Posts Tagged ‘Noise’

Weston Super Maim – 180 Degree Murder EP

Posted: 6 July 2021 in Singles and EPs
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16th July 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

One of my mates enjoys expounding on the opinion that all band names are inherently and fundamentally crap, at least when taken on face value and interrogated for their meanings and connotations. He invariably takes it back to The Beatles – a shockingly bad pun if ever there was one, and I would have to say that point is hard to argue. It’s not even especially clever.

Any band with a one-word name prefixed with ‘the’ is, unquestionably terrible (even allowing for the fact that The Melvins is purposefully bad), and existing and acts who’ve added a definite article have gone rapidly downhill on doing so – take The Offspring, for example. But maybe not so much The Verve, because they were gash to begin with, with their overblown, flappy indie shoegaze flailings.

Recently, we discussed Death by Unga Bunga and Ender Bender, and unanimously agreed that they were both terrible names. But then, objectively, pretty much every band name – even your favourite – is poor and difficult to defend.

But we were divided over Weston Super Maim, which he deemed a bit shit, and which, objectively, is based on a terrible half pun that only UK residents and only then a percentage will grasp. But, despite knowing this, I can’t help but find amusement and a certain admiration for it and the audacity.

Their latest offering, the 180-Degree Murder EP isn’t so much a source of amusement, but more of a brutal industrial battering. Tom Stevens (All Of Space, Brown Stratos) teams up with US-based Seth Detrick of Los Angeles thrash outfit PDP to handle vocal duties. It’s an EP in the 80s tradition, where two tracks too long for a 7” would make up a 12” release. The two tracks on offer here both extend beyond the six-minute mark and pack all the punch.

It’s been a long time in the making, as the press release details: ‘Written as a single track, 180-Degree Murder traverses caveman heaviness, tech-driven grooves and shifting melodic patterns to create an immersive experience that rewards multiple listens. The writing process for the EP began in 2019. By the time the pandemic hit, an early instrumental draft had already been recorded, but it wasn’t until Detrick joined the project in June 2020 that things really began to take shape. Making use of extra time at home in London during the first UK lockdown, Stevens retracked instruments for the EP at his home studio while Detrick developed lyrical ideas and vocal patterns from his home in Eugene, Oregon. Vocal tracking was completed in early 2021, and the mix not long thereafter.’

‘180 Degree Murder’ is a cacophony of hard slabs plus squalling bleeping fretwork, roaring, ground-razing vocals and an air of explosive violence as guttural roars set against the most pulverising of riffs. Strapping Young Lad is the comparison that comes to mind, but then there’s also the relentless mechanised industrial blast of Wiseblood and Swans that’s also hard to ignore. Oh yes, this is hard and heavy, alright.

‘We Need to Talk About Heaven’ offers a graceful intro and the breaks are remarkably light and melodic in context, but the chug never stops, and cuts loose into violent distortion-driven fury at precisely those crucial points, and it’s not for wimps. In fact, it may only be some fifteen-and-a-bit minutes in duration, but 180 Degree Murder is a savage and brutal affair.

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Fading Tapes – Cartographer

Posted: 4 July 2021 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 4th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Fading Tapes: a moniker that casts allusions to degradation, the wear and fade through the passage of time, the notion of impermanence and the significance of medium – because the medium isn’t only the message, it’s the determining factor in the lifespan of a record, whereby digital is supposedly forever, but analogue corrodes, deteriorates, and ultimately becomes unusable.

A Cartographer is one who draws or makes maps, and Fading Tapes’ latest work is, ins ways, both map and territory. The titles of the four tracks sketch out the features of the locations in the most minimal of forms – and these aren’t necessarily natural geographical landforms or biomes, but remains of human activity left marking the landscape.

The sequencing of the four compositions, each of which span around fifteen minutes apiece, very much create the sensation that the listener is being guided on a journey, and there is a clear linearity to Cartographer.

