Tagged: metal

May 31, 2013

A burger from Norway with metallic ingredients

Staer
Staer
DISCORPORATE RECORDS DISREC20 CD (2012)
Well, I didn’t really know what to expect with this one. Some Pop-Op packaging; “Noise”, says the info, straight out of Norway. So when a guitar/bass/drums racket of lurching bass-driven chunk that sounds firmly in a Butthole Surfers/Flipper sort of lineage (via, more pertinently, three decades of subsequent, related music) erupts when I press play I am briefly taken aback, having braced myself for Merzbow-isms. I guess there are other connotations of noise in other musical circles. Perhaps if a ‘rock’ was appended to the noise the approach would have been more obvious to me. Although (textual) noises also are made about ‘mind-enhancing’, ‘counter-cultural’, ‘new’, ‘forward-thinking’, these prove red herrings, in most respects. The key to Staer’s music lies firmly in a rock mode, more specifically a largely American tradition of ‘alternative’ rock, metal and various ‘core’s. The rumbling bass and choppy guitar recalls hoary alternative rockers of yore, heavily redolent of the 90s, such as Unsane or even the Melvins, sans all vocals. Something I would not particularly consider ‘counter-cultural’, associated as it is with MTV, burgers, etc. Although, curiously enough, the press release does compare the album to a burger-meal from a certain pervasive red and yellow fast-food establishment. Do Noxagt and some Load Records things sounds like this? I’m not sure, for some reason I think they might well. I think there’s perhaps a sonic connection.

Riff based and workmanlike, clad in oily dungarees (not too oily, mind. In fact on closer inspection, this could be hamburger grease…) this is primarily a bass showcase, prominent thundering and grumbling away under everything. It is certainly has some weight, which I understand is important in heavy musics. It’s also very tightly controlled and played, riveted by the monstrous downtuned bass. The fastidiously geometric riffing also contains clear whiffs of that most arithmetical of modes, ‘math-rock’ (or ‘maths-rock’ as it perhaps could be known on our shores, if it has to be known). It’s recorded very nicely, even glossily, although a bit of dirt never hurt anyone in these circumstances. Incidentally, I never did understand the dichotomy in metal (not that this is a metal album, this is only metal in a post-millennial, post-metal way) between the latent distortion inherent in the music and the pristine recording often aimed at when bands had enough money to access a studio.

There are no melodies or hooks or any particularly unhinged moments (moments in the last track, which is a definite highlight, are an effective exception, where a borderline melodious guitar line is allowed to raise its head from sweaty scrutiny of the fretboard and roam free over a steady kick drum pulse), the dedication to furious, knotty, detuned, riff construction above all is paramount. Overall we are presented with something a little like some monumental sculpture involving heavy iron plates and more rivets than you can shake a bass at, all coated in thick, battleship-grey lead-based paint sitting in an exclusive art gallery. It is heavy, unadorned, feels expensive, and involves a lot of metallic ingredients. If it is cleanly recorded, scrupulously-anchored riffage (health and safety would be proud, none of these riffs are going anywhere, lashed firmly as they are with industrial cabling) and growling bass in a reasonably energetic rock idiom that you’re after, then there is more than sufficient chunk for those requirements contained herein.

