Posts Tagged ‘Noise’

PAK40 / Teleost / ATKRTV – The Fulford Arms, York – 4th December 2025

Posted: 5 December 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a cold and very wet Thursday night in December. The kind of night that would validate the narrative that music venues go bust because they’re not supported, and people want to see bands they know over local acts and so on – if the place had been quiet. But there’s nothing quiet about tonight., in terms of turnout or decibels. Ok, it’s not rammed, but it’s respectably busy, and as for the volume… These guys take it all the way to eleven.

The promoter’s strategy of booking a local / student / uni band to open up is one that rarely fails, and there’s a significant turnout early doors for ATKRTV. It helps that they’re good, albeit an acquired taste and not your average uni band. Operating in the classic power trio format, their primary inspirations are clearly US noise rock and grunge – there’s a bit of the Jesus Lizard here, a dash of Sonic Youth and Shellac there – as well as UK 90s noise that makes nods to the likes of Fudge Tunnel and Terminal Cheesecake – but there’s a lot going on, with hints of avant jazz in the blend, too. They’re a bit rough round the edges, but there is a musical style which is forgiving of this, and the jagged jarring juxtapositions of squalling guitar work with some meaty bass work evidences a technical ability beneath the surface of the feedback-strewn tempest. And while the banter might need some work, the songs are a glorious angular explosive racket, and they give them a hundred percent. And this is why it’s always worth getting down early doors. Every headliner was a support act once, after all.

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In my recent review of that debut album, Atavism, I commented on how the challenge would be for them to replicate the live sound in the studio. This is because their life sound is simply immense. There really is no other word for it. And this is not volume simply for the sake of it: this is volume as an expression, volume which renders the music physical, volume without which certain frequencies and tonalities, so integral to their sound, would not be achievable. Their performance in this same venue back in February was spellbinding, and I came tonight in the hope of replicating that experience. And oh yes, I did, and then some: Teleost seemed to take things to the next next level tonight.

Theirs is a subtly different take on the whole droning doom / stoner form, incorporating almost folky elements in the way that more recent Earth albums do. And instead of being solely about bludgeoning riffery – and hell, there’s plenty of that – there’s a rare attention to detail, not just in the delicate picking and soft cymbal splashes in the quieter moments, but in the full-spectrum sonic experience they conjure. And yes, conjure is the word: this is a world of magic made with a mystical blend of musicianship, amps, pedals, and something else quite indefinable. The way Leo Hancill uses a standard guitar, played through a substantial but not extravagant pedal set and two amps, to cover the range of both guitar and bass is spectacular in itself, but what really makes their sound unique, and it’s so easy to lose yourself in the timbre and texture, the way the sounds reverberate against one another to create this sensurround experience.

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Teleost

Once again, I find myself truly mesmerised by Cat Redfern’s ultra slow drumming. What’s most remarkable is how effortless she makes it appear. Granted, her sticks are batons, but she is still an immensely hard hitter please with absolute precision. Yet she plays with an order of serenity, her expression calm, almost a smile, although it’s clear that’s behind this is intense concentration, and perhaps an element of telepathy between herself and Leo. Certainly the intuition between pair is remarkable, and no amount of rehearsal alone can achieve this level of tightness. The way they navigate the peaks and troughs, spinning elongated quiet passages, where they reduce everything to a hushed hum and the tinkle of a cymbal before bringing in a cataclysmic riff with pinhead precision is nothing short of phenomenal. And for all the noise, the experience is remarkably calming.

Before Teleost, there was PAK40. But with basis / vocalist Andy Glen now resident in Germany, and Leo Hancill living in Glasgow, activity from this former York duo is now extremely rare. That they’re touring with Teleost, having released a new EP simultaneous with the Teleost album makes economical sense, but also represents a significant feat of co-ordination.

It’s not difficult to identify the origins of Teleost when listening to pack 40. They’re certainly slow and heavy. But their style draws more overtly on the Sabbath-based doom sludge template, and there much more overtly metal. In places, they present a sort of blackened New Age metal hybrid. There’s also something more direct about their drum / bass combination. But oh, that bass. The thick, tearing distortion when the riffs kick in are agonisingly close to brown note territory: you feel your ribs rattle and your skin quivering.

