Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Ashley Reaks – Nature Reversed

Posted: 29 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Ashley Reaks is an artist who has very clear creative cycles, releasing, as standard, an album a year, and sometimes two, which make the fallow periods more conspicuous. This is not one of those fallow spells: Nature Reversed arrives just four (dark, cold, wet, gusty, wintery and generally depressing) months after At Night the World Belongs to Me, released at the end of September last year. And it marks something of a shift, and even ventures into the realms of what one might consider a ‘concept album’.

Reaks describes the album as ‘a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.’ That’s a lot to unpack. If it was the plot for a novel, it would be a twisty-turny work, rich in allusion and haunting imagery – but likely jazz-free. But to compress all of this into nine songs and forty-five minutes… Ambitious would be one word for it.

The album’s first piece, ‘I Don’t Like The Old King’ does very much explore the expansive fields of folk, but through a proggy filter, performed with synths, and underpinned by a strolling bass – somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus song ‘Part of the Third Part’, at least at the start – and a beat that both shuffles and swings. It’s the bass that defines ‘We Forage in the Gutters’, going full Jah Wobble in its dubbiness. But at the same time, there’s a sparseness, an introspection which is different here. The elements we’ve come to expect from Reaks are all present and correct, but Nature Reversed takes those elements to another place, and it feels like the freneticism has been turned down in favour of a more focused approach.

As with everything Reaks releases, Nature Reversed is interesting… by which I mean it’s a collage of weirdness that draws together a host of disparate elements. Just as Reaks’ artworks are crazy collages, so his music is relentlessly unpredictable. ‘The Desire to Seduce Euphoria’ is perfectly representative: it brings together some moody, melancholic postpunk, with chiming, reverby guitar… there are some processed vocals and there’s some jazz in the mix… I say ‘some’, but the mid-section is a massive blast of horns, before it careens into a heavy prog synth workout What the fuck IS this? This is no criticism: Reaks relentlessly challenges the borders, and does his own thing.

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Nature Reversed gives us all of the conventional Reaks elements – but the wild jazz is dialled back significantly. He describes it as ‘cut-up jazz, awkward Eastern folk, medieval motifs, old ghosts, and new life pushing through ancient stone walls — music about inheritance, rebellion, and what survives when you break things wide open’, and so it’s no surprise that William Burroughs features in the list of inspirations, ‘ranging from ‘nature poet’ John Clare and William Burroughs to Rip Rig + Panic, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart, Nature Reversed fuses literature, music, and visual art into a chaotic, lyrical, and intimate landscape. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on survival, rebellion, and renewal — the feral life that surges when you break open your origins.’

As is always the case with Reaks’ work, Nature Reversed is a huge intertext, and it would be reasonable to describe him as a classic postmodernist, celebrating and revelling in multitudinous sources, plundering his influences and inspirations openly and emphatically. This feels more restrained, more contemplative, and lyrically there’s a proliferation of images drawn from nature – but then again, there’s no shortage of sharp-edged, darker stuff, as on ‘Picking on the Meat Membranes’, and ‘Swan in a Womb’ brings together post-punk grooving bass, sprawling jazz, glittering prog synths and vocal processing – and this is point of definition for Nature Reversed, really. It’s everything, all at once, but at a sedate pace. Don’t be fooled by the gentler, more introspective sound: Reaks stull pushes experimentalism to the absolute limits, and Nature Reversed is the singular sound of creative freedom.

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Cindytalk – Sunset And Forever

Posted: 20 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 30th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Cindytalk has been going almost literally forever, at least in terms of the life cycle of bands. A brief scan of my own archives reveals that the last time I wrote of Cindytalk was way back in 2013, covering A Life is Everywhere, released on the esteemed experimental label Editions Mego. The musical vehicle of Scottish musician Cinder, with an ever-shifting supporting cast, Cindytalk has been in a constant flux and perpetual evolution since the project’s formation in the early 80s – emerging from the post-punk scene and exploring every direction since, a career defined, as they put it, ‘by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration’. This is the very essence of the avant-garde, which was built on a manifesto that said that its function was to destroy the old to build the new. And implicit within that concept is the need to destroy its own creations in order to progress. Cindytalk has very much espoused that ethos over the course of the last forty years or more, with a career defined by perpetual reinvention.

