Posts Tagged ‘Harsh Noise’

North Vänern Appreciation Society – the moment multibillionaires realise that their money could be better spent helping humanity on Earth

Posted: 9 October 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 1st September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This twenty-two-minute continuous composition is ‘A consideration and contemplation of the stupidity of people who have more money they could ever spend and fritter it away on dick-waving projects instead of paying the tax they should be paying and contributing to society’, adding ‘Billionaires shouldn’t exist at all and we need to start having this conversation.’

Yes. Yes. And yes. It’s been something I’ve been silently raging and experiencing existential agony over in recent months. During the summer, half the planet was on fire. Meanwhile, tax-avoiding billionaires were jetting off into space and planning cage fights to settle the argument of who’s the bigger testosterone-fuelled egotistic manchild.

August saw Oregon flooded following hurricane Hillary and a billion-dollar plus restoration project in its wake: the same week, Virgin Galactic was jetting people into space for fun at a cost of around half a million dollars a ticket. If the ticket fees had been put towards the recovery operation, they’d be well on the way. But these cunts just don’t care. Fuck the plebs in their flooded homes: they’ve all got multiple penthouses well above sea level and they’ve earned their jollies – through the labour of the people who have so little, and some who have even lost everything.

I suffer corpuscle-busting rage at people who jet off on skiing holidays bemoaning the lack of snow. They’re one of the primary reasons there is no snow. How fucking hard is it to grasp? And if cars and planes are heavy polluters, launching rockets is off the scale. Not that they give a fuck. They’ll be dead before the earth becomes inhospitable to human life, and their hellspawn will have all the money and can go and live on Mars, so everything’s fine in their megarich world.

It begins with a grand organ note, as if heralding the arrival of a bride or clergy…and so it continues. On… and on. Five minutes in, and very little has changed. Perhaps some light pedal tweaks , a shift in the air as the trilling drone continues, but nothing discernible. The note hangs and hovers. It fills the air, with the graceful, grand tone that is unique to the organ, a truly magnificent instrument – and I write that with no innuendo intended, no reference to the Marquid de Sade submerged for my personal amusement here.

Admittedly, I had initially anticipated something which would more directly articulate my frothing fury at the fucked-up state of the world, but begin to breathe and relax into this rather mellow soundtrack… I start to think that this abstract backdrop is the salve I need to bring my blood pressure down, and think that perhaps this is the unexpected purpose of this release… but by the ten-minute mark, I find myself bathed in a cathedral of noise, and before long, it’s built to a cacophonous reverb-heavy blast which sounds like an entire city collapsing in slow-motion. And this builds, and builds. Fuck. I’m tense again. I feel the pressure building in my chest, the tension in my shoulders and back aches. It makes sense. This is the real point of this recording. Everything is fine until you log onto social media or read the news, and you see the state of things. Momentarily, you can forget just how fucking terrible everything is, how the world is ruined and how there is no escape from the dismalness of everything, and how capitalism has driven so much of this, creating a life stealing hell for those who aren’t in the minuscule minority.

Fact: 1.1% of the population hold almost 50% of the global wealth. A further 39% of wealth is held by just 11% of the population. 55% of the world’s population hold just 1.3% of the wealth between them. So remind me, how is capitalism working for the world? Trickle-down economics is simply a lie as the wealthy retain their wealth and simply grow it. Liz Truss may think that the UK importing cheese is ‘a disgrace’, but this statistic is mind-blowing.

Eighteen minutes in and my mind is blown, too. It feels like it could be part of the soundtrack to Threads. It’s a dense, obliterative sound, a blowtorch on a global scale, the sound not of mere destination, but ultimate annihilation. It seems fitting, given the future we likely face.

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Omnibadger – Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III

Posted: 8 May 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

If ever a band could be defined by constant flux and evolution it’s this Derby duo, who began life as Omnibael before becoming the more frivolous-sounding Omnibadger. Working their way through doom-grunge riffery to all-out industrial electronic noise, theirs has been an interesting journey thus far, and one that it would seem is by no means over yet.

So many acts set themselves into a mould and stick to its form for the duration of their career. Some may find a market and thrive in it, but for many, it becomes a trajectory of diminishing returns as they plough the same rut over the course of successive albums, as things become evermore predictable and wearisome, and people lose interest. But then, so many acts make a radical shift and lose a substantial part of their audience in the process. You simply cannot win.

