AMENRA announce their Relapse Records full-length debut De Doorn coming June 25th. Watch the official video for ‘De Evenmens’, directed by Dehn Sora, here:
AA
Amenra vocalist Colin H. van Eeckhout comments:
“We are only here for a split second in history. This song is about finding the answer within the question, man’s search for his place here on earth. A journey of sorrow with mere moments of beauty and happiness and this all in relation to his or her fellowman. To accept what is. Our brother Dehn Sora sculpted the digital world where Everman dwells, protected by its thorns, wounded by the others. Sacrificing blood of gold.”
Fly Pan Am’s viscerally sculpted and starkly evocative music for the acclaimed multi-media contemporary dance opus FRONTERA was originally created and performed live in collaboration with choreographer Dana Gingras and the Animals Of Distinction dance company, with scenography by United Visual Artists. The sound design and musical score juxtaposes foreboding electronics with minimalist motorik avant-rock—now captured in a superb studio recording by producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and being released as Frontera on Deluxe 180gram vinyl, CD and Digital on 21 May 2021.
“Grid / Wall” opened the dance production and is also the album’s opening track.
Nadja share special video footage recorded at The Black Lodge in Berlin, which originally premiered exclusively for Roadburn Redux last Friday – now available to view here. About this new material, Nadja comments, "Early in 2021, the Black Lodge and Salon Oblique invited us to participate in their series of filmed performances by Berlin artists. For this session, we chose to perform a new composition, ‘Seemannsgarn’, an extended, meditative piece we wrote about a liminal and tranquil green space/urban waterway in our quiet corner of Berlin, now in flux and with an uncertain future, threatened by gentrification and development.”
This standalone piece does not appear on their forthcoming album Luminous Rot, which shall be released on CD and DL formats via Southern Lord on 21st May, with the LP version arriving on 13th August. Pre-order information incoming soon.
On the new album, Nadja have refined their signature sound which combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial. The duo retain their overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests not only in metal, but post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial.
Thematically, the album explores ideas of ‘first contact’ and the difficulties of recognising alien intelligence. This was in part inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui — in particular, theories on astro-physics, multi-dimensionality, and spatial geometry in "The Three Body Problem" — as well as Margaret Wertheim’s "A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space," about mathematician Daina Taimina’s work with crochet to illustrate hyperbolic space and geometry.
The album was recorded between their home studio, Broken Spine Studios, or Nadja’s live rehearsal studio, both in the district of Lichtenberg, Berlin.
Luminous Rot marks the first album mixed by someone else, who in this case was David Pajo. The band comment, “as big fans of Slint, we thought he might fore-front the more angular, post-punk elements of our music – the mix is quite different from our previous albums. But, as usual, we had James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, etc) master the album as we trust his ears and aesthetic, as he’s mastered numerous records of ours.”
White Moth Black Butterfly the project from TesseracT’s Daniel Tompkins have shared the first single from their new album The Cost of Dreaming. You can watch the video for ’The Dreamer’ now:
The project sees Tompkins collaborating with New-Delhi based Skyharbor songwriter and producer Keshav Dhar; US based producer and string arranger Randy Slaugh who has previously worked with the likes of Devin Townsend, Architects & Periphery, drummer Mac Christensen and the line up is completed by ethereal vocals of UK singer & lyricist Jordan Turner.
‘The Cost of Dreaming’ is out on 28th May (Kscope).
Clicks are now releasing a video clip for the track ‘Dropdead’, which once again stresses the sharp ironic humour of the Polish electro project. ‘Dropdead’ is the third single taken from the forthcoming new full-length "G.O.T.H.", which has been scheduled for release on April 16.
Was the whole thing really just a dream? The Armed, one of the most exciting and innovative experimental hardcore bands of the past decade say maybe it was via their new video for “AN ITERATION”. Featuring a voice-over and cameo from one of the most recognized voices in video game history, David Hayter — the legendary voice behind Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid series — the video watches the band’s Dan Greene as he comes to terms with the fact that The Armed may only exist in his head. A fever dream of sorts after one too many times falling asleep playing Metal Gear. A scattered timeline of past music videos that centered around Dan Greene, “An Iteration” is full of easter eggs from the band’s history as well Metal Gear Solid. Stay tuned to the very end.
