After hearing the first part of today’s offering (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 170-2), I grow less sure than ever. Titled Kapuke, it’s some 24 minutes of mayhem originally credited to Twardawa and Janowski, and self-released as a mini-CDR in 2003. It’s a grotesque sound assemblage, boiled down from a set of three improvised sessions, and featuring mostly voice and prepared piano sounds. A woman named Barbara also features as the lead vocal. The impression I have so far is music that is bleak, wretched, and futile; to put it plainly, the three voices sound like they’re lost in Hell, blind damned souls howling to themselves – not expressing everlasting agony so much as desperation and boredom. The unnatural musical and non-musical sounds (lots of tape mangling and varispeed) are precisely calculated to add to this sense of claustrophobia and meaninglessness. In short, here’s a slice from your worst nightmares; no natural light, no chance of escape. Despite all this, I kind of prefer this Kapuke to many of GT’s more relentless factory-inspired industrial pieces; it’s odd, unsettling, a form of “art” music. As to the two collaborators, I find that neither Piotr Jankowski, nor Barbara, made any other records before or since, a fact which only adds to my sense of mystery and confusion.

With the second half of this release, Music For Vienna Aktionists, we’re on slightly more familiar ground, as Tomasz Twardawa grinds out seven cuts of remorseless industrial electronic noise and tape manipulation (though this is only a guess). With the last reissue, we learned that GT had discovered computers in 2002, although these 2004 recordings seem to me much more a return to the old-school hands-on methods involving much amplification and brutal feedback. I’m prepared to be corrected on any of these guesses. The music this time is explicitly intended as soundtracks to the documentary films made by Kurt Kren in 1964 and 1965, when he filmed certain performance art pieces of the notorious Vienna Aktionists. The selection mostly favours the work of Otto Muehl, who was I gather one of the more extreme members of this very extreme group, although Gunter Brus is also noted. If you bought the original CDR in 2004 on the label Die Schone Blumen Music Werk, you could have enjoyed the movies as data encoded on the disk; if so inclined, you can see them today on Ubu.com.

I’m not a huge fan of the Aktionists, and the films are certainly not for the squeamish, but I respect their devotion (some might call it fanatical) to pursuing personal liberty and emancipation on every front. Also it’s about time we heard more about Otto Muehl instead of the one who usually hogs all the limelight; I mean Hermann Nitsch, whose excessive and bloodthirsty escapades went on for long durations and have been documented (aurally at least) on bulky CD sets from Cortical Foundation. As to these recordings, GT comes very close to matching the Kurt Kren films, which have been noted for their radical energy and kinetic editing style (as well as the extreme subject matter) with this bizarre experimental music, and it feels both constricting and nauseating to listen to – exactly the same sensations I have when faced with a movie of a Muehl action. Further, the music fits well with the Kapuke set for some reason, making this whole album an essential slab of post-modern alienation and doom-infested angst. From 2nd August 2019.

We noted in July 2019 this ultra-bizarre CDR where Broken Penis Orchestra (Stan Reed) applied his demented magic to the task, something so fractured and crazy that the term “remix” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Part of that project has now resurfaced, I think, on the first of today’s vinyl offerments – a split album called Arme Nüsse (Volume 2) (PSYCH.KG 485). Spin side one of this grotesque biscuit to savour again the twisted joys of ‘The Groping Fingers…’ escapade; may I refer the reader to our previous review for an attempt to come to terms with this collaged, layered madness. The B side of the split contains, amazingly, a collaboration between Kommissar Hjuler and Family Fodder. The latter were post-punk heroes in the late 1970s, and their first single on Fresh Records could have been a bigger smash if only it had been released in time to take advantage of John Peel’s premature spins of the pre-release promo. The Kommissar is a highly prolific creator from Flensburg (on the Germany-Denmark border) whose work occupies some twilight space in between music, performance art, sound poetry and various other extreme forms of modernism, and he always brings an absurdist dash to everything he does.

