Escape From Warsaw here with Transit / The Specter of War (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 343-2), a very poignant title given the disastrous state of world affairs, and now in 2026 that “specter” is looming even closer in everyone’s hearts and minds. Karol Su/Ka proudly describes his hard-hitting music as “lo fi distorted electronic beat” on the cover; only the records of Kotra come close to delivering this degree of steely punch, landing with precision on chin of enemy wearing army boots. The record label are always looking for material that yokes together dance beats with the powerful surge of “dark industrial”, and here’s a record that aligns perfectly with that plan. The militant subtext of this album surfaces not only in the title, but in songs like ‘Panzerbrigadier’, the relentless forward-march mode of almost every track, and even the sound of gunfire represented as synthesised stabs. Drum machines have rarely seemed so ominous. (09/01/2025)

We’re still in the “war zone” with Bunker Musick (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 342-2), a heavy-going record credited to Düsseldorf…in fact it’s a German-Polish collaboration, conceived by Tom Axer of Düsseldorf and played by Elektrokraft, the German duo of Leander Rönick and Patrick Woitaschek who have been releasing their brand of “EBM” electronic music since 2017. I hope this record is not sailing too close to the sort of territory previously staked out by other industrial and “dark folk” players, and I worry the swastika may surface at any moment, but no – it seems Bunker Musick is intended as a story-telling piece that depicts a symbolic bunker of the mind, a “place from which there is no return”. It might refer to memories of past wars or to current conflicts in Europe, say the creators. Hmm. Not an easy listen, if you have no appetite for strident vocal chants set over equally strident electric music, and the samples of jubilant cheering crowds aren’t helping much. We heard Tom Axer in 2022 on the very melodramatic Amok, with his drummer Jacek Sokołowski. (09/01/2025)

Entering a mystical and unfathomable realm with the album by Galaktyka Mięsa, a band name which translates as “galaxy of flesh”…yes, there are still people in the world who worship at the altar of David Cronenberg and wish for nothing more than to recreate the themes of his 1980s movies such as Videodrome or Scanners, in audio terms. However, there’s a lot more going on in the strange groovular indentations of Lejek Bólu (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 341-2), evident even to non-Polish speakers. These songs are mostly intense, chaotic outbursts of strange screes of information, situated somewhere in a nightmarish version of experimental techno with added electronic noise-mayhem, plus the declamatory vocals which seem to be reaching us through a distorted telephone receiver with their urgent, cryptic messages. Quite untypical of the slow drone ambient-scapes which often feature on this label, this Galaktyka Mięsa item is packed with teeming life-forms. The incomprehensible press release suggests influences from shamans, apocalyptic imagery, and even Korean culture (which apparently is very close to Polish culture – perhaps they share a certain pessimistic frame of mind). This might be a duo of Jakub Knoll and Łukasz Bejnar from Wroclaw, and either they have composed soundtracks for troubling futuristic movies, or they have a strong desire to do so. (09/01/2025)

All from Zoharum Jan 2025

The music is non-specific object-based noise with electronics – Bohman’s specialty area in fine – ditto for Crow, who is credited with amplified objects, electronics and projections. Furt of course are all electronics – Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, from whom we would love to hear more…we do glimpse Barrett now and again playing in Han-Earl Park groups, but what about his classical avant-garde compositions? Hospital as it turns out is a “classic” 1993 performance of that vintage…and was even recorded at a site of high experimentation and avant-magnetism, the London Film-Makers Co-op. Some lucky souls may even have heard it on cassette through Vintage Productions at the time. It would have had an Elastoplast stuck to the cover.

Now thanks to that German label that takes Komnmissar Hjuler seriously, we have this reissue – which already is growing as rare and collectible as the cassette. I think it’s got a CD and CDR inside the bandages. I refuse to open the package. I savour the hand-written messages in felt-tip pen. This patient will live forever in a bed of healing in my private wing. But you can stream it on Bandcamp and enjoy an amazing passage of slow, deliberative strangeness and charm.