Opener ‘East Valley’ calls us to the ritual with an insistent tribal drumming and wailing pipe before… actually, before what the fuck? It’s not so much a building of layers of sound as it is a jet plane flying overhead, devastating the image of a hidden tribe enacting an ancient, esoteric ritual. And this is the dynamic of the piece – ancient collides with modern, and as immense gongs and cymbals crash, ringing out into an expansive desert, unchanged for centuries, hidden from the march of technology and evoking a deep-seated spirituality, the disruptions are deep incisions that disrupt without care for the existing habitat. But over time it’s the soft, supple droning ambience and wordless vocal tones that ring out into a spacious echo that come to dominate. For once, nature, and the old world, wins out as so-called progress falls by the wayside: the valley remains unconquered.

‘Bones’ is a more contemporary-sounding drone work, with conventional western percussion propelling a deep, dark surge of slow-burning desert rock that’s slowed to a the pace of drifting dunes, and the sound is dense. The snare rings out into a cavern of reverb – it’s almost dubby, but it’s accompanied by wailing feedback, that does on, and on, and endless mid-range drones. We learn little, if anything, of the bones themselves, or their origins, but there is a sense that there is little interest in the real detail of the past, and that a sketched narrative is all that there is an appetite for. Instead, to the present, and the future.

The cymbals grow in dominance on the tempestuous ‘Boats’, but again, echoes and shadows dominate, and this very much feels like a window on an historical event, the soundtrack to a battle or other catastrophe at sea where boats were lost beneath the waves. To all intents and purposes, this is a spacious post-rock piece, but it possesses a richness, a level of detail, and a degree of ambience, that is so much more.

The final track, ‘Red Dry Land’ is a hypnotic piece that drifts without real movement, a nagging motif backed by a thrum that simply thumps on unchanging for what feels like an eternity. There’s a scratchy guitar that’s reminiscent of Andy Moor, and mines a more avant-jazz seam, but retains that expansive post-rock vibe, too.

The map charts a route, and as it progresses, it leads the listener back to themselves. This all feels highly evocative, and conjures images in the mind’s eye – but every perception is different. Perhaps that difference ultimately does come down to the map, and one’s experience of the territory – for while the former is fixed, factual, the latter is not, and will always be coloured by individual realities, the eye of the explorer. You may know exactly where you are, and still be lost. With Cartographer, Fading Tapes point the way but provide no real answers. But perhaps that’s ok: the enjoyment is in the journey rather than the destination.

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Muscle Vest – Live Laugh Loathe

Posted: 3 July 2021 in Singles and EPs
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Prank Monkey Records – 11th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The story goes that London four-piece Muscle Vest reportedly ‘formed in 2018 over a mutual appreciation for ugly rock music’, and that’s what they serve up on their debut EP – a sweaty, guitar-driven dirty rock workout that’s brimming with churning riffs, grease and grime. They come out all guns blazing and firing wildly in all directions with the manic racket of ‘Creepy Crawlie’, a juddering, angular rager that melts the best of 90s noise into a mangled metal nugget in the vein of later acts like Blacklisters and Hawk Eyes, and it very much sets the fast and furious tone for the rest of the EP: ‘Stray’ bears fair comparison to Blacklisters’ ‘Shirts’, with a throbbing riff blasting out against a low-slung bassline. If Shellac and Big Black are in the mix, so are The Jesus Lizard and early Pulled Apart by Horses.

Muscle Vest pack in a boatload of adrenaline and bring ALL the noise: it’s fucking ugly and monstrously brutal, and those are its positive points. It ain’t polished or pretty, and if you’re on the market for something gnarly, look no further.

‘We’ll all be dead / we’ll all be dead one day’ vocalist Dave Rogers howls nihilistically into a tempest of abrasive guitar noise that churns and grinds on ‘A Slow Death’. He’s right, of course: the question is whether we will die a quiet, peaceful death, or a horrible, painful one, shrieking in agony for the duration of those final hours. This is very much the soundtrack to the latter, and it’s almost enough to make death sound appealing. Because, well, better to go out screaming than to flicker out. The last track, ‘Blissbucket’ is a minute and three-quarters of blazing napalm, taking its cues from hardcore punk and tossing in all the jarring, jolting guitars that scratch and scrape at all angles across the relentlessly churning rhythm section. It’s fast and furious and brings the EP to a blistering close and then some. It positively burns with an intense fury, and it’s beautifully brutal. Gets my vote, and then some.

