Industrial metal pioneers Godflesh will release their new album Post Selfon November 17th via Justin K. Broadrick’s Avalanche Recordings on CD, digital and LP formats, with a cassette version incoming on Hospital Productions. Over two years in the making, Post Self explores a different side of Godflesh, taking in their formative influences to conjure something informed by late 70’s/early 80’s post-punk and industrial music. The album deals with themes of anxiety, depression, fear, mortality, and paternal/maternal relationships.
The second collection of collaborative recordings by Off World, the aptly titled 2, is dropping on Friday October 6th. After an initial introduction to the improbable orbit of this project with the track ‘Decamp’, we’re venturing further into deconstructed electronic realms with ‘Scrubdown’. On this track, label veteran Sandro Perri is joined by fellow Torontonian Lorenz Peter as synths and drum machine squelch and snake their way around some lovely, spacious piano punctuations – highlighting the exploratory, impressionistic, harmonic eloquence of the semi-improvised sound world that is Off World’s signature.
Perri will be the first to insist that Off World is not "his" project: tracing its origins as far back as 2008, with Perri and Peter (Processor, Corpusse) working together on tracks and very occasionally performing live, Off World collaborators include producers Drew Brown (Lower Dens, Blonde Redhead, Beck), Matthew Cooper (Eluvium) and Susumu Mukai (Zongamin), and instrumentalists Craig Dunsmuir (Glissandro 70, Kanada 70) and Eric Chenaux, among others.
Off World is alien electronics played humanly, resulting in genuinely exploratory and peculiarly sui generis electronic music that sounds like it could have issued from any time in the past 40-50 years. Off World resists easy categorisation: not ambient, not strictly "improvised", nor "retro" – just eccentrically absorbing, impishly stimulating and gently uneasy listening in an awkward, nerdy, precocious class of its own.
The seventh record by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Luciferian Towers, will be released 22nd September 2017 on Constellation. As a taster, they’ve unveiled the album’s opening track, ‘Undoing a Luciferian Towers’, on line.
We’ll spare any extensive preamble or detail about the album here, and shall instead get to the important business: listen to ‘Undoing a Luciferian Towers’ here:
From Chester-based instrumental-electronic artist, Dom Sith, comes this dark goth-inspired tune to soundtrack people’s struggles with themselves.
It’s nothing to do with Allen Ginsberg. Of the inspiration for ‘Howl’, which takes sonic leads from the likes of NIN, The Haxan Cloak, and Burial, Dom comments: “I wanted to create something haunting, something that’d soundtrack those long nights alone, but not in a reassuring way, like how loneliness might sound, and how depression might sound, if it was heard…in the dark.”
We like NIN, The Haxan Cloak, and Burial, and we like this: get your lugs round it here:
New York City duo Uniform turn the spotlight to their second full length album, Wake In Fright, upcoming on 20th January 2017 via Sacred Bones – a harrowing exploration of self-medication, painted in the colours of war.
Following their Ghosthouse 12" released last month, vocalist Michael Berdan (ex Drunkdriver, York Factory Complaint) and guitarist/producer Ben Greenberg (ex-The Men, Hubble) return with a new batch of even more punishing songs that incorporate elements of industrial music, thrash metal, harsh noise, and power electronics.
“This record is primarily about psychic transition,” Berdan explained. “The distress that these songs attempt to illustrate comes from a place of stagnation and monotony. This is what happens when old ways of thinking become exhausted and old ways of coping prove ineffective. Something must change or it will break.”
Listen to ‘Tabloid’ here:
If the rest of the album’s half as good, it’ll be a belter.
Crippled Black Phoenix have revealed the second track from their forthcoming album Bronze. The UK dark progressive rockers will release their stunning new full-length on November 4th.
New track ‘Winning A Losing Battle’ can be streamed here:
Justin Greavescomments: “Some songs depart from my mind into reality without consent. ‘Winning A Losing Battle’ is one of those. The track just barged itself into the world. It is also one of the musically unconventional Crippled Black Phoenix style of songs that keep appearing on our albums. The title says it all. We have been through a lot of adversity as a band in these past two years and even though it seemed that all is doomed at times – I/we never gave up or gave in. We just say ‘screw you’ to the people and forces that tried to bring us down. Crippled Black Phoenix win, and always will.”
Really? David Tibet and Youth? With an album , Create Christ, Sailor Boy, and live show in the offing, they’ve unveiled a brace of tracks, including the album’s final track, ‘Night Shout, Bird Tongue’. So yes this is really something which is happening nd it promises to be unusul if nothing else. And given the various path-crosings the two have made ove the last three decades, it’s perhps not as bizarre as it may ppear on the surface, so much as a collaboration a long time in the making.
A transformative union of two idiosyncratic tellers, Hypnopazūzu sees Current 93 speller David Tibet joining forces with the eternal Youth, famed not only for his work as bassist with Killing Joke but for production and collaborative work with an outlandishly eclectic list of artists from Alien Sex Fiend to Paul McCartney. Together, they’ve created a singular hallucinatory vision that marries symphonic splendour to indignant gnostic intensity – Create Christ, Sailor Boy draws in, and down, masks terrestrial and celestial and summons a collection of songs unlike anything either artist has created previously. In addition to this debut album release, the duo have also announced a live show in London on Saturday 22nd October at Union Chapel with The Stargazer’s Assistant in support.
Having both first skipped together on Current’s debut album Nature Unveiled in 1983, together, these two again manifested their sticky alchemy, with Youth’s ornate and dramatic arrangements sliding into and around Tibet’s vivid hypnagogic visions to end up in a psychic picnic hinterland that is as sumptuous as it is colourful in its opulence. Tibet’s luxurious kosmoi sliding slyly onto peaks of intent and intoxication on the album, and songs such as the Galactic Sexiness of ‘The Sex Of Stars’ and the Cuneiform Cuteness of ‘The Auras Are Escaping Into The Forest’ show him, backed by the emotive and expressive power of Youth’s arrangements, as a conduit turning unspelled grammars into grimoires.
Transcendent, tumultuous, and tricky, Create Christ, Sailor Boy is the sound of two spirits skipping as one to create a sidereal glimpse into uncounted cartoons. It seems likely this partnership will be a fruitful one, both in this realm and other playgrounds. “I am happy always to work with Youth in any way, forever and for ever and always and in all ways” stresses David. “I wait for my Ouija Board Planchette to receive his Mind’s Eye Text.”
93 years in the making, this elaborately-packaged 3-sided LP (it will have a laser etching on Side 4) contains ten songs and brings together spheres and planets for the Ultimate Hallucinatory PickNick. Also available in CD and digital formats, check out the House of Mythology store for pre-orders. This album will come with two different front covers; one by David Tibet, the other by Youth, available on 26th August.
At Aural Aggravation, we still remember when the grinning face of someone like Bruno Brookes would beam from the television screen and say, “It’s Friday night, it’s still number one, it’s Top of the Pops!” The demise of TOTP and the collapse into irrelevance of music charts, especially the UK Top 40 singles chart was more or less concurrent with the final and absolute corporatisation of the charts, and while we miss the good old days, it was always a fact that the most exciting music never got near the charts in the first place, even then.
And so, it’s 2016. It’s Friday night, you’re reading Aural Aggravation and here’s some Greek hardcore courtesy of Sarabante, whose second LP, Poisonous Legacy, will be releaed by Southern Lord on June 10th. As a taster, you can stream ‘Mass Grave’ here. Fuck yeah.
Aural Aggravation 