Three CDs of music by the excellent Biliana Voutchkova on Blurred Music (ELSEWHERE MUSIC elsewhere 001-3), documenting three live performances from Dec 2016, where this violinist was joined by Michael Thieke and his clarinet for these dates in America. The word “blur” is being used to set the scene for “indeterminacy”, and refer to the method used by both musicians, for instance alternating between improvisation and composition in the structure of each piece. Ultimately, they’d like to “blur” time itself. There’s nothing unfocussed about their playing, if that’s what you were thinking; Voutchkova in particular lands each note with the grace of a bird somehow alighting on a cloud. Not minimal music; it’s packed with empathy, emotion, meaning, and genius. Released in 2018.

Austrian genius Katharina Klement here with Textur (KALD CD 03) – 14 experiments composed for the piano and loudspeaker, using a six channel tape recorder. Some technicians and mixers are credited, e.g. Flo Prix, Oliver Gross, David Petermann, but I think this is all played by Klement. I love the precision of this – it feels like she’s typing it all out by longhand, setting each note in metal in preparation for a letterpress edition. She packs so much complexity and density into short, economical spaces that it’s like hearing Xenakis compressed in a matchbox with a Stockhausen packed lunch at the interval. One of several back catalogue items she sent to us years ago; see this page. This one was released in 1998.

Doc Wör Mirran sent us Confusion Rocks! (MISS MANAGEMENT HAVE TEN) – recorded in 2015 in a German studio. Joseph B. Raimond plays all the guitars and synths, and did the cover paintings, supported by Stefan Schweiger on drums. Raimond has been ruder, and more abrasive, but this is enjoyable and well-made rock music, not especially avant or challenging. Think of it as a form of latterday Krautrock with added Euro-synth melodies and textures. I’d like to have heard a shade more “confusion” in the grooves, but the mood throughout is pretty mellow, despite growling mad head painting on the cover and titles like ‘Every Fibre of my Body Hurts’. Not enough Jean Dubuffet, more like Marc Chagall. The ‘Self Portrait, Broken’ does at least deliver a mildly uncertain episode of self-contemplation. Released in 2016, their 142nd release (take that, Zappa).

Also from Doc Wör Mirran the much more interesting Tape Hissed (Historical Obscurity Volume 2) (MISS MANAGEMENT HAVE NINE) which apparently was drawn from the archive of DWM recordings as far back as 1983 up to 1994. A long list of collaborators and camp followers on these rare cuts, even including Jello Biafra. Packaged as a “three-sided” release, of which the first two sides on tape might be included as a snippet inside the jewel case! At least two tracks here – unsure of the titles which don’t quite add up – are brilliantly concocted layers of balmy noise, accumulating in a very open-ended fashion and allowing any errant synth squiggle or passing gnat to flap their wings in the general melee. Some tracks may appear more conventional art-rock mode, but even these uglified workouts are informed by a lunatic sense of mayhem and controlled chaos. They also had the good taste to dedicate the release to David Bowie. Maybe the time has come for a proper reevaluation of Doc Wör Mirran, arguably a much “better” band than Sunburned Hand Of The Man. From 2016, I think.

It’s almost a musical synth drone. Possibly he’s taking a leaf out of Ian Holloway’s book (Holloway – aka The Swansea Spaceman – is also The British Space Group who does occasional tributes to Dr Who, Radiophonic Workshop and UK supernatural fiction on the telly). Now that I play this queasy tuneless synth chiller, I’m not so sure. Discordant tones mix up with an alien “sighing” sound from capacious lungs to evoke all of our worst nightmares about the extra-terrestrial zones and visitations from strange creatures with electric ears and hideous snouts. Hardman’s trick is to pile on the terrors and increase the intensity somehow – the basic audio emanations become more urgent, as unseen fingers probe our brain in search of the inner “panic button”. Part of the strangeness comes from its refusal of conventional “harmony”, meaning there’s no recognisable root note or key, although if I am right in pegging Hardman as an outsider-primitive, this is probably more of a happy accident than a planned exercise in breaking musicological rules.