In contrast to Cat Redfern’s zen drumming, Leo drums with his face, and in contrast to Hanclil’s slow nodding guitar style, Andy Glen goes all out with some unrestrained headbanging as he unleashes the most pulverising bass riffs. PAK40 are harder, and more abrasive. And this is why the double-header works: for all of their similarities, the two bands bring different shades of heavy. And they’re both intense, physical forces.

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PAK40

I babble some shit to people on the way out. I think I got away with it, because everyone is equally dazed. We’ve been blitzed, blown out of our minds and shaken out of our skins tonight by a musical experience that borders on transcendental. It’s a cut above your average wet Thursday night in December, for sure.

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.

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Deborah Fialkiewicz & {AN} EeL – Purple Cosmos

Posted: 27 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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22nd November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The second collaborative release of the year by Deborah Fialkiewicz & {AN} EeL (aka Neal D. Redke) lands amidst a blizzard of output from two musicians who are both insanely prolific – by which I mean prolific on a scale which isn’t far off Merzbow or Kenji Siratori: they each release more frequently than the average person has time to listen to it. I don’t in any way consider myself to be an average person – and we’ll not go there – but writing about music means that having something play in the background while I do other stuff, like changing the cat litter or whatever, isn’t always something I fancy, and certainly isn’t my way of hearing a release for the first time. Ok, so this is not how, say, my daughter, who’s fourteen, or her generation, or even some of my peers take in new music, but my formative experience of new music involved sitting down and setting a new album to spin and giving to my undivided attention for its entire duration. Sometimes twice in succession, or more on a weekend.

Attention, in 2025, is, it would seem, in short supply. And yet, flying in the face of this, albums with long tracks seem to be becoming increasingly more common. Perhaps it’s a sign of artistic rebellion. Perhaps it’s that artists feel a need to reclaim the focus and concentration associated with longer works. Whatever the reason, it’s welcome, and Purple Cosmos contains three compositions spanning a solid half an hour.

This is a thoughtful, delicate trilogy of compositions, which build from hush to tumultuous tempests of sound incorporating powerful space rock and progressive elements within their protracted ambient forms.

‘The Floating Monk’ is centred primarily around a thick, earthy drone that has the texture of soil, and it’s enmeshed with dark layers of serrated tones and thunderous rumblings. It’s dark and it’s dense, and it’s uncomfortable. The rest of the album doesn’t offer much by way of light relief.

Yes, the title track strays more toward bleepy electronic experimentalism –a different kind of space rock, if you will – and the final track combines wailing synth overload with some persistent beats… but first and foremost this is an unashamedly experimental work.

Purple Cosmos is a work which reflects a rare attention to detail, and it possesses a certain persuasive relentless in its marrying of dark noise, analogue undulations, and insistent beats. There’s more than a hint of Throbbing Gristle about it, and perhaps a dash of Factory Floor. It gets inside your head, and at the same time enwraps your entire being with its otherworldliness. It sure is a far-out groove.

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Benefits / The DSM IV – The Fulford Arms, York, 19th November 2025

Posted: 20 November 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Benefits exploded onto the scene not long after lockdown – and I mean exploded, an atomic detonation of rage. The essence of the setup was pretty simple: angry sociopolitical spoken word delivered with blistering vitriol, backed by a blinding wall of noise. The result could reasonably be described as something in between Whitehouse and Sleaford Mods, but the fact is that from day one, Benefits created their own niche. The live shows were jaw-dropping, and the debut album, Nails captured that raw energy with a rare precision.

The arrival of second album, Constant Noise marked a necessary departure – sonically mellower, far more beat-orientated, a lot less shouty, angry-sounding. My first impression was that it was decent, more produced, but still packed some sting in the lyrics., and will be hard to top in terms of the number of mentions of dogshit in albums of the 2020s. But it’s a fair reflection of post-lockdown Britain: dogs have proliferated exponentially, and concordantly so has the volume of dogshit – and, just as bad, bags of dogshit tied and dropped, piled next to or on top of bins, and hung in trees. What kind of twat does that? A selfish one is the only answer. But as for the album, I kinda let it sit for a while. But over time, with more – and more – listens, the album’s depths reveal themselves. Constant Noise is every bit as angry as Nails, and if anything, the more moderate, tempered delivery hits harder. It just takes a little bit longer to reveal its depths and quality. But how would this translate live, especially now they’ve been stripped back to the founding duo of Kingsley Hall and Robbie Major?

