Tagged: industrial

February 22, 2014

Great Invisible Crashing

We’ve got this six-CD set Passagen (MONOTYPE RECORDS mono58) which a “career-spanning” box of the undefinable work of the German combo P16.D4. It’s been lurking in the cannisters for many a month, but today I’m just going to try and look at the first CD. It’s called Kühe in 1/2 Trauer and was (sort of) the first proper LP put out by the team of Ralf Wehowsky, Roger Schönauer and Ewald Weber. This album wasn’t released until 1984, but the band was started in 1980 and had been steadily recording all that time. Even then Ralf (or RLW) was terrifyingly prolific, as his solo career will demonstrate. In fact this album contains a jumble of live and studio recordings mostly made between 1982 and 1983, and often we’ll find two recordings from different dates or actions, spliced together to make an unholy lump of gnarled noise. Before the release of Kühe in 1/2 Trauer the band put out various single tracks as contributions to cassette compilations. Did I mention the band were originally called P.D.? Their Inweglos LP from 1980 under that name is a real gem. I haven’t got an original LP of course but the later CD reissue on Absurd Records. Real tasty minimal electronic rhythms and analogue blattery. I seem to recall it as somewhat more tuneful than the hateful, depressing noise I am enduring today. Which isn’t to say I’m not enjoying it or appreciating it. This music is staggeringly original and innovative, and while it’s possible to locate it in a chain of circumstance that links it to “industrial” music, P16.D4 indulged in none of the empty cliches associated with the genre, worked incredibly hard, and seem to have been aiming at a form of sound art that was much more profound, varied, subversive, and potentially dangerous.

You can be impressed just by reading the printed credits for each track, which indicate their radical approach to making music: lots of improvisation, lots of live electronics, extensive use of tape loops, some conventional instrumentation, and much that isn’t – like the milk churn on ‘Paris, Morgue’ or the use of baking tray and washing machine elsewhere. Even when guitars, drums or keyboards are used, they’re played very weirdly. It’s not even made clear who was doing what; the main credit is “Concept”, which I assume means that one of the three devised the framework in which the noise would operate itself, and while RLW gets the lion’s share of these credits, a lot of the cuts are evenly divided among the team and (without reading the history in the booklet) I have no doubt that the group operated in a very democratic or libertarian manner. None of this prepares you for the insane and troubling sounds that reach your ears, composed with scant regard for conventional logic and following an exciting, absurdist path, especially in the matter of tape edits and juxtapositions of recordings. Take a simple three-minute song like ‘Rückplötzlich (Scheitze)’ – it clashes a group improvisation played with organ, drums and guitar with some unsettling tapes of screams, voices, laughing and radio noise; in less than three minutes presenting an unhinged and distorted view of society’s follies that George Grosz would’ve applauded mightily. The musical instruments are played with a ferocious amateurish attack, making a nonsense of “musicianship”, yet producing the correct degree of angry, hideous malevolence and seething discontent. At this juncture it’s hard to escape making comparisons between P16.D4 and This Heat, but P16.D4 seemed to have gone even further; it’s as though the whole band were at the level of Gareth Williams, the musically-untrained trickster in the This Heat pack. P16.D4 may also share some of Charles Hayward’s troubling ideas about the impossibility of communication; at one point in his life, Hayward despaired of human beings ever communicating anything, and it informed just about every song he wrote for that band. P16.D4 seem to take this state of affairs as a given, and are constantly striving to find expression in the most desolate and God-forsaken zones possible. They speak in desperate, blocked growls and fowl buzzing tones, defying anyone to make their way past this palpable membrane of alienation. Powerful!

Another abiding impression I have from today’s spin is one of broken-ness, a deliberate attempt to realise a broken and fragmented music; the music itself is shapeless, abrasive and lumpy. That milk churn image just won’t go away for me; the music itself might as well have been made by a churning process, and that’s reflected in the semi-mechanical churn of the sound. And it usually produces a sour coagulated whey, music that is virtually indigestible by the human system. Tracks are contrived to begin and end in the middle of nowhere, resisting conventional form, often breaking off just at the point where you think you might want to hear more of it. It’s hard to fathom the sensations of “beautiful ugliness” which this music induces. We’re left stranded in a world governed by absurd and incomprehensible rules; not much fun to listen to the unholy noise they make, but it’s even worse when it stops. “Funny, the more you eat the worse it gets,” said Estragon in Waiting for Godot. “With me it’s the opposite…I get used to the muck as I go along,” replied Vladimir in Beckett’s play.

