Tagged: industrial

May 14, 2013

Discontinuities: a new way of seeing the world in hidden musical tones

Jute Gyte, Discontinuities, Jeshimoth Entertainment, CD JE063 (2013)

Jute Gyte is a very prolific act that has so far released 20 albums and a couple of EPs since 2007. For this album, JG man Adam Kalmbach had his guitar retro-fitted by Ron Sword of Sword Guitars (and Florida death metal band Last Sacrament) to accommodate a scale of 24 tones that enables our man to explore and play microtonal intervals. At last Kalmbach can break with his previous style of guitaring extreme industrial black metal soundscapes and dive into something even more extreme, hence a reason for the album’s title “Discontinuities”; other reasons will become apparent in this review.

Listeners will pick up the new sound straight away: on first hearing the album does sound highly discordant and cacophonous. It’s an organic sound though, one that comes across putting its feet right and not making awkward turns just for the sake of it. Other instruments on the album (bass, synth, programmed percussion) quickly fall in line with the new sound and my ears at least become accustomed just as fast. The music turns out to be as fluid and natural as Kalmbach’s own song-writing abilities allow.

The album describes a dense and hellish sonic universe in which familiar points of reference either no longer exist or are demonstrated to be bizarre and meaningless. The realisation that our paradigms of viewing the world and the universe are and have always been irrational falls heavily on us. Whether loud, defiant and brazenly noisy or subdued, Kalmbach presents us with the truth of our existence, hitherto inaccessible because of the limitations of previous musical tools we had, and that truth is not at all pretty. Lyrics of tracks like “Night is the Collaborator of Torturers” and “Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal” force us to acknowledge the ugly consequences of our delusions and self-cocooning with cultural myths, propaganda and groupthink. After the instrumental title track, later songs focus on decline and death in a world collapsing under the ruin we have inflicted on it.

Apart from the title track which is a minimalist guitar groan-drone affair, the songs tend to sound much alike: the basic structure for each track consists of several repeating riff loops. On all tracks the barking vocal is thin, harsh and ragged. The programmed drumming takes a distant second or third place to the other instruments and sticks to keeping time and setting the pace: this prevents the music from becoming bombastic

The whole work is bleak and relentless. Probably parts of it could have been edited for length as the guitar sound is so dense and demented that the music actually does not need to rely on repetition and length to accentuate tension. The sound can be a bit flat as well when there is excessive looping of riffs. Only on the last track “Acedia” does the music start to mix volume and mood dynamics: blaring metal guitar noise insanity is punctuated with short quiet and contemplative moments.

This might be one album that doesn’t get much play but when you do spin it, it’s highly immersive and confronting, and it’ll fair clean your head of the petty issues, fears, lies and obsessions that trouble everyone else and keep us all enslaved to The Man.

Contact: Jeshimoth Entertainment

May 7, 2013

Cypher: black metal fusion soundtrack tracking our path to Hell

Spektr, Cypher, Agonia Records, ARCD102 (2013)

It’s been several years since I heard anything by this duo and one reason is that Haemoth & Co haven’t been very prolific: “Cypher” is their first release since “Mescalyne” in 2007. The major advance in Spektr’s music since then is the musicians’ incorporation of elements from several other music genres such as industrial, melodic post-metal, jazz and the usual musique concrete and spoken voice samples with the result that this album resembles a soundtrack to an otherwise silent horror sci-fi film. There is also much manipulation of atmosphere and emotion here.

What horrific futurist film might Spektr be offering on “Cypher”? It agrees more or less with previous work of theirs in which an intrepid adventurer, investigating the deepest recesses of the human mind, crosses into a realm beyond life where not even the dead normally go but some of heightened mental and emotional sensitivities, and some training in gnostic knowledge and ritual, might dare to enter. The volume of the music goes up and down as if the whole thing were animated by an inwardly-generated self-aware consciousness. The critical Rubicon appears to take place somewhere in track 3 (“The Singularity”).