Described in the press blurbage as ‘a labyrinthine opus, one that returns to the themes of the sacred and profane that have rippled through all of Cindytalk’s recordings’, Sunset And Forever opens with the eighteen-minute exploration which could reasonably be described as a (dark) ambient work. And it is dark. Spectral voices and spirits haunt every second of this unsettling drone-led work.

‘Labyrinthine opus’ is a fair description for an album which begins with a sprawling eighteen-and-a-half-minute ambient monolith, where falling objects cascade in caverns of reverb before slowly undulating drones gradually grow and turn. At times dense, at other more nebulous, around the mid-point, the scraping trickle of ‘embers of last leaves’ turns into a darker place, and is ruptured with percussive crashes and unpredictable extranea, while haunting voiced fade in and out through the swelling churn of abstract noise. This first piece, alone, feels like an album.

With seven tracks and a running time of around sixty-mine minutes, Sunset And Forever takes it time in exploring sonic contrasts, with graceful sweeps of watercolour synth washes underlaid with scratches and hisses and harder, uneven textures, the sonic equivalent of cobblestones underneath a velvet rug – or somesuch. Put another way, the soft and gentle is rendered uncomfortable by something altogether less soft or comfortable beneath, and hidden beneath a pleasant surface, and those hidden elements are reason to tread cautiously or risk twisting an ankle. It’s almost as if each track contains two compositions overlaid, a kind of collage or a palimpsest of a gentle ambient work and an altogether less gentle noise construction.

On ‘tower of the sun’, the dissonance and angularity rises to the fore to make for a skin-crawling ten minutes, while ‘my sister the wind’ screeches and scrapes, shards of drilling treble buffeted along by a train-track rumble.

The sound – and the meaning – of Sunset And Forever is forever just beyond grasp. For as much as the sounds and textures rub against one another and create discomfort, as a whole, it’s vague, indirect, hazy. It concludes open-ended, with questions unanswered and leaves a sense of uncertainty.

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Machinefabriek – Spelonk

Posted: 12 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Crónica – 20th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As time passes, our tastes change. For some, they narrow and become more cemented, more deeply entrenched. There’s a broad acceptance that people become more conservative as they grow older – which may explain why, with our ageing population, we – that’s the western world – has become more in favour of conservative values, such as low tax and a belief that the past was a golden age in which hard work was rewarded, and of course, music was better. There is certainly more than a grain of truth in the boomer stereotype. And as a Gen X-er, I’ve observed people I grew up with, and /or have known for many years become set in their ways and their listening habits, locked in the 90s in their musical tastes, and becoming increasingly churlish about the youth of today and the like.

I consider myself fortunate to be surrounded by friends and acquaintances, both in real life and in the virtual world, who are deeply invested in new music. The fact I get sent new music of all kinds from around the globe is only half of the story, as it would be so easy to sweep vast swathes of it aside to listen to, and review, nothing but goth, contemporary iterations of post-punk and new wave, grunge, and reissues. In fact, I could devote my entire listening time and run a website dedicated to nothing but reissues and still be incredibly busy. It would probably garner a huge readership, too. But no: I am constantly encouraged to listen to new music, and the fact of the matter is that I thrive on it, and never fail to get a buzz from new discoveries. As such, since I began this journey as a music writer, my horizons have broadened beyond a range I would have ever imagined.

A measure of this is that my first encounter with the music of Rutger Zuydervelt, back in 2014, was marked by a most unimpressed four-star review, in which I said that Stay Tuned was ‘a bit of a drag’. While I don’t feel particularly inspired to revisit it now alongside my writing of this review, I feel I would likely have been more receptive to its longform minimalism now.

Spelonk is not quite as long in form – three compositions spanning a total of forty-two minutes, and sees Zuydervelt taking some time out from his dayjob to indulge in the act of creating for pleasure – or, perhaps, more accurately, creating out of the need to experience freedom, to feel that metaphorical – and perhaps literal – sigh of release.

As he explains, ‘Most of the music I make nowadays is commissioned for film, dance, or other projects. And I love it — it’s the best job in the world! — but sometimes I have to pull myself away from it, and make something purely for myself. My 2004 release Omval was one of these works, as is now Spelonk. These projects are always made in short bursts; once I start creating, things fall into place quickly, as if the ideas were (unknowingly) already there and just needed to get out of my system.