I can’t imagine a less likely pairing of people to work together, but this may be testament to the power of Rupenus and his persuasive powers, rumoured to involve a type of old-school mesmerism not used since the time of Rasputin. Hjuler and Fodder – I’ll assume it’s just Alig Pearce and not the whole band, as I hear a deal of accordion work here – turn in seven experimental tracks with odd, ambiguous titles, and create a fug of puzzling inconsequential nonsenses. Collaged found voices, weird sounds like mice nibbling the furniture, and generally balmy antics are combined with the finest romantic and melodic fugues Alig can summon from his piano and accordion, plus a few forays into glorpy electronic sqwudge when an extra dose of exotica is called for. The connection to Bladder Flask seems pretty remote by the end of it, and while Reed’s side is I think based on some rediscovered 1981 materials from Rupenus, this Hjuler-Fodder mental vacation appears to be mostly new and original gloop but done very much in the spirit of the project. Although…Reed is violent and unsettling, clearly out to destroy our sense of normalcy, while the Kommissar and the Fodder are that bit more gentle, slipping the rug out from under our brain without us noticing. Their side is loopy, humourous at times, but still delivers the mind-smearing feeling of strangeness and disconnect by the end of the seven sessions.

Artworks are notable…the front cover looks like the psychedelic X-Ray form Hell, reporting on an internal disease you certainly don’t want to know about, while the back cover is a playful construct showing Playmobil characters enjoying a rock concert, except that instead of a band they’re looking at a huge cassette tape tied to a balsa-wood stage with purple string. Pretty zany, eh? Collectors may like to know that this release exists in at least three variant editions, each with different titles and radically different artworks, the more extreme versions released in minuscule numbers and resembling hand-made gallery pieces rather than boring old “albums”. This reflects the inspiration Kommissar Hjuler has drawn from the Fluxus artists. From 17 June 2019.

The second item is called Arme Dornröschen (PSYCH.KG 483), likewise a split, likewise a showcase for several artistes and collaborative works. On the first side you get the BPO / Stan Reed 2018 reworking of the classic Rupenus piece “One Day I Was So Sad…”, also available on the Orgel Fesper CDR. I did spin it again today just to get the experience of hearing it as one side of vinyl. As expected, the sheer incoherence of it starts from the get-go and doesn’t release its hold on your poor cerebellum, until you too are dragged down to a state of lunatic frenzy. What I’ll add is that today’s spin brought home one of the striking aspects of this concoction, the odd and ill-fitting mix of vulgar, crass humour with moments of near-pathological darkness. It’s like watching a slapstick movie from the 1930s spliced with a low-budget Italian zombie movie – custard pie fights morphing into monstrous flesh-eating. Just one of the many tricks of psychological warfare this record can conceal; you’re pulled in both directions at once until you can hear your own sinews snapping.

The flip of this one is less spectacular. ‘Who/Wer’ is the soundtrack to an art installation piece of the same name by Magda Stawarska-Beaven, a Polish artist whose recent work explores “the shifting sonic and visual identities of cities”. What we hear is rather uninteresting field recordings accompanied by a voiceover, spoken in two languages at once, describing what’s happening in this rather ordinary urban scene. Wolfgang Kindermann wrote this text and supplies one of the voices. In this tedious urban drama, a woman receives a mobile phone call and her life is ruined, or something; it’s hard to make out what’s going on here, as everything is deliberately obscured by this two-voice tactic. The very precise attention to detail, when applied to this banal subject matter, is infuriating. I’m missing the point of this one by about a mile, but it probably connects to the overall themes of absurdity and futility that the Bladder Flask LP expresses so successfully. There’s a third piece which closes the B side, this one credited to Dino Felipe, Kommissar Hjuler and his Frau. This ‘Daswesender’ is more in my line; strange voices and noises, all set forth in a stream of seemingly-random collision edits and assemblies that produces the most wonderful nonsense. The cover art to this release should need no further commentary from me. From 17 June 2019.

Alina Kalancea is a Romanian performer whose triumph on this release has been to meld her spoken word rhythms with the rhythms of very dark, mean, buzzy and pulsating electronic music – even on the tracks where no words appear, you still get the sense you’re beaming in another chapter from the same lecture. She began electronic composition in 20102, and has since explored her own interiority to devise the present way of working, aided by such movers and shakers as Enrico Cosimi in Rome (where he’s Professor of Electronic Music at Tor vegata) and Steve Thomas at QMU London. Also lending a lift is Spanish entrepreneur Alex Gámez (aka Asférico) who runs Störung and is a collaborator with the whole project – we last heard him working with Mia Zabelka on The Broken Glass – here, he’s credited with music, production, arrangement and sound design. We’ve also got cello playing by Julia Kent on the chilling track ‘Poisonous Girl’ – one of the rare occasions where Alina sings, albeit in an attenuated deeply-lost manner – and string arrangements by Raven Bush on ‘Behind The Curtains’.

