Posts Tagged ‘trilogy’

Coaxial – Redux Media

Posted: 12 February 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 6th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a ‘me’ issue that when an artist suddenly hits the world with a blunderbuss blast of output, I feel somewhat overwhelmed. There are some acts I know I like which I’ve simply avoided because of not knowing where to start. Overfaced is the word: a term I discovered perhaps in my early teens when presented with a large roast dinner. The sheer amount of food in front of me instantly killed my appetite, to the point that I felt queasy and, not knowing where to start, felt incapable of starting, meaning that I would fold before I’d barely consumed a forkful.

While I did manage to ease myself into The Fall after dipping a toe, I very much feel this way about the likes of Merzbow, among others, and, to a lesser extent, the Melvins – and the specific reason I come to them is because of their early 00s trilogy, when they cranked out The Maggot, The Crybaby, and The Bootlicker on top of one another. Ben Heal, aka Coaxial has truly splurged with his output this year, as Redux Trilogy is not even the total. My head swam. The prospect of listening to, and reviewing, three albums in one session, for one piece… No. Just no.

Having stepped back and broken things down to more bitesize chunks, I have come to Redux Media, which is in fact the second of the trilogy, first. This feels reasonable, since this is set of releases is sold as ‘a triptych of cassette releases conceived as a recombinatory system rather than linear statement’. I will return to the other releases in due course, but for now and content to dabble.

The seven tracks on Redux Media are soft, squelchy, electronic and experimental. ‘Onyaxial’ lifts the lid on the set with a bibbling, bubbling stroll that sits in the space between minimal techno and the pulsating grooves of Kraftwerk. It bends and warps a bit, and there’s some weird shit going on near the end as it battles with its own identity, but this is the very essence of this release – it’s about the exploratory, about swimming out of the lanes and venturing wherever the mood takes.

‘Tryxxial’ is mellow, an 80s drum machine sound plodding along while keyboard sounds trill along, mixing all shades of electronic action with no suggestion of a conclusion, and rightly, with the wonky babbling of ‘Peswyx’. ‘Pymediax’ wanders into eighties electropop, but without vocals, and it’s more DAF than Depeche Mode.

In the main, it’s entertaining, and despite the overarching connotations of seriousness, it’s quite good fun. Redux Media finds Ben Heal venturing every which way and drilling deep into different dimensions.

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Watch: ‘It’s All About the Music’ videoo trilogy / EP by Bee Bee Sea

Posted: 21 July 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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In anticipation of their soon-to-be-announced new album, Italian psych-garage band Bee Bee Sea returns with a 3-track concept EP titled It’s All About the Music and a limited 7" edition presented at Bergamo’s Punk Rock Raduno #8.

Three acts. One song. Three versions. The same song, reimagined in three forms:

The original version.

A faster one, like a punked-up Sgt. Pepper’s Reprise, born out of rehearsal boredom.

A slow, kraut-rock-inspired instrumental version shaped in the studio by producer Marco Giudici, who also played one of the guitars.

Each version got its own video, crafted by a different filmmaker:

A collage of Age of Empires visuals, curated by Lorenzo Perteghella

A medieval fantasy starring the band in armour, directed by Marco Bellini, with photography by Gloria Pasotti

A dynamic green-screen performance edited by Marco Alliegro

The limited 7-inch vinyl was released at Punk Rock Raduno #8, and was screen-printed live during Bee Bee Sea’s show in Bergamo by Saldacani and Baby Lemonade. A physical artefact. A visual riot. A mini garage-rock opera.

Check the video trilogy here:

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SINE – Mantis 1

Posted: 20 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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eMERGENCY heARTS – 6th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

SINE’s new 5 song EP, Mantis 1, is the first in a trilogy of EPs, “Mantis 1, 2 & 3”. The hype for the release pulls a spotlight on the involvement of a name producer, with the EP being ‘produced by SINE founder, Rona Rougeheart in collaboration with esteemed audio engineer Charles Godfrey at Scary American Studio in Austin, TX. Godfrey, in his two decade plus career, has been engineer/producer on over 75 recordings, including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’, It’s Blitz! and Mosquito, The Black Angels, Indigo Meadow, and notable work for…Trail of Dead, SWANS, among so many more’. No question: Godfrey’s resumé is impressive, and there’s similarly no question that a decent producer can make a huge, huge difference, with great production having the capacity to render a recording far more than the sum of its parts (Joy Division simply would not have been the same without Martin Hannett’s work, however unconventional and difficult his methods), while equally, poor production can be crippling. Then again, engineering is perhaps equally important: it’s worth noting that Steve Albini doesn’t consider himself to be a producer, but his engineering skills have brought the life to so many albums, and not just the ones he’s renowned for. Still, for all that, you can’t polish a turd: you still need songs and for them to be played in a way that does the material some kind of justice.