The three tracks that comprise Spelonk (simply titled I, II, III) are built with “hardware jams” that I recorded with my live setup. It’s all quite hands-on, with effects pedals, an oscillator, and electronic gadgets. The magic happens when combining different recordings, layering them, and hearing what happens. Listening is always a favorite moment in the process, with a welcome element of surprise. I guess it’s all about creating alien landscapes — alien also to me too — that are exciting to explore.’

‘Alien landscapes’ is a fair description of these sparse works, constructed with layers of ominous drone. On ‘Spelonk II’, there are chittering sounds which scratch like guitar string scraping against a fret, or perhaps a ragged bow dragging against a worn string, but by the same token, untranslatable voices come to mind. The drones are eerie, ethereal, and hang low like mist or dry ice: it’s not nor merely an example of dark ambient work – there is very much a 70s sci-fi feel to it, hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop emerge between every surge and crackle as slow pulsations reverberate among the unsettling abstraction. Over the course of the track’s eighteen minutes, there is movement, evolution, and just past the midpoint, there is a shift, where trilling organ-like notes and digital bleeps emerge, evoking recordings from space travel, and, as rippling laser sounds begin to burst forth, vintage sci-fi movies and 70s TV.

There are moments of near silence as ‘Spelonk II’ drifts into ‘Spelonk III’, also eighteen minutes in duration. Here, clanks and bleeps bubble and bounce and echo erratically, unpredictably, over a backdrop of low hums and reverberations. The low-end vibrates subtly but perceptibly, and while the experience is not one which instils tension, the cave-like digital drips and sense of space, as well as darkness, is not relaxing. You find yourself looking around, wondering what’s around the corner, what’s in the shadows. And while there’s no grand reveal, no jump fright here, the second half of ‘Spelonk III’ grows increasingly murky and increasingly squelchy and unsettling.

Over the album’s duration, Spelonk grows in depth and darkness, becoming increasingly dark, strange, and unsettling. Rutger Zuydervelt makes a lot out of very little, to subtle but strong effect.

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Bell Barrow – Saltire

Posted: 7 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

2026 is certainly off to an interesting start: did anyone seriously have what looks quite feasibly the first move in World War 3 on their bingo card? Consequently, the level of noise has simply exploded. There is shock. There isn’t much awe, but there is bewilderment, there is panic, and infinite speculation. And infinite noise.

Thankfully, 2026 is already offering up some interesting noise on the musical front, and for my money, the most effective way to tune out all that other noise is by turning off the TV, putting the phone down – or better still, switch it off and leave it in another room – light some candles, pour a drink and listen – properly listen, and engage, with some new music.

Saltire may not be the most soothing soundtrack to push aside all of the external turbulence, an obvious balm to calm a psychological spasm. In fact, it’s pretty grim at times, a big blanket of darkness which drifts and envelops, riven with top-end trilling whistles and a host of wide-ranging elements, both sonic and stylistic, which clash hard. But relaxation isn’t necessarily what the Dr ordered. Sometimes, the best remedy is one that shocks the system to the extent that all the other shit is displaced.

The band say of the album, “Through a time-based, panoramic view of past, present and future, the album’s composition is a dissection of familial cyclical patterns of violence, abuse and addiction, and whether supernatural events or one’s own choices impact fate. Each track is a voice spanning multiple dimensions and time frames of reference. Is our eventual destruction predetermined and independent of will? Or can we control the course of events through determined pleas at salvation?”

Right now, it doesn’t seem that many of us have any control over anything, particularly global affairs, and while some aspects of history do seem to be repeating themselves, this moment in time feels like a huge rupture in the flow of modern history. And all we can do is watch as things unravel, and at pace. It’s terrifying, and anyone who isn’t scared is deluded or simply burying their heads in the sand. But taking time out to bury my head in the sand for the duration of an album is necessary. And clocking in at over seventy minutes, this is a decent slab of time to pursue this objective.

From the outset, Bell Barrow’s Saltire brings some uncomfortable noise. ‘Death Lullabye’ is dark, droney, unsettling and uneasy. In contrast, the frenetic noise rock explosion of ‘Breath of an Acrobat’ sits in the field of the wild angular noise of, say, Daughters, while at the same time introducing a frenzied jazz element, and propelled by black metal drumming, but with the treble cranked to the max. ‘Cor Orans’, too, is a frantic blast of lo-fi gothy metal. This is tempestuous stuff, and with the treble up in the mix, the sound slices the top off your head, while at the same time slamming you in the gut repeatedly with a lump of wood.