Only, Omnibadger have done things differently: they have spent their career trying to decide who they are, meaning each release has been different, with one release often landing leagues apart from its predecessor. To say that they’ve spent their career deciding may suggest that search is now complete, but that would be a wrong conclusion: that quest continues, and likely will: Omnibager exist to eternally push the boundaries, to seek, to progress, to evolve. There is no linear progression, only expansion.

It all kicks off from the outset with ‘Lick One’, and it gives little away in many respects: it’s a semi-ambient collage of rumbling noise which gives way to tribal percussion, and it’s a confusion of collage that’s difficult to find a hold in. But that’s no criticism: it’s tedious knowing what you’re going got get for the entirety of an album from the first four bars. And this isn’t a ’bars’ album: it’s a hotch-potch sonic soup where rhythm really is not a dominant element, and at times isn’t even present at all.

‘Speeding Ground (Part 1)’ is an epic electronic exploration, stun lasers and gleeps and glops and trilling top-end drones shrill and challenging, like a Star wars scene – and then it goes hypno-prog, a thumping rhythm backing a screeding sheet of noise. And on it goes, thumping and thundering a relentless beat. At Nearly fourteen minutes, it’s a monster.

‘F.I.X.’ slams in some gnarly electro stylings, with undulating synths and insistent, fretful beats twitching away as a backdrop to howling vocals. It’s as if Gnaw Their Tongues and Cabaret Voltaire had bit in a head on collision. There’s no winner here, just a mangled, smoking mess. And as if to reinforce the point, ‘You Never Tell Me What You Think’ crashes in with a nagging bass groove and aa shedload of aggro, and battering away at a simple monotonous grind while the vocals are mixed low in a ton of reverb with the treble cranked to the max, it sound like early Revolting Cocks. Elsewhere, ‘But What I Want Is Not the Most Important Thing Right Now’ spins like an outtake from Pretty Hate Machine, all mangles electronics and gritty guitar.

Clocking in at over ten minutes, final track ‘Equations for a Falling Body’ is the album’s second monolithic piece, and it grinds and scrapes and sheers and saws it way through its duration. Within a couple of minutes, it’s built to a full-throttle racket of discordant electronic chaos, a tempest of noise.

That’s ultimately a reasonable description of Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III (their second album, which is largely guitar-free) overall: audacious, like Throbbing Gristle ironically calling their first (and second) release ‘best of’ and their second album First Annual Report.

By way of a ‘difficult’ second album, with Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III, the only difficulty is for the listener, who is faced with a harsh and challenging listen. But for all of its racket and unpredictable nature, the experience is rewarding, and even enjoyable in a perverse way.

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Merzbow & Arcane Device – Merzbow & Arcane Device

Posted: 26 April 2022 in Albums
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Important Records – IMPREC511 – 29th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Merzbow releases are rather like proverbial busses, with this collaborative release with Arcane Device being releases simultaneously with a 20th anniversary reissue of his Merzbeat album and a CD reissue of his 1983 album Material Action, all on Important Records. The difference between Merzbow and busses is that you never have to wait long for a Merzbow album.

Merzbow & Arcane Device is a coming together of two very old hands at this experimental / noise stuff. David Lee Myers aka Arcane Device has been building electronics and creating feedback based electronic music since the late 70’s. Merzbow’s career also began at the tail end of the 70s, and the last forty-odd years has witnessed the release of a truly staggering body of work, with as many as twenty or more albums being released in a single year. It’s a daunting, overwhelming output, and the same is true of the music itself. Perhaps more than any other artist, Merzbow has pushed the boundaries of music – and even the boundaries of noise – to the absolute limits, and then continued to push beyond.

The premise of Merzbow & Arcane Device as a split LP is straightforward: each takes a piece by the other and remixes it, each presenting a longform piece correspondent with a side of vinyl.

The two pieces here are very slow, low, and drony, with the EQ geared toward the mid-ranges and lower, rather than harsh walls of treble. ‘Arcane Device Remixes Merzbow’ is particularly dense, murky, and unhurried in pace. Bubbles and pops blister the crinkled surface of churning sods. There are brief, momentary stalls to the crunching earthworks, filled with swarming hornet buzzes and wippling ripples of analogue synth sounds and skimming laser blasts. A Geiger counter crackle is pitched down and slowed to register around the gut and occasional trills of feedback break through the swampy soup. But for the most part, it’s half an hour of thick, wind-blown drone.