The record reminded me a little bit of the recent-ish item by She Spread Sorrow – and since the label invited us to listen to the work of other women in similar vein, I’ve since discovered the joys of Pharmakon and Puce Mary, and in my own mind I’m trying to prove there might be a whole genre of disaffected feminist noise artists, all making use of their hollow voices in among the dark ambient electronics. If there is, I’d be tempted to add Alina Kalancea to the list, but may be doing her a disservice. I suppose it’s the “confessional” aspect that leads me into this chain of thought; She Spread Sorrow was definitely in full-on confessional mode, and did it in the context of an inverted Catholic rite, plus was not averse to injecting a sinful sexual dimension to her cold and dispassionate recits. Alina Kalancea perhaps doesn’t go down that route, but there is a determination to meet the truth and stare it in the eye, which she does with considerable poise and dignity, producing beautiful ice-cold music as she does so. Now to build a small shrine and light some candles, and play this shining jewel after dark…from 10th January 2019, also available as a double LP.

While I may protest publicly all I like about how “industrial” is just not my cup of liquid plutonium, I still keep getting sent records like this one, and find in spite of my personal tastes admitting to a begrudging enjoyment of the hideous, joyless sounds on offer. Admittedly. this Jakie Piekne is a real oddity compared to the previous gloom-fests of endless pain, in that it represents our man Gen Tran trying out more varied and bolder experiments in style and technique. One major leap forward in this case is that he started to use computer processing around this time (2002), when up till then he’d been a diehard devotee of magnetic tape, amplification, feedback and metal objects. He’s also dipping his zinc-coated toes into the radioactive waters of the cut-up genre, which according to the label notes can be regarded as a move “in the tradition of Nurse With Wound”. (NWW have a tradition?) In the hands of Genetic Transmission, this means creating faintly nightmarish and disturbing effects with varispeed, disrupting our sense of normalcy with unexpected samples, and using fragments of edited sound to chatter out broken narratives that short-circuit common sense.

Rather than being “surreal” – a term which is often applied to the music of NWW – the most extreme examples here are more like delirious, hallucinatory drug trips, riddled with unpleasant imagery and steeped in ambiguity. Even the title is a cut-up, mixing nonsense Polish with Russian words, and translates roughly as Look (You Are Welcome) What Beautiful Mommys, a phrase all full of false innocence being used to conceal what is evidently a sinister intent. While this album is not exactly a “pleasant” listen, I’m getting a certain buzz from the primitive, near-brutal methods by which the work is assembled – you can see all the joins in this sewn-together monster, and Genetic Transmission likes to keep hammering away remorselessly at his theme until the point is made (or even hammered into the dirt). I’m always in favour of a slightly obsessive approach to tape assemblage, so this scores points with me. Indeed given the very strong and jarring juxtapositions on offer, one might say the more accurate comparison is with Bladder Flask rather than NWW.

In all, this is quite a different kettle of mercury from the grim, murky noise of Gen Tran’s earlier releases, and a more complex picture of the fellow is slowly beginning to emerge. From 6th December 2018.

On the grooves, you can expect mostly creeping electronic minimalism performed with the skill of a micro-surgeon, calculated to freeze the marrow and tense every nerve in your terrified bag of bones…on top of these ice-cold emanations, She Spread Sorrow whispers her deathly intonations in the calm, deliberate tones of a sociopath patiently explaining why they are going to kill you. Actually it’s not all quite as menacing as that; half the time she seems to be owning up to her personal sinful thoughts in the confessional box, consumed by Catholic guilt, barely able to admit these terrible things even to herself. While there might not be anything directly obscene in the content (and I can only make out about 50% of what she’s murmuring anyway), some of these private rants appear to be getting pretty close to the bone and near the knuckle, passing on impressions perhaps of forbidden sexual acts, a certain degree of self-disgust and “body horror”, or otherwise unwholesome predilections.