Wide-ranging would be one way of describing this expansive exploration, which ranges from drone and ambient to New Age, from prog to post-metal.

The seven-minute ‘Beyond the Labyrinth’ is quintessential weird darkness, warping, droning, while the nine-minute behemoth that is ‘Sybian Interval’ builds dense, billowing clouds of dark noise, rumbling, swirling, heavy, oppressive, but rent through with screams of treble and whines like a dentist’s drill, which are counterbalanced by soft, vaporous watercolour sweeps. ‘We Reek of Utopia’ arrives in a muffled package of irony before the squalling assault of the title track applies scissors to the brain in a wild explosion of jazz-metal discord served with a heavy helping of ‘what the actual?’ And this is good. This is healthy. Music should challenge. Art should challenge. Saltire challenges on many levels: there are no songs to speak of, and the pieces veer wildly in stylistic terms. ‘A Carrion Call Rings Out’ plunges into heavy industrial noise, and it hurts.

They do threaten ‘an obvious tension and release feel to the style’, and they deliver on that, although the tension is significantly greater than the release, proportionally speaking. Saltire offers no pause for reflection, no sigh of relief, no time to simply sit back and reflect: it swings between atmospheric states most unexpectedly, most dramatically. It’s hard work, but at the same time elevatitive and revelatory.

By no means an easy album, Saltire offers angularity – and some significant reward.

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Bell Barrow - Saltire - Cover Art

R. Schappert – Hellherz

Posted: 4 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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r-ecords – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A crackle of static washes in and obfuscates the murky bass and beats which begin to emerge. It’s a strange experience, like listening to a tune while under water. Over time, this shifts: hypnotic beats with clicking, cracking snares and low, thwocking bass drum sounds cut through the curtain of hiss which hangs like heavy rain. And so it is that ‘Waiting for nothing’, the first of the three compositions on R. Schappert’s Hellherz EP. It’s an intriguing piece, layered and unpredictable and multi-faceted.

In context of his bio, which informs us that ‘Roland Schappert pursues border crossings in the form of an “organic digitality” oscillating between melos, sound and rhythm’.

The EP’s accompanying notes are somewhat winding, kind of cryptic: ‘Where do we put all the words that held us captive? We put them in a bottle post and send them out into the open sea. Back on land, there is fluttering in the space of spaces. Corners and edges crumble away in tumultuous layers. Let us take the time that the melos urges us to take, let us entrust him with our voice.

Sensually coded sequences of notes disrupt the free flow of our thoughts. Cranes hop and counter common notions of progress. Hopping instead of marching. Jumping instead of stomping. Up into the sky. From 3/4 to 4/4 time and back again. With hissing and quiet humming. Do we like it better up here? Where do we come from, where are we flying to for the winter? No more getting lost: Wrap your words. Our hearts are light.’

It appears that much of this is cultivated around the EP’s centrepiece, ‘Wrap your words’, the credits for which draw my attention in a way which imbues me with a certain unease:

Lyrics by R. Schappert

Vocals: revised AI voice

AI’s ubiquity is cause for concern in itself, and the reasons for this are a thesis in themselves. But specifically, given the way AI trains itself, voluntarily feeding it words to recycle and regurgitate feels like an abandonment of artistic ownership. When William Burrroughs cut up existing texts in order to form new ones, he questioned the notion that anyone ‘owned’ words, contending that the act of writing was simply the selection and manipulation of words in differing sequences. But this is not the same challenge of ownership and methods of creativity, because the application of AI serves to remove the artist from the process, partially or even wholly. Moreover, while AI is being used for military and medical purposes (and fears over where that may lead again are another thesis worth of debate at least), in the day-to-day, AI for the everyman seems to be about creative applications. Personally, I would rather AI did my admin and cleaned the oven in order to give me more time for creative pursuits. The idea that an artist would delegate any part of their creative work to AI is something which I find truly bewildering. Yes, there are skills we may lack, but the joy of art, in any medium – is learning those skills, or collaborating with other creatives to fill those skills gaps. There are real people with real skills, and working with them and learning from them is how we grow as artists.

So, AI voice? Why? Why not find a vocalist? Why not even apply autotune to a real vocal if that’s the desired effect? The warbling, autotuned-sounding digital vocalisations sound pretty naff, if truth be told, and add little to a tune which clops and thuds along with some retro synth sounds hovering vaguely around a beat which stutters along in soft focus. But as I listen, the whole AI vocal thing gnaws at me: has AI been utilised, uncredited, to the instrumentation too? What can we trust, what can we believe now?