Merzbow’s treatment of Arcane Device’s sound is similarly given to bleeps and drones, but at a higher pitch and faster tempo; the laser bleeps are machinegun rounds by the barrage, and there are wailing siren cries of elongated feedback notes. As the drones drill deeper, the washes of static grow louder and harsher, and as the layers build, so does the volume and the tension. By the eight-minute mark, the tonal separation has become most pronounced, with barelling low-end underpinning a veil of squalling pink noise. Perhaps uncommonly for Merzbow, there are lulls, and they’re most welcome – but when the noise swells once more, the impact is amplified.

In the scheme of harsh noise, Merzbow & Arcane Device is not particularly harsh, but it’s tonally varied and its comparative subtlety is effective, as it gives the album a more considered feel, and it in no way diminishes its impact. The fact the two tracks are different – perhaps not so much for the casual listener, but to a noise enthusiast – the variations on a theme hold the attention, and draw the listener into the details of texture. These works are restrained, respectful, even, but not reverently so, and in offering two sides of a melted, battered, and pulverised coin, Merzbow & Arcane Device makes for a tough yet immersive listen.

Listen: Nosnisbor vs Prudent split release

Posted: 3 December 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Swedish microlabel Dret Skivor marks its first birthday with another suitably challenging release, in the shape of a split release featuring spoken word artists Dale Prudent and Christopher Nosnibor. As both artists also purveyors of harsh noise, they’ve combined the disciplines to create complimentary pieces of some of the harshest noise-backed spoken word around.

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘This release brings together two spoken word artists who also do harsh noise. These are the results. Nosnibor rants and raves in the York area of England and elsewhere. Prudent performs no audience spoken word in (in)appropriate spaces around Hammarö in western Sweden. ‘

Available as an audiocassette in a limited edition of six, and also as a download, Dret 12 is an instant underground classic.

Listen to the dense blast of Nosnibor’s ‘A Psychological Spasm’ and Prudent’s sprawling, feedback-soaked ‘på bunkern’ here, and follow the label’s advice – Listen through decent headphones or decent speakers for the full horror of what lies within……

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Listen: ‘E.P’ by …(something) ruined

Posted: 17 October 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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I know, I know, poor form, etc., etc. But hey, it’s not every day this kind of thing happens.

…(something) ruined coalesced by happy accident as a live proposition. Like so many bands, lockdown hit our progress and development hard. The ‘white noise and shouting’ worked because of a combination of factors all in the moment – extreme volume, intuition, adrenaline, the consumption of alcohol. Replicating the vibe without those factors proved to be a challenge – but, when offered the platform of the FEAST online streaming events organised by the Nim Brut label during lockdown, it felt like an opportunity to develop a new way of working and to refine that sound in a more controlled setting. Trial and error led to the creation of noise first, vocals second, and over the course of several months, thing evolved, and …(something) ruined became something more, with not only a more defined sound, but a thematic focus lyrically.

E.P. is a cohesive document, but also a document of an evolution, and the tracks are presented in the chronology in which they were created, each first aired at a FEAST event.

‘Life Is Too Short’: small frustrations simmer and boil over when presented with the stark reality that you could die tomorrow and you’ve squandered the last 10 years your waking hours being nice and pandering to utter cunts.

‘On Mute’: anthem for remote workers around the globe as we’ve watched cretins babble away merrily on video calls while no-one can hear a single word – although, frustrating as it is, it’s usually better than hearing their words.

‘Harder, Not Smarter’: another corporate classic. Time and again management promote smart working, time-saving, and economy. But for all the words, there’s only whip-cracking ultimately.

‘On Brand’: brand isn’t just slogans and advertising. It’s an ethos. You don’t just work for a company, you are the company, a walking promotion. Live the brand.

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Watch: ‘On Brand’ by …(something) ruined

Posted: 10 August 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Having coalesced by chance after an encounter in the virtual world, harsh noise / power electronics duo …(something) ruined had been making headway on the live circuit over a couple of years before – and this is a familiar tale – Covid and lockdown put paid to all that. Accustomed to rocking and rolling some raw noise improv, it took them some time to reconfigure their approach to collaboration, but having been invited to perform at a FEAST event online, they began to evolve a new way of working. Each subsequent outing has seen the band go from strength to strength, mining a seam of lyrics dismantling the contradictions of corporate culture paired with some of the most abrasive noise.