Staer home
Staer on Soundcloud

December 15, 2012

Deliberate Mistakes

Home Service

The latest entry in the Vernon & Burns catalogue sees this Glasgow duo teaming up with Lied Music, the duo of Luke Fowler and John W. Fail. Lost Lake (SHADAZZ SHA.11) is one of the stranger and darker emissions from these talented creatives, particularly if you care to compare it with the sometimes more playful assemblages of V&B, or the deliciously offbeat melodic avant-pop tunes created by Fowler as part of Rude Pravo. At first spin the record is a near-bewildering toasted-cheese sandwich, a concoction which contains at least a zillion ideas apparently thrown together any which way. Faced with such an array, discerning avant-LP listeners may want to reach for The Faust Tapes as one touchstone, but another credible precedent is the unearthly Bladder Flask LP ¹, that ne plus ultra of cut-up sound art put together by a teenaged Richard Rupenus as if possessed by some fevered desire to surpass the worst excesses of the lunatic fringe end of the United Dairies catalogue. But the Bladder Flask release had the underlying sinister aim of sending all those who heard it mad, through highlighting the complete absurdity and futility of everything. Lost Lake has a more benign mission, thankfully. The album has been very carefully crafted, using sets of recorded improvisation sessions produced by the four players, aiming to resculpt the near-chaos of that source material into a coherent structure. Within that structure, fractured songs and equally fractured stories emerge; yes, a scrambled form of a radio listening or cinematic experience, which is an effect Vernon & Burns have striven for with a good deal of their work (and have produced many items expressly in radiophonic mode). As to the cinematic, Fowler is also a film-maker. There is a logic to this scheme, but it is hard to follow and weaves its way around in a highly secretive and intuitive fashion, like an errant underground stream full of eccentric fish and darting river-insects stained in unnatural colours. We could account for some of this quirkiness by pointing out that all four creators were involved in the refashioning process, rather than a single editorial hand behind the editing knife; one can imagine the clashing dynamism generated by four powerful personalities, each of them bending the path of events in their favour. Additionally, the source material itself was not exactly straightforward music to begin with, but created using the now-virtually-standard set-up of the modern improviser, that is amplified instruments, toys, found tapes, field recordings, and live electronics. From this rich stew, voices and tunes emerge from amid a varispeeded and highly layered humid aggregation of extremely strange sounds. And yes, like the Rupenus LP, it is quite absurdist, but I like to think it’s a fun and cartoony absurdity, rather than bleak and Beckett-like. That said, this aural bric-a-brac crawls out from a dark attic of the mind, and is as much an unsettling listen as it is entertaining. Corin Sworn’s cover art encodes all the above information quite perfectly. Using collage technique (naturally), it depicts a figure sitting on a sofa surrounded by hideously “tasteful” drapes and furnishings. This image of bourgeois normality is thoroughly disrupted by replacing the outline of the figure with fragments of urban horror and machinery, then further scrambling the visual schema with concentric rings and diagonal bars, suggesting the power of the aural emanations on the record. The album is, we are told, a sequel to a 2006 release called Lied Music vs Boy-Band Tax Returns, which we reviewed in our Vinyl Viands issue.

Pedal to the Metal

A promising experiment in steam-driven innovation is the one-sided 12-incher by DJ Mistakes (PHASE! RECORDS PHR-81). The two creators are Casey Farnum and Elliot Hess, who built a complex apparatus allowing them to power their turntables using bicycles; the cover art and the enclosed drawing, as if torn from the pages of the English comic illustrator Rowland Emmett, give some indication of the set-up and its concomitant paraphernalia. These drawings also reminded me of the sketches Hans Reichel used to include on his early FMP albums (e.g. Bonobo Beach), indicating how he assembled his own hand-built guitars. On the record, we actually hear live recordings of the infernal machine, made in Brooklyn in 2006-07 and also using gongs, microphones, a mixing desk, and of course records on the turntables. The artists may be slightly poking fun at the conventions of DJ culture, but also intend to put more spontaneity back into the artform, and they hark backwards to the time of the hand-cranked Victrola, harbouring a certain intellectual nostalgia for an undefined early modern period when “gears and bicycles were the stuff of aural and physical revolutions”. If I were a writer of the Ken Hollings school, no doubt I could bring forward numerous references to the place of the bicycle at key political moments of the Russian revolution, the First World War, or in the films of Eisenstein, thus making ingenious connections across political and cultural history. Farnum and Hess may even be attempting to begin that undertaking with their front cover collage, which although let down by rather murky printing, does suggest a darkened industrial landscape where the bicycle wheel on the horizon resembles part of a mining operation, and the two men in old-fashioned suits have their heads replaced, John Heartfield style, with objects which I assume are bicycle seats. Unfortunately, the record itself doesn’t live up to much of this promise, and is merely odd and amusing where it could be radical and wild. Some unusual moments can be heard, but it is mostly a lot of wobbliness and speed variations, which is pretty much what you’d expect. This arrived around June 2011.