Pivotal tracks are “Teratology”, “The Singularity”, “Antimatter”, the surprisingly blues-sounding (at least in its first few minutes) “Cypher” and “Le Vitriol du Philosophe”, this last being the most brutally industrial, ambient and futuristic, and the least black metal. Indeed, black metal figures much, much less than might be expected: the guitars are still sharp but have a more melodic bent. The long tracks rampage across the musical spectrum and dive into quite unexpected turns and twists; the short tracks are usually quiet ambient interludes between long tracks.

Only about 45 minutes, the album feels like a mammoth effort on the duo’s part to create a hellish odyssey into demonic kingdoms, out of which our explorer ends up crawling out of a wormhole into a future society run by self-aware machines powered by simulacra of human brains. There is not a flesh-n-blood critter in sight. One shudders to think that the one thing more terrifying than what Satan and his acolytes can magick up is the mind, individual and collective, that can imagine Satan and the demonic hierarchy in the first place. As I sit and type this review, am I already looking into the shape of Hell?

Contact: Agonia Records

May 5, 2013

Cloaks versus Grain: blank snapshot of future society in industrial techno dubstep album

Cloaks, Versus Grain, 3by3, 3by3002CD (2009)

It has a certain cache for one track “R.F.I.D.” which contains samples from a flick “Zeitgeist” which several people have recommended that I see but about which I have reservations that it is emotionally manipulative, simplistic and confrontational in its approach. Apart from that tidbit, this album by Cloaks is a punchy industrial techno affair sure to appeal to us tinfoil-hatted fashionistas. Plenty of futuristic cyberpunk sci-fi paranoid nightmares of all-seeing / never-sleeping panopticon cities stretching many a mile from one side of the country to the other may be imagined here. Cyber-insekt drones survey the population either singly or in swarms, quickly scanning the state of people’s minds, analysising the neurochemical states of individuals’ brains and diving down quickly to jab in injection of tranquilising serotonin into the bloodstream, mosquito-like, whenever someone is detected as having unhappy thoughts. People willingly submit to body searches and biochemistry assays via in-built doorway surveillance systems every time they enter or exit a building or public space: thieves are immediately tagged with an electromagnetic disc they cannot see and everywhere they flee they are tracked and pursued by tracker micro-drones that can fire paralysing pellets with unerring accuracy into a designated spot on the body. Citizens are permanently plugged into the city’s central database and anyone who ducks out of the system for even a few minutes is regarded as suspicious and possibly criminal. Such will be life in the Megatechnopolis. If you have a headache from all this, take your choice of chill pills: the red one or the blue one.

Or you could listen to this nine-track patchwork snapshot of what your lives will be like in a decade or so: heavily reliant on looping textures, rhythms and effects, the music is essentially static all the way through and offers no point of vulnerability in its steely carapace. Particularly impressive is “sixmenacetwo”, a lumbering behemoth of hard-hitting, hard-edged beats and digital effects with a dubstep rhythm. The aforementioned ”R.F.I.D.” is another awkward clunky beast. Final track “Detritus” reveals an unexpectedly danceworthy rhythm beneath humming drones of analog noise scree. Even in the midst of a tightly controlled techno-society there may be allowed pockets of individual rebellion that masquerade as obedience, though it’s just as likely that the powers in control recognise that people need outlets to let off steam and provide and moderate channels of harmless rebellion.

The album seems fine as it is though overall it seems a bit blank and one-dimensional in a way and several tracks hold potential for a more thorough and thought-out work-out of layered noise and rhythms.