Besides the entire Kühe in 1/2 Trauer album, this CD also contains the three Masse Mensch tracks from 1982; these were released on a Selektion LP of this title that year. I think it was the first vinyl release on this label, which Ralf operated with Achim Wollscheid. These items are no less chilling than the preceding work, but they also have a starkness in their realisation, often comprising not much more than a ghastly bass guitar riff with a layer of angst-ridden guitar noise growling on top. On one track, tapes of crowds shouting are manipulated to nightmarish proportions. On another, a saxophone and piano are added to the minimal set-up, but no sense of joy is imparted by this quasi-jazz instrumentation, and a very forlorn conversation ensues. The sound of the saxophone alone – a ghostly inhuman and echoing wail – will induce an instant melancholy, which can only be cured by the suicide’s noose. Most grotesque of all is the five-minute ‘Halbmensch’ where the treated voice stutters, moans and wails over a fragmented backdrop of tapes produced from kitchen utensils, along with the desultory minimal bass-guitar murmurations. The voice is struggling to make itself understood through a mouthful of dough. This stunning aural portrait of a “half man” is for me a particular highlight of the set, a penetrating observation on the human condition that imparts many uncomfortable truths.

I’m looking forward to digging into the other five CDs, and reading more from the booklet with its history, photographs and critical essays; a fitting showcase for this massively significant band.

January 24, 2014

Decollate: going headless again with the thinking person’s favourite black metal horde

Source: http://clothbodies.blogspot.co.uk/

L’Acephale, Decollate, Black Horizons, Canada, cassette (2013)

L’Acephale‘s latest release “Decollate” is a short five-track set on cassette that includes two original songs and three covers of songs by Emperor, Darkthrone and Current 93 in that order. For less than 30 minutes in total, Set Sothis Nox La and his merry musicians deliver some of the most militaristic, sabre-rattling, operatic and bombastic music this side of La Scala Theatre in Milan. Plenty of industrial, folk and ambient music elements abound here without the band’s essential black metal style floundering under so many different genres.

First up for the headless horde’s treatment is Emperor’s “Ye Entrancemperium”, a thumping martial folk beast with savage rhythms and riffs, a venomous gabbling vocal and super-bombastic percussion. Multi-layered at various points, the song is complex and murky. L’Acephale’s rendering of the track sticks closely to the original with details in the vocals and percussion being different and the production distorted. Then follows one of two original songs, “Sleep is the Enemy”, a seething sinister beast, laidback yet doomy, lurching into view with subliminal swamp-monster groans and growls and rhythms that slouch from somnambulist soldier march to frenzied blast-beats and chaos, and back again. And again. It’s a simple song to follow though with much of its emphasis on the quietly creepy atmosphere that envelops it.

Flipping over to the B-side, we find Darkthrone’s “As Flittermice as Satans Spy” given a dramatic neo-folk reworking that makes the song supremely sinister and inhuman. Militaristic horns, severe marching percussion, jittery mandolin tones and crabby misanthropic grim vocals render the track an implacable juggernaut experience. My complaint is that it’s not long enough to drive a listener totally deranged. “Passing into Sleep”, the second original track which might be a continuation of “Sleep is the Enemy”, is another quietly malevolent and oppressive piece with samples of droning vocal chant combined with operatic singing, percussion experimentation, guitar drone and piano punctuation. Again the atmosphere is the most important element here, more so than the previous original, allowing L’Acephale the opportunity to experiment with tone, space and texture.

Last up is a Current 93 cover “Allons vior si la Rose” (“Let us go to the Rose”), dressed Burzum-style in folk melodies and a lead guitar playing over a steady repeating rhythm and a basic drum beat. The ambience is a curious mix of not-quite summer folkiness and sinister blackness. The song ends all too quickly after a minimalist delivery and listeners are likely to feel a bit cheated that the cassette ends much too soon.

