Posts Tagged ‘Experimetnal’

Aches – 42 Year Sunset

Posted: 29 November 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve harped on about my appreciation of physical releases a fair few times here, and while I am myself striving to declutter my home of late, miscellaneous crap is more clutter than collections. Placing CDs and records snugly on shelves satisfying, and collections are the culmination of what can be a lifetime’s work. I started collecting at the age of around thirteen, having discovered The Sisters of Mercy via Floodland, and the fact that they had a significant back catalogue which wasn’t available on cassette in WHS or Boots, and so started hitting record fairs, which were commonplace at weekends in the late 80s and early 90s.

But while vinyl and cassette have been enjoying a sustained renaissance, CDs remain at a low ebb, and this is a sad state of affairs. Considered by many to be inferior by virtue of their clinical, impersonal nature, they’re the perfect balance of a physical format, and practicality, in that you can skip tracks, for a start.

Receiving a CD copy of Aches’ release through my letter box truly made my day, initially for the simple reason that this is a wonderful physical product – a hand-numbered digipak with a nice sleeve, with a Japanese-style wraparound strip, although it’s not an Obi but a semi-opaque slip which bears the band logo and the track listing. It has quality written all over it, and it’s a joy to hold it. If it sounds like I’m being a physical format enthusiast wanker, so be it: the element of tactility is completely absent from the streaming / download experience, and those who have never experienced it are missing out.

And so turn my attention to the band – well, another experience, but of a different kind. Aches aren’t quite a supergroup, but featuring members of Helpless, Gunderson, The Imperfect Orchestra, and Caracals, they are very much a new hive mind collaborative collective that represents the best of the Plymouth scene – a city which isn’t particularly renowned for its musical exports, but did bring us the unparalleled Cranes at the very least. Aches are a whole lot heavier than Cranes, though.

Heave-ho! ‘Sky Shanty’ comes in hard with a roaring grunt and heft that strains the guts and blasts on a tidal wave of brutal black metal guitar. The roaring impact is enough to stop your breath for a moment. The band’s bio explains how they draw inspiration from writings on capitalism, neuroscience, and drug use, as well as from personal experiences and research on mental illness and suicide, and that this release ‘responds to the feeling of hopelessness we feel, as combating climate change is increasingly minimised by those in power in return for gargantuan profits of archaic industries…’

It may be an incorrect and assumptive joining of the dots to suggest they’ve individually been impacted by these in various ways, but when one in four are likely to suffer mental heath issues in any given year, it’s not unreasonable – but it’s reasonable to recognise the fact that any release which confronts these issues is culturally critical. And those feelings of hopelessness… One suspects they’re widely relatable, and anyone who doesn’t clearly has too much money, and this is about you.

Aches don’t require a trigger warning: life doesn’t come with trigger warnings, after all. But Aches confront all of the topics head-on, and 42 Year Sunrise is hard, heavy, unflinching.

If ‘Sky Shanty’ is fucked-up post-hardcore noise rock, then the brutal ‘Bruxism’ start out hard and heavy before drifting into softness. I’m reminded more of Bjork and Zola Jesus during this soft close. Spinning together dramatic post-punk and elements of post-rock into a multi-faceted roaring torrent of raging anguish which essentially encapsulates the essence of 42 Year Sunset. ‘Bruxism’ is a post-hardcore explosion; switching rapidly between psychotic mania and theatricality, equal parts Dillinger escape Plan and Muse via Oceansize. To pack this much into just over four and a half minutes is a monumental feat which evidences just how articulate and accomplished this release is.

The shortest track is also the heaviest, with ‘Is That It’ bringing a barrage of crushing riffs and packing about three songs’ worth into less than two frenzied minutes, before the monster title track brings forth absolute devastation. It’s a slow, heavy, monotonous crawler that slugs relentlessly. The way the drums roll and patter busily while the guitars grind at a snail’s pace and you feel this pulling at you slowly like a thread tied to your intestines. Five minutes in, the bass cuts in low, slow, dark and heavy, and by the eight-minute mark, it’s burst into a shrieking riot of demonic torture that’s gother than goth: it hurts.