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Benefits

Before we would get to find out, there was the equally intriguing support. The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster are one of those acts who may have only attained cult status during their time together, but it’s one which has expanded since their demise. They were always a band destined to implode, as was apparent when I witnessed a particularly fractious gig here in York circa 2007. But this was always a band which had derangement and volatility wired into their makeup. Guy McKnight formed DSM IV in 2018, and they’re an altogether different proposition, trading in gothy electro with some tidy guitar textures woven into the fabric of the songs, and Guy seems altogether more settled. It’s all relative, of course, and he ventures into the crowd on numerous occasions, and at one point around the middle of the set, tosses mic stand over, drops the mic and busts some tai chi moves. It’s a solid set, both compelling and entertaining, and they’ve got some tunes, too.

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The DSM IV

Benefits don’t really have a great many tunes in the conventional sense. Choruses and hooks aren’t the primary focus of their compositions. Hall’s words range from reflective and ponderous to outright roaring rage, the backing spanning sprawling barrages of obliterative noise to quite chilled dance grooves. But at this volume, and when delivered with this much passion, there’s nothing chilled about this live show.

Here, I find myself returning to the topic of seeing an act you’ve seen before and been blown away by, and going to see them again in the hope of replicating that first time – only it’s a weak hope, because the first time has the element of surprise which is unlikely to be repeated. Yes, a band may be consistently awesome, but that first bombshell experience, that initial high… very few bands have the capacity to have that impact more than once. Benefits, however, hit even harder on this outing than any before.

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Benefits

There was word online that their current tour was as brutal as any they’d ever done. Having seen them three times previously, and never with the same lineup, it seemed like that claim might be a bit of a stretch, particularly without a live drummer. But synthetic beats have a way of bludgeoning and cracking in a way that live drums don’t always, and when paired with gut-churning low-frequencies and ear-bleeding top-end noise, the sonic impact of what blasts from the PA is positively immolating.

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Benefits

Kingsley gets most of the chat out of the way at the start, with a bit at the end: in between, they power through a relentless set uninterrupted. And relentless it is, and not just sonically: with the sole lighting consisting of blinding white strobes for the entire duration of the hour-and-twenty-minute set, the stark, uncompromising nature of the music and lyrics is amplified. They put every ounce of energy into the show, Hall positively streaming with perspiration by a third of the way through. And we feel the passion; the whole room is buzzing and aglow with a sense of unity through a shared experience of catharsis. These are shit times. Dark times, bleak and scary times, domestically and globally. Benefits capture the zeitgeist, and rail against those who will one day be proven to have stood on the wrong side of history – the right-wing, flag-shagging, pro-Brexit, racist, xenophobic, hatemongering, exploitative, manipulative capitalist shits and their supporters and enablers – articulating thoughts and feelings with a unique precision and an intensity which is positively nuclear. The experience is nothing short of mind-blowing.

Oscillator – OSC

Posted: 12 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Dave Procter is / has been involved in more musical projects than your mum’s had hot dinners. Having left Leeds for Sweden, not least of all on account of Brexit, he’s currently paying the UK a visit with a tour which features performances by no fewer than five of them – last night’s set in York was one of two halves, featuring the polite extreme electronica of Trowser Carrier and the whacked-out post-punk infused racket that is Loaf of Beard. So about these ‘Brexit benefits’… and the fear of taxing the rich for fear they’ll leave the country. Since they’re not paying much tax anyway, where’s the loss there? Meanwhile, we’re losing migrant workers who keep the NHS operating, who harvest crops, and flip burgers, AND we’re killing creative industries by making it harder for artists to tour here. A few years ago, there was considerable coverage given in the media about the country’s so-called ‘brain-drain’; there’s been rather less coverage given to the slow murder of the arts. The Guardian and The Independent have raised their hands in quite anguish over the killing off of arts degrees, degrees which are being targeted as not providing a route to a well-paying career, but in the main, this is happening quietly. What’s painful is that there’s so much raving about ‘small boats’, hardly anyone is noticing, and even fewer care because they’re too busy buzzing over the Oasis reunion or Taylor Swift. I’ve got no specific beef with Taylor Swift and her sonic wallpaper, but the point is that there is so much life and art and creativity beyond the mainstream. There is an extremely diverse array of subcultures, an underground that’s as big as the overground, only more diverse, eclectic, fragmented, and this is what’s suffering.