Thirty minutes for a recording, even if it’s an EP, are just too short and cramped for an ambitious and maximally inclined band like L’Acephale who like throwing everything they know or can reference into a big pot just for one song. The individual tracks go by far too quickly and, though some songs can perhaps sound overdone and overwrought, they all seem to need more development to become mighty huge structures of black metal evil.

One problem with covering other people’s songs and including them with your own work is that the song covered can show up deficiencies in your own song-writing and arrangements. This is true with particular bands whose work you’re covering and which happens to boast complex musical structures and arrangements – like Emperor for example. But I should think SSNL and company would have been well aware of the scale of ambition and ability needed to tackle Emperor’s work and what they needed to do to make their version succeed. The cover is very good indeed but L’Acephale’s own compositions on the cassette pale in comparison as a result.

As always, L’Acephale make no concessions to first-time listeners who have to come prepared with sufficient general knowledge worthy of ten university doctorates to understand the references the band tosses into its music. Fans will find this cassette an essential addition to their collections, as long as they realise it’s not likely to deliver to their high expectations.

January 23, 2014

Strata: documenting sound worlds within nooks and crannies of urban landscapes

Tarab, Strata, Unfathomless, CD U18 (2013)

For years the Australian artist Eamonn Sprod, working under the project title of Tarab, has been collecting field recordings and turning them into albums that explore and document the secret audio histories of vacant spaces in and among urban landscapes where ecosystems of plants and animals arise and thrive unseen and unnoticed by the dominant human inhabitants. His most recent album “Strata” focuses on the sounds of vacant and deserted lots and their surroundings in an area in northern Melbourne. Factories and warehouses back onto these forgotten areas on one side and on the other there is a small creek. A highway overpass runs overhead. Photographs, admittedly treated, of these places in the album sleeve design show a forlorn, almost post-apocalyptic desolate landscape in which feral grasses threaten to cover over evidence of a past human civilisation. The detritus of culture, discolouring and rotting and reverting slowly into scraps and dust, lie strewn over the ground, lacking any function and meaning for whichever life-forms still survive in this barrenness.

The album has a very dark and foreboding air and the sounds therein intimate that the natural world is biding its time until such time as when it can reclaim the city-scape for itself again. There is a sculptural and dynamic quality to the noises that appear: among other things, we hear wind, the crackle of dry leaves, rusting industrial machinery ambience, distant thunder, aeroplanes buzzing in the distance, the vibrations of pylons and of what cables may be found beneath the concrete epidermis. The border between man-made and natural dissolves, everything inanimate takes on an animated quality and aspects of the natural world seem as machine-like and forbidding as does the traffic on the roads and in the sky. The microphones used to record the sounds are themselves featured on the album as they were often dragged around the ground and over the garbage and rubble or buried within pylons.

It feels quite intimate and the entire tone of the recording for the most part is very soothing with few abrupt or jarring moments (one major exception occurring about the 22nd minute when a hail-storm suddenly erupts). The production is clear which allows the sounds, even quite distant ones such as a choir of barking dogs, to be heard with great and precise clarity. The album has an amazingly polished feel without seeming to be precious. Even though individual field recordings are carefully spaced apart so you tend to hear one or maybe a couple of things happening, the album seems very rich in terms of texture, mood and volume dynamics.

This isn’t simply a collection of sounds from a particular small set of forgotten or spurned locations in Melbourne; “Strata” is as much an artistic composition as it is a document.

December 12, 2013

Life Cycle of a Massive Star: a grand operatic work that falls short of great wonder and drama

Roly Porter, Life Cycle of a Massive Star, Subtext Recordings, SUBCD005 (2013)

At just over 35 minutes in length, how does a short recording like this recent album capture the immense magnificence and sheer scale of such a topic as the birth, life and death of a supernova? If your name is Roly Porter, you use the topic to explore what it means to be alive as a human, to be a tiny and insignificant speck living in a massive universe where such phenomena can exist yet experience the same life cycle as you do.

The music is split into five tracks that trace the upward trajectory from disorganised helium cloud into concentrated masses of cloud that soon reach critical mass and begin to draw other particles into them. Masses take on definite form and substance, generating internal heat, gravity and other forces, and from there evolution and growth begin and accelerate. The album gets off to a brisk start and rarely lingers for long on sounds, melodies, rhythm structures and tone wash for their own sake. There is plenty of dark void in and around the sounds, suggesting the vastness of space and our own lonely condition on a tiny blue planet in a small star system. The music combines elements from industrial, dubstep, formal acoustic composition, symphonic music and dark ambient.