With 42 Year Sunset, Aches articulate the anguish of feeling utterly powerless in the face of everything as it piles up, end on end. It packs so much force, and it hurts. Aches bring the pain, and this is a phenomenal debut.

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Sodomisery – Mazzaroth

Posted: 23 August 2023 in Albums
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Testimony Records – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

‘We are living in troubled times and it is hardly surprising that this is reflected in any form of art including music. On Mazzaroth, Sodomisery have spun a dark lyrical yarn about mental illness in society, religion, and the struggle of the individual, which is running like a red thread through their sophomore full-length. The Swedish melodic death four-piece are underlining their loosely conceptual approach with a remarkable musical evolution’, says the bio which accompanies this album.

There’s no misery like Sodomisery. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. For reasons I haven’t explored, while society has progressed – and I do mean this broadly and generally, being most aware of the fact that homosexuality and many things more widely accepted remain not only illegal but subject to severe punishments in a large number of countries – the word ‘sodomy’ carries brutal connotations which continue to hold currency in the circles of the

blackest of metal and industrial and power electronics. It’s true that Whitehouse’s Erector (with its blatantly unsubtle ‘cock’ cover) was released in 1981 and things have moved on a bit since then, but how much? Many of these bands are, as far as I can discern, less concerned with contemporary perceptions of anal penetration, whereby in permissive western society, it’s generally accepted regardless of sex or sexuality, and in pornography, it’s more or less considered essential, and more preoccupied with the harsh, perverse connotations of the writings of The Marquis de Sade – one of the few writers whose work still has the capacity to truly shock. And in this context, sodomy connotes the worst of sexual tortures, the infliction of pain, a statement of the ultimate power dynamics. It all seems appropriate given the band’s objectives.

This album had an interesting evolution, too: ‘When all the new tracks were written and pre-produced, SODOMISERY decided to create two versions of the album. One mix included keyboards and orchestration, while the other version had no such additions. After an extensive period of deliberation and many listening sessions, the Swedes decided that the new dimension and cinematic feeling added by the keyboards was exactly what their songs needed.’

Without hearing the two versions side by side, I’m in no position to comment, but the fact of the matter is that the keyboards certainly have not transformed this into some twiddly prog-rock effort: instead said keyboards are low in the mix but serve to fill out the sound with elongated droning tones against the relentless, thunderous fury of frantic fretwork and double-pedal drumwork that’s faster than the eye or ear can process.

There are some moments of such tunefulness that one has to take pause and breathe for a moment. We’re not just talking clean vocals or tuneful; there are moments, albeit brief, of outright pop sandwiched between the furious rage and overloading distortion. But rather than diminish the album’s power, I find myself respecting the band all the more. To have a softer breakdown in a song is one thing: to be so unashamedly clean and crisp and tuneful is bold.

‘Delusion’ balances all of the various elements nicely, coming together to forge a blasting yet grand and graceful dirty monster of a track which even packs in a heroic guitar solo near the end. Juvenile snickering ensues here with ‘A Storm Without Wind’, and I know it’s not funny and the delivery is entirely serious. Not least of all the lung-ripping bass that prefaces the throat-ripping vocals which snarl over guitars which alternate between old samples and snippets stolen from the present.

It feels scary, like being left alone on a platform and staring into the abyss. Any minute and it could retreat, and leave you falling into the void, and on the evidence here, you’d incinerate in seconds. Ultimately, we’re all scared. Mazzaroth is a worthy soundtrack to that fear.

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Incidental Crack – Detail

Posted: 7 September 2021 in Albums
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Anticipating Nowhere Records – 24th September 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

With the colossal five-volume ‘Isolation and Rejection’ lockdown compilation series and the one-off final final FINAL Front&Follow project, the compilation You Can Never Leave released in June, the eternally restless Justin Watson can put his label to bed and resume work with his current musical vehicle, the collective who operate as The Incidental Crack to deliver album number two. After all, it has been more than three months since second album Municipal Music.

The three – Justin Watson, Rob Spencer and Simon Proffitt – are still yet to meet, and their third album, like its predecessors, took form with ‘them exchanging field recordings, samples and random noise between Manchester, Wigan and North Wales’.