Contact: 3by3, Baked Goods

April 14, 2013

Entertainment and Partial Entropy

On Numbers (CREATIVE SOURCES RECORDINGS CS 201 CD) we have the team-up of the guitarist Han-Earl Park with Richard Barrett playing live electronics. After some 20 minutes of slotting this one into the old playback vestibule, I bethought me “Yikes…amplified Derek Bailey meets Thomas Lehn!” Park is one of those scary polymath guys who seems to have a tremendous facility for music, both improvising and composing it, and he has played in many groups and at many festivals, appearing around the globe in seemingly ubiquitous fashion. Scariest of all is his intense and speedy guitar technique, which on parts of this album presents a rush of tangled information that would require a bank of dedicated computers to solve it. Thankfully Mr Han-Earl is never too “glib” in his phrasing and throws in multiple fishhooks and other barbs to snag our ears, otherwise we might be tempted to switch off in the face of his effortless glides and spiky dense riffs. It’s also good to find him in this duo set-up where the detail of his playing can be more clearly heard than in Mathilde 253. The Englishman Barrett is also a composer, like Park sometimes situated in an academic and teaching context, and is no stranger to using electronics in the live situation having formed the FURT duo with Paul Obermayer as long ago as 1986. Some day I really must get around to hearing FURT, or some of Barrett’s compositions, because I have the sense I would find a denseness and complexity that I could really sink my teeth into. Barrett’s method in wielding his “boxes” here is certainly pretty enervated. Regardless of whatever intricate and dazzling shapes are thrown at him like crystal spears by his sparring partner, he responds in kind with impossibly twisted gurgles, shrieks and salivated electronic utterances. Throughout album, a lively and sizzling session of fierce interplay is staged between these two boxing kangaroos, with sqwawks and yelps a-plenty as another blow is landed on the respective muzzle or snout. The striking thing is that neither player appears to be breaking into a sweat at any time, and I have the abiding mental image of two unfazed chess players sitting in a deep-freeze unit, weaving complex theorems while remaining almost immobile in large leather armchairs. The music has that degree of rigid control, of brittle precision, even when the structure appears at its maddest and the musical data is flying wildly beyond the point of interpretation. The value of this music as a form of invented language is emphasised by the odd titles, ‘tolur’, ‘tricav’, ‘ankpla’, ‘uettet’…as if counting upwards in Venusian. From 19 June 2012.

We got a small bundle of items from the Lisca Records label in Lucca on 25 June 2012, which I intend to digest one at a time. First from the envelope is Uncodified with the Document (LISCA 011) album, which is mostly the work of Corrado Altieri, although the venerable Simon Balestrazzi popped into the studio to add electronic parts to a couple of tracks, and also did the mastering using his magickal digital toasting device. Unlike Balestrazzi who seeks to beguile with occult drones, Corrado Altieri is a no-nonsense bare knuckle fighter, and can be quite adept at piling it on with remorseless intensity when creating nasty slabs of throbbing noise-poundage. ‘Severance’ is one particularly compelling assault of post-industrial grindery which is akin to trip through the ancient tunnels of Lucca at high speed during a dark night, while also being pummelled about the face with a leather sap. ‘Aesthetic Imperfection’ is slightly less brutal, but still exhibits the same qualities of airless, layered, noise; the ultra-dense sound occupies every available space in the spectrum and never dares to relax its tinnitus-inducing whirrs and buzzes. And for those who still enjoy inculcating a sense of dread and unease in their lives through music, the opening cut ‘Discobar Panic Disorder’ is your go-to point for the requisite ingestion of paranoia. Just ten seconds in and an instant migraine headache will be thine. I think it achieves this through its upsetting mixed organ chords, but there is also an overhanging cloud of gloomery on this cut produced by more insidious and inscrutable methods. Maybe all it takes is to go into the studio when you’re in a bad mood, and your ill temper will simply pass directly into the recording process. Of the other cuts, five of them are extremely short, making cryptical and punchy statements in a matter of seconds; perhaps they were rescued from offcuts or outtakes of longer sessions. One of them may be simply an amplifier warming up, another a mere doodle from a synth machine. I wish other noise-makers could be as concise and selective in their releases. Document is perhaps not a staggeringly innovative release in this genre, but there is much strong content to enjoy in this stern frowner of sullen, rhythmic, pulsations.