To return to topic, somehow, amidst all this activity and while in transit, Procter’s managed to launch both a new release and a new project via his Dret Skivor label, in the form of OSC, the debut – and likely one-off – album by the imaginatively titled oscillator.

The accompanying notes are unusually explanatory for a Dret release, forewarning of ‘Glitch, ambient and toy keyboard experiments. Play through decent speakers and headphones, the lows are LOW!!!’ The tracks were created during some free studio time in Copenhagen in October 2024, and, as ever, the CD run is minuscule, with just 6 copies. This, of course, is typical of the DIY cottage industry labels, particularly around noise circles. It’s not only a sign of an awareness of just how niche the work is – and it very much is that: no point doing 50 CDs or tapes when it’ll probably take a year to sell four – but also indicative of a certain pride in wilful obscurity. Just think, if the bigtime ever did beckon, those spare copies sitting under the bed may actually acquire some value. Just look at how much early Whitehouse albums go for, for example.

OSC is very much an overtly experimental work, featuring six numbered pieces – the significance of said numbers remains unclear, if there even any significance, although notably, they’re all zeros and ones, or binary – which range from a minute and twenty seconds to just over eight and a half minutes.

‘01’ is a trilling electronic organ sound skittering over long drone notes, and abruptly stops before the bouncing primitive disco of ‘10’ brings six and a half minutes of minimal techno delivered in the style of Chris and Cosey. It’s monotonous as hell, but it’s intended to be, hypnotic and trance-inducing. Zoning out isn’t only acceptable, but a desirable response. ‘100’ is seven and a half minutes of dense, wavering low-end drone, the kind which slows the heart rate and the brain waves. As the piece progresses, the rumbling oscillations become lower and slower and begin to tickle the lower intestines, while at the same time some fizzy treble troubles the eardrums. Nice? Not especially, but it’s not supposed to be. Sonically, it’s simple, but effective.

‘101’ is so low as to be barely audible: not Sunn O))) territory, so much as the point at which the sun has sunk below the horizon and the blackness takes on new dimensions of near-subliminal torture. The final track, the eight and a half minute ‘110’ is a classic example of primitive early industrial in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, with surging oscillations which crackle and fizz, a thrumming low-end pulsation. It ain’t easy, but it’s magnificent.

Procter loves his frequencies, just as he loves to be eternally droney, and at times Kraut-rocky. OSC reaches straight back to the late 70s and early 80s. OSC is unpredictable, and tends not to do the same thing twice. It’s in this context that OSC works. Embrace the experimental.

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Zero Swann – Benefactor

Posted: 8 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

From the very outset, this is not easy on the ear. Sometimes, something leaps out about an album in the opening minutes, and here it’s the production – or lack of. The title track heralds the arrival of Benefactor, the first album by Washington D.C. improvisational psychedelic outfit Zero Swann in two years. And it’s a swampy, reverby, dingy mess. It’s integral to the experience, but it’s also likely to be a deterrent for some – but screw them, it’s their loss, right?

Although straddling heavy psychedelic and the dramatic gothic style, it’s the sludgy, feedback-riven outtakes of The Jesus And Mary Chains’s Barbed Wire Kisses which first come to mind when listening to this.