As the liner notes recount, ‘Detail contains within three new long-form pieces and a couple of shorter ones filling in the gaps. The adage goes that the devil is in the detail, and Detail brings exactly what the title promises, with the first composition, ‘We Might Bump Into each Other’ beginning with some muffled dialogue and an ominous hum, then hums, bubbles and slurps against a backdrop of echoic reverberations, before ‘Fish Dance Tank Track’ marks a shift in style, with more defined beats – an insistent bass bump occupies a different space from the glitchy fluttering woodpecker-type stammers and stuttering hi-hats which all make for something quite complex beneath the drifting drones and quavering hums. It’s an interesting and complex composition that brings together elements of ambient and minimal techno, and as birdsong flutters in toward the end, the piece takes on new aspects that juxtapose nature and artifice.

That the grating looping throb of the six-and-a-half minute ‘Waterfalls Per Capita’ should be considered a gap-filler is a matter of context, and it comes after the harrowing dark ambient collage of ‘I Lost It’, that is by no means a comfortable or easy listen.

The seventeen-minute ‘Morning Tram’ combines field recordings where the original source remains clear, but with subtle but insistent beats, and it’s perhaps there – the finale – that everything comes together. Fragmented samples and snippets of dialogue collide with tumbling trees and slow-turning washes of ambience to create remarkable depth. Passengers pass on and off, engines rumble past, there is endless chatter and a wall of extraneous sound. Assimilating it all may be difficult, but it’s rewarding. The beat is almost subliminal, but it’s relentlessly insistent and registers almost subliminally as the sound swells and voiced clamour and congeal among a rising tide of horns and other momentous sounds. And then it stops, abruptly.

It may be short in terms of tracks, but Detail has substantial depth – and much detail, all of which is very much worth exploring.

The Incidental Crack - Detail (cover)

PILES – Una Volta

Posted: 16 September 2018 in Albums
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Aagoo Records / REV. Lab Records

21 September 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

French experimental drum outfit PILES are pitched as being for fans of Neu!, Can, Trans Am, Hanged Up, Beak>, Captain Beefheart, Edgar Varese, This Heat. Yes, a drum trio. Which means dominant percussion, and then some. But hen, anyone who’s heard Japanese drum combo Voordoms will appreciate the power of percussion as a dominant aspect.

And so we have eight tracks, all as drummy as it gets. Often, drums with little more than drones and hums or hovering feedback or sustain. But all the rhythmic complexity under the sun, with two or even three kits battering away.

‘Decay’ comes in hard and heavy, the opening bars reminiscent of The Fall’s ‘Muzoweri’s Daughter’ before dispersing in myriad directions as it spills directly into ‘Ulrick’. And just as things threaten to get tedious, ‘Mort aux cons’ brings new dimensions of noise, with sludgy bass and cacophonous guitar accentuating a different range of racket. And yes, it is a racket, albeit a good one.

‘Kraut and Piles’, the first of three nine-minuters eschews accessibility in favour of relentless pudding beats and extraneous noise. In venturing into industrial territory amidst shards of feedback, PILES reach a point at which the overall weight of the album tips into that of the heavy: there’s not much let-up here as the beats pound away at the cranium and the raring noise buidls to the sound of a jet engine preparing for take-off. The sonic barrage of ‘Kraut and ‘Piles’ is immediately followed by nine minutes of cut-up sound arrangements and drone with ‘Material in US’, which creates a very different atmosphere and casts the band in a very different light, even when things burst into an explosion of drums neat the end – because this about so much more than drumming. Then again, ‘Chambre d’echo;’ suddenly erupts from brooding atmospherics into a barrage of beats before shifting into a tinkling lullaby, which is pleasant if incongruous.

The final composition, ‘Marie’ is another nine-minute-plus beast that begins with ominous drones and conjures an unsettling darkness for its duration and culminates in a weird sort of semi-climax on a cymbal that rings out to eternity.

Una Volta confounds expectations and forges a strange mix of percussive assault and ambience, and does so through unexpected forms. It makes for an album that isn’t remotely what you might expect, but is all the better for it.

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PILES – Una Volta