Excellent recordings of animal wildlife and the forest environs on Sempervirent (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 111), made by the field recordist Rodolphe Alexis. He did it in various nature reserves and protected areas of the Costa Rica forests in Central America. His setup was such that he simply wanted to document whatever passed before his mics, but it so happens a large amount of wildlife was captured onto disk as well, and so a list of species has been provided in the package, along with rich colour photographs of same in the booklet. Monkeys, parrots, frogs and bats abound; all of this information was probably added after the recordings were made, but it adds a satisfying sense of completion to the work. Alexis remains justifiably proud of his decision to leave the recordings raw and unprocessed, and what we hear is as close to nature as technology can bring us. If I had to locate this within the broad spectrum of field recordings, I’d venture to place it at the “scientific investigation” end rather than in the zone of “art music”, but it remains a vivid and fascinating listen. From 18 June 2012.

Slow minimalist composition from Monty Adkins on Four Shibusa (AUDIOBULB RECORDS AB040), which was released in April 2012. Each lengthy title uses the plaintive long tones of the twin clarinets played by Heather Roche and Jonathan Sage, and combines this sound with wispy electronic drone music, holding everything for a long time. Along with duration, delicacy and subtlety are the main watchwords, but Adkins is carefully creating some very poignant contrasts in his music – it’s just that they happen very slowly and tend to creep up on the listener. The term “shibusa” is Japanese and is concerned with finding beauty in everyday objects, recognising perfection in simplicity. As part of his aesthetic development along this contemplative road, Adkins worked for one year with the visual artist Pip Dickens, whose paintings of small and beautiful objects can be seen on the panels of this digipak. I like parts of this record and perhaps my preference is for the unadorned clarinets, which have a stark loneliness I find appealing. The electronic half of the act is a shade too “tasteful” for me, but I admit the combination of sounds works well.

February 25, 2013

In Memoriam J. G. Ballard: muzak soundtrack to Ballard’s novels

Altieri / Balestrazzi / Becuzzi, In Memoriam J. G. Ballard, Old Europa Cafe AVS, OECD 159 (2012)

First work dedicated to the English novelist J G Ballard I’ve ever come across, “In Memoriam …” is quite a good album of melodic and rhythmic industrial/electronic music that attempts to capture something of the particular universe of the author’s novels which in their own way criticised the direction and values of Western society and the popular culture it produced. Each track is named after a novel that Ballard wrote and some of his more famous works like “Crash” and “The Atrocity Exhibition” are referenced.

To be honest, the music is more pleasant and even more unified than what I had expected. The entire album can be heard as one united work of slightly different chapters; I think Ballard’s work was rather more varied than that. Although there is plenty of power electronics hissing, seething and foaming to be found on a track like “Crash”, the industrial pulsating rhythms of that track are more soothing than alarming. I thought there would be screeching tyres, the shatter of windows and the scrunching of metal upon metal mixed in with the groaning and gasping and other mechanics of sexual intercourse to emphasise the central role that automobiles and highways play in our lives and how our relationship with the car and the petroleum that powers it is more intimate than the relationships we might have with members of the opposite sex (and sometimes the same sex as the protagonist of the novel discovers). “The Drowned World” sounds suitably aquatic but for me it doesn’t have that languid, enervated, passive atmosphere of the original novel in which the hero, a typical Ballardian blank-slate character, allows himself to blend into his changed environment and become part of its flow and rhythm.

After a while, I learn not to have high expectations of the music and start to enjoy it as something that works well by itself. A version of “The Atrocity Exhibition” that reflects the disoriented, schizophrenic, almost psychotic nature of the novel and its structure will eventually arrive; in the meantime, the track named after the novel is a busy creature of regular railway-train rhythmic structure, sharpish high-pitched drone and murky underwater ambience. Eventually the track becomes something the novel never was: monotonous and boring.

Yes, the music can be of a very interior nature and in parts is quite sinister and alien. There are some great atmospheres of smoky cloud and digital hissing created here. But I detect very little of that inquiring Ballardian mind and wonder at the extremes of human behaviour, how very irrational by narrow conventional parameters yet totally rational from Ballard’s point of view people can be in situations where the human-technological interface pushes people away from natural forms of intimacy and interactions into more machine-like and mentally disturbed behaviours.