The Charred Rise

The double LP Atonal Hypermnesia (MEGATON MASS PRDUCTS PIKADON002LP) by French avant-metallists P.H.O.B.O.S. is their third release and arrived here in June 2012. We last noted them in 2009 with their album Anœdipal, and this new release provides an even more remorseless manifestation of their craft. They began life in 2000 using the “conventional” four-piece set up of guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals, but from the start their driving mission has been to create a degree of sonic intensity that transcends the conventions of the many generic labels that are flung in their direction, including Black Metal, doom, stoner, sludge, noise, industrial, etc. As a matter of fact the principal creators are proud of their “maximal” approach to amplified noise, which while it may use a lot of churning, droning effects is arguably more “eventful” than any given release from the Sunn O))) school of imitators. They also aim to structure their tunes, rather than merely reverberating their Marshalls into infinity. Stefan Thanneur once again provides the cover artworks, but where the Anœdipal record made provocative use of religious icons, the keynote this time is heavy abstraction, a restricted colour range which allows only black (lots of it) and silver, and an allusion in the direction of geological formations, intended to suggest this is music that causes earthquakes or was engendered inside the crater of a volcano. As a listen, it’s very heavy going; treated guitars, much studio fog and choking drone effects, solemn vocal grunts, and relentless hammer-blow drums throughout. In fact I can’t stress enough how inescapable these drum beats are. They strike their way into the very fabric of the music like geologists’ mallets, and serve mainly to illuminate how trapped we are by the cavernous walls of this extreme sound. These drums make the entire sonic environment sound hollow, and start to make me feel hollow inside too. As to the guitar and electronics (if indeed that’s what we hear), they produce endless, clotted clumps of noise, and to endure them is like eating lumps of burnt coal or solidified nuclear waste. Certainly this is very well-crafted music and is quite some way removed from the more primitive end of Black Metal (e.g. Striborg, Bone Awl, and Beherit), and the elaborate titles such as ‘Solar Defrag’ or ‘Necromegalopolis of Coprolites’ point to a strongly intellectual influence on the work, adding additional layers of context to what is already an extremely dense statement.

One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling, originally released in 1981 on Orgel Fesper Music. ↩

November 7, 2012

The Feather tipped the Serpent’s Scale: album inspired by vivid and unusual concept

Eagle Twin, The Feather tipped the Serpent’s Scale, US, Southern Lord, CD (2012)

Reading the fine print on the gatefold sleeve of this, Eagle Twin’s second album, and seeing ” … This album marks the conclusion of a deep, sometimes dark, shared personal journey for all involved …”, I was, I admit, afraid that this heralded the end of the desert doom metal rockers but from what I’ve seen on the Internet, Eagle Twin are in for the long haul but perhaps in a different, if no less thoughtful and literary direction. Members Gentry Densley and Tyler Smith draw lyrical inspiration from poet Ted Hughes, the Biblical story of Job who had to suffer endlessly and undergo a transformation in his relationship to God, the 20th century Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Compared to the first album “The Unkindness of Crows” which was dedicated to our favourite black birds that fought the sun and were scorched during the battle, “The Feather tipped the Serpent’s Scale” is a cleaner, almost rock’n'roll affair though still very heavy, dark and monumental. Here, the crows burnt by the sun are thrown back to Earth in the form of black snakes and must stay in their reptilian forms until they can be reborn and reclaim their true heritage.

The 18-minute “The Ballad of Job Cain”, cut into two 9-minute halves, is a roiling noisy work mixing quite complex percussion rhythms and beats derived from progressive jazz with twisting and tortured guitar drone chords. The atmosphere is intense, burning and malevolent. There’s a bit of throat-singing at the beginning which unfortunately doesn’t appear elsewhere on the album. Gentry Densley’s vocals still can descend very low to subterranean depths; his deep gravelly voice, as slow as the music is serpentine, matches the vivid horror of the images of the two birds falling, condemned to crawl on the ground on their bellies. This two-parter is a restless beast, flitting from slow to mid-paced, filled with tension and turmoil, mirroring the agonies that the birds feel as they die and are reborn. (Well, one of them anyway as the other is called Cain and can never die – but of his fate, I remain in the dark as the album concentrates on his mortal brother’s destiny.)

“Lorca (Adan)” is a quieter and more measured affair: a sluggish pace and steady pace carry the almost dirge-like music dominated by long scything chords and Densley’s singing. About halfway through the track erupts in fury and there’s an extended instrumental section of controlled though simmering guitar aggression. The track segues into “Snake Hymn” through a cloud of searing hot guitar feedback noise; this is a major highlight of the album, very distorted in sound and featuring some incredible volume dynamics as the music dives into the quietest of quiet moments only to break out in a loud crash of abrasive guitar crunch and solid sub-bass riffing. Past the halfway mark, the track gets very chuggy with drums providing the driving force that energises Densley’s guitar-playing which sends out forceful flashes of guitar tone and melody.