For all the solemn beauty that passes our ears though, there’s something rather too controlled, steady and unemotional about the music – it’s very grand but it evokes no sense of wonder or drama in the way that the music selected by Stanley Kubrick for his sci-fi masterpiece flick “2001: A Space Odyssey” does. True, the clever director chose a wide range of music and musical styles, some stretching as far back as the mid-1800s, to emphasise the visual action or vistas portrayed – and that in itself points to a problem with Porter’s work: for much of the recording, there’s no sense here that he was reaching for the utmost in the genres of music he chose to work in for this album, no sense of risk or exploration. Only with the final track “Giant” do we arrive at a state of terror and awe as the star in question achieves super-giant status and engulfs some of its inner planets but the musical drama only goes so far. We are not even allowed to hear and visualise the star’s full glory and extent as it reaches its maximum size and development just before it begins to collapse in on itself.

It’s a beautiful work, grand in its own way, yet in my view not quite reaching the heights and depths that beckoned. Perhaps if Porter had extended his vision of the star’s life cycle to include its inevitable descent and death, a connection between the most incredible physical phenomenon and our own lives would have been established, and we humans would find comfort in knowing that even the mightiest things to exist must eventually die. Something really grand, intense and quite emotional could come out of that.

Contact: Cargo Records

December 10, 2013

Rubbed Raw / Volume IV: deranged outsider noise electronics skating close to madness and chaos

Rubbed Raw, “Volume IV”, Ormolycka, cassette (2013)

Wacky sped-up chipmunk vocals and glitchy rubber electronics herald this collection of often creepy electronics that almost verges on noise, isolationist dub and Whitehouse-styled power electronics. I have no idea who Rubbed Raw are and what connection they have to a character called Big Daddy Nugg who died in his early 40s in 2010, whether this person was a member of the band, a friend or a major inspiration. The A-side of the recording early on is dominated by a pounding percussion, wobbly watery sounds and deranged guitar feedback drone in parts, followed by a vigorous rhythmic stroll of more blaring industrial-sounding noise electronics with just a dash of techno thrown in. A later track consists of a spoken-voice recording overlaid by shimmering echo that renders the voice alien and sinister, and a quivering guitar feedback drone solo, leading into what sounds like a peculiarly sanitised exchange of gunfire as imagined on laptops and PCs.

Side-B is no less weird or abrasive with occasional rhythm loop forays into something quite funky and almost worthy of admission into dance clubs without fear of being thrown out by bouncers. Blasts of industrial-strength steel noise, searing guitar feedback drone and effects that fly in and out hold you spellbound. This is quite a short side compared to the A-side.

Although this recording seems very lo-fi, the composition, arrangement and execution of the sounds, rhythms, beats and field recordings are excellent and suggest the musicians, amateurs though they might consider themselves, have quite a long history of performing original music. The music is very edgy, skating very close to the jagged point of a sheer drop down into machine noise chaos. There’s a sense of the music being very deranged due to its extreme isolation from familiar music networks; that deranged attitude elevates the sounds into feverish paranoia territory. It can be terrifying to hear and it’s sure to warp your brain the more you listen to it. How can I get more of this stuff?

Contact: Ormolycka, PO Box 649, New York, NY 10163, USA

December 9, 2013

Deimos: scary little quartet of occult sounds taking listeners on a trance journey

Official pack shot from http://unfestinsagital.blogspot.co.uk/

Un Festin Sagital, Deimos, Black Horizons, cassette BH-72 (2013)

In ancient Greek mythology, Deimos was the god of terror and together he and his brother Phobos, the god of fear, would ride on either side of their father Ares during battle, glorying in the slaughter of soldiers as they fell from chariots or their horses, or were cut down by storms of arrows and spears. This cassette might be short at 20 minutes but the terror and fear it delivers are perhaps no less in the music’s assault on the eardrums. The style of music might best be described as a mix of blackened psychedelic free noise industrial ambient punk. If I missed anything out in that description, readers are free to suggest more labels ad infinitum.