The album ends more quietly than disturbingly: “High Rise”, far from being a ferocious, seething prison of very proper middle class English people who resort to ripping one another apart and the conspicuous consumption that follows when they find they cannot leave their apartment block, is an unassuming industrial-lite piece of pumping rhythm and sighing clouds of noise. Damn.

Hard to say if the man himself would be enthralled by the music on offer: in his last years, Ballard found and wrote himself very deeply into a niche of dystopian comedy about upper middle class lifestyles, the artificial, isolated environments in which they are found, the stresses such environments cause to people and how normal people turn into neurotic or psychotic nutjobs as a result. The music here might serve as a kind of muzak to that period of Ballard’s work. (Hmm, in that sense, maybe Ballard would like the music.) In some ways, Ballard’s death in 2009 might be the most ironic and Ballardian aspect of the man’s life since after 2009 our world has become more and more like the universe his pen created, in which democracy, community, equality, justice and freedom mean their polar opposites, Western humanitarian aid in Third World countries destroys lives and reduces survivors to neo-colonial slavery, people sneer at the homeless and desperate refugees, and modern medicine meant to heal people and reduce their pain instead turns them into rampaging killing machines.

Contact: Old Europa Cafe

February 18, 2013

Apocryphal Stories: grim tales of descent into avant-black metal / industrial / noise world

"Utarm...finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos..." — “Utarm…finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos…”

Utarm, Apocryphal Stories, Handmade Birds Records, CD (2012)

Good thing Utarm called his album “Apocryphal Stories” as I’d hate to think the five songs here were for real. Judging from the continuous demented wailing and screaming, and the twisted theatrical Satanic stylings of the music, you’d think the Utarm man has spent all his life in Arkham Asylum, that mental institution hell-hole beloved of Lovecraftian short stories and Batman graphic novels; and some would say perhaps he has indeed spent all his life in a bizarre mental institution – for isn’t our entire planet one insane asylum where the most severely disturbed and psychotic inmates are those in charge of all our major political, economic and religious institutions, claiming to know what’s best for us? “Apocryphal Stories” certainly plays as if, having awoken one day and realised his nightmare was not only for real but was also never-ending, the Utarm man decided to record an album detailing his horror and anguish at being permanently trapped with 7 billion crazies on Planet Apokolips right here on Earth.

Opening track “AltEtende Skaper” might capture the moment when the Utarm fella wakes up and finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos: it begins with a slowly expanding universe of warped music-box melodies, spooky ghost lullabies and the guy’s own cries of inner torment. There’s a definite air of disorientation as if he’s waking up from a drugged state and he can barely talk and stand. Voices come out of his brain but he knows not what they are, what they’re saying, where they’re coming from or even if they’re his and not artificial implants. Full realisation hits him about the 6th minute in a huge blow-out of distorted metal guitar fuzz, pounding industrial percussion and howling vocal despair. The whole thing is gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and soul-destroying though there’s a campy edge to the destruction.

The torment doesn’t lessen with “Of Rape, Solitude and Bliss; the Triangle of Flesh”, a creepy suspenseful blackened drama of solo operatic singing, more disorientation with a shaky tempo, and a strange stage-like ambience as though a medieval play about the Black Death was playing out before us. We watch the central character tortured by sights and visions in his mind while beings of ether swirl around his head, baiting him constantly. Again, quite late in the song, there’s new existential pain as a wobbly guitar melody, distorted static buzz and something that sounds like a demon cow mooing and sitting on top of the singer drown out his screams.

And so the album plays out like a twisted Ingmar Bergman film of soul-searching amid desolate soundscapes of bristling, buzzing guitar noise, gently swirling and trilling guitar melodies, tortured screeching and always that strange atmosphere of blissful and serene yet deranged black trance. Layers of sound and noise are at once warm and soothing, and filled with agony and derangement. No matter how bombastic or demented the album gets, there’s always a very strong sense of direction; the songs could easily have gone all over the place and become totally overpowering but it’s to Utarm’s credit that the music is intense and focused throughout the album. The result is that compared to similar blackened metal/industrial/noise acts like Gnaw Their Tongues, Utarm comes across as epic, bombastic and even majestic without becoming overwhelming. There is a core of trance-like bliss in the music that’s reminiscent of drone doomsters Nadja.

