Posts Tagged ‘history’

Sicker Man – Spökenkieker

Posted: 23 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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blankrecords – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

For context, a definition: Spökenkieker: soothsayer / a person who has second sight and is believed to have the ability to know and tell what will happen in the future. And we also learn that ‘The local mythological figure of the Spökenkieker is situated in the mystical depths of the Teutoburg Forest and serves both as name giver and patron saint for this journey to the initial starting point.

Arguably, anyone who has invested any significant time in studying the past can predict the future. History has a habit of repeating itself, and this has perhaps never been more apparent than now. Consider the following:

In 1933 Mussolini closed the national opera to “renovate” it.

In 1934, Hitler closed the national opera house to “renovate” it.

In 1935, Portuguese dictator Salazar closed the national opera house to “renovate” it.

Orwell’s 1984 is considered one of the greatest dystopian novels of all time, but 1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year it was written, and as such, penned in a recently post-war world, holds a mirror to the ways in which totalitarian regimes operate. And now, here we are, and it’s not just the US under Trump, but a creeping shift towards totalitarianism and total surveillance. We may not be in World War 3, but the world is very much at war, and what peace we have is hanging on a knife edge. If you’re not scared, you’re simply not paying attention.

Sicker Man’s fifteenth album, Spökenkieker is a mesh of different elements thrown together and mixed, blended, chopped, and pulped together. ‘Stop the Gravy Train’ is a perfect example of the melting pot of post-punk, stuttering drum machines, ambience, rave, and experimental jazz. And that’s just four minutes. And however representative it is, it doesn’t really prepare the listener for so much going on all at once. And it’s no mere wheeze that the album is strewn with spoken word samples culled from the past – the idea is to pull these snippets into the present, and cast the future, too, a layering of sorts whereby the past reverberates, echoes forward through the generations.

‘Jojatsu’ and its reprise, and the three-part ‘Ad Finem’ sequence is built around an orchestral / jazz hybrid that transitions between passages of tranquillity and of tension, while samples flit in and out.

I’m going to hit the pause button here for a moment: I’ve been fairly explicit in my dislike of Public Service Broadcasting over the years, online and in conversation. So why is Spökenkieker great and PSB’s work an abomination? It boils down to the fact that Sicker Man is digging through the archives and responding to both the past and the present in a way which strives to articulate something meaningful. It may not be immediately apparent, but some of the titles offer clues: ‘Greedy People’ and ‘Mean Drift’ for example. In contrast, boil these dark moments in history and present them as some for of nostalgia-infused entertainment, no more than the endless ‘documentaries’ churned out on Channel 5, lean on content and even leaner on analysis.

Spökenkieker engages on another level, and the aforementioned ‘Greedy People’ lands like Melvins gone jazz with a Roland 606 spinning a primitive post-punk beat while muttering samples criss-cross over one another as things take a turn for the experimental / ambient / dark dance vibe – and if that sounds like a wild hybrid, it is. ‘Matchless’ is simply a frenzy of elements which defies categorisation. The fact that it works is barely conceivable. But work, it does, and well.

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Mortality Tables – The Engineer

Posted: 19 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 16th June 2024

Sometimes, personal events drive creative work in a way which runs away from the artist. It ceases being first and foremost about ‘art’, and the need to expunge, to offload, to outpour takes precedent. It’s not a conscious thing, something planned: the fact is that creativity leads the way, and art is not something one necessarily can direct or determine – at least, not true art. Art happens in response to things, and oftentimes, the most powerful art is born from exploring the deepest, most intensely personal scenarios. Such explorations may not reveal a great universal truth, but then again, they may present something that’s unexpectedly relatable. And this is where we find ourselves with The Engineer.

Mat Smith has no ambitions of leading the country, and nor does his musical output seek to obfuscate his journey or his reality. The Engineer documents this reality, and I shall quote, quite comfortably, the press release which provides vital context here:

‘In 2012, writer and Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith (Electronic Sound, Clash, Further. wrote a short story, ‘The Engineer’. A work of fiction, the story was loosely based on his father, Jim Smith, a skilled mechanical engineer who had spent most of his adult life working in a factory in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Engineer represented Mat’s thoughts, feelings and fears about his father’s retirement.

‘The story was later narrated by author, producer, playwright and poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. 29 artists, working in the fields of sound art, electronic, experimental and contemporary jazz music, were then approached to provide a sound response to a thirty-second extract of Barney’s narration. The order in which they agreed to be involved determined which section of narration they would be asked to respond to.