The A-side ( “Terror Diluviano” and “La Ofrenda Danzante del Cuerpo Enamorado”) promises a real scare-fest with a short passage of deep chanting vocals counterbalanced by solemn trance-like witch voices all surrounded by strange twisted wobble effects and wisps of airy sound. A creepy lead vocal takes charge and for a few moments you wonder whether you’re hearing a real Satanic Mass being performed. We continue into a bass-like doodle that transforms into a series of berserk piano squiggles, background sigh and whoosh, and evilly grim black metal goblin vocals chanting repetitively in a strange tongue. Weird FX dive in and out of the music.

The B-side (“Deimos” and “Ni Sobreproteccion, Ni Descuido”) is more ominous and ambient than avantgarde weird. The title track is based around an original contribution by Wesley Young / Deciduous Flux who plays electronics here. (Young also modelled for the artwork by Jesse Pepper.) It consists largely of sleepy bass drone suggestive of an idling grinding machine over which a flute might play or a lone speaker might say or whisper something. Bringing up the rear is a piece that might have escaped from a long moody movie-music soundtrack: blowing wind, space synth wash, glitch rhythms, ticking percussion and glittery space-ambient tone squiggle loops will keep you guessing as to what kind of B-grade sci-fi monster flick from the 1950s is being referenced here.

Your brain will be kept in overdrive figuring out how all four tracks relate to one another and whether a theme greater than terror and fear is struggling to emerge. Track titles suggest occult references and the sequencing of the tracks might imply the performance of a ritual followed by transcendence and its after-effects. On the other hand, there might not be any relation at all among the four tracks and all that holds them in common is the effect they have on your mood and thinking.

Un Festin Sagital is a Chilean act revolving around one Michel Leroy aided by various musicians who appear on tracks 1 to 3.

December 7, 2013

Rotten Developments

This should be the last of the bundle received from Richard Kamerman’s Copy For Your Records label in August 2012. Developer’s self-titled (CFYRT04) is a cassette most likely made by Matthew Reis of Ohio, whose email address for his Factotum Tapes label is supplied in the inner of this short, small-run tape. Despite indications of brevity, Developer manages to compress a good deal of overpowering factory-noise and metallic shriek into a tiny frame, creating a rather haunting sensation of alienation and futility with his echoing klang. Oddly enough, I like it less when the episode collapses into more conventional harsh noise, but even so there is plenty of evidence of skill and subtlety in the way Developer handles his very abstract, abrasive material – especially in the editing. Reis is one of these impossibly prolific creators who not only has numerous releases under this name, but has also operated under numerous aliases, including Antennaeboy, Black Almas, Disasternaut, Heart Of The Whore, Wasteland Jazz Ensemble, and Yes, Collapse. (09/08/2012)

Another noisy cassette is the one from Darren Wyngarde aka Filthy Turd, who also sent a package in August. For this C20 release, “The Filthy One” extends his filth into the packaging itself, which arrives with a little packet of dirt in a plastic bag, marked with the legend “This mud protects against Radiant Cracks” – presumably just one of many spells and charms lifted from his warlock’s cabinet of magic philtres. This even made me slightly reluctant to open the thing at all, which is another index of this uniquely English noise-maker’s success; he radiates powerful waves of unapproachability. Two titles are printed on the skuzzy photocopy insert – ‘A Rotting Throb’ and ‘Rancid and Trmblin’, and it’s released on Urine Soaked Rag as #23 in that catalogue. When you succeed in spinning the tape itself, you’ll know that the world has finally come to an end amid a cacophony of distorted screaming, sirens, extended explosions of devastating destruction of earth-shaking building collapse proportions. With this release, Filthy Turd manages to pollute at least three of our five senses, and right now he’s probably working on methods to assault our noses and taste buds too. Another triumph for this remorseless, absurdist fun-loving magickal-prankster. 30 copies only. (06/08/2012)