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Watch: Biomechanimal and Sentinel Complex – Crown of Glass

Posted: 1 July 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Biomechanimal and Sentinel Complex join forces to bring you ‘Crown of Glass’, an intense mashup of sounds and styles, leaving a trail of destroyed genres in their wake. Both acts deliver huge vocal performances and brutal production, pulling from symphonic metal, midtempo, harsh industrial, dubstep, and more. Liberation in Domination!

‘Crown of Glass’ refers to the ego that we see in ourselves; this fragile symbol of our own strength. The song deals with the negative side of this ego, how it can lead us to view others and ourselves in a distorted way.

Watch the video here:

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Jim Haynes – When The Sky Burned

Posted: 25 June 2021 in Albums
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SIGE Records – SIGE103 – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It was The Decline Effect, a full decade ago, which provided my introduction to the work of Jim Haynes. It was an album I described as ‘bleak’, commenting on the way it reminded me of ‘Robert Burton’s 17th Century text The Anatomy of Melancholy, which detailed in the richest language the terrible physical symptoms of melancholy and its effects on the humours of the body. It still stands as a fitting description of a work by an artist whose career is devoted to ‘compositions of corrosion, shortwave radio, and tactile noise’.

Haynes’ inspiration for this latest offering was environmental, circumstantial, situational, as he recounts: “I completed this record in the fall of 2020. Much of the western states of the US was ablaze for months. The anxiety of the collective American psyche was ubiquitous, also due to the Presidential elections in November of that year. And When The Sky Burned became an appropriate title given the environmental and political climate of that particular time.”

But what’s also fascinating is the more subtle use of reference, of intertext: Haynes explains that When The Sky Burned When The Sky Burned is ‘also a reference to Zbigniew Karkowski’ – before going on to explain his ‘complicated, if distant relationship’ and subsequent hostility from both Karkowski and Andrew McKenzie, aka The Hafler Trio, for what appear to be the most disproportionate of reasons.

Haynes dedicates the album to both McKenzie and Karkowski ‘whether they like it or not’, writing on the latter, ‘After his death, I most certainly felt a sorrow that the world has lost this artist, but I was also very conflicted as I wish there could have been a conversation about what happened. I don’t think he was capable of remorse or reconciliation, but I wonder if I was wrong in that analysis. So this album is a tenuous homage to Karkowki’s early works – with the chest, cavity rattling lows and the shrill sustained high frequencies. The title in fact is a direct translation of the opening piece to that aforementioned Silent CD – "Als der Himmel brannte." But of course, I can never leave anything so static alone, and the heaps of noise, junk, and dissonance were required."

Haynes is an absolute master when it comes to noise, junk, and dissonance, and When The Sky Burned is abrim with all three.

As album openings go, the first few seconds of ‘Multiple Gunshots’, are striking, shocking, even, as blasts of percussion – which slam like gunshots – hit the listener without warning. They arrive a succession of hard blasts – some warping backwards, and Haynes manipulates them to forge an erratic but devastatingly heavy beat. I’m reminded of how Swans sampled a nailgun and pitched it up and down for the punishing rhythm on ‘Time is Money (Bastard)’, and this builds a grind of rapidly oscillating drones that flicker and shudder. Seven minutes in, the drones rise to a shriek, before obliterative distortion decimates any semblance of musicality. Everything combines to forge an intense and oppressive eleven minutes where little happens other than the listener suffering a brutal sonic punishment.