‘The collated 29 responses were curated and recorded over the next two-and-a-half years and assembled into a single, 14-minute collage by James Edward Armstrong. Its sprawling, disjointed presentation of short, rapidly-replaced ideas is intended to evoke the devastating confusion of Alzheimer’s, which Mat’s father was diagnosed with in 2018.’

This is about as intense and personal as it gets, and I’d like to think that this well-crafted work makes for a fitting homage. The sleeve image depicts a teenage Jim Smith on Margate’s Promenade in the 1950s, and the narrative tells the story based on his life against a shifting sonic backdrop.

On the surface, it’s a quite charming work. But it’s also sad, a tale of the way the ageing process is one of decline. And as the story progresses, a different kind of decline becomes the focus. It’s also a narrative of the way work has a way of stealing life away, especially for the manual worker. It also speaks of the difficulty of relationships, emotional disconnection, and ultimately faces the issue of mortality in the most real and matter-of-fact way. Time passes, and it passes far too fast. When you reach a certain age, every birthday gives pause for thought, and every picture gives rise to a pang of sadness. Even the passage of a year or two… how do you compute? How do you deal?

It seems that many simply don’t: I often hear or read people remark how people dying – and they die, they don’t pass, although hardly anyone ever says or writes it – people dying in their 60s or even early 70s is ‘no age’ or how they were ‘taken too soon’. I struggle with this. People have a finite time, and I speak from painful personal experience when I write that I feel that it’s quality of time which counts most. To witness a slow degeneration tends to be far more painful for those around the person experiencing it. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and all profits from this release are going to the Alzheimer’s Society. This is to be applauded, of course, but not simply for its charitability, but because of its art.

The Engineer may only be fourteen minutes in duration but represents twelve years in the making, and the input of more than thirty people in various capacities. In short, it’s an immense project, and the amount of time and energy poured into such a complex, detailed work is immeasurable.

The narrator starts out feeling vaguely AI, but in no time, we come to feel a connection with poet Barney Ashton-Bullock’s delivery. It’s crisp and clear, and in some respects has BBC documentary commentary. Its power derives from its simplicity: the narrative itself is straightforward and linear. Its sonic backdrop is not, and it’s disorientating, and at times uncomfortable, incongruous, at odds with the point of the narrative with which it’s paired. The sounds behind the narrative range from grinding, churning industrial din to woozy blooping electronica and shuffling disco and is altogether less linear, mutating over the course of the piece. It will leave you feeling disorientated, it will leave you feeling harrowed, possibly even stunned, and drained. But this is as it should be. The Engineer is ambitious, and a quite remarkable work.

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Megalithic Transport Network – Engine Vein

Posted: 3 April 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Crooked Acres – 29th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Megalithic Transport Network is the vehicle – if you’ll excuse the necessary pun – of Martyn Stonehouse, and as his project’s moniker suggests, Stonehouse has quite a deep-seated interest in transport systems, as well as, more broadly, industrialisation, and what one might call the heritage of production and its progress, with previous works including Excavations On Harthill Moor, and other meditations on geographical / environmental events.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘Drawing inspiration from the 18th and 19th century mining works at Alderley Edge in Cheshire, Engine Vein explores themes of our industrial past and the myths surrounding the historical site itself, which has been worked since the early Bronze Age up until the 1900s. As well as the mines themselves, the area is full of intriguing features and is steeped in folklore, including the story of The Wizard, The Golden Stone and a Holy Well.’

The tracks titles clearly are directly connected to specific locations, and mark the points at which human geography intersects with physical geography – quite specific instances of man-made interventions imposed upon the landscape, you might say: ‘Descent Assembly’; ‘The Hough Level’; ‘Engine Vein’; ‘West Incline’; Windmill Hollow’. Our relationship with mining has changed substantially over the long centuries. What began as a marvel of development has now become a defining feature of the destruction of the planet by human hands and machinery. But this is how our species is: we always go too far, beyond what’s necessary or sustainable. It’s small wonder there’s a collective nostalgia for bygone days and the deeper recesses of history.

Engine Vein, though, sits in a unique space, between two levels of nostalgia, and the present.

First, as for the method and practicality of its creation, Engine Vein was ‘written as live evolving pieces of electronic sound, each recorded using an AE Modular Synthesiser, Korg MS2000 and Yamaha R100 direct to tape, before being digitally transferred’.

And so it is with Engine Vein that MTN explores a tale of industrial with industrial sounds, and if not necessarily vintage equipment, at least using kit that evokes the spirit and sound of a different kind of industrial, namely that of the late 70s. Engine Vein doesn’t replicate the gnarliest noise of Throbbing Gristle, but the more proto-electro pulsations of cuts from 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

It is, as a listener, difficult to directly correlate the track to their associated locations, for two reasons: first and foremost, there’s no ‘field’ element to the compositions, nothing which is identifiably evocative, nothing which associates the sounds with time or space, period or location. But as much as this, there is the historical gap which sits unbridged – how post-millennial technology emulating the sounds of the late seventies and early eighties connects with the time frame which inspired it.