The title track draws the EP to a close, with some brooding, quavering organ sounds and glitchy beats and more static, returning things full-circle before an abrupt end. It’s atmospheric, and a shade unsettling, too.

It may be brief, but there are many layers to this. As a whole, Hellherz provides much to ponder.

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(Click image to link to audio)

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Dééfait – Dééfait

Posted: 2 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Ici d’ailleurs – 12th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Woah, what? Is that really how it’s supposed to start? Hitting play on Dééfait’s eponymous debut EP and landing with ‘We Love Each Other We Don’t Belong to Any Species Anymore’ feels like crashing in midway through a song: there’s no intro, everything is already happening. And there’s a lot happening. It’s chaotic, lurching explosions of noise erupting through tidal waves of cacophony and discord, frenzied fretwork and spuming mania and derangement are everywhere here, to the point that you wonder if you’ve arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, and downloaded the wrong files while you were about it. But no: welcome to the weird world of Dééfait

Their bio summarises their sound quite nicely as ‘Somewhere between krautrock, noise rock, decaying psychedelia, and pagan proto-punk’, adding that ‘Dééfait makes music as one performs a ritual: in trance, on repeat, and without a safety net. From the chaotic arteries of Mexico City to the basement venues of the Paris suburbs, Dééfait sculpts noise rock in a state of breathless tension. Their self-titled debut EP is a noise rite: a wall of guitars, incantatory percussion, and possessed voices. With Dééfait, sound twists, repeats, stretches, until exhaustion and ecstasy.’

And yes, this is all true. Dééfait transport the listener into another world, a different space, another time, where you don’t even know what space you’re in or what time it is, what year or even millennia you’re in. The warping, twisting trudge of ‘Molokh ’ is an epic, drifting desert-rock wandering into weirdness.

‘BONDNONDOND’ is a roiling rocker, the context and lyrical content aren’t easy to comprehend, but this I no way detracts from the ability to appreciate the song, which reminds me of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. I have no idea what it’s actually about, but it’s a tempestuous aural blizzard which transports the listener on a rising tide which threatens to smash against rocks and deliver annihilation by nature. In contrast, ‘Comatose Big Sun’ is a classic example of 90s indie inspired shuffling jingle with psychedelia interwoven into the dense, droning texture. Ride and Chapterhouse are in the blend when it comes to touchstones here, but so do The Black Angels. They use a similar template for ‘Al’Ether’, but here, everything’s cranked up to ten, a wail of distortion swirls around the rolling rhythm section, and the whole thing goes off the rails in a blast of raucous jazz noise on the last song, ‘Wow! Ferreri Cooked for Us’. Wow indeed.

This isn’t so much an EP as a voyage of discovery.

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Mr Vast – This and That

Posted: 29 December 2025 in Previews and Editorial, Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Cack Records – 31st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

When is a Christmas single not a Christmas single? When it’s released on New Year’s Eve, has nothing to do with Christmas, and it’s new work from Mr Vast. It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the king of cack in terms of releases: Touch & Go was seven years ago now.

It’s feast or famine when it comes to output from Henry Sargeant, the maniac behind the weirdness: Wevie Stonder had been mute and seemingly dormant since their compilation The Beast of Wevie (the title of which may or may not have been an influence on my own retrospective release, The Beast of Noisenibor, released in the autumn of this year. If you think environmentalism and social conscience is only about recycling papers, glass, and plastic, think again, and start recycling puns and jokes too) in 2017, only to drop a fresh dose of warpedness in the shape of Sure Beats Living in June.

Meanwhile, he’s spent the summer on the road around the UK bringing a ‘vast’ array of outfits and strangeness to venues around the country – and now, ahead of the release of a new Mr Vast album – Upping the Ante – due for release in March, he’s dropping ‘This and That’, a real banger for your New Year’s Eve party. And because it’s Mr Vast, he’s gone and picked the album’s longest track for the single.