We’re well and truly in the realms of snake mythology and symbolism by now, epitomised by “Horn-Snake-Horn”, a slow-burning piece on the mystical connections among snakes, fertility and renewal. Track 6 picks up the renewal theme and extends it into a legend of death and regeneration in which the mighty horned serpent heroically gives up its body to become mountains, landscapes, trees and ultimately birds. The epilogue in which he returns to life is celebratory for the most part but still has a dark mood. The bird has atoned for his past arrogance and presumption, and has sacrificed himself for the betterment of his fellow creatures and environment (this means he created of himself the Garden of Eden – what a hoot!); but it seems still that he has hard lessons to learn as a new path stretches before him – and what has happened to his brother in the meantime?

Most tracks are quite long and very busy, and sitting through the album in one hit, even though it’s actually less than an hour long, can be quite exhausting. It is truly an assault on the ears with complex jazz-influenced percussion rhythms and writhing guitar riffs and chords. The standard of playing and the level of consistency are very high; there is not one moment here that is wasted or should be edited for length. Eagle Twin have delivered an excellent album inspired by a strong, vivid and unusual concept redolent of Old Testament Bible absolutism, desert despair, snake symbolism and redemption through self-sacrifice. Aspiring young musicians, take note: all the technical prowess you can muster is as nothing if you don’t have a good theme or subject that can push you to creative and energetic heights.

I only wish – and here my gripes are my own personal preferences – that there was more throat-singing, that sometimes the music could be a bit cold to bring out the transformed birds’ new reptilian behaviour and nature, and that the album could blow out intensely hot and dry desert atmosphere along with cold, sliding leathery scales.

Contact: Southern Lord

November 4, 2012

Garten der Unbewusstheit: doom metallers Corrupted at their most elegiac

Corrupted, Garten der Unbewusstheit, Japan, Nostalgia Blackrain, CD cold ashes 002 (2011)

This album might be Corrupted at their most elegiac and wistful: the garden described in the album’s title could be a metaphor for planet Earth and all its natural ecosystems. I like to think my interpretation of the album’s title is consistent with the band’s general aim of criticising current political systems and societies, and standing up for oppressed peoples around the world. “Garten …” serves as Corrupted’s warning of what lies ahead if the world continues on its present path of self-destruction: this is a highly sorrowful and despairing work, epic and majestic in its description of ultimate tragedy.

Opening track “Garten” would appear to have an extremely long and drawn-out introduction of deathly quiet music and huge still space, animated only a little by Hevi’s whispered vocals, but the music then plunges into a near-orchestral passage of crashing percussion and guitar drones that sound like brass horns. Hevi’s whispers become long guttural groans. Interestingly about halfway through the track, there are trilling shimmers of guitar drone, possibly fed through a computer and sculpted into a very atmospheric sound, that might reflect a post-metal influence and which by its tone suggests a glimmer of hope in the devastation so far described. Unfortunately that hope doesn’t last long as the track crashes into another orchestral realisation of horror. As the piece dies down and limps off to a quiet finale, I notice that the music all the way through has a clean and almost smooth sound with hardly any of the crust and abrasive quality that usually appears on Corrupted’s recordings.

“Against the Darkest Days” is a brief track at four-and-a-half minutes of slow, frail acoustic guitar melody, nothing more and nothing less, that serves as a breather and extended introduction to the mammoth 30-minute “Gekkou no Daichi”. The track gradually acquires a darker, deeper, more ominous second guitar melody before plunging into long, pained guitar riffs and extended tones, sporadic use of drums and cymbals, rumbling guitar shower in the background and Hevi’s groaning vocals. The whole atmosphere of the track is of suffering, pain and desolation. As the song progresses, all musicians become more active and the music builds up with extra effects and sounds. It all reaches an early climax about the 12th minute and the music falls back into a coasting instrumental with a mix of clean lead guitar solo and roiling background guitar noise. Hevi’s vocals change to an angry or desperate whisper, depending on the point of view, and progresses to a constant if restrained rant that never quite works up into a full-fledged roar. “Gekkou …” gradually becomes a grand and defiant death cry, the last statement of a dying though still conscious species. Clean lead guitar solo trills and vibrates against the majestic backdrop of emphatic, crashing drums and cymbals, a continuous metal guitar rain and Hevi’s vocals. A sandstorm emerges to swallow up the music gradually.