Well … the avant-black metal/industrial/noise torture continues all the way to and through outro track “Above Death” with more whooping screams and howls, a strange echoing hover-drone as if our man had been dumped in an underground wind tunnel lined with metal sheets and high-pressure industrial white hiss is pissing through it. Severely damaged freak-out power electronics are being churned out of a sausage-mincing machine; the manufacturers would collapse and die in horror at the way their choppers and mincing grilles were being used here. (Especially if they were the ones strapped to the conveyor belts.)

This collection of grimmer-than-grimm fables and fairy-stories is freaky and intense … the music is scary and noisy, anguished and tortured, yet at times strangely peaceful, trance-like and blissed-out at its centre … a deranged genius is at work here.

Contact: Handmade Bird Records

December 22, 2012

Limiter: dream-like set of soundscape science fantasy recordings

Berber Ox, Limiter, Twice Removed, CD TR01 (2012)

Berber Ox is the unusual name of an experimental ambient / electronic music project by David Rutledge, an Australian-born sound sculptor and radio producer, and “Limiter” is one of a number of albums the project has released in the past couple of years. As Aquarius Records notes, very few people have heard of Berber Ox and it’s puzzling that better known labels like Editions Mego, Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux have not signed him up as his minimalist style combining drone, electronics, dark ambient, noise and some industrial-lite would go down a storm with those labels. “Limiter” features quite lush, layered pieces of mood soundscape, some of which come over as water-based for their liquid murmurs.

The opener “Magnetic Assembly” is an impressive overture of space ambient /drone atmospherics with a repeating tone loop that changes about halfway to something a little darker, backed by a background drone that changes into muted flowing water from which in turn a UFO emerges and rises into the air. This is quite a singular track that could have been a bit longer and the rest of the album based around it. After “Magnetic Assembly”, the other four tracks seem rather like apologetic footnotes. “Gamma Sponge” gives us an industrial drone wash: it’s very dense with a rapid rhythm pulsing away and another rhythm, suggestive of a train, looping over and over in the track somewhere. The album then travels further into a deep, dark interior world in the murky “Milky in the House” with a fogged-up, blacked-out ambience that paradoxically features a glowing edge while behind it a grunting rhythm loop and water sounds are glugging away at almost inaudible levels.

The title track is more layered than the others, boasting a murmuring texture combined with a noisy motor drone background. There’s a repeating revving motor rhythm buried within, another texture that seems to seethe with hostility for no good reason, some cricket noises and various echoes. This is an intense piece and the tension that steadily rises is very palpable. After this piece, we need something to bring us gently back to Earth and the soothing “Mother Eye” with its constant beat and warm and luminous bell sound delivers us safely back to terra firma.

A very dream-like set of sound paintings, “Limiter” might well serve as a soundtrack to a science fantasy adventure set underwater in the future where murky seas harbour genetically mutated creatures who may or may not be hostile to humans and might in fact lead us to a better understanding of how sea-life adjusts to changed conditions where discarded junk machinery replaces coral reefs and exotic bacteria and algae feed on industrial toxins brought by rivers from factory effluent.

Contact: Twice Removed, Berber Ox

December 21, 2012

Epidemics of the Modern Age: harsh noise drone that morphs into a greater psychedelic drone monster

Brennendes Gehirn, Epidemics of the Modern Age, Ordo Pestilentia, CD ORDO001 (2012)

Debut release by what looks like a band from some distant snowbound part of Iceland but which is the brainchild of one Matt Harries, this CD is a stunning panorama of bleak post-apocalyptic blackened ambience and digital industrial soundscaping. I wonder if Harries really does know of some part of Iceland or a similar region in his country where blizzards blow continuously and carve out odd landscapes with metal scythes, perpetual-motion chainsaws and geothermally powered hacksaws.