Between this, and the ten-minute ‘Appropriate to a Sad, Frightened Time’, Haynes presents a series of compositions that really test the listener’s capacity for noise and overall endurance. ‘Abruptly Scattered’ sounds like an enormous generator’s throb, occasionally rent with blasts of explosive treble noise as if said generator is bursting into flames. The tonal separation is well-defined: the bass sends the most uncomfortable vibrations through the pit of your gut, while the shrill, harsh treble smash makes you clench your teeth and fear for your hearing. You swallow hard, feeling uncomfortable, wondering if you’re going to suffer tinnitus or diarrhoea first, and pray it’s not both simultaneously.

Haynes’ explorations are brutal and harsh, and the set as a whole is truly relentless. Heavy crunches and grinding, gut-churning growls are suddenly ruptured by unexpected thacks and cracks, detonations, and the kind of heavy impact that makes the car-door slams used for punches in films sound like friendly pats on the shoulder. Swirling vortices of noise on noise howl and shriek, violent sonic tornadoes that inflict devastating levels of damage tear from the speakers, and even the moments of calm are unsettling, uneasy.

When The Sky Burned is not a nice album, but it’s a remarkable one, one that quite literally crackles with intensity, and genuinely hurts in places. But while it is relentlessly abrasive and often excruciating, Haynes’ attention to tone and texture, and the way the utilises these elements to forge a work of immense range isn’t only admirable on the technical, sonic, and compositional levels, but also results in an album that has massive impact, and is an outstanding example of well-crafted and intuitive electronic noise.

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Photographed by Lightning – Blood Music

Posted: 10 June 2021 in Albums
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Empty Quarter – 1st June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest instalment in the reissue series of albums by oddballs Photographed by Lightning is something of a departure from its predecessors – but then, each album marks a different departure, and if one thing this contemporary appraisal of their back catalogue highlights is that they never stated still or retrod ground, which each release existing in a completely different realm from those which came before.

Recorded in 2002 and released in 2004 and considered by the band to perhaps be their strangest offering (and it’s got some tough competition), it lists as its inspirations the works of Kenji Siratori, Friedrich Nietzsche, Suehiro Mauro, Georges Bataille, J G Ballard. I’m often particularly intrigued when a band’s citations are literary, or otherwise non-musical, perhaps because in some respects, while there is naturally much crossover between all creative disciplines, literary influences tend to be more cerebral, ideas or concept-based over sonic. When a bands say they’re influenced by Led Zeppelin, you can probably hear certain stylistic elements in the composition: but you’re not going to hear elements of Ballard in the guitar technique of any band – although with a substantial catalogue of releases to his credit, Kenji Siratori is a notable exception to the rule, particularly as the experimental Japanese polyartist’s forays into extreme electronica and harsh noise in the vein of Merzbow actually do very much resemble his literary works also as a brain—shredding sensory overload.

This is certainly a fair summary of the experience of this album: the title track, a mere intro at under two minutes, is a blend of scratchy, synthy noise with extraneous elements collaged here and there.

‘The Embryo Hunts in Secret’ and ‘Putrid Night’ are both a sort of psychedelic new wave collision, and with the wandering basslines that veer up, down, and everywhere amidst treble-soaked chaos, the effect is disorientating dissonant, as if everything is slowly melting or collapsing in on itself. Everything is murky, dingy, kinda distant-sounding and discordant. Take ‘Kundalini Butterly’ – a spiralling kaleidoscopic mess or scrawling feedback and a bass that sounds like an angry bee bouncing around inside an upturned glass, coming on like Dr Mix covering Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag’.

Blood Music is noisy, but it’s not straight-ahead guitars noisy: instead, it’s a mangled menage of bits and bobs hurled together – not clumsily, but then, not delicately, either, with pulsing washes of rhythm throbbing and crashing all around. It gets weirder and darker as they plunge into ‘My Hole’, where the bass bubbles and throbs beneath a continuous stream of trilling distortion, synth whistles and wails, and there’s a lot of overloading, whupping distortion that derails the helicotoptoring synths and froth and foam that sloshes around at the lower end of the sonic spectrum. ‘Dark Sun’ goes kind of industrial with a hefty, thunking beat, with a relentless, distorted snare, low-slung, booming bass and heavily treated vocals, and there’s chaotic piano all over the place: the emphasis is very much on the dark here.