While this whole “transgression” angle when practised elsewhere has left me cold for many decades now, there’s a very personal dimension to She Spreads Sorrow which is something I can endorse. It’s as though she’s making a direct connection with her own thought processes, giving vent to ideas as they simmer in the brain, rather than simply reading aloud from a prepared script of shocking words or flicking through a book of stock taboo images. It’s also possible she may be in a line with other solo female acts who have been treading this dangerous ground for about ten years – Pharmakon, Puce Mary and Sewer Goddess are all named on the hype sticker, and while I never heard their music they all seem to be probing those uncomfortable zones left unexplored by the previous generation of feminist performance-art shockers, such as Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch and Annie Sprinkle. I also like the phrase “sinful power electronics” printed on said hype sticker, as in my mind this cements the release firmly in the Catholic-guilt confessional area as I suggest above. Not a happy listen, but a cathartic one for sure. From 8th November 2018.

John Grieve kindly sent us a copy of this LP in April 2018. It’s only the second LP released by the sound-poetry group Hastings Of Malawi, whose original membership I believe included Grieve, Heman Pathak, and Dave Hodes. (John Grieve clarifies: “Visceral Underskinnings is actually all my own work although the cover was designed by David Hodes. We do not know what has happened to Heman Pathak.”) Pathak was in the original Nurse With Wound group, appearing on many of their early LPs, while John Grieve has issued very little under his own name; those that I know of include two tracks on the Variations compilations put out by Paradigm. (Update: There have been a few digital releases by John Grieve over more recent years – one is a collaboration and very limited edition LP with French musician Christian Renou, and various other offerings are on his Bandcamp page.)

The first LP Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth came out in 1981, released on Papal Products. There’s been such a long gap between these two releases, the wait can only increase the mythological status of this “British Dadaist” group, and I thought it would be worth relistening to it to see if any clues could be picked up. Both records could be characterised as “collage” LPs – that is they use a number of found sources and cut-up techniques to assemble the material. The collage technique extends to the cover art, which in the case of today’s release juxtaposes images of African peoples, food, faces, and militaristic uniforms in unsettling ways, as it were detourning an issue of National Geographic by folding in images from Ladies’ Home Journal. However, the enterprise is more than just collage – varispeeding and edits are just as important as the selection of content.

On today’s revisit spin of Stapler, I found a nightmarish experience awaiting me – strange voices and strange music all out of context, all information scrambled, all things familiar made unfamiliar and dark. The first side has clocks ticking, whale calls, quasi-scientific narration, percussive noises, frantic electric noise, detuned piano hammering, readings from a recipe book…numbers being recited…and of course the speaking clock, which might be the bit everyone remembers. This is the old speaking clock which you used to get on the telephone by dialling TIM. Come to that, there are also other audible voices speaking on the phone, and the sound of old dialling tones on the record. Most unsettling of all is the repeated voice saying “Hello? Hello?”, and receiving no response, as if uncertain of who might be there, if anyone. Some of the record contains something approaching music; clunky, sarcastic, lead-footed march-time tunes on the piano with inept playing of keyboards and synths…it’s sheer genius. Perhaps this is Pathak’s contribution to the Hastings collaboration. Meanwhile the B side dwells at length on a gruesome recipe involving slicing meat, described with some relish, and it opens with the delicious moment of a nursery-rhyme record followed by an interminable section of the speaking clock.

It’s probably futile to look for “meaning” in what is intended as a bleak, cold statement of the meaninglessness of life, but this spin seemed to be full of images of communication; or rather, images of communication breaking down. The human voice, and the devices we use to transmit it – especially the telephone – all are shown to be failing us drastically.

These themes continue some 36 years later, almost without missing a beat, on Visceral Underskinnings. To begin with, we have the same techniques of collaging, editing and varispeeding, only now they are used much more aggressively. There are moments when the human voice is distorted into absolute ruin, producing incoherent mumbles and inhuman groans. The varispeeding (it might be more accurate to call it time-stretching) does actually create some astonishing effects, especially one side two, where the layered artefacts from old 78s and discs and decaying tapes combine to produce audio textures that are almost aesthetically satisfying, if one could only ignore the unfolding nightmare they depict.