UN NU is the team of Pascal Battus and Benjamin Duboc, and their Recoupements (EH?63) was recorded in 2010 at a performance space in Albi in the middle of the Pyrenees. Battus has wowed listeners before with his radical “rotating surfaces” method by which he produces slow and grindy sound-art, and his 2010 Ichnites (a collab with Christine Sehnaoui Abdelnour) was a “classic” of that genre. No surprise to learn Battus has been seen grinding his axe with that other primo scrapey fellow, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, for a goodly number of years. For Recoupements, he’s working only with guitar pickups, probably using them as a low-grade electronic instrument to generate the intensely irritating background squeal that permeates most of the length of this 52-minute endurance test; when he’s given the chance to “take a solo”, you won’t believe the obnoxious results nor the shrill, inhuman nastiness that Battus is capable of. Duboc meanwhile veers between attempting to play some simple tunes on his bass – free-form bowing to create simple two-note patterns, as if expecting Cecil Taylor to arrive and rescue the session – and making boxed-in clattering noises that are slightly more suited to the austere sound-art nature of the gig. As an album this has some great moments, but I sense the duo keep running out of steam every ten minutes, and the pauses in between ideas are a little bit awkward. But I’m a sucker for minimal improv when the noises produced are as deliciously abrasive, introverted and unfriendly as this. (08/08/2013).

Highly unusual item credited to HÁK-DAH is in fact the team of Hákarl (i.e. Kevin Nickells) and Daniel Alexander Hignell, and their Bambi (LF RECORDS LF025) includes a small insert which indicates, by means of a Venn diagram, what their musical contributions are where they overlap. Based on the scant 32 minutes of mist-drenched gumbo they provide here, I’d tend to characterise this music as a form of sinister ambient crawl, an assertion I make when faced by the nebulous clouds puffed out by Hignell’s fog-pumping electronic machines, and the experience is made ten times more creepy by the insistent violin work of Nickells. He himself calls it a “screaming violin”, and with good cause. One has rarely felt so terrorised by the sound of the instrument, which in his hands becomes a very persistent ghost stalking us along the deserted shore with all the tenacity of an M.R. James spectre. The agonised faces reproduced on the cover of this item are but a small indicator of the mental anguish that you, as the listener, will endure upon purchase and playback of this excellent item. Both players are based in Brighton, and on the strength of this they must have spent many hours wandering by the sea during off-season, when skies are grey and a mysterious offshore mist swirls around the feet of the unwary traveller. The record becomes even more of a weirdie around its mid-point, as voice elements and drum beats are added; one would hesitate to say it mutates into a “song”, but I’m lost for words to best describe the unsettling dirge that emerges from my tremulous speakers – the rhythms are askew, the pace lumbers like a crippled sea-monster, and Daniel’s vocals are just plain harrowing. HÁK-DAH would be lost with their echo chamber device, but they put it to very good use. This record may not be especially enjoyable listening, but it is quite unique and delivered with as much conviction as the two pallid ghoul-like creators can manage, as they brush the dirt of the grave from their faded black funeral outfits. (30/05/2012)

Bonus Filthy Turd image shewing bag of dirt

November 12, 2013

Folk Songs for an Obscure Race: freaky combination of noise junk industrial and faux naif folk

Grim, Folk Songs for an Obscure Race, Haang Niap Records, CD HAANG-002 (2009)

A weirdo industrial junk folk record, this is a compilation of releases and compilation tracks made in the 1980s by the Japanese industrial music project Grim. This band was (maybe still is?) the baby of one Jun Konagaya who sometimes had help from a couple of other noiseniks. This album is very much in the style of industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einsturzende Neubauten and early Whitehouse: lots of bashing metal rhythms, a harsh declamatory pygmy-Hitler vocal, a screechy high-pitched siren drone, crude rhythms and song structures, and a lo-fi punk sensibility.

The recording switches from early noise-junk industrial to serene soundtrack music to harsh brutal power electronics to delicate acoustic-guitar folk ditties and back again: quite a dizzying range of music styles that bleed into one another can be found here. The contrast between severe uncompromising noise electronics, suggestive of torture, deviant sexuality and compulsive psychotic behaviour, on the one hand and an extreme faux naif innocence in the folk music stylings on the other can be very disturbing. I’m rather reluctantly reminded of some Whitehouse late-1990s releases that had tracks by Peter Sotos where he assembled together spoken dialogue recordings by girls and women who had been sexually abused. On several tracks, Konagaya’s vocal is pained and screechy, far beyond what William Bennett and Phillip Best achieved in their band’s heyday; on some of the later tracks, he could pass for Dalek Caan of the Cult of Skaro from Doctor Who.