Dave Mitchell’s lyrics are, we’re led to believe, to have been inspired by whatever he was reading, but buried low in the mix, bathed in reverb and given a grating metallic edge, he sounds like a malfunctioning Dalek chanting incantations. To be clear, that’s by no means a criticism.

Final track, ‘Frame’ is more overtly ambient, but dark, with a certain industrial hue as it shifts to pound out a relentless beat against braying sax and a whirlpool of aural chaos: I’m not about to suggest that PBL were going through any kind of NIN phase, but there are hints of parallels with The Fragile in places here.

Everything about Blood Music is seemingly designed to challenge, to present the music in the least accessible way possible – and it’s far from accessible to begin with, for the most part. The dark density of the sound is heavy, and there’s something quite deranged about the album as a whole, in a way that’s hard to define… but deranged it is. Which seems a pretty fitting summary of the band’s catalogue as a whole: the only thing you can really predict is their unpredictability.

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Thank – Thankology

Posted: 5 June 2021 in Albums
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1st July 2021

Christopherr Nosnibor

No doubt it’s an age thing, but the title of this compilation from Leeds noisemakers Thank – a collection of everything they’ve released to date, which number three in total existing across a brace of EPs and a one-off single – makes me think of Maureen Lipman in the 1987 ad for BT when he grandson tells her he‘s failed all of his exams except pottery and sociology, and she famously cries, ‘He gets an ology and he says he’s failed… you get an ology you’re a scientist!’ I’m amused by this, and I have an A-level in Sociology, and I’m certainly no fucking scientist (I also have a PhD in English literature, and lot of good that’s done me, too). As a further pointless digression, the title also reminds me of the third album by another legendary Leeds band, That Fucking Tank.

This is relevant, because back in 2004 or so, Tank were ubiquitous, and proved to be an absolute revelation. It wasn’t that the DIY ethos was anything new – it emerged when punk broke, and has long been a major feature of the Leeds scene. Track back about 40 years and The Sisters of Mercy were representing Leeds internationally on their own label. Whatever bollocks recent governments have spouted, the North has always been a powerhouse of its own making. Free of the sway of whatever’s cool in London at any given time, the Noeth – and particularly Leeds – has forged its own identity and done its own thing. And Leeds has, over the last tent o fifteen years, been a city with a scene throwing up a lot of angular, noisy stuff.

Emerging from the DIY microscene centred around the rehearsal space / occasional gig venue that was CHUNK, Thank draw on a host of influences from home and away, but sound like no-one else.

That debut EP, Sexghost Hellscape, from 2017, was – and still is – a wonderfully deranged mash-up of all kinds of strains of noise, with throbbing synths and punchy fink-tinged post-punk basslines reminiscent of Gang of Four providing the backbone of some off-kilter blasts of noise and some ragged, shouty vocals. The insistent pounding of ‘Punching Bag’ – a dismal, depressed swipe at celebrity taking ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ as its starting target – has that twitchy relentlessness of Shellac about it, and it really only cuts loose right at the end. Thank get delayed gratification – and sometimes they really torture us: there’s no real gratification on the squirming, crawling eight-and-a-half-minute dirge of ‘Petrol Head’ that grinds mercilessly like early Swans. It has the roaring rage of hardcore, slowed to a glacial crawl, and it twists at the gut with its low, slow percussion-driven relentlessness.

Standalone single ‘The Curse’ is an anguished roar of rage – it’s sparse, mangled, messy, and comes on like Uniform minus the riffs. It’s pretty fucking dark and brutal.