Opening track “Chorea Imaginative Aestimative” is one of the strongest pieces: a blistering storm blows continuously throughout, laying waste to everything in its path, sweeping up machinery and the odd hapless soul whose pitiful cries for help can just be heard above the whirling chaos before it is swallowed up completely. Rotor blades, torn off a rescue helicopter, circulate through the winds, cutting up the noise, and chunks of metal fly off into the churning clouds of debris. “Over Man and Beast His Flaming Sword” follows in a similar path but the recording really lifts its game with the delirious and trance-like “Annihilation (Awakens New Life)” with steely, on-edge silver metal-teeth keening and a continuously echoing loop of a female yogi chanting an ecstatic mantra against a gloopy black and malevolently stirring atmosphere. Suddenly a portal is opened, as if the whole time a ritual was being enacted to summon up a demonic spirit, and harsh, bubbling rhythms explode repeatedly. The track eventually settles down to a drunken sitar-playing sequence and a hilarious spoken voice recording that suggests a scolding Japanese Buddhist sensei.

“Elegie Für Clemens Scheitz” is a snaky reptilian piece with a sleazy pulsing grime-encrusted bass rhythm edged with caustic metallic noise. Again there’s a trancey, drugged-out, drunken feel to the track and sure enough in the distance a deep masculine voice chants a mantra or hymn over and over. Closing piece “Chorea Sancti Viti”, clocking in at 20 minutes, is a mind-warping experience that slowly and continually evolves from nondescript shimmer drone to an enormous, protean, mutating monster chorus of reverberating sound whose forms are limited only by its own imagination and consciousness which are far more vast and complex than humans can conceive.

The entire recording is very like a journey through what seens like familiar noise / drone / black ambient territory on a burnt-out Earth until about halfway through where an encounter with a strange ritual, perhaps through discovery of the remnants of a long-dead civilisation, the tiny products of which are imbibed by our foolish explorers (kin to those silly scientists in Ridley Scott’s mash-up of a film “Prometheus”) who then experience the brain-blowing effects of the hallucinogens and are left lying in small scorched pieces, to be consumed by the storms that go screeching around the planet. It’s an album to hear out at your own peril: true, your head will feel pleasantly clean and clear after the final scorching blow-out but that will be because your head literally IS clean and clear inside, all nice squeaky-clean blank space all round that the amazed doctor doing the autopsy can rub a gloved finger against.

Contact: Ordo Pestilentia

December 7, 2012

Black Mamba: a strong and consistent album of darkly sinister hard techno / ambient / dance electronics

Cut Hands, Black Mamba, Very Friendly / Susan Lawly, CD VFSL102 (2012)

Since Whitehouse split with the departure of Philip Best some years ago, William Bennett has wasted no time with his new musical venture Cut Hands which includes a very strong and intense rhythmic percussion element due to Bennett’s interest in traditional styles of music from western and central Africa and the hand drums used in those styles. Given Bennett’s past musical pedigree, one might expect Cut Hands to feature strong harsh electronic or industrial music elements in competition with the African drums cooking up an Almighty sonic racket; Bennett offers instead an amalgam of musical styles all his own making, ranging from mellow minimalist / ambient to a hard-edged dark techno almost kin to folks like Actress and Submerged, and once upon a time to Porter Ricks and Techno Animal. The atmosphere on the album can be soft and benign with just a hint that something is a little bit sinister; at times though, you feel you have to be alert for something, like a leopard creeping through tall blades of grass that all but obscure its presence. The songs play like real songs with a mood and feeling all their own and not like long rhythm texture parts of something much greater.

All tracks are good and have a very intense interior mood to them so I’m singling out the really outstanding ones: “Krokodilo” (spine-tingling silvery synth tones create a sinister demonic church ambience against an insistent hard drum rhythm); follow-up piece “Nzambi Ia Ngonde” with similar but warmer droning synth and a more peaceful, contemplative and floating ambience; “No Spare No Soul” (this is the kind of hard electronic dystopian techno that would not be out of place on something by Submerged, City Surgical, Justin Broadrick or the Hyperdub label); “Brown-Brown” (a spoon-playing rhythm meets near-hysterical chrome drones); “54 Needles” (the only really soothing song on the album with a spare hand-drum rhythm and undulating if cold tones); and “Nine-Night” (a bendy talking-drum beat that appears to be interrogating itself against a backdrop of shimmering jewel tones).