What separates Konagaya’s music from his noisician compatriots is strong rhythms throughout the industrial pieces; the quieter folk songs have distinct lullaby melodies. The music is not at all free-flowing and the attitude behind it is very different: it’s often confrontational and hostile to the society from which Grim arises. The folk music pieces can be quite comic in their po-faced blank innocence after all the aggression that’s come before them.

All the music is very good if deranged and the tracks near the end of the album, superficially calm and child-like, are perhaps the most disturbing and freaky of all. They have a Grand Guignol air about them in their careful merry-go-round melodies and rhythms, while in the background something like a Nuremberg rally from the late 1930s might be running. Near the end, dreamy psych-folk songs sung by girl singers who might be evangelising for their particular nut-house religious cult that promises highly sanitised retro-1950s white-picket fence suburban domestic bliss salvation add another level of deranged sensibility. There’s an all-instrumental percussion piece that might have been written for a tap-dancing troupe that rounds off the album and at this point, I shudder to think that our friend Jun has been accepted into his local little trendy avant-garde artist colony that survives on government hand-outs and performance art stunts that try but fail to shock little old ladies and families with small children.

Nevertheless this album is a revelation in that there are actually forgotten Japanese acts that could more than hold their own against the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, that also didn’t fit into the classic Japanese noise improv mould. What more might there be, that have been overlooked for far too long?

Contact: Haang Niap Records, haangniap@gmail.com

November 5, 2013

Body Horror: a brooding work of heavy industrial metal dub and ambient dronescapes

Iron Forest, Body Horror, Crucial Blast, CD 020 (2013)

Iron Forest is a fairly new experimental music project by US Midwest artist Brandon Elkins that combines heavy industrial metal rhythms and riffs with drone, dub, noise and doom elements. “Body Horror”, the project’s second album, is a lavish effort: eight tracks of layers of power electronics, digital noise, warped dub, crushing machine rhythms, sharply cut reverb and space atmosphere, and elements of black / death / doom metal. The plastic case is a large DVD-style container with several postcards of pictures of mutant body parts that have a strange if repulsive and disturbing beauty.

The recording revolves around themes of mutation, deformity and transhumanism. Track 1 is a gentle introduction of reverb and fuzz, very spacey with spurts of dub rhythm, and highly atmospheric. Subsequent tracks range from fierce and threatening dub guitar-noise splatter with washes of shrieking vocals to doomy dronescapes set against an ambience suggesting post-apocalyptic industrial wastelands of polluted ponds of water and winds sweeping up fine sand mixed with industrial chemical dust. Although the music can be highly robotic and its rhythms dominated by echoing machine sounds, I always have the impression that here is a world in which biology and technology have become completely fused and to treat the two separately is an antiquated notion. All machine noises seem to come from cyborg creatures with self-awareness and cunning natures.

For music that draws its inspiration from past industrial metal heavies like Godflesh and Scorn who also included very liberal doses of dub rhythms and sounds into their work, “Body Horror” is as much atmospheric and meditative as it is harsh and grinding robot doom machine music. The surprising thing is that the music is very accessible and much less menacing than its title and artwork suggest. (The album is also much shorter than I would have liked – at least an hour would have done for this style of heavy industrial dub.) There’s a lot of murk along with the knife-sharp skittery quicksilver rhythms, the crunchy bass riffs and machine-gun synth percussion beats but the music never sounds chaotic or overwhelming. Parts of the CD remind me more of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s old Hrvatski act with the flighty rapid-fire blastbeat electronic rhythms, though without the playful attitude.

This genre of music has a lot of potential to be a mighty monster and I feel with most recordings I have that the artists are scraping just a thin layer of it. “Body Horror” doesn’t advance the known parts of the territory much but as it is, it’s quite a good work: it has a distinctive airy atmosphere in most tracks and there is a psychedelic trance element as well. Each track has enough in it that could generate a family of long remixed tracks.