Once described as being ‘like Whitehouse without being edgelords’, ‘On Brand’, premiered on Sunday at FEAST 5, not only encapsulates sound and ethos of …(something) ruined, but is perhaps their most potent dispatch yet.

With a debut EP and more live shows in the pipeline, …(something) ruined are poised to fuck shit up on a wider scale.

Watch ‘On Brand’ here:

Watch: …(something) ruined – Life is Too Short

Posted: 1 April 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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The coming together of Paul ‘Zanntone’ Tone and Christopher Nosnibor was a random one which more or less encapsulates their approach to creativity: Paul placed ashout-out on FaceBook for recommendations for a vocalist for his upcoming Foldhead show in Leeds, and Nosnibor’s name was thrown into the hat after a number of previous collaborations with noise artists that had seen his ‘Rage Monologues’ project move from the spoken word scene into the realm of ‘music’.

What happened at that show occurred more by accident than design, but it worked – and so …(something) ruined was born.

Subsequent live shows saw them really hitting their stride – and the pain threshold in terms of volume and intensity – before the COVID apocalypse swept the globe, putting paid plans for further shows and a planned live studio recording.

Nevertherless, live-stream gigs catering to fans of electronic / experimental / noise has continued to give them a platform, and they’ve continued to develop their sound and visuals. Following their brief but brutal turn at FEAST #2 hosted by Nim_Brut, they’ve released their track, ‘Life is too Short’ as a videosingle.

Of the track, Nosnibor says “the lyrics were inspired by conversations I’d been having with a friend of mine, about how if one thing the pandemic had brought into sharp relief was that life’s too short. You never know when your time’s going to be up, and we waste so much of the time we have expending energy stressing over work and trivial shit. No-one ever lay on their deathbed saying ‘I wish I’d spent more time in pointless meetings, or watching trash TV’. I recorded the vocals in one take – first take – and send the file over to Paul, who mangled them beautifully, in a way that conveys all the anxiety, anguish and rage beyond the words themselves”.

Watch the video here:

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Life is too short still

Sterile Garden – Acidosis

Posted: 11 October 2020 in Albums
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No Part of It – 23rd September 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Slowly raising a hand – dripping in coagulated blood and thick, sticky semen – from the swampy morass of angled noise that’s entirely representative of the contemporary dark electronic scene, where dark ambient, power electronics, and harsh noise sim in the same sewers, Sterile Garden emerge with Acidiosis. It’s pitched as ‘harsh noise for junk metal, tape recorder, and 4 track;, and while Sterile Garden is an open-ended project with countless contributors featuring on their 40+ releases in the 14 years since their inception, on this occasion, Sterile Garden is simply Jacob DeRaadt.

Acidosis contain six untitled, numbered tracks, and they segue together to create on enormous lump of churning industrial noise. Howling whines of nose like jet engines firing up power full-throttle into barrelling blasts of abrasion.

Without lyrics or any form of vocal element apart from the muffled dialogue on ‘Acidosis 6’, the album is purely a host of permutations of mangled noise which feature here with every shade of feedback and distortion imaginable assailing thee listener’s tenderised eardrums. Metallic clattering, and scrapes, barks and yelps and screeching screeds or nail-scraping, eye-watering blurting screeds or treble dominate.

So much of this overloading, speaker-splitting noise is so above the limits, so over the regular limits of noise, it hurts. But while suffering, enduring, or perhaps enjoying the pain, if you can get past the tinnitus-inducing shards of treble, the walls of mid-range that blast away like hurricane, there is detail, there is textural depth. No doubt many would disagree, and this s very much one for the noise aficionados: there no tunes, no structures, just screaming feedback and howls of painful noise, whistling feedback and manged, cacophonous noise hurtling headlong toward the crusher. Alright, it is just needless, neverending noise, but as I was out and about earlier, on a supposedly ‘quiet’ walk, I became attuned to an endless stream of noise ranging from conversations to car engines. Peace and quiet is a myth – although Acidosis is not so much anti-ambient as anti -sanity, a relentless bewildering squall of horrible noise.

Acidiosis is all the metallic clanks and scrapes. With Acidiosis, Sterile Garden have landed the crusher that will crush your soul. It’s a gut-churning, skull-compressing horrorshow that hurts, physically and psychologically – meaning a job well done.

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Vitauct – Breaking Bad

Posted: 29 April 2020 in Albums
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Noisequanoise – 29th January 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

What is this? A reimagined soundtrack to the popular TV series? Having not watched it (I know, it’s a crime against contemporary popular culture) I’ve no idea if the track titles are references.