None of this is to say that Engine Vein is a bad listen: it’s simply better, perhaps, to listen to it separately from its context. It’s rare for a time / place inspired / orientated release to be so overtly beat-driven, and for all the dark shifting ambience which lurks and lingers in the further reaches of the many layers, Engine Vein is a throbbing, pulsating, and quite up-front, energy-strong set which draws as much on 90s dance tropes and rave as it does more primitive 80s forebears.

Of course, for the artist, the experience may be entirely different again: perhaps, for him, this is a listening experience which harks back, back, way back and back further. The title track, with its low, slow pulsations and layered facet, does perhaps speak on another level, and its low, dark throbbing certainly has a resonance which bothers the midriff if not one’s perception of history.

Engine Vein is constructed around a dense sonic haze, throbs and pulses. And at times it’s hard to separate the reality from the recordings, as well as the hazy memories. Dark heavy drones, gouging lines ploughing thick and deep churn the ground to a depth and drag the thick sods over one another. ‘Windmill Hollow’ draws the set to a slow, sludgy conclusion, and leaves you feeling dredged out, tired.

There are manifold depths and layers to explore here, making Engine Vein an album worth spending time with.

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Listen: ‘The Affair Of The Poisons’ by Hellripper

Posted: 27 September 2020 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Hellripper have released a new single and the title track from their forthcoming album entitled “The Affair Of The Poisons”.

Having revealed the theme of the album through the release of “Spectres of the Blood Moon Sabbath” and their last single “Vampire’s Grave”, based on true life events from Glasgow in 1954,  Hellripper continues to explore the historical dark & insidious underworld of witchcraft and the occult.

James MacBain explains the inspiration for ‘The Affair Of The Poisons’ “the song takes inspiration from a series of events that occurred in 17th Century France. Possession, witchcraft, child sacrifice & poisonings were at the heart of a large-scale investigation conducted during the reign of the Sun King (Louis XIV) after an extensive plot was unearthed within the court of Versailles, targeting members of the aristocracy and the King himself in order to gain power and influence; the scandal exploded when it was revealed that the royal favourite herself was partaking in black masses and had allegedly poisoned a younger rival to win back the King’s favour.

Listen to ‘The Affair of the Poisons’ here:

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Kemper Norton – Oxland Cylinder

Posted: 27 January 2020 in Albums
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24th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Kemper Norton’s kept a steady trickle of releases coming for some time now, and while the last couple – Hungan (2017) and Brunton Calciner (2019) – had bypassed me until now, the consistency of previous works, from Cam (2013), Loor (2014), and Toll (2016) was more than enough to ensure my immediate interest on the arrival of Oxland Cylinder. His music always has an intrinsic sense of place, however elliptical, and if on the face of it Oxland Cylinder appears to break this trend, the accompanying text is informative:

‘In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the majority of the world’s arsenic was created in Cornwall and Devon. The “Oxland Cylinder” was one of the methods used and was a revolving iron tube used to process and vapourise arsenic pyrites. None of these devices remain intact.’

Immediately, we’re transported to England’s south coast over a century ago, and not only to a bygone era but a practise essentially lost to history. And in this context, Oxland Cylinder takes on layers of meaning and caries a certain historical weight.

If the first piece, ‘halan 5’, which introduces the album with discontiguous electronic scrapes and buzzes, and a swell of bleeps and bloops, an analogue bubblebath that slowly eddies and swells, feels like so many other post-Tangerine Dream ambient electronic drifts, it’s also an evocation of a process akin to alchemy, only instead of turning lead into gold, it turns minerals into alloys, including lead.

Oxland Cylinder forges temporal spaces through the medium of sound, slow-spun ambience that conjures a certain mental blankness into which the listener is free to project their own sense of alternating coastal countryside and industrial production. Some will likely visualise Poldark, although the ruins that remain today tell little of the intense labour, heavy mining and vast engines involved in the extraction of ores and pyrites and their conversion to various alloys as lined the south coast at this time.

‘Dark as a Dungeon’ finds the first occurrence of vocals: it’s a sparse shanty with ringing electronics building a glistening, metallic backdrop to the lilting vocal melody. Singing about mining against funeral echo-laden rings feels like a sad thing.

Oxland Cylinder is as rich in evocative depth and subtlety as the south coast is in social and industrial history, and an absorbing album irrespective of context or intent.

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Kemper Norton – Oxland Cylinder