October 29, 2013

Chaos is Come Again

Contrastate
A Breeding Ground for Flies
UK DIRTER PROMOTIONS DPROMCD91 CD (2011)

Contrastate is back! The well known British band was hitting the ground since the late 80s with a row of essential albums released by Tesco Org. and their own Black Rose Recordings, delivering outstanding post-industrial music penetrated by the cold atmosphere of England and social depravity causing the deepest melancholy and disaster in minds. Their epic works like A Thousand Badgers In Labour and A Live Coal Under The Ashes were absolute masterpieces of doomed, grotesque and sinister electronic music which remain incomparable with anything else. After the fabulous Todesmelodie, released by the now-defunct Noise Museum label at the turn of the millennium, it was pretty quiet in the Contrastate corner, and only a few re-editions appeared over the next decade. Rumours said that they were disbanded, confirmed by a few solo albums by former Contrastate member Stephen Meixner who was still running Black Rose Recordings but moving in another musical direction, dealing more with installation/soundtrack works. For me, this new Contrastate album was a true surprise, an unexpected but (now I can say) long awaited comeback. And without the shadow of a doubt, the glorious one! A Breeding Ground For Flies was released in 2012 by the ever-evolving Dirter Promotions label delivering the best underground works of post-industrial music masters like Ramleh, Andrew Liles and Con Demek. It features all new material recorded with the full lineup of Grieve/Pomeroy/Meixner. But since a lot of time passed by, the Contrastate sound has changed. No more abandoned industrial area sounds, no gloomy songs accompanied by guitar, and no theatrical spoken word nightmares. Cold as steel, intrinsic and dehumanised, minimalist electronic sonorities raised from the frozen land of sorrow and chaos. Paralysed by fear, you will listen to this mechanized symphony and forget about your neighbourhood, personal disdain and everyday struggle. This is the sound of overall sickness, claustrophobia and hopelessness. Without relying much on scary noises, pounding rhythms and grave vocals, Contrastate build another kind of horror reality, creepy and dull, merciless and uncompromising. As I’ve said already, no comparisons are possible – you should just hear it with own ears and feel the difference. If you are a long-time follower just like me – you will not be disappointed. If you never heard about Contrastate, this is your chance! And of course I need to mention the great packaging design conceived and carefully realised by the label – the CD housed in a massive cardboard box with the booklet inside the oversized slipcase, with the great and deep coloured artwork all around. More than just “recommended”!

T.A.C.
Chaosphere
ITALY OLD EUROPA CAFE OECD 170 CD [2013]

Another band with a history, T.A.C. defines the epoch. From the early 80s, the ingenious Italian band (with Simon Balestrazzi as mastermind and many other luminaries involved) created many albums of a totally different nature, starting from the jazz/funk influenced self-titled debut in 1983, to the chamber rock music of Ouvrez Vos Auditifs Canaux (1985) and the prog elements of Il Teatro della Crudelta (1987), going further to industrial/ambient/goth obscurity in the classic A Circle Of Limbs (1992) and dark folk, neoclassic and experimental electronics hybrids in Hypnotischer Eden and Apotropaismo. After the T.A.C. trilogy for the Italian Smallvoices label released in 2002-04, there were years of total silence. Some T.A.C. classics were reissued recently, but this album is also not that brand new stuff you may suggest. Yes, it was released in 2013 but actually recorded in 1998. As the label says, the masters were lost and damaged, so the material needed to be restored. Well, now we can say – it was worthwhile to complete this job, because the music looks fresh and up to date, still retaining this “lost in time” attitude. Chaosphere is much influenced by our favorite Tarkovsky films, and you can hear some samples from the cult Solaris movie behind the clouds of analogue synths and sparse arrangements. Looks like Simon Balestrazzi recorded the music alone, so this is the exception in the row of multiple albums featuring many other musicians at their best, with many instruments and techniques presented. However, I can’t say that the music is minimalist or totally different from other T.A.C. works. It keeps the same spirit of adventurous experiment, and the sincere austerity you can feel from the start to the end. The vintage sound of the VCS3 synthesizer is the main driving force behind the tracks, but the clever use of samples makes the music more vivid and reflective. For me, this album also announces the powerful return for the one of the best Italian underground projects, so let’s look forward to see more new music coming out from Simon’s NeuroHabitat studio!