What I do know is that we’re in ultra-niche ultra-noise territory here: Breaking Bad was recorded on a CD-R data discs and released on an initial run of CDs limited to 8. Yes, 8. There’s a wilful obscurantism that’s part and parcel of the scene that this clearly taps into, and it was ever thus going back to the dawn of Come Organisaton. There’s a whole essay, or even a book, in the culture surrounding the scene, and that isn’t for now, but despite what all this may seem to imply about elitism and snobbery in the noise scene, my personal experience has to date presented many accommodating, pleasant, self-effacing and self-aware, not to mention shy and reasonable people. It;s often the case that extreme art is not a reflection of the individual, but simply an outlet.

The opening bars of the album’s first piece, ‘Hidden Threat’, are serene, almost ambient, and pleasant. Then in a turn it explodes and what sounds at first like a metal bucket full of stones and a broken contact mic being kicked down the stairs in a tower block swiftly becomes a relentless swirl of churning metallic distortion, a churning blast of noise that’s excruciating. There are some vocals in there, too: pained shouting, submerged by a blistering wall of distortion. It’s so intense as to make five and a half minutes feel like fifteen.

Shifting into lower frequencies and breaking the wall with the occasional stutter, ‘Stream of Thoughts’ conjures the anguish I feel around 10am on most mornings in the office – and while the actual office experience is rapidly receding into the distance as a memory, the recollection of the trauma of operating in such surroundings will likely never fade.

And so it is that ‘My Future Plans’ is a shrieking mess of treble that jolts and jars, and with so much turbulent top-end, ‘More Pain!’ is appropriately titled as a trudging, sawing sound grinds back and forth against a squall of shrieking ballistic white noise. And it just keeps on going. There is absolutely no fucking respite. The spaces between the tracks are negligible, and while the tracks are all different, when presented with so much relentless blasting noise, the effect is ultimately flattening. That doesn’t mean it’s numbing or desensitising: six or seven tracks in, it’s still as eye-wateringly assaultive as in the opening minutes – but you’re just too battered and beaten to really differentiate one shade of overloading distortion from another, in much the same way as standing in a DIY store comparing paints. Only this is like comparing paint while having an electric drill penetrating each ear.

That said, the final track ‘The Way No Nowhere’ does seem to increase the intensity, with more rapid circulations of the internal rhythms that manifest within the whorl of noise.

It’s draining, and hard work: but then, it’s not intended as easy listening and one of the primary purposes of harsh noise and power electronics is a sonic catharsis, and one which often involves an element of self-flagellation. And in terms of delivering against objective, Breaking Bad brings it.

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Death Circuit – An Easy Passage To The Mind

Posted: 29 April 2020 in Albums
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Noisequanoise – 1st January 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Avery Vickers, aka Death Circuit, isn’t exactly big on info, biographical or otherwise. But, specialising in Harsh Noise, Harsh Noise Wall, and Power Electronics, what more do you really need? Personality and politics are less than nothing in the face of instrumental annihilation.

An Easy Passage To The Mind is noted as having been ‘recorded on 90 minutes of cassette tape’. The medium naturally brings a roughing, analogue feel to the two tracks, which are both exactly 15:03 in duration (90 minutes would surely be unbearable even for the biggest fan of this).

What’s impressive is just how much sound is packed into those thin, magnetic-coated strips. It’s not just harsh, noisy, and a wall – that’s pretty much a given. But the density is more than a towering slab of basalt. And of course, there are no smooth edges here: this is pure abrasion.

On ‘1’, there’s an emphasis on the lower mid-ranges, meaning the experience isn’t cranium-splittingly abrasive. The sound is very much like a cross between a helicopter at close range, and a washing machine on a spin cycle, the air torn and shredded, and rent damaged by the obliterative volume. After the initial shock of the sheer sonic force, it becomes immersive. Not pleasant, but not unpleasant.

The same cannot be said of ‘2’, which may or may not be the same track cranked up to a level of overloading distortion and does actually hurt and fuck with your head even more than your speakers. It simply sounds broken. And after a quarter of an hour of it, I certainly am. It’s torture by frequency, and it’ torture by volume, and it’s torture by dissonant vibration. I feel jaw clenching involuntarily as every muscle in my body get gradually more tense. It’s horrible. And exactly as intended. Harsh.

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