Skip on to the last EP, and it’s an even more rabidly raging effort, harder, harsher, more furious. ‘Commemorative Coin’ ups the rage another forty percent. It’s like PIL on steroids: pink and fuck, but more articulate than some three-chord thrash, many time more oppressive and infinitely more powerful. In contrast ‘Think Less’ goes full 80s electro, but it’s jitter, jarring, a three-way collision between Talking Heads, Revolting Cocks, and DAF. It’s crazed, manic, and intense. ‘No Respect for the Arts’ is all-out, foaming-at-the-mouth frenzied. It’s raw. It’s passion, and it’s real. And they speak from the heart here. Please was released in the Autumn of 2019, and this reminds us that the arts were being battered to fuck long before the Covid pandemic shut everything down. Over the last decade, successive Tory governments have been shafting the arts from every whichway. Artists have a right to be angry, but so few articulate that anger so directly though their music. We have reason to thank Thank.

Thankology give us no fewer than ten reasons to thank Thank, They stand as the very epitome of the Leeds underground / alternative /DIY scene: uncompromising, unbeholden to trends, and doing it because they believe in it, and just because. Bands like this are rare these days, and Thank stand apart in these times.

For those who’ve had a taste, this will give the full flavour, and for the uninitiated, here it all is. Get stuck in.

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Watch: ‘I Might Have’ by A Place to Bury Strangers

Posted: 2 June 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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A Place To Bury Strangers share new single/video ‘I Might Have’ from their forthcoming Hologram EP out 16 July on founding member Oliver Ackermann’s label Dedstrange. Following lead single ‘End Of The Night‘, ‘I Might Have’ is a fuzz-soaked sonic disaster in the best possible way. Past reflections collide with the brutality of a disintegrating world, stories of personal trauma, acceptance, and human failings emerge from the rubble of noise and destitute motorik rhythms. This is A Place To Bury Strangers at its most honest and unfiltered. Hologram serves as an abstract mirror to the moment we live in and ‘I Might Have’ smashes that mirror into a thousand pieces.

“‘I Might Have’ is about the insecurities of life and growing up and when you just have to turn around and say ‘F*ck it,’” says Ackermann. “Life sucks so we may as well have a good time.” The accompanying video visualizes this mentality as it shows the band raucously hanging out together in New York City.

Watch the video here:

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A Place To Bury Strangers 2022 Tour Dates – Tickets on sale NOW

Wed 09 March – Hafenklang – Hamburg, Germany  

Thu 10 March – Beatpol – Dresden, Germany

Fri 11 March – Klub Poglos – Warsaw, Poland

Sat 12 March – Futurum – Prague, Czech Republic
Sun 13 March – Randal Club – Bratislava, Slovakia

Mon 14 March – Durer Kert – Budapest, Hungary

Wed 16 March – Control Club – Bucharest, Romania

Thu 17 March – Mixtape5 – Sofia, Bulgaria
Fri 18 March – Eightball – Thessaloniki, Greece

Sat 19 March – Temple – Athens, Greece
Mon 21 March – 25th of May Hall – Skopje, Macedonia

Tue 22 March – Club Drugstore – Belgrade, Serbia

Thu 24 March – Mochvara – Zagreb, Croatia
Fri 25 March – Freakout Club – Bologna, Italy

Sat 26 March – Largo – Rome, Italy
Sun 27 March – Legend Club – Milan, Italy

Tue 29 March – Bogen F – Zurich, Switzeralnd
Wed 30 March – Backstage – Munich, Germany

Thu 31 March – Caves Du Memoir – Martigny, Switzeralnd

Fri 01 April – La Trabendo – Paris, France
Sat 02 April – Lafayette – London, UK
Mon 04 April – Kayka – Antwerp, Belgium
Tue 05 April – Gleis 22 – Munster, Germany
Wed 06 April – Melkweg – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Thu 07 April – Vera- Groningen, Netherlands
Sat 09 April – Hus 7 – Stockholm, Sweden
Sun 10 April – John Dee – Oslo, Norway
Mon 11 April – Pumpehuset – Copenhagen, Denmark

Tue 12 April Hole 44 – Berlin, Germany
Wed 13 April – MTC – Cologne, Germany

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FEAST 4 – 23rd May 2021

Posted: 24 May 2021 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

No two ways about it: coinciding with the NIM compilation album Deprived of Occupation and Pleasure We Feast, FEAST 4 offers the most jam-packed and solid quality lineup they’ve put on yet, with sets from a number of acts featured on the album and a stack more besides.