In spite of the album’s gloomy mood, the style of music throughout has a hopeful, even optimistic and bright edge that rarely appeared on previous Corrupted releases. In the later parts of “Gekkou no Daichi”, the mood can be quite sunny even as the noisy storm conjured up by guitar feedback grows louder and engulfs the music. The album plays like a soundtrack for a prolonged funeral procession; “Gekkou no Daichi” alone certainly would qualify as the accompaniment to a funeral cortege from church to the grave. Admittedly the music is very long and monotonous in parts, and editing could have been applied to the beginning of “Gekkou no Daichi”, but I think the intention here is to involve the listener fully in the music, drawing the attention into the quiet, meditative melody of acoustic guitar and then breaching the consciousness with a heavy barrage of guitars and percussion.

Corrupted may not be a very original band and the guys try to play catch-up with trends in doom metal these days, incorporating a cleaner sound and post-rock elements that give the band’s music an additional dimension. No longer are the guys just glum reporters and commentators on what they see as a world that’s lost its way. They are now detailing its final end and calling on us to decide whether we’ll fade out meekly or make a last defiant stand against a universe that doesn’t care whether we live or die.

Contact: Nostalgia Blackrain

October 29, 2012

Ea (self-titled): new beginning for mystery Russian doom band?

Ea, self-titled, Solitude Productions, CD SP055 (2012)

I guess when you’re onto a good thing and milking it for all it’s worth, you should stick with it. Especially if you’re locked into a particular groove and the mother lode still promises to yield hidden riches. This self-titled one-track album may signal a new beginning or a change of direction for this mystery Russian band, inspired by sacred texts of ancient civilisations written in languages long forgotten and undeciphered, or it might not. A very brief and delicate piano melody is our entry point into the grand universe of Ea’s ambitions and music: chiming guitars, some with vibrato effects, bombastic percussion and keyboards that lend a rich and warm ambient halo around the gloomy procession. Listeners may feel they’re witnesses to a grand funeral cortege that never ends. Vocals are deep and near-indecipherable beneath the layers of sound (though they’re not thick layers) and there is some death metal influence in the drumming.

These guys have learned something from their last three full-length outings: there is more emotion in this offering and the music’s intense emotion increases, slowly yet surely, with passages where the instruments pause and there is only the afterglow of a heavenly choral ambience bathing listeners in a warm light. About the 17th minute the musicians include a field recording of water being swirled about which is an interesting if pointless touch since the music resumes its onward and upward climb with no change. Spacey quicksilver liquid effects appear later.

Past the halfway point, black metal elements enter with harsh sandpaper vocals, a faster synth drumming pattern and a definite guitar melody leading the way. Clean female vocals, smooth and soothing, enhance the picture. Lead guitar dominates from this point on and while it provides a necessary focus, it’s bland in sound and quite boring in delivery as the track progresses. At various points along the way, the deep gruff vocal declaims lyrics while guitars sorrowfully circle them, going slightly off-key at regular intervals, as if to launch into a different, perhaps more ominous direction.

Save for a brief pause at the 39th minute when the music dies down to trickling water, the track proceeds relentlessly in its own strange, somewhat delirious style towards the end. The music barely changes pace but chugs steadily along, as if sensing its time is nearly over.

Overall this is solid if not very imaginative music. In its second half, the track appears to flounder under its weight and grandiosity and the lead guitar fiddles aimlessly. Parts of the track could have been edited to tighten up proceedings and give the impression of ever-increasing tension, even a bit of urgency here and there. At least the musicians try to vary the music by introducing some death metal, black metal, electroacoustic and traditional Christian religious musical elements; these never last long nor do they interact much so tensions that might arise from their fusion and help to sustain the track are missed. I get the feeling that at times the musicians are so awed by their creation that they lose control of it and let the music run away under its own massive weight. There’s a self-indulgent and pretentious element in the whole mammoth missive that, with the passage of time, might turn the track into a huge piece of atmospheric funeral doom kitsch.

Contact: Solitude Productions

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

July 27, 2012

Archer Heights

Split for the Coast

The eleventh release on the Spectrum Spools label is Soft Coast by No UFO’s, which is the work of Konrad Jandavs from Vancouver. Once again John Elliott rescues an obscure piece of music from a small-run cassette label origins, and reissues it on luxury vinyl. I like a good deal of what Mr Jandavs is doing here with his synths, beatboxes, sequencers and filters, especially those cuts which maintain a good solid beat to support the layers of droniness. In some ways it’d be nice to hear him try out the long-form La Dusseldorf thing and see what part of the melodic backwoods his Winnebago takes him, but there’s also a lot to be said for his generally economical approach here, curbing any tendencies towards wallowing in self-indulgent filtered ecstasy. No UFO’s also has an uncluttered and fresh approach to the construction of each piece, such that we’re not wading through layers of overdubbed fug; there’s a simplicity and directness which appeals, even if the melodic figures are not especially strong or original. From December 2011, and likely to grow on us with time.