Several songs are distinctive enough that they could stand alone as dance-floor or dark ambient / techno singles, if Bennett were inclined to do that. Not that he needs to: I venture to say that once upon a time the album might have sold like a single, so strong and consistent are the songs and their inventiveness. Who’d have thought that, after the end of Whitehouse and an era of ear-splitting, piercing, howling power electronics, Bennett would bounce back and re-create himself as a hard-techno / ambient / Afro-beat electronics DJ?

Some people might be upset at Bennett’s apparent appropriation of African rhythm and percussion styles to embellish his music but his use of African instruments seems sincere to me. If anything, the use of African drums jibes perfectly with his own style of electronic techno and opens up new musical vistas for those instruments. Those who complain are perhaps the same people who whine about “The Black and White Minstrel Show”, that used to air on TV decades ago and which featured white guys in blackface singing musical numbers while white women in glittery body-stockings and strategically placed ostrich feathers dance in the background, for being racist; yet those complaining are happy to line up to buy tickets at $300 a pop to watch concerts in which a lone white woman in corset and fishnet stockings sings and gyrates with bent legs apart while behind her a huge chorus line of black men in bondage leather and PVC gear cavorts in perfect choreographed unity.

Contact: Cargo Records

September 29, 2012

Flak Planet: an intense journey of avant-garde jazz / industrial / post-metal force and energy

Combat Astronomy, Flak Planet, Zond, zond03CD (2011)

Stars Wars it ain’t without George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic company that does all the pyrotechnical special effects but Martin Archer’s intense avant-garde jazz / post-metal / industrial band supplies enough sonic ordnance for the imagination to take off on a virtual journey into long tours of intergalactic warfare. Generations of human cannon fodder are sent into hostile alien terrain with a mix of technologies spanning the centuries to hunt out and kill enemy combatants who also resort to any weapons and fighting methods they can, from slinging stones to flying circular metal saws to the latest laser stun-guns that send out slivers of light to blind soldiers and render them helpless and burdensome to their own forces. (It’s not killing the enemy soldiers that hinders the enemy, it’s leaving them incapacitated to force the enemy to divert resources to patching up their guys that creates the greater burden.) Gritty low-end bass guitar rhythms, massive pounding drums and loud blaring horns define CA’s style and push the melodies all the way. Imagine that Metallica saw the light and decided they didn’t need to sing any more or (shudder) hire Lou Reed but instead took on some trumpeters and just played free-form improv jazz thrash metal from now on – well, they might get some of their old fans from thirty years ago back!

It’s not just heavy grinding music but this recording can be very swanky and tough as the title track demonstrates with a stern steely bass riff laying down the law for lots of horn screech and scrabbly melody fragments. Along the way the musicians use and abuse an astonishing variety of instruments from banging piano (“Zona”), all manner and forms of woodwinds, organ, electronics and handheld percussion. For all the apparent cacophony, there is definitely an intuitive structure to the tracks: even on “Zona”, the ivory abuse turns out to be a repeating motif.

And in case you think this is all storm and fury, “Infinity Decay” will be a surprise: the general style of the track is still albeit with an underlying menace like that of a panther stalking its prey and preparing for the moment to leap. The piece segues gracefully into the quartet of tracks collected under “Inverted Universe” which on the whole is a steady rhythmic chug-along that builds tension by layering melody, texture and beats, and lets it come to a calm resolution and fade-out. What began with a fierce and heavy storm of brash brass instruments, pounding drums and a grinding gravelly rhythm transforms into a restrained, yet not quite fully tamed, force of energy and strength. No prolonged tours of duty for these guys.

Contact: Zond