Either way the competing frequencies multiply in an alarming way. The atmosphere becomes intolerable as we draw nearer the spaceship in the woods, presumably entering into its baleful magnetic forces and drawn to an unwelcome encounter with the crew of “greys” – why can’t we turn back? The inexorable pull of these forces from Alpha Centauri are vividly captured by this highly unusual creator. And yet, when the meeting takes place, all Hardman can find to say to the Cosmic Visitor is “Good morning, I like your hat.” There’s bathos for you. (23/12/2024)

So far I hope to establish the outlaw credentials of this player, but the cover photo (taken by collaborator Ogrob) does that job for me, depicting our man as a masked terrorist or bank robber in the studio and emphasising the massive presence of his baritone sax. Once that initial shock has passed, you may notice the clip-on microphone attached to the bell of the instrument. Something tells me that’s probably not the orthodox way to record a saxophone, but it works for Noiserist, who creates six strains of merry Heck much more akin to heavy-metal guitar riffing or harsh noise wall than the collected works of Eric Dolphy. It’s possible overdubbing, distortion, and looping effects are also part of the permitted game plan, but the main sensation that comes over is unflagging energy, delivered through near-mindless repetition of short phrases, and above all a commitment to manifesting as much obnoxious attitude in the room as is humanly possible. It’s not enough to make rude farting and belching and grunting noises – this is the sound of a man issuing a continual stream of four-letter words as music, with the unstoppable mania of a Tourette’s sufferer.

As if to sweeten the deal and remind us he’s actually a very intelligent and scholarly fellow, Noiserist prints all his track titles in Latin, many of them well-known phrases established in the culture, such as ‘Rara Avis’. A favourite is ‘Ferrvm Ferro Acqvitvr’, which I think means ‘iron sharpeneth iron’ or, more colloquially, ‘seize the day’. Although there are some quieter moments of fogged-out drone on the album, these too are laced with menace, and the whole set starts to feel like the document of a home invasion. As free improvisation goes, this is at the extreme of a very thin margin, shading into territory marked out by Borbetomagus; perhaps this solo format is the one that suits him best, as (and I mean this in a nice way) he’s not the kind of player that many would feel comfortable collaborating with. That said, he’d probably be good in a sesh with Romain Perrot of Vomir. 60 copies of this were made. From 23 Dec 2024.

We’ve been following the releases of the French group L’Autopsie for some time now, as well as related eruptions such as micro_penis and Sun Plexus, and regular readers will know we’ve reacted with a certain amount of nausea and repulsion mixed in with the musical appreciation. Sebastien Borgo is one of the prime movers and shakers in this rotomontade, and it seems there are no lengths to which he won’t go in terms of breaking taboos, unsettling the listener with queasy sounds and shocking imagery, and doing his level best to unbalance normality in his quest to disrupt the “straight” world. In terms of apt collaborations, today’s item is matched only by the time Sun Plexus made a double-LP with Canada’s finest anti-good taste merchants, The Nihilist Spasm Band – not only do they produce horrible music, but also bellow out rude words at the audience.

As to Smegma, despite owning not-a-few records by this unclassifiable Californian band of monstrous weirdos, I still find I can’t say anything remotely useful about their work or their music. They’ve been active since 1973, tangentially associated with the LA Free Music Society, and it’s well-nigh impossible to say who the members are – because people keep coming and going, they often go by absurd alias names, and even long-serving players may not be the same people they started out as. Like the French group, they too have flirted with outré imagery and nasty-ish album titles, and have successfully transitioned into the 21st century via noise collaborations with Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Carlos Giffoni and other prominent weirdos. For those who want to know which “incarnation” of Smegma appears on today’s record, forget your rock-family-trees and check the Bandcamp page; I will mention that John Wiese, one of the more prolific and abrasive West Coast noisers, is present on the grooves.