Secondly, there’s the telephone and the phone voices. On the new record, the speaking clock has given way to a pre-recorded digital voice instructing the caller to press a number to select an option; again it’s the voice of a woman; but the 21st-century version is distant and uninterested in anything, despite her efforts to sound helpful. This segment leads to repeated phone button pressing, to produce a short mini-symphony of overdubbed digital dial tones. Thirdly: there’s another disembodied voice saying “Hello? Hello?”, almost a direct match for the Stapler LP, as if answering their equally-lost friend.

These sampled voices turn into pure terror by the end of the LP, where I seem to hear something like a witch, or a victim of demonic possession…she or he is spitting out pure venom and anger, perhaps in German (there are other foreign languages on the LP too); edits and studio effects speed up and distort to make this even more nasty than it should be, and the sudden bursts of horror-movie music played on an organ don’t help the mood, nor do the calming chants of what might be intended as a priest or congregation attempting to exorcise this possessed soul. The horrifying intensity of these grooves – near the end of side B – cannot be overstated!

These examples I cite all contribute, I think, to the continued theme of communication failure; other instances include the Numbers Station sample on Side A, directly after the dial tones. The repeated numbers – themselves an index of cryptic, coded communication – are soon overlaid and repeated until they too become gibberish, at which point an old record cuts in featuring the whistling of George Washington Johnson, an entertainer who died in 1914. Just one of many listening moments which are guaranteed to short-circuit common sense.

If we wanted to seek out further subtexts, we could point to the critiques of modern consumerism and military interventions (forces which pretty much dominate everyone’s lives today), but they are done so fleetingly and without unnecessary emphasis, that it seems that these themes are so obvious to the creator that they are barely worth mentioning. I refer to the old military march record, which is at first jaunty and then deflated when replayed at quarter-speed; the brilliant TV sample of competition winners at the end of side one; and the close of side two, which gently juxtaposes upbeat adverts for computer gear with the sounds of military aircraft.

All of these recognisable elements are sandwiched together with computer music, and with noise – very good sound art noise (Grieve adds: “The sound sculptures that you kindly described as very good sound art noise are in fact my work.”) – like a more musical version of The New Blockaders, often sounding mechanical, groany, turgid and alarming. Some of what we hear may be derived from “the many sound sculptures produced by Hastings of Malawi over the last 30 years”, as the Sub Rosa webpage informs us, but the sound manipulation is remarkable – a very extreme form of musique concrète, that changes the nature of things to the ultimate degree. I suppose Visceral Underskinnings could easily be read as a “noise” record, which would tend to align it with the history of industrial music and related enterprises, but I would prefer to see it as a text; an audio text where every sound has been selected, arranged, treated and sequenced with considerable care. You can dig out more and more from this text every time you spin it, and there’s enough information here for scholars to go mad as they try and process it. “An epic sound poem,” say Sub Rosa, “a 40 minute film without light”. Limited edition pressed in yellow vinyl; very highly recommended. From 20 April 2018.

Updated 08/01/2019 to incorporate clarifications and information from John Grieve.

I had no idea Burroughs was pursuing a solo line. On the evidence of this, it involves an intense form of electronic music with plenty of weird processing, nasty effects, vocals buried in a swampy mix…it moves beyond mere dark ambient drone music somehow, perhaps through his close attention to dynamics and studied application of nuanced tones to his ever-shifting howls and murmurs. Needless to remark there’s a highly unpleasant subtext to Surgical Fires, as evidenced in titles like ‘Demonic Forms’, ‘Mind As Corpse Bearer’, ‘Black Air (Exhale)’ and ‘Release of the Burning Mouths’. These do much to trigger the unhealthy imaginative forces of a susceptible listener, and it isn’t long before we’re all sharing alarming visions of a subterranean Hell, not unlike a coal mine, laced with poisonous vapours…death is all around us, and there’s a supernatural dimension to boot, if the “Lordly Cobras” alluded to on track 7 are the demonic entities I suspect them to be.