It’s a whopping six minutes of strange – a hyped up slab of lo-fi electronica that’s big on repetition and bubbling bursts of synth. It has many of the features of 90s rave woven (or Wevien, if you will) into its fabric, and it straddles the space between a bona fide dance tune and a parody of one. But as Hugh Dennis’ embarrassing dad character used to say on The Mary Whitehouse Experience, it’s got a good beat…

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Richard Francis – Combinations 4

Posted: 26 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

2025 has been something of a year of noise for me – on the reviewing front, for sure, but perhaps more so on the creative front. Noise doesn’t have to be confrontational or antagonistic. Moreover, it can most certainly be a release. Richard Francis’ latest offering, Combinations 4, is a work which offers up some substantial noise, with a broad exploration of frequencies which are immersive rather than attacking. Churning, droning, unsettling, it spans the range of what noise can do without venturing into the domains of the harsh. Nevertheless, this makes for a pretty challenging work.

Francis’ summary of his working practice and of this album is worth digesting, for context, as he writes clearly and factually:

‘Since 2010 all of the recordings I make and release are improvised live takes, recorded down to a stereo digital recorder with very little editing other than EQ, trimmed beginnings and ends, and the occasional layering of two tracks together… I arrived here through spending many years prior trying to build an electrical system (which I now call the ‘fugue system’) that would do what I did in composition/studio work but in a live setting: combining together dozens of sounds with open feedback and generative channels, and discrete control for each. Then when I finished building that system using digital and analogue tools, I preferred what I heard and recorded ‘on the fly’ more than what I was doing in composition, so that system is now my instrument in a way.’ Precisely what this system is and how it works is unexplained, and we probably don’t need to know: process and tech can very easily become tedious and adds little, when ultimately, it’s about output.

As the title suggests, this is the fourth in his Combinations series, and here, Francis suggests ‘there’s a bit more structure and layering to the works, if that makes sense’. It makes more sense in context, I assume, because on its own, Combinations 4 is a tour though difficult terrain, and any structures are at best vague.

‘Four A’ is a deluge of dirty noise, curtains of white noise rain cascade, and ‘Leave it all alone for months’ is a queasy mess of drones and groans, a morass of undulating dissonance. This piece is quiet but uncomfortable, the sound of strain, whining, churning unsettling. ‘Parehuia’ booms frequencies which simply hurt. In places, it gets grainy and granular, and the experience is simply uncomfortable. I feel my skin crawl. From here, we plunge into ‘My Fuel! I Love It!’ It’s six-and-a-half head-shredding minutes of sonic discomfort, dominated by rising howls and rings.

Assuming ‘Phase effect on wet road’ is a purely descriptive title based on the source material, it’s three minutes of the sound of heavy rain heavily treated while undulating phase hovers and hums, creating an oppressive atmosphere which bleeds into the slow ebb and flow of ‘The alphabet is a sampler’. The effect of Combinations 4 is cumulative, and while the final four of the album’s ten compositions tend to be comparatively shorter, they’re dense and difficult to process. By the arrival of the quivering, quavering oscillations of closer ‘Four J’, which become increasingly disjointed and discombobulating as the piece progresses, you’re feeling a shade disorientated, and more than vaguely overwhelmed.

For an album which appears, on the surface, to be a fairly innocuous work of experimentalism, with Combinations 4, Richard Francis has created something which delivers substantial psychological impact by stealth.

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Watch: ‘Kether’ by Zu

Posted: 18 December 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Legendary Italian experimental trio Zu recently announced their return with Ferrum Sidereum (produced by Marc Urselli), a big and bold double album arriving on House of Mythology on the 9th January.

The music combines the complexity of progressive rock, the grit of industrial music, the precision of metal, the spirit and energy of punk, and the freedom of jazz. The result is a sonic journey that is as cerebral as it is visceral, defying easy categorisation while remaining unmistakably Zu.

Today they share the new single and video for ‘Kether’ – about which the band comments,

“Kether is the crown, the halo, the nimbus, the corona. Since it has been symbolically attacked, we symbolically take it back.The golden crown became the sign of kings, but it is a much older and deeper symbol, and it is at anyone’s reach to reactivate the crown.”