Benefactor is the follow up to 2023’s Amon Zonaris, which, at the time, was a one-off collaborative release with Scott “Wino” Weinrich. This time around, bandleader and Saccharine Underground label curator Jeremy Moore is flying solo, handling guitars, fretless bass, drums and noise assault. And there’s no shortage of the noise assault on this punishing no-wave behemoth. As they tell it, ‘From the noise rock / no wave snarl of Ritual Tension and early Sonic Youth, to the shoegaze sounds of My Bloody Valentine, to doom and free jazz chaos over a backdrop of pure lo-fi abrasion, Moore’s latest outing is a true crosspollination of styles’. It is, and what’s more, many of those styles are melted together to form a dark, disturbing sonic sludge.

‘Grave Wax Horticulture’ is a skull-splitting mesh of noise, equal parts The Jesus and Mary Chain and Christian Death. It’s theatrically gothy, in the vein of The Horrors, but primitively noisy – which is a fair summary of the album as a whole. It’s experimental, overloading in its racketaciousness – and while is a psychedelic album, it’s a full-on assault album, too, which draws parallels with Head of David’s first album, LP, and simply summarises a noise ethos which eschews convention in every sense.

Moore’s commanding baritone brings a sense of drama, not to mention a certain theatricality to the chaotic, palpating grind, and there’s an edge to his delivery which is both world-weary and tense, a voice emerging from the desolation of a society collapsing, a world in flames. This is surely the sound of the apocalypse, the sound of everything ending. Everything is overloading, murky, blown-out, blasted with distortion and reverb, resulting in a discordant thunderous attack which fires in all directions at once. It’s a primal roar reverberating from buildings collapsed to rubble, a brain-bleeding blitzkrieg of ruinous proportions, as mechanised drum sounds fire like machine guns and missile explosions, cutting through the wildest, densest racket. The absence of overt structures only compounds the sense of things falling apart. It’s the sound of unravelling, of societal threads pulling apart in real-time, a descent into mayhem, anarchy, barbarity.

‘Anagrams for Agnosia’ is perhaps jazz, but jazz in the loosest sense: it’s exploratory, experimental, freeform, but more than anything, it’s the sound of fracture, or fragmentation, instruments churning and burning, and pulling in different directions like splinters of an object in the wake of a detonation. As the screams die down, there is the thud of a panicked heartbeat, before the final track, ‘Phaneron’ obliterates with a squalling wall of howling guitar, stuttering drums and raw, ruinous noise.

Benefactor is an album without let-up, which provides no breathing space, and is thoroughly relentless in its intensity from beginning to end. Recommended, but approach with caution, and a stiff drink. It sounds like the cover looks.

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Smote – Songs From The Free House

Posted: 6 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Rocket Recordings – 17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The thing that particularly stands out in the bio for the latest Smote album is this: ‘Daniel Foggin has spent the majority of his adult life working as a landscape gardener, frequently pursuing his trade in conditions of either baking heat or freezing cold and, as he puts it “more often covered in mud than not”. Yet the primal, meditative aspects of this work, the act of communing with nature, its histories and its depths have fuelled his art on a profound level. As Daniel himself relates; “I think the music is a direct reflection of this feeling that I haven’t quite managed to define yet, it is dirty and hard but there is an overwhelming comfort to it.”’

It’s something artists rarely mention: they have day jobs. Perhaps there’s an element of shame in it for some. Maybe it detracts from the mystique. Or it could be that it’s considered a detraction from the pitching of the latest creation. But it’s a truth rarely spoken: most musicians, and artists in any medium, have day jobs and have to make time for their creative work. Tours have to be negotiated with work, taken out of annual leave, often juggled with family responsibilities. Sleevenotes by Joe Thompson of Hey Colossus and Henry Blacker is the most open narrative on the realities of this I’ve read to date, and at times the exhaustion crawls from the pages. As such, it’s refreshing that Foggin not only acknowledges his day job, but recognises it as a significant influence on his creative work. And why not? The most engaging art is drawn from life, after all. Much as it would be a more ideal situation that artists could make their living from art, at the same time, there is perhaps greater value in art created by those who live in ‘the real world’ rather than floating, detached, elevated above it in some kind of bubble.

The words ‘Free House’ make me automatically think of pubs, which perhaps says more about me than the artist, of whom we learn that ‘In the world of Smote, going further out means going inward. Less a metaphysical journey into inner space, more a physical journey into the ground itself, converging with its roots and vibrations. What’s more, a journey right to the heart of its principal architect’s daily experience’.