The record, half-music and half sound effects, does nothing to dispel such tormented visions – nor does the cover art, also by Burroughs, which seems to be applying a decalcomania effect to suggest grim, grey, gruesome caverns of inescapable doom. The printed press release takes us off another tack, alluding to “psychic surgery” (whatever that may mean; in this instance, it probably involves taking slices out of a man’s soul with an invisible scalpel) and a roster of important-sounding abstractions, such as “loss, gain, conflict, resolution, decay and transformation”. I have no idea if these words belong to Burroughs or to the Cold Spring PR department, but they just make the work seem unnecessarily solemn and self-important…it reads more like the agenda of a two-day international symposium on 21st-century urban problems. Nonetheless, the record remains an assured piece of depressing gloomoid filth…from 30th November 2016.

London player Anthoney Hart projects a low profile in his music and image, a strategy which I admire heartily, and every release seems to be an attempt to undermine our collective certainties, using stealth and invisible means…each beat is a hammer blow delivered with the surgical skill of a geologist prising loose a keystone from a pyramid of power…the temples of the Establishment are sure to topple, but not before our masked hero has long made good his escape under cover of night. The A side contains ‘Preternatural’ and ‘Enlightenment’, both hugely effective pulsation and throb experiences that can sap the vitality from a hundred civil servants in just ten minutes.

The B side includes the unusual ‘(A Drift)’, a version of a Closed Circuits track which is even more skeletal and bare-bones in its arrangement (if that’s conceivable), where the beat is unprocessed and raw, arriving like the knocking of a hammer on an empty wooden crate (or coffin). Chris Page intones a dark and defiant lyric in a resigned tone of world-weariness, while around him strange minimal electronic tones dart about like small birds.

To complete the package and its tone of strange despairing symbolism, we have the excellent cover art: a troubling image of a man with a head split in two, blood trickling down his nose, yet wearing an impassive and calmly accepting expression. His striped shirt and jacket might almost mark him out as a businessman or other enemy of society. The half-tone printing employed on this monochrome image adds to the weird mood; you certainly wouldn’t welcome a “visitation” from this menacing apparition with his grey, clay-like features. From 19 May 2016.

Over the years I keep finding myself in a love-hate relationship with Dijkstra’s work, forcing myself to hear it and drag myself to the writing block afterwards; even he was moved to email me with the observation, “although you don’t really seem to like my music, you’re nonetheless one of the best review writers I know.” Remembering In The Cosmic Manifestation (EDITIONS LE SOUFFLEUR LS111) is, for the first side at least, one of his more approachable records. The two parts of the title track appear on side one, and it’s a couple of moog / percussion workouts that I’d venture to say might even appeal to fans of the first Popol Vuh LP, Affenstunde. Matter of fact the very word “Cosmic” in the title is probably a nod in that very direction. But it’s far darker and colder than the sunlit worlds of Florian Fricke. It’s as though Florian had turned to diabolry and satanism instead of Tibetan Buddhism. I say this because the music is so wayward and distorted; although Le Ray comes close to playing recognisable chords or melodies, it’s as though he deliberately stops short of doing so, refusing that safe resolution into a comforting E-C-G chord shape. Likewise, his sonic treatments keep the listener off balance here; distortion, wayward interventions, and other devices to disrupt the surface calm keep on bobbing to the surface, like so many unwelcome monsters rising up from the bottom of the lake. Even those conga rhythms which could have added a transcendental effect and contributed to a meditative frame of mind are poisoned somehow; they smack of decadence, ether-infused trance states, unwholesome nightmares. So far, “approachable” does come with a caveat or two.

Side two turns out to be the hideous twin brother of the relatively benign side one. Both parts of ‘Kosmische Vernichtung’, especially the interminable part I, are the sort of indigestible and unsettling music I usually associate with Dijkstra. The title says as much. You may be cheered by the sight of the word “Kosmische” and assume we’re in for some more Popol Vuh related treats, but it translates as “cosmic destruction”, indicating at least three related aspects to Dijkstra’s fiendish plan. He aims to destroy krautrock music; he aims to completely reverse any benefit that may have been conferred by his efforts on side one; and he aims to create a soundtrack for the apocalypse. Yes, I know there’s probably not a single Industrial musician who hasn’t boasted about their apocalyptic ambitions since 1980 onwards, but Dijkstra comes pretty close to opening the Seventh Seal with this horrifying melange of sound he’s unleashed. Produced I think with mellotron added to the moog and percussion, said mellotron probably contributing the ultra-queasy string effect that sounds like a hundred classical musicians being sick at once, ‘Kosmische Vernichtung Part I’ manages to stay just on the right side of coherence long enough to pull you in to its hateful vortex of chaos and despair. Every discordant moment is probably planned and executed with a ruthless precision, the composer knowing exactly what buttons to push to induce existential terror in the listener’s head. You’ll think you can stand it at first, then after ten minutes you’ll be begging for mercy. I can’t really say I enjoyed listening to this side of swirling, monstrous noise, but it’s a work of genius. Evil genius, that is.