Dead By Dawn

Now here’s a lively and spicy mixed-up morgeroon from Anders Hana, who’s a Norwegian loopoid from Stavanger associated with such fine acts as MoHa!, Noxagt and Ultralyd. Also Blodsprut, Circulasione Totale Orchestra, Clifford Torus, Crimetime Orchestra, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Quintet, Jaga Jazzist, Morthana, and Pokemachine. Matter of fact if there’s any far-out underground music going on in Stavanger it’s fairly likely that Hana will be involved in some way, either organising the venue where it happens or tearing the tickets on the door with a surly grunt directed at all incoming punters. On the single-sided vinyl object Dead Clubbing (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR2), he plays all the instruments including guitar, bass and drums, adding demented saxophone noise and groany synth passages, thus performing as his own one-man stoner-rock heavy-metal beat-jazz free-noise experimental-electronics combo. When you’re in the mood for something rich, thick and zesty, Hana is the man who’ll spread hot sauce over your French fries using a trowel for the purpose. Aye, nothing less than high volume and full-intensity performances will satisfy his creative urges on this salvo of grapeshot, and primary colours are the only oil paints he’ll deign to scrape with his nine-inch palette knife. What’s not to like? Well, only the slightly clod-hoppering and clumpy dynamic of the whole LP gives it a slightly awkward feel in places, like a Sherman tank stuck in first gear or a 30-foot giant with impaired motor functions, but that’s all part of the unkempt charm of Mr “no hairbrush for me thanks” Hana. The six dense pieces are generally short, obsessively repetitive and extremely – erm – direct. The label also operates as a fine-art screenprinting joint in Stavanger, and the actual artefact (I only have a promo CD) has visuals printed directly onto the vinyl and onto the PVC sleeve. 300 copies only of this drool-worthy red pancake.

Free Fall

Deeply impressed by Airfields (MAZAGRAN mz005), a new composition by Cypriot genius Yannis Kyriakides which we’ve had in the pouch since December. We noted his double-CD set Antichamber in TSP19 and I think it was around then we started to find a way into this dense work with its blending of acoustic chamber music with electronic sounds and strange effects, whereas previously it had seemed a bit daunting and unapproachable. This Airfields piece, a 12-part composition played by musikFabrik, an ensemble of classical players, with live electronics by the composer, really hits home – a very interesting take on spectral music, all players producing uncanny tones and unfamiliar sounds from their carefully-woven shrouds of woodwinds, strings, piano and percussion. In his notes, Kyriakides tells the story of how the piece came to be, and it’s a tale that involves a composition for the Siren Orchestra (who derive ideas from the futurist Luigi Russolo and the scientific theorist Heimholtz), and another composition for the Seattle Chamber Players. Since 2008, Kyriakides has been developing his own form of unusual graphic scores, working with photographs taken by satellites which he manages to recast into sonic information. As that technique improved, he found ways to render parts of these graphic scores by hand, translating the contours of these aerial views into scores which musicians could read. I like the idea that the musicians playing this unconventional sheet music are “put into a metaphorical orbit”, and it’s no doubt this methodology which accounts for the unusual, dizzying sensations of Airfields – sometimes we feel we are indeed falling through the sky in a semi-controlled way, taking a reverse parachute dive into another dimension. It’s entirely subjective, but I think this compelling and strangely melancholic music would make a perfect accompaniment while viewing Le Drapeau Noir, a 1937 painting by René Magritte. Further ghostly timbres arise in this, the third version of the evolving concept, through his placement of the brass section on the balcony of the performing space, to assist with the natural echo of the other musicians on the stage (a radical rearrangement of orchestral convention of which I’m sure Stockhausen would’ve approved). A live recording made in Amsterdam, the disc is issued with a booklet of full colour photographs.