After some weird woozy shit off Territorial Gobbings’ recent Automatic for Nobody album release (which we covered and coveted here), where Theo Gowans hoarsely whispers corruptions of lines from REM, Rejections Ops kick things off early doors with a blitzkrieg of stuttering beats, squalling bass feedback and squealing, crackling synths: the guitarist’s wearing a veil and there are strobes galore. The noise is complete overload, a devastating mass of distortion, and while it would perhaps benefit from a little more contrast – it’s absolutely fucking full-on from beginning to end – it would just be amazing to witness in a small, sweaty room at proper ear-bleeding volume. I could happily go home now – but of course, I’m already home, and am thirsty for what’s to come.

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Rejections Ops

Hubble’s cover of Swans’ ‘No Cure for the Lonely’ from the aforementioned compilation provides a mellow interlude before Omnibael’s set. It’s another intense work, and probably their best yet. Stark, black and white footage accompany the duo’s low-down, dubby industrial scrapings. There are some mangled vocals low in the mix, while the crashing metallic snare is pitched up high, and driven by a relentless sequenced synth bass groove overlaid with explosive noise, the atmosphere is dark and oppressive.

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Omnibael

Blackcloudsummoner brings more overloading electronica, dark, dense, story, tense, crunching electrodes crackling distortion, occasionally rent by trills of feedback. And it all sounds as if it’s coming from an immense cavern, about a quarter of a mile underground. The bass sounds like a nuclear experiment, and it’s all going off at once, making for an intense and disorientating experience.

AGED’s sound is rather more ambient, and considerably less abrasive, and it’s well-timed. That isn’t to say that this is in any way soft: there’s a crackling decay at the edge of the sound, and distant samples, barely audible, create a disorientating effect. And it’s over in the blink of an eye.

Making a return for …(something) ruined, the full-tilt, all-out noise abrasion with shouting seemed to hit the spot, and the altogether mellower sounds of Pigsticks and the Wonderbra, making droning harmonica noises in some woods arrives just in time to prevent any aneurysms. This is wonderfully weird, with leaves dropping and being raked creating a ‘field recording’ element to this curious experimental concoction. Birds tweet. A helicopter flies over. Atonal woodwind. Random words. What is it all about? The epitome of avant-garde oddity.

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…(something) ruined

Paired with Pressure Cooker Release valve for a collaborative set, Territorial Gobbing bring all the oddball experimentalism you’d expect. For TG, anything and everything is source material, and on this outing we witness some effervescent vitamin tablets fizzing in bowls, the sound contained by a folded IKEA box. And then they bring on the squeezy sauce bottles, which puff and sigh and gasp in their varying degrees of emptiness. Drainpipe and walkie-talkie, toast, toasters, lighters, phone ring tones, egg slicers, books, paint tube, polystyrene packaging, and kitchen sink also provide sound sources in this bizarre object-led experimental set. It almost feels like we’re watching an album being recorded in real-time. Maybe – and even hopefully – we are. With a track per object, it would work well.

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Territorial Gobbing / Pressure Cooker Release Valve

Gintas K’s set is a brain-bending bleepfest, a tangle of jangling synths and collapsing synapses that fray the nerve-endings. Everything squelches and zaps every which way, and we get to watch it all happen in real-time as the notes twitched away on his keyboard are run through software on a dusty Lenovo Thinkpad to create a crazy sonic foam that bubbles and froths all over. But deep, resonant bass tones boom out over the stuttering bleepage and groaning, croaking drones emerge. It all squelches down to a mere drip before finally fizzling out in a patter of rain, and it’s well-received, And rightly so.