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Photo credit: Marco Franzoni

Theo Nugraha & {AN} EeL – 1XXTR / TRXX1

Posted: 3 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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29th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s not a good thing to feel nostalgia for something from the recent past which wasn’t even any good to begin with. But on seeing the cover for this split release by Theo Nugraha and {AN} EeL, I’m reminded that Google DeepDream was actually quite fun for about five minutes in 2015. Ah, hindsight… The results DeepDream produced were weird, psychedelic, trippy, and resembled no dream or subconscious thoughts I’ve ever known, its hallucinatory aspects were oft said to share qualities with LSD. But this was part of the appeal: it was novel, silly, with dog faces emerging from inanimate objects, whappy wallpaper, and the like. How many of us knew that it would be a precursor to the AI hell we now find ourselves in? Ten years is not such a long time in the scheme of things, but in the context of the now, it feels like another lifetime. A lifetime when doing daft stuff with digital tools wasn’t annihilating the environment, when it wasn’t stealing the work of writers and artists, when it wasn’t rendering jobs obsolete while creating billionaires at the expense of those losing their livelihood. Arguably, the golden age of The Internet was in the first years post-millennium, when applet-based chatrooms first made it possible to connect in real-time with people around the globe and MySpace was a wild melting pot where people came together through shared interest and communities evolved. This isn’t just some nostalgia wank: these were exciting times, and the world truly began to open up in ways hitherto unseen. These were times when The Internet offered freedom, where, as Warren Ellis’ novel Crooked Little Vein expounded, anything goes and if you could imagine it, you’d find it online. Godzilla Bukkake? You got it.

Everything changed when major corporations realised that they could really, really make on this. But major corporations being major corporations, they didn’t want to participate – they wanted to take over and own it, to wring every penny of profit from every last keystroke. And so now, while Napster and Soulseek were the equivalent of home taping, which didn’t kill music, Spotify and most other major streaming services really are damaging artists’ livelihoods – because unlike small-time peer-to-peer file sharing, this is a multi-billion dollar industry which siphons off pretty much all of the money for owners and shareholders rather than artist – and then you have scums like Daniel Ek using those proceeds to fund war. Something has gone seriously wrong.

Theo Nugraha’s contribution, 1XXTR is a longform work – seconds short of thirty minutes – and while it’s perhaps not quite Harsh Noise Wall, it’s most definitely harsh noise, and there’s not a lot of variation. It may even be that any variation is in the imagination as the mind struggles to process the relentless barrage of sound and seeks tonal changes, details within the texture. It doesn’t so much sound like a cement mixer – more like being in a cement mixer with half a ton of rocks, at the heart of an atomic blast. There are squalls of feedback and mutterings beneath the blitzkrieg, and around ten minutes in, the tempest suddenly begins to rage even harder and it’s like being hit by a train. Twenty minutes in, the relentless roar drops to merely the blast of a jet engine and the sensation is like huge pressure drop, or a fall. It’s impossible to discern what’s going on inside this swirling vortex of noise (there does sound like a vast amount of collaging and random things floating in and out), but it’s a full-on physical assault that vibrates every cell in the body. By the end of this most brutal half hour, you feel battered, bruised, damaged.

‘TRXX1’ by {AN} EeL, which runs for a second over the half-hour mark, is altogether less abrasive, but it’s no more comfortable. At first, it’s a clattering, metallic rattle, like an aluminium dustbin rolling down the street in a gale, accompanied by rattles and chimes. Extraneous noises – twangs and scrapes – enter the mix, and the sound starts to build, like the wind growing stronger at the front-end of a storm. But soon, from nowhere, a squall of static – or rainfall – begins to swell and while off-tune notes reverberate in the background, and a scan of radio stations yields alternately cut-up fragments and random noise, and while it may not possess the same physical force as Nugraha’s piece, ‘TRXX1’presents a disturbing array of frequencies and makes for a particularly tense listen. There’s a thunderous ripple like a freight train a mile long barrelling along, while disjointed voices echo here and there, and as bhangra and old-time brass fade in and out, the collage approach to the track’s creation, harking back to William Burroughs’ tape experiments, and early Throbbing Gristle become increasingly apparent. The Police’s ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ cuts through what sounds like a snippet from lecture or interview. The repetition of the same fragments becomes difficult to deal with after a time, and you begin to feel like you’re cracking up. The it’s back to the sound of metal buckets being dragged down a cobbled street, with random busts of discordant noise jabbing in for extra discomfort. The final segment is a cacophony of abstract drones and crashing, calamitous racketry – a combination which is uncomfortable and unsettling.

The two pieces are quite different, but equally difficult in their own ways, and as such compliment one another. And if you’re seeking an album that really tests your capacity for abrasion and nauseating noise, 1XXTR / TRXX1 hits the spot like a fist to the stomach.

AA

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