A cottar is a farmer, and with the album’s first piece, we’re plunged into a deep, surround-sound immersive dronescape, There are many layers to it: reverberating voice, trilling flute, sonorous synths, distant percussion… and it builds, and builds, growing into a hypnotic swell before finally breaking into a slow, weighty post-metal riff that twists and turns with spectacular force, hammering with the force of Pale Sketcher by the six minute mark. It has the weight of sodden earthworks, and conveys the hard exertion of ploughing and tilling, as it descends into a speaker-shredding wall of distortion.

‘The Linton Wyrm’ brings heavy Nordic connotations as it plods on, and on, over the course of a rousing nine and three quarter minutes. It’s not so far removed from the epic force of Sunn O))), but equally Wardruna, a band who evoke earthiness and the essence of pagan spiritualism – not about worshipping mythical gods, but celebrating a connection with nature on a level which is almost primal, and isn’t readily articulable through words: it’s something which transcends language.

Single cut ‘Snodgerss’, which clocks in at under four minutes is both representative of the album as a whole – and not. With its trilling flute and thunderous slow riffery, it incorporates some of the leading elements, but in a way which is considerably more accessible, not least of all with its folk leanings, and presents them in a condensed format. That said, it’s an intense piece, which offers no let-up.

The ten-and-a-half-minute ‘Chamber’ is slower, heavier, dronier, and encapsulates the true essence of the album as a whole, building on a low, resonant throb before the introduction of mournful woodwind. As graceful and soulful as it is, it connects with a primitivism which reaches to the core, a place beyond linguistic articulation. This is the sound of forests, of hills, of streams and moorlands.

The final track, ‘Wynne’ hammers the album home in a squalling blast of overloading guitar and powerful oration propelled by thunderous percussion. It’s mighty, and beyond, seven and a half minutes of blinding intensity which concludes an album that’s varied but unswerving in its density and force. You can truly feel the earth move.

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Misery Bacon – Turning in the widening gyre

Posted: 4 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 3rd October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This is proving to be a particularly good week in the world of noise, what with Foldhead’s Paris Braille and this being released on the same day. There’s more information given about this release than most to slip out from Swedish underground label Dret Skivor – in that there is actually some. We learn that the work was ‘Recorded and assembled on residency at Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, Leveld AIR and Gallery ASK, Norway 2025’, and that the ‘Album and song titles taken from / inspired by WB Yeats ‘The Second Coming’’. We also learn that Misery Bacon is the vehicle of Bergen’s Luke Drozd. It’s not clear if this is one of those monikers that’s amusing because translation, or if it’s a case of humour that doesn’t translate geographically, like Die Toten Hosen. I’m sure dead trousers are a massive wheeze in Germany, but here it’s vaguely surreal but mostly a bit odd. Then again, ‘Misery bacon’ makes me think of all the moaning gammons we have here in the UK, red-faced and chuntering into their Carling about ‘immagrunts’ and how everything’s ‘bloody woke’ nowadays.

It contains two longform pieces, each filling a side of the cassette release – of which there are just six copies – ‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’, and ‘Shambling onwards in the shadows of indignant birds’, and neither literary allusions or social commentary are apparent in the work itself.

‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’ starts with some sampled dialogue and an array of pops, clicks, whirrs and glops, a swampy collage of seemingly random elements layered across one another. It’s atmospheric, but also difficult to get a handle on any idea of where it’s headed, if there’s any theme or concept that connects the diverse sources. But soon, serrated drones and distortion build to a sustained whorl of noise atop a quivering bass judder. Five minutes in, and it’s an all-out assault worthy of Merzbow or Kevin Drumm. It’s noise, and it’s harsh, but it’s an ever-shifting, seething mass of tinnitus-inducing tones and textures, at time fizzing and crackling in such a way as to give the impression that the sound is actually inside your own head, rather than reaching the brain from an external source. There’s a niggling crackle of static that sounds like there might be a problem withy your equipment. This is most pronounced and unsettling during a quieter spell of jangling metal which sounds like a light metallic object being rattled against a metal fence, or the clattering of cutlery. It’s a piece that slides and slithers hither and thither, and sits well against Throbbing Gristle’s most experimental, abstract works. Towards the end, it does feel like it could be the soundtrack to the collapse of everything. Listening to it while the US government is in shutdown, Israel seemingly continues to level Gaza despite a supposed ceasefire, hundreds of people are arrested in London and other cities for protesting against genocide, and Russia continues to expand its campaign of interference across Europe, it’s hard to feel much positivity.