July 21, 2012

Posthuman: fresh and blistering fusion of industrial metal dubstep and groove

JK Flesh, Posthuman, 3by3, CD 3by3009 (2012)

First solo album released by Justin K Broadrick under the JK Flesh monicker which he originally held as a member of Techno Animal over 15 years ago and it’s an apt one indeed as “Posthuman” is a blistering mix of industrial metal dubstep and groove with that distinctive scrapey junkmetal shovel Godflesh sound. It’s a good-2-great return to old form for Broadrick even if it’s lacking in the raw ferocity and intense angst that Godflesh used to be famous for; now all we need is his old sparring partner Kevin Martin to come back and collaborate on new jagged cutting-edge industrial trip-hop for a revived Techno Animal.

Opening track “Knuckledragger” gets the album off to a clunky and not very impressive start; it’s “Idle Hands”, the second track, that takes “Posthuman” into old-time Godflesh / Techno Animal territory with a definite crunchy shovel metal rhythm groove and slurpy serpentine outer-space loops battling for attention while Broadrick screams and yells under heavy coatings of reverb. “Punchdrunk” is more junkyard industrial scrap metal with almost Njiqahdda-style dried-out vocals atop an eccentric rhythm loop of out-of-tune guitar. Just when you think the JK Flesh juggernaut has settled in a comfort zone of its own making, along comes “Devoured” with its crazy mix of futuristic dystopian cyberpunk robot noises and effects laid over a skittery beat. A very satisfying soundtrack to nightmares of human-robot fusions. Even better is the title track with a heavy dubstep martial metal rhythm sprayed over with light gritty buzz distortion and a stuttering synth wobble. The programmed drumming is a little bit of a let-down – it needs to be more like mixed martial arts fighting in my book to get an extra layer of rhythm – but as is, the track is tough, heavy and sharp-edged.

Later tracks are treading water with no real stand-out: “Dogmatic” would have been much better if the skittish percussion had been replaced by a more substantial repeating rhythm loop; the track points up the main strength and weakness of the album in that all tracks are heavily dependent on rhythm loops and rarely deviate from them with the result that they are very repetitive, perhaps too much so. Final track “Walk Away” salvages the album’s otherwise worn-away credibility by retrieving some Godflesh-y elements, adding some disembodied (and disembowelled) vocals, and bringing in a more slightly varied drum/percussion rhythm loop later in the song.

The album is surprisingly fresh and invigorating for someone who has peddled in both industrial metal and heavy sci-fi dubstep for so long (nearly 25 years, who’da thunk that Broadrick is so close to celebrating a silver anniversary in music?) and who might be expected to churn out tired rehashes of past glories. Indeed, in spite of the album’s patchiness, I find myself looking forward to the next JK Flesh album even though I know it’s probably not going to stray all that far from what Broadrick’s known for … but then again, he might just do what I least expect him to do.

Contact: 3by3

July 13, 2012

The Ancient Method: blackened funeral doom metal in a tiny package

Monument of Urns, The Ancient Method, Hand Hewn Timbre, 3″ CD-R (2005)

Mysterious and reclusive act Monument of Urns was in the habit of releasing his music in the form of 3-inch CD-Rs of about 20 minutes in length and this first album “The Ancient Method” set the template for other Monument of Urns releases to follow. “The Ancient Method” is one track of the same title as the “album”: a very long and punishing, repetitive piece of slow, hard yet regular rhythms and yowling guitar drones. Riffs and percussion alike rise and fall with a huge crash like slow heavy waves of thick lava goop smashing against walls of iron holding them back. A deep subterranean whispery wraith sighs and mouths sounds that might be actual words and lyrics beneath the crushing rhythms and moaning tones. The packaging is mysterious and quite macabre yet it’s also very neatly and immaculately designed and presented.

The style of music might best be described as blackened funeral doom metal with some abstract experimental tendencies, especially near the end. A reference point might be Sunn0))) though that band has a deeper sound; another might be the equally elusive Spanish act Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere, especially in the atmosphere, but without the earth-shaking booms. Some time after the halfway point, the voices start to gibber and whisper rapidly and the track acquires a feathery and weirdly deranged quality; there is frenzied savagery and madness going on among those phantom beings in the background. The music still comes at you with slow and pounding regularity, crashing again and again, wearing down your resistance.

It’s not a varied track, it’s quite monotonous and it may not be MoU’s best work, but I hazard that “The Ancient Method” is the first of a series of similar tracks that might eventually turn out to be chapters in an on-going masterwork and perhaps at some stage in the future the man guarding the secrets of Monument of Urns might decide to put all the music released under that name on one CD or a double CD set. Only then will the meaning or meanings behind the music of this droning black doom project be fully revealed and half the fun for fans of this project may well be to work out the MoU main-man’s message if any within the music before then. As it is, the tiny CD-R format is appropriate for this project.