The record starts out menacing and broody on side one, then grows hysterical and shocking on side two, ending in a flurry of diabolical shrieks and incessant pandemonium that’s enough to send anyone crazy. It’s all the more troubling for the lack of context, somehow; nothing explained or framed, much like the extreme close-up details of the collage artworks, which make no sense at all yet contain just enough recognisable imagery to confound the poor human brain. You can’t call this free improvisation, or free noise; it’s just some monstrous presence that insists on itself, squatting in your mind like an unwelcome supernatural apparition. The release also includes a witty self-referential self-sabotaging insert, a text written by the French-Japanese artist Samon Takahashi, which does everything it can to undermine the music, the audience, and the framework of music journalism / criticism too; while demonstrating how futile it is for anyone to write about music, it also manages to pull the rug out from the listener’s expectations, especially that segment of the audience who know anything about Smegma and think they know what to expect. Ogrob has played a similar sardonic prank before, on the Musica Acouscousmatica LP, mercilessly poking fun at anyone foolish enough to take art seriously.

Today it has the effect of pre-empting just about any response to Transmissions Des Fluides; maybe that’s the point, to insist that we go in with no preconceptions, and take our medicine without complaining. Either that, or these madmen have jointly decided that modern culture has run out of road long ago, and all that’s left to do is trade bodily fluids, as the title suggests. This record isn’t a friendly jam session at all, but a free-for-all orgy of far-out perversion among consenting freaks. Equally unsettling is the poster insert with an impossible photo of a ruined bridge, with two tiny figures walking across the top of it at an absurdly dizzying height. An indigestible, but unforgettable, melange of extreme sounds and ideas, executed with reckless abandon and flashes of pathological insanity, another nail in the coffin of modern music. (12/11/2024)

That’s right, “distortion” is the name of the stern emperor who holds sway in their world as they thrash madly about on these 2023 recordings made in Berlin, which sound as though they were performed in a gigantic concert hall made of titanium, with androids in the audience. Karla Wenzel has also startled the world under her Kiki Bohemia alias, and we might refer you to that odd record Waiting For Wood which we heard in 2022, but the association between her and Vethake goes back even further. Seems these three maniacs shared an interest in the music of Caspar Brötzmann Massacre (and other instances of high-energy free jazz), and in 2022 decided they wanted to unleash their own brand of sax-noise-drum terror onto the world.

Certainly loving the mangled noisy surfaces here, besides the collapsing free-form structures and unexpected eruptions – more of the chilling spoken-word samples next time, please. Even so, our German compadres can’t always match the energy or vitality of their chosen models, cavort as they may, and what mainly emerges from Burst is a kind of black, bleakened mix of hatred and despair, rather than a celebration of leaping bodies and soaring acrobats drenched in sweat. The Bandcamp page has some flickery videos in support of the desolate themes, although the kaleidoscopic swirls sparkling about the screen for ‘Burst 3’ deliver more of the hoped-for passion and juice. (01/11/2024)

After years of providing the world with serviceable drone-process music (electronics mixed with field recordings) this fellow scaled new heights with his Mind Matter double cassette of odd audio episodes. Today’s CD item is equally episodic and – like the title seems to be implying, with its hints of a lysergic drug or a disastrous LSD trip – might be aiming at a low-grade surrealism or an array of hallucinatory images, albeit in a cheerful and upbeat way. I’m sure there are more than enough records which chronicle the darker side of the acid experience, but Stormhat is seizing the opportunity to make a more creative statement. Nicolaisen himself declares he’s aiming to “punch small holes in the prosaic reality of everyday life”.

This is quite an unorthodox take on the field-recording genre, 90% of whose proponents are aiming to preserve that prosaic life, putting it in a contextual frame of audio; and many of them would stop far short of saying it’s “prosaic”. But the utterance also reflects the changes, or more accurately the juxtapositions and contrasts, that Stormhat delivers in his work: we’re hearing simple synth sounds simultaneously with the sounds of weather, water, and air, and the multiple layers are skilfully aligned for maximal dynamics and unexpected surprises. It’s all good, but fave cut might be ‘Teenage Repellent’, and I can see myself using its harsh and abrasive tones to dispel many a mob of arrogant youngsters in my area. (27/11/2024)