On a personal level, the present feels overwhelming. The world is at war. The world is on fire, and at the same time that we have drought, we have flooding. But instead of coming together collectively to address this global crisis, as a species, we’d rather bomb the fuck out of one another. And with shootings, mass knife attacks and all manner of savagery taking place daily, it really does feel as if humanity has descended into a spiral of insanity and self-destruction. And there are really no words to articulate the panic and anguish of all of this. Music and literature may provide a certain comfort and distraction, but it’s in sound alone – more specifically, sense-shattering noise – that I find something which articulates the experience of living in these torturous times.

And so it is that ‘Shambling onwards in the shadows of indignant birds’ returns to the sampled dialogue which opens ‘Every finger double crossed as things fall apart’, before plunging into a mess of static cackles and hiss. It’s a Bladerunner world of rust and robotics gone wrong. It’s murky and it’s unsettling. A blast like the roar of a jet engine momentarily hampers the hearing, and we sit, dazed, in the comparative quiet of crackles and pops. There’s a mid-track lull, which feels uncomfortable as whistles of feedback and laser bleeps criss-cross before collapsing into a broken wall of noise on noise.

Turning in the widening gyre is harsh, heavy, bursting with uncomfortable frequencies. The final minutes are nothing short of punishing. And yet, at the same time, that punishment offers vital release. This is where you get to let go. At last.

AA

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Foldhead – Paris Braille

Posted: 3 October 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Foldhead has been quiet on the output front of late, after something of a purple patch around lockdown, there was a lull, broken by Mirfield Pads in 2022, with only the ‘Single’ release with …(something) ruined since, and a live outing or two. This is the only kind of quiet you’ll get from Foldhead, mind you: the Yorkshire maker of mangled noise likes to turn it up and blast the frequencies – and tones.

If Mirfield Pads ventured towards mellower, more Tangerine Dream-like electronica, Paris Braille sees a return to the harsher territories more frequently wandered by Foldhead.

Paris Braille – the title likely a reference to two cut-up novels by the late Carl Weissner (who not only appeared in some collaborative / split works with Burroughs, including the seminal pamphlet So Who Owns Death TV?, but translated many of his novels for the German market), namely The Braille Film and Death in Paris – is a typically abrasive affair, with the title track being a nine-minute loop of noise which captures of the essence of the ‘derangement of the senses’ Brion Gysin strove to achieve with his multi-sensory performance pieces which extended the concept of the cut-ups to its logical extreme. The thunderous beat, when surrounded by and endless loop, becomes almost trance-like and strangely euphoric. It’s difficult to discern precisely what’s in the mix here: there may be voices, or it may simply be a tricky of the human ear – my human ear – in its quest to seek recognisable forms amidst the formless sonic churn, in the same way one finds the shapes of animals and faces in clouds. In the right context, say, as a remix on a Cabaret Voltaire EP (where it would be right at home, and the William Burroughs / cut-up connection is again relevant here), this would be hailed as an industrial dancefloor stomper – largely because that’s what it is. Intense, hypnotic, relentless, it’s a pulsating, shifting noise beast that slowly spins off its axis and out of control in a swelling surge of sound.

‘CW Loop’ unashamedly harks back to the tape experiments of Burroughs and Gysin from the late 50s and early 60s, which in turn were a huge influence in Throbbing Gristle, and in particular Genesis P-Orridge, who released a selection of archival recordings on the Nothing Here Now But the Recordings LP on Industrial Records in 1980. It is, quite simply, short vocal sample, heavily bathed in echo, looped, and overlayed with a churn of undulating noise.

