Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Moore’

AD Ozium – In the Style of Dead Sparrows

Posted: 10 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Saccharine Underground – 9th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I like my shit weird and experimental, and so it is that AD Ozium’s In the Style of Dead Sparrows is both weird and experimental, and needless to say I like it – but with the caveat that listening to it is an experience akin to being dragged through an near-endless nightmare, and every time you think you’ve woken up, you discover that you’re simply in another level of this multi-faceted anxiety dream.

The pitch is that ‘In the Style of Dead Sparrows is the latest transmission from the outer edge of instrumental music – a fractured, hallucinatory convergence of freak folk textures and no wave dissonance that dissolves the boundary between sound and psyche. Created by Washington D.C.-based solo musician Jeremy Moore (Zabus, Zero Swann, Bell Barrow) under the name AD Ozium, the album operates at the intersection of freak folk, no wave, avant-garde drone and experimental instrumental music.’

But this barely scratches the lumpy, irregular, alien, fog-covered surface of this album. The first composition, ‘Lifespring’ is exemplary in its exploratory nature. It begins subtly, some desert rock twang in a drift of breeze and warping ambience. With tweets and yawns, it feels as if the tape is stretched in places, and there’s a crackle and hiss reminiscent of that old four-track tape noise and plunging synth rumbles. Discord builds as the sound swells, unsettlingly. It continues in this way for the first six minutes or so, until the nerve-jangling tension and suspense breaks into a brief but thunderous rupture.

The ten-minute ‘Tender Loving Seed’ is swampy, straggly, churny, a mangled mess of broken-sounding country guitar and fractured electronics, not so much a whistle of feedback as the sound of circuitry melting amidst a swell of distortion. It sounds like fucked-up flamenco, it sounds like dialling through radio stations and managing to tune into none of them, it sounds like a cerebral spasm. It’s a slow unwinding of discordant chaos.

I’ll take a stab that ‘Whore of Sound’ is perhaps a reference to ‘Whorle of Sound’ by Throbbing Gristle, which appeared on their First Annual Report, and was subsequently reprised in a radically altered but altogether more brutal form as Walls of Sound on DOA: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle. Certainly, the sonic parallels are apparent: this is seven minutes of gnarly noise which swells to head-shredding intensity with hints of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

‘Faith is a Hole’ brings new layers of discomfort, the overloading low frequencies creating mic distortion and the most hellish vibrations, making for a long seven and a quarter minutes, before ‘Portents of the Terminal Mind’ ripples and reverberates a whirlpool of the wrongest confusion.

Confusion, contusion… ‘The Nazarene Distortion’ is gentle at first, but again, discord and chaos and blasting lasers reign… and all the while, there is a background rumble, a tape his that never stops. The background noise at times reminds me of Rudimentary Peni’s Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric – not because its similar in musical terms, but that endless, nagging background sound gnaws away at your ears and your brain. It’s not the most abrasive or attacking nine minutes of noise, but it’s a heavy slog of the most difficult atonality. It’s stomach-lurchingly messy. At times, you just want it all to stop.

This is challenging. It’s woozy, head-spinning. It simply sounds wrong. It’s not some Beefheart-style cacophony. It’s darker, the lo-fi leanings and atonality only amplifying the tension. Drones and buzzes, hums and fleeting phases are interspersed with annihilative blasts of noise, and the guitar notes simply echo out into the void.

In the Style of Dead Sparrows isn’t simply weird or experimental – it’s harsh and abrasive, and it will assail your intestines and hollow you out.

AA

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Bell Barrow – True Human Trough

Posted: 16 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Saccharine Underground – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Bell Barrow are on fire right now. And so is half the world. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that they thrive on war and global turmoil, so much as feel the compulsion to create in the face of global crisis. I may be projecting a little here, but seriously – come the fuck on: how can anyone not feel all-consuming, abject terror right now? We’re hearing a lot of Israel claiming an ‘existential threat’ from the supposed nuclear activities of Iran right now – although this seems a little lacking in credibility, since it can’t also be true that the USA ‘annihilated’ Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer. I mention this in my preface to the review of True Human Trough because although the current events aren’t mentioned specifically, it’s clear that this is an act who are tuned in to current tensions as well as ecological concerns, and who channel the energy of anxiety into their music.

As they themselves write, “These compositions function as experiments in torture empathy: forcing the listener to inhabit the suffering inflicted on our ecosystem by human dominance while simultaneously confronting a far older truth—that humanity’s power is temporary, localized, and ultimately irrelevant. Plant life, scavengers, and insect civilizations speak here through perceived chaos, not to ask for mercy, but to assert inevitability. True Human Trough reflects agony, yes—but more importantly, it documents supremacy. We may poison this world for now, but be clear…in the universal order, they rule in the end.”

I admire their optimism, and for what it’s worth, I share this hope. Because right now, it feels as if our species is suffocating the planet harder by the second. And suffocating is how the first track on this frenzied sonic blitzkrieg of an album feels. ‘Solunar Theory’ is a melting morass of experimental jazz immersed in a wall of phased reverb. Time signatures collapse into chaotic discord on ‘The Unbirthing of Jackals’. Everything lurches, drunkenly, it’s a dizzy stagger that’s powerful enough to unsettle the guts and leave you seeing stars. This is a woozy cacophony rendered all the more brain-frying by the wild application of reverb. Everything is off-kilter, the EQ is all over and there’s flange and phase and good old-fashioned manic musicianship, melting Beefheart and Zappa and Trumans Water in a cauldron with The Necks and Throbbing Gristle. Reading that back, it actually reads like some fucked-up Victorian era recipe that’s only missing some tripe and trotters to top a truly foul soup. Bell Barrow simmer up a pretty foul sonic soup even without these ingredients: ‘Neckless of Tongues’ delivers it

‘Infauna’ refers to the animals living in the sediments of the ocean floor or river or lake beds, while ‘bloat stage’ is occurs during the decomposition of a corpse. Yes, I looked this up while experiencing the obliterative force of ‘Bloat Stage Infauna’, and in context, it all makes sense. ‘Rites of Silent Spring’ is almost black metal in its frenetic frenzy, but of course, it’s also a jazz-infused instrumental which is a long way removed from black metal – which pretty much sums up True Human Trough, an album that’s everything all at once.

The production and mix is deranged, demented, furious. There’s no intention of softening the blows here: Bell Barrow are set on bringing pure mayhem and disruption – of the best possible kind.

We are living through historical moments in real time. As we hurtle towards self-extinction – it’s more a question of by which means than if now, what with the pace of climate change, AI’s rapid and unfettered advancement and now – let’s call it what it is – the onset of World War 3 – with True Human Trough, Bell Barrow have created a work which soundtrack the next stage of the end of times.

AA

Jeremy Moore by Fleurette Estes- February 2026 - Landscape 001

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Jeremy Moore by Fleurette Estes