The label is equally as mysterious as the man and his project, having just seven releases to its name and all of them by Monument of Urns and a related project Bird of Omen.

Contact: Aquarius Records

July 10, 2012

Erosive Karung

Our graves must send those that we bury, back

From Bloomington we received a copy of this excellent limited CD by Charnel House, a band who are content to be labelled “doom metal” though would not deny the creeping sensations of other musical influences to caress their clammy body like the hand of a mortician on some grey-skinned cadaver. They’ve been creating churning riffs and malevolent episodes of eeriness since 2009 and have to date released two small-run cassettes and a 12-incher on vinyl called The Leprosy Of Unreality. Contagion (SYGIL RECORDS SYGIL 008) is evidence of their multi-faceted headmasked identities, and while Aquarius Records have been quick to praise the “lo-fi, primitive and minimal” qualities of this record, I would have to respectfully dissent on all three points. The record sounds full and lush to me, and the only minimalism I can discern is the fact that the duo (it’s just a singer called Hellfire and one instrumentalist, Adam Sommer) know how to make their imaginative playing work in their favour, without the need for multiple overdubs, guitar pedals, or excessive studio effects. ‘Erosive’, second cut on the album, is an early fave with its unstoppable percussive power and near-angelic wodge of blended guitars, vocals, reverb and distortion, but ‘Accipiter’ is mostly a hymn of forlorn soprano wailing in a nameless abstract wasteland of psychotic despair, occasionally interrupted by manic flailing from the axe section. ‘Statue’ is another tortured atonal ballad of moanage somewhat in the Khanate mode, while ‘Moonburnt’ sees them return to the dense swarm of metallic noise which seems to be their signature sound, drums are moving at a million miles a second, while guitars and singer are rooted to the spot at a certain date in the Bronze Age. And there’s ‘Immolation II’, which contains some of the most corrosive and horrific riffs the guitarist has managed to bleed out of his amps at this point. At times, Charnel House achieve an uncanny and unique “haunted” sound almost without trying; methinks a double bill shared between them and Back Magic would be a show you’re not likely to forget. A fine example of a more unearthly and near “artistic” take on this genre which I am delighted to recommend; Charnel House, despite a name which promises plenty gore and guts, have a graceful side which you won’t get from an average group of stomping Sabs imitators. As you can probably make out, my copy arrived here on 16 January 2012 in a rather – erm – waterlogged condition after its passage across the seas, which has added an interesting warp effect to the chipboard cover and the full-colour insert. Luckily this moisture attack did not affect play of the disc. Many thanks to Adam for sending this.

Hit The Sack!

Now for some splendidly creaky improv music from the Swiss label Veto-Records. Sack (EXCHANGE 003) is a meeting between three Chicago players, the cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, the bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Frank Rosaly, with the Swiss saxman Christoph Erb who happened to be in the windy city as an artist in residence on a visit from Lucerne. Plenty of loopy energy on the 4-minute ‘Kopp’, where Erb’s growly bass clarinet is chasing tiny mice and other pests out of the house, and plenty of thoughtful brooding on ‘Karung’, which is like a ride over a slightly choppy lake in a rubber dinghy, as the musicians strive to find common ground in a highly fluid environment. The centre-piece is the 20-minute ‘Kadhananio’, which begins with a joltingly vivacious interplay of free playing featuring (I think) some far-out guitar work from the freaky fingers of Fred, while Christoph is blowing his stack with many pounding strokes, as if arm-wrestling with his own tenor. Mid-point, this track offers some delicious stretches of quieter “mystery jazz” with the intoxicating sort of saxophone-cello conversations that are meat and drink to fans of the Eric Dolphy-Ron Carter sound, like myself. After that we’re treated to Rosaly’s inventive live electronics being showcased for precious seconds, accompanied by minimal bass and cello stabs. Most abstract of all is the lovely ‘Meshok’, with its combination of dark twisted half-melodies with noisier scrapey events. Arrived here 31 January 2012. Released in a silk-screened chipboard package and recorded at a studio in May 2011; one month later, Lonberg-Holm and Erb would record in the exact same studio once again, to produce the very odd Screw and Straw record for this same label. I have a copy of that too, so look back again later for a review. Added bonus for me: two owls on the stamps!