The third and final track, ‘Film Death’ – the title echoing and mirroring that of the first – round the set off with a return to the thunderous, beat-driven sound of ‘Paris Braille’, this time with a squall of shrill feedback and full-spectrum static. The result is akin to Throbbing Gristle covering Matal Machine Music. In the world of Foldhead, this is absolutely mission accomplished.

AA

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Kevin Drumm – Sheer Hellish Miasmah

Posted: 27 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 10th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This is a monster. A monster that’s been roaring and raging for twenty-three years now. The appropriately-titled noise classic, Sheer Hellish Miasmah, was first released in 2002. It remains a pinnacle of abrasive noise after all this time. To say that Kevin Drumm has released a lot of albums would be an understatement: as is the case with many experimental / noise artists, the likes of Merzbow, and myriad lesser known underground noise acts he’s cranked out multiple albums per year, and the question of quality versus quantity becomes an obvious point of debate, or even potential friction. But when it comes to Sheer Hellish Miasmah, there’s no real debate: the consensus is that it’s a classic in its field.

I step back for a moment to present the summary offered in the press release: The history of Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma is one of resilience to the twists of underground trends that have come and gone since its initial release. Using guitar, tape manipulation, microphones, pedals, analog synthesizers, and subtle computer processing, Sheer Hellish Miasma is an overwhelming experience: a sonic onslaught of storming feedback, fractured textures and an unrelenting energy. At once brutal and meticulously composed, the album offers a singular vision at the outermost edges of sound art.

And here it is, reissued on four sides of vinyl. I assume it’s nice and black and heavy and shiny, because I’m working from an MP3 download, as is the way these days. Does vinyl sound better? It depends on your kit. And your ears.

A lot of extreme noise albums are mercifully brief, presenting a short, sharp shock. Not so Sheer Hellish Miasma, which presents a sustained and truly brutal assault, with five tracks stretching out for well over an hour, some sixty-six torturous minutes. The track sequencing has been altered, with the two longest tracks first, and ‘The Inferno’ is split over sides B and C.

The first, ‘Hitting the Pavement’ is a twenty-minute blast of oscillating, pan-heavy drone and distortion. As grating sinewy nose and distortion riven with feedback hard enough to annihilate even the toughest eardrum, the discomfort levels are high. Sunn O))) may be hailed as pioneers of heavy drone, but Drumm’s activity is contemporaneous, taking electronica to the same extremes and over the same epic durations. The first couple of minutes of ‘The Inferno’ are gnarly, overloading crackle and pop, stutter and static that give you cause to wonder if your speakers are fucked or there’s something wrong with either the recording or your equipment (something I genuinely experienced when I first heard Whitehouse – having downloaded a couple of tracks via Napster back in the day, I deleted the files and searched elsewhere as I assumed the files were corrupted). But no, it’s supposed to sound this fucked-up, and it burrows into your skull in the most intense and uncomfortable way. Over the course of twenty-four minutes, he gives the listener’s ears a proper kicking, and more, seemingly conjuring new frequencies and discovering infinite new angles from which to deliver a truly brutal sonic assault.

At times, it’s like having a road drill applied directly to the head. Full-on doesn’t even come close. It’s not just the frequencies, either: it’s the jagged, abrasive textures that graze hard enough to draw blood. And there is absolutely no respite. Glitching laser bleeps shoot across grinding earthworks. It’s the sound of total annihilation. The album’s title provides the perfect summary of its content: it is absolutely, mercilessly, hellish.

If ‘Cloudy’ offers a momentary pause to breathe and feel the tinnitus, the sawing oscillations of ‘Impotent Hummer’ hit with all the more impact, a persistent buzz that grates away at every sense. The effect is cumulative, and the reaction is physical. The track’s thirteen minutes is a test of endurance. ‘Turning Point’, which now closes the album, leaves the listener with an obliterative thrum, which, while comparatively mild in terms of its attack, is insistent, and again feels like a considered, targeted sensory assault.

Sheer Hellish Miasma is a hard listen – but it’s not hard to understand how it’s come to be considered an outstanding noise album. It’s not for the feint of heart.

AA

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