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Gintas K

Hubble’s headlining set is accompanied by some eye-opening PoV visuals of a parachute jump and clips of people leaping off mountains, and the footage is so terrifying I actually hope it’s CGI even though it looks like it’s actually real. The freefalling blue sky space is the ideal accompaniment to the disorientating fretwork of the musical accompaniment which sounds like multiple guitars and keys playing interloping lines together and across one another. The rapid ebbs and flows are immersive, hypnotic, and a long, mid-range drone builds and hangs against the dizzying blanket of fretwork that weaves the rich and sense sonic tapestry of this bewildering sound on sound. It couldn’t be more different in sound from Ben’s regular gig as guitarist in NY noise act Uniform, but everyone needs a break, and this is wonderfully, if dizzyingly, realised. It makes for a top ending to a top night packed with all the weird and all the wonderful from the full noise spectrum.

Chris Sharkey – Presets

Posted: 14 May 2021 in Albums
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Not Applicable – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Chris Sharkey’s first album released under his own name is what I suppose one might call an ‘environmental’ album. Not an album about the environment in the broader sense, or the ecological sense, but in the sense of having been inspired by the artist’s surroundings, and the music herein is a direct response to that in many ways. While so many releases from the last year have been environmental in the context of creative responses to lockdown and a shrunken vista consisting of four walls and the view from the window, paired with a pervading anxiety on account of the 24/7 news media and social media doomscrolling, Presets comes from a very different perspective. First and foremost, its inspiration is travel.

“I had been touring and travelling a lot. Lots of long car journeys, the M1, driving between shows in Europe. Long waits in airports. The occasional long-haul flight to play farther field. Throughout this period my relationship to music changed. I found that listening to songs or short pieces would leave me agitated and frustrated. I’d been listening a lot to Actress, particularly ‘Ghettoville’ and ‘Hazyville’ which really worked for me on the road. I wanted a music that develops slowly over time, drawing you in, making you forget about the clock. Music that has so much grain and texture that you could almost pick it up and turn it around in your hands, examining from all sides. Like a physical object. Music that resembles something you might see out of the window of a plane, high above the clouds, a meteorological event or a storm on distant mountains from the back seat of a car.”

I can certainly relate to the agitational effects of listening to certain musical forms while in transit: I always had to stop music and be on full sensory alert on arriving at a train station and walking through an unfamiliar city, for example, and since lockdown, I’ve not been able to listen to my MP3 player at all while walking around anywhere.

The physical setup for the album’s production was minimal, and Presets is the product of two months’ intensive recording, producing hours of material. But this was only the start of a protracted second stage, which Sharkey details as follows: “As the process continued, I would select my favourite parts and create playlists just for myself. By the end I had over 4 hours of music that lived on my phone and whenever I would travel, I’d listen. Over the course of the next 5 years: touring, travelling, listening, I slowly whittled it down to what you hear on Presets.”

In short, Presets is the product of many years’ work – not just the five years in post-recording evolution, but the years of experience and observation that preceded its creation also. It was, unquestionably, time well spent: while many of the individual segments are quite short – mere fragments – the album as a whole sees them sequenced and segued so as to feel like one continuous piece that gradually transitions between tones and shades. It’s also an immense work, clocking in around the eighty-five minute mark. It’s very much a good thing that it’s intended as a background work, because it’s practically impossible to sustain focus for that kind of time. But Presets is about not focusing, about disruptions and interruptions, about life.

It begins with quavering, key-ranging notes that do, at least vaguely, sound like guitar, before layers of processing build, before the source instrument becomes lost, evolving to conjure organ -like drones and entirely abstract washes. Before long, particularly over the course of the eighteen-minute second track, ‘the sharecropper’s daughter’, you find yourself not so much listening as floating along with the sounds as they slowly creep and shift.

The titles are sparsely descriptive and evocative at the same time: from ‘blue cloud, red fog’, to ‘scorpion bowl’ via ‘detained at the border’, there are hints of mini-narratives attached to each piece, and the sense of travel and movement does come across through the difficult drones and scrapes of feedback that build and buzz through the foggy murk.

It’s an epic work, and a major achievement.

Chris Sharkey Presets cover 3000px

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