Dan Greene states “The story of Metal Gear Solid 2–which seemed like convoluted, impenetrable nonsense when we were kids–has turned out to be disturbingly prescient of society in 2021. I would argue that this video game raised more interesting artistic and philosophical questions than a lot of “higher art,” and much earlier too. We are beyond honored to see David Hayter take on the role of Dan Greene within The Armed Cinematic Universe.”
ULTRAPOP, available April 16th via Sargent House features work from Mark Lanegan and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, and is the first album co-produced by the band’s own Dan Greene in collaboration with Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe). Kurt Ballou remains at the helm as executive producer. Ultrapop is the genre of music that said album features. It reaches the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise, and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres but finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. As is always The Armed’s mission, it seeks only to create the most intense experience possible, a magnification of all culture, beauty, and things.
The coming together of Paul ‘Zanntone’ Tone and Christopher Nosnibor was a random one which more or less encapsulates their approach to creativity: Paul placed ashout-out on FaceBook for recommendations for a vocalist for his upcoming Foldhead show in Leeds, and Nosnibor’s name was thrown into the hat after a number of previous collaborations with noise artists that had seen his ‘Rage Monologues’ project move from the spoken word scene into the realm of ‘music’.
What happened at that show occurred more by accident than design, but it worked – and so …(something) ruined was born.
Subsequent live shows saw them really hitting their stride – and the pain threshold in terms of volume and intensity – before the COVID apocalypse swept the globe, putting paid plans for further shows and a planned live studio recording.
Nevertherless, live-stream gigs catering to fans of electronic / experimental / noise has continued to give them a platform, and they’ve continued to develop their sound and visuals. Following their brief but brutal turn at FEAST #2 hosted by Nim_Brut, they’ve released their track, ‘Life is too Short’ as a videosingle.
Of the track, Nosnibor says “the lyrics were inspired by conversations I’d been having with a friend of mine, about how if one thing the pandemic had brought into sharp relief was that life’s too short. You never know when your time’s going to be up, and we waste so much of the time we have expending energy stressing over work and trivial shit. No-one ever lay on their deathbed saying ‘I wish I’d spent more time in pointless meetings, or watching trash TV’. I recorded the vocals in one take – first take – and send the file over to Paul, who mangled them beautifully, in a way that conveys all the anxiety, anguish and rage beyond the words themselves”.
The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then “scratched and abused to add texture and colour,” from which the entirety of ‘Clara’ was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres.
Although Morgan’s compositional premise for ‘Clara’ was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album’s title comes from the Latin for ‘bright’: a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where “shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.”
Beak> made a new song during lockdown last year called, ‘Oh Know’. It is not being released as a single, they just want you to know that they’re still here and are making music during this global upheaval.
When Beak> were asked by their friends at the NRMAL® Festival in Mexico City (an all female run company with diversity and equity as core values) if they had anything they could provide for their monthly YouTube TV show, ‘NRMAL CAMARADA TV’, ‘Oh Know’ came to mind and Beak> were only happy to oblige their friends in Mexico.
For the making of the video, Beak> teamed up again with Echo Panda films from Canada, who had previously made a fan video of their song, ‘The Gaol’ in 2019. The band were mightily impressed by its bare boned strangeness and backwards wit. Made within a two week deadline so it could be shown in time on NRMAL’s TV show, Echo Panda films delivered again, and a whole lot more, as you’re about to see…
Canadian DJ & Multi-Instrumentalist JHNN has unleashed his highly-anticipated new album, StereoTYP.
StereoTYP is a personal dark album redefining the definition of what it means to be a walking "StereoTYP" who enjoys different kinds of music.
As a taster, he’s unveiled the video for ‘Heroin’: check it here:
AA
JHNN says regarding the album, "Basically the album was made from 2016 – 2020 and it’s about my biggest pet peeve of society which is the existence of StereoTYPs. It only scratched the surface of what I like to talk about; what it means to be a black man who just likes, is not afraid of experimenting, and making synth pop without being too expressive. I wanted to have fun as well and I wanted to get the point across. I also wanted to show all my sides of trying to cope like in the song "Darkness Will Always Be There", the fact that all the people in power won’t matter; "Children Are The Future", dealing with being anxious "The Warning/Warfare" and some views on religion "Greatest Lie."
Aural Aggravation 