their name, and it’s a landmark that truly warrants a box-set retrospective. Although it’s not a retrospective in the conventional sense: this is a work created in collaboration with a selection of instrumentalists and improvisers who share their exploratory mindset. Traditional compilations feel somewhat lazy, and are ultimately cash-ins which offer little or nothing new to the longstanding fan. And so this set serves to capture the essence and style of their extensive catalogue, rather than compile from it.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, too. As the accompanying notes detail, ‘Vienna- and Berlin-based ensemble Polwechsel have been making music at the interface of collective improvisation and contemporary composition. With their changing cast, the group have been at the forefront of musical experimentation, from style-defining works in reductionism in the 1990s, which concentrated on silence, background noises and disruptions, to a change in direction in the 2000s, which saw the introduction of traditional musical aspects such as tonal relationships, harmony and rhythm. Through varying constellations, instrumentations and collaborations, Polwechsel have developed a unique body of work that has firmly established them as one of the driving forces in contemporary music-making… Their music has mostly straddled a line between contemporary music and free improvisation, and is characterized by quiet volume, sustained drones, and slowly developing structures.”

And so it is that for EMBRACE, Werner Dafeldecker, Michael Moser, Martin Brandlmayr and Burkhard Beins are ‘joined by a roster of likeminded guest musicians and former band members to perform a series of new pieces reflecting the whole breadth of their musical investigations.’

‘Jupiter Storm’ is spacious, spatial, strange and yet also playful, an assemblage of sounds that lurch from serious and atmospheric to sleeve-snickering toots and farts, and everything in between over the course of its eighteen minutes, with slow—resonating gongs and trilling shrills of woodwind and plonking random piano all bouncing off one another, while the bass wanders in and out of the various scenes in a most nonchalant manner. On ‘Partial Intersect’, drones and hesitant drones occasionally yield to moments of jazzification, parps and hoots and squawks rising from the thick, murky sonic mist which drifts ominously about for the track’s twenty-minute duration.

Sides C and D contains ‘Chains and Grain’ 1 and 2, again, longform pieces almost twenty minutes long, comfortably occupying the side of an album, are the order of the day. Clanking, clattering, chiming, bells and miniature cymbals ring out against a minimal drone which twists and takes darker turns.

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The tracks with Andrea Neumann are eerie and desolate, and occupy the third album. These pieces are different again, with the two ‘Magnetron’ pieces building from sparse, moody atmospherics to some piercing feedback undulations. The shrill squalls of treble, against grating extraneous noise, make for some tense listening. The second in particular needles at the more sensitive edges of the nerves. ‘Quartz’ and ‘Obsidian’, are more overtly strong-based works, but again with scratches and scrapes and skittering twangs like elastic bands stretched over a Tupperware container. The fourth and final album contains two longform pieces, with ‘Orakelstücke’ occupying nineteen and a half minutes with creaking hinges, ominous tones, and a thud like a haunted basketball thwacking onto a bare floorboard. There are lighter moments of discordantly bowed strings, but there’s an underlying awkwardness with crackles and scratches, muttered conversation in German. The fifteen-minute ‘Aquin’ is sparse, yet again ominous and uneasy, majestic swells of organ rising from strained drones and desolate woodwind sinking into empty space.

The set comes with a thirty-two page booklet containing essays Stuart Broomer, Reinhard Kager and Nina Polaschegg (in both German and English) and some nice images which are the perfect visual accompaniment to the music, and while it’s doubtless best appreciated in luxurious print, a digital version is included with the download.

EMBRACE is a quite remarkable release – diverse and exploratory to the point that while it does feel like an immense statement reflecting on a career, it also feels like four albums in their own right. It’s a bold release, and an expansive work that certainly doesn’t have mass appeal – but in its field, its exemplary on every level.

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