The cover art to this record continues the series of photo-collages we have already seen on Nivritti Marga and the Santasede 10-inch, also on this label and another Dijkstra collaborative project. Through the simple expedient of cutting up images of a lushly-furnished room, the artist strikes cold fear into the heart of the onlooker. It’s a deliberate attempt to subvert the normality of the bourgeoisie, through a direct attack on “good taste” and the traditions embodied in fabrics, wallpaper, and antiques. In the same way that the music challenges you to find a way into its illogical patterns and pathways, this impossible room looks at first sight like a place where a human being could enter, but the more you examine it the more you realise it’s an impossible, nightmare dimension, full of broken perspectives and awkward shapes. It’s not too far-fetched to suggest a connection could be found with the music on ‘Kosmische Vernichtung Part I’, those parts where classical orchestral traditions are being parodied and grotesquely mutated into a sickening noise. What these collages do for a hundred stately homes and luxury hotels across Europe, Dijkstra’s music is doing for the conventions of classical music. Once again I must liken him to that most famous of 20th century art movements, and consider him one of the most outright Surrealist artists working today. From 10th February 2016.

Both Panoptic and The Other exhibited a heavy dependency on the work of other musicians, contributions which would then be subjected to near-ruthless reprocessing and cutting up, as Baran did his best to stamp his own identity and agenda on the original performances, diverting their directions in his favour, co-opting the sounds, colonising the work. To some extent The Cray Twins do similar, in that a number of collaborators are embedded in the fabric of The Pier, including the avant-saxophonist Lucio Capece; Gerry Kelly, with his field recordings; the voice of Nicky Miller; the clarinet of Tuomas Ollikainen; the saxophone of Ken Vandermark. That he is credited with playing a ‘mutant saxophone’ on his track may clue you in to the vaguely disturbing and radical nature of Cray Twins’ work. BJ Nilsen also appears, remixing one track. Jos Smolders contributes further field recordings on another. Yet somehow, none of these individual voices are allowed to stand out in any way; the album remains all of a piece, posing one dark riddle after another, shaking its head sadly at the state of the world.

The Pier is something to do with going out too far, with attempting to reach the edge of the world and sailing off into the void. Baran and Kennedy propose to probe the “limit of human extent” and find the sweet spot beyond which “space opens up to the unknown, the unheard”. I’d imagine they have spent a long time in the studio working with various elaborate set-ups, which probably involve computers, cables, microphones, recording devices; a long chain of dependencies. They now believe that these “audio systems” they work with are equivalent to human systems, a challenging view which is vaguely alluded to in the press notes. I’d love to know more about what they mean. Any person’s life today is also a long chain of dependencies. But some of them are good dependencies; friends, family, the community, work, play, art. Perhaps Cray Twins are interested in other “systems”, including political and economic circumstances, which tend to involve dark forces and larger unknowns, operating well beyond our control. I am speculating now, but having interviewed Baran by email I have some inkling of his predispositions. If The Pier is indeed setting out to find the weak links, the point at which these systems begin to break down, that is a very intriguing proposition. That aim may not always be fully realised by the doomy abstract music on offer here, but it has resulted in a suitable soundtrack for the questing brain to ponder such imponderables.

I like the subtly disquieting cover photograph. It seems to show the contents of a house (including the kitchen sink) leaking out into the garden, a space which is so open it’s becoming the entire countryside. And there’s an odd visual glitch in the middle of the image, a reflection of something in glass that should not be there by rights. It could almost be a lost still from Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Or a very English take on the back cover image of Trout Mask Replica. From 24th March 2016.