Everything comes together just so on this release, and one question I often consider is how close to the artistic ambition is the end result? I have a sense that Mantis I is everything Rougeheart had in her head at conception.

‘Attack’ certainly brings plenty, a combative, dark disco thud of a beat pitched against a relentless throb of synthesised bass. In contrast, ‘Until’ is more overtly pop, but it’s pop in the way Garbage are pop – eclectic, savvy, the production simultaneously crisp and grimy. ‘Future Whores’ is stark, and if there’s something of an early New Order vibe about it, there’s equally some early Pet Shop Boys, and that’s by no means a criticism. Then again, the expensive, yawning notes border on the mellow new age grooves of The Beloved, while the distorted vocals and thumping bass are more industrial… in combination, it crashes hard in the domain of industrial shoegaze, and if that’s not yet been recognised as a thing, now is the time because it’s here and it’s in your face.

Things get murkier and meaner on ‘Blurred’, where I’m reminded of The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’, only with a harder technoindustrial edge, and the pulsing, bulbous bass is dominated by Rougeheart’s blank, robotic monotone vocal, that’s treated with a metallic edge and some grainy reverb.

Closer ‘Control’ burrows deeper into the darkness, a shuddering mass of slow velocity – yet for all the crushing grind and gnarly digital distortion, the dislocation and thunderous tribal drums, it still slides in a truly aching bridge with a magnificent vocal melody that evokes wistful summer scenes, before crushing them like ant underfoot in a driving death-disco slam.

It all adds up to a meaty and pretty powerful release, and if the idea of releasing three EPs instead of an album seems perverse, it will be interesting to see how SINE utilise the format after such a strong start.

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Hesperian Death Horse – Ziv

Posted: 10 September 2018 in Albums
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15th August 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

To conceive an album trilogy is certainly ambitious, and I can’t think of many besides the Melvins trilogy released in 2000-2001. And given that it was a full five years since the first instalment, Mrtav (Croatian for the word ‘Dead’), the scheduled 2020 release for what Croatian avant-garde/sludge/post-metal band Hesperian Death Horse state will not only be the conclusion of the trilogy, but their last album, also seems ambitious. Ambition is a good thing, and there’s a lot to be said for having some kind of master plan – although what matters is having the ability to back it up with an execution that does justice to the concept.

The concept in this case is – appropriately for a band whose lifecycle will be represented by these three albums – the cycle of life, delivered in reverse order, with ‘Ziv’ being Croatian for the word ‘Alive’, and the final piece being ‘Rodjen’ (Croatian for ‘Born’).

Hesperian Death Horse is more than a band: they pitch themselves as ‘a narrator of psychedelic, nihilistic poetry that sings a saga of the birth, life and death of every being’. It’s quite a claim, and ordinarily Id scoff at the elevated level of pretence… but this is good.

Ziv is one of those albums that contains just four tracks, which, if released on vinyl, it would be a double with just a track on each side. The first of these, ‘Saol (Part 1: Prizma)’ has a running time of just under ten minutes and is indeed epic in every sense. An echoed, chiming guitar warps and bends into dissonance through the awkward and intentionally ‘wrong’-sounding opening passage, gradually and gracefully building while maintaining an undercurrent of discomfort. Sibilant voices chant low in the mix as a squall of noise and a rhythmic throb jolts… and then its gets really dark. It may be about life, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a celebration of fulfilment: if anything, it’s closer to Filth era Swans: discordant, bleak, jarring, nihilistic, a sonic representation of the grind of life on the treadmill of existence. The claustrophobic entrapment of work and sleep, that vacant, hollow life that isn’t really life, but is life as so any of us have come to accept it.

Don’t look to the second track, ‘Elu (Part 2: Voda)’ for light relief, either. More skewed guitars slant across a woozy, gut-churning bass and loping rhythm to forge a dense, murky backdrop to the impenetrable lyrical incantation, delivered in a bitter-edged monotone. It’s a dingy dirge of soul-crushing proportions.

‘Hayot (Part 3: Mezanin)’ is – incredibly – even slower, dirgier, more oppressive, the blank vocals the sound of defeat. The bass thuds relentlessly, while the guitars shiver at skewed angles across the solid underlying structure: it bleeds into the final song, ‘Liv (Part 4: Horde)’ – and it’s intense. As the pace and intensity build, things go haywire and a sustained crescendo of chaos emerges. And still, the vocals remain blank, impassive, giving the whole searing blast an air of detachment and dislocation. It’s a fair representation of life over the long-term: stripping out the peaks and troughs, it’s a long, bleak and relentless slog of an album. Yet for all that, it’s intensity and sonic force create a kind of gravitational pull that drags you in. Feel the force, and surrender to it. Yes, this is life.

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Hesperian Death Horse - Ziv cover