Ultrabonus have been active since 2022, toured widely in Berlin, and this is their second release. All the songs are of genuine “classic” pop song length, most of them under two minutes, and you could pick any two songs out these ten, couple them on a seven-inch and you’d have an instant gold-plated sunshine diamond on your mitts. They don’t just emulate the surface effects of their fave genres (we’d have to add surf music to the above shopping list), but also exhibit genuine songcraft in the way they compress their ideas into 120 seconds of urgent, fun-filled rainbow superbo-munch. 4.5 stars out of 5, with only minor points deducted for failing to add a Vox Continental organ. They even managed to squeeze a bi-lingual lyric sheet into the package, and the collage artworks are by Andrew Kemp.

Fans of The Undertones, step this way; if Ultrabonus ever teamed up with Felix Kubin, look out world – for an avant-pop explosion of gargantuan dimensions. (25/11/2024)

Nowadays, with music genres continually splintering into a thousand and one pieces, it was a full-on dead cert that mentions of “post everything” world eventually surface in those accompanying crib sheets. The trio, who’ll subsequently be called O.D.E.H., are a good a choice as any to be the hood ornament for this particularly spacious vehicle. After a handful of European and middle-eastern concerts performed as a duo, electric oudist Dargent and guitarist/vocalist Oberland later joined up with bassist Tony Elieh (also of Karkhana) and Polyphemè’s Wassim Halal (on darbuka and percussive ‘others’). Their first recordings were hatched at the Downton Studios in 2002; a three-day brainstorming session where this plunge into cross-fertilization, now finely tuned, became the more manageable “Sihr”.

We’re in safe hands here b.t.w., as Oberland’s ten years as Oiseaux-Tempête’s majordomo means that there’s an experienced ear hovering over this and indeed other projects inc. Foudre! And L.R.D.T. But, as anyone who is aware of sixties U.S. combos Kaleidoscope and The Devil’s Anvil (not forgetting * The Saqqara Dogs with Factrix’s Bond Bergland), when it comes to east meets west alliances, there really isn’t anything new under the sun. However, O.D.E.H. acquit themselves famously. “Oui-Ja’aa” matches an insistent marching beat with a hyper-tense swarm of keyboard activity. The sombre/lyrical tones of “YouGotALight” are dominated by Frédéric’s breathy alto sax while slithering into view “Babel Cedex” would be perfect for a Marrakech-based T.V. Thriller where intrigue and the fine art of double-crossing is second nature.

Now well into its middle-age, Sub Rosa remains in the forefront of labels where consistently challenging and adventurous releases come with the regularity of a stuck disc. “Sihr” is a welcome addition to that ever-teetering pile.

* ‎One-time ‘Melody Maker’ scribe Paul Oldfield made their “Thirst” (on Pathfinder Records/U.S.), one of his top five albums for 1988. How soon we forget.

The label are quick to point out the “zero guitars” ethos in operation here, and perhaps in the minds of the label curators this helps to align The Telescopes with certain strains of electronic music which we know they like – e.g. Coil, Psychic TV, and Martyn Ware. But Lawrie has an old-fashioned rock fixation that doesn’t overlap neatly with those dark-disco and mutant funkoid types, he also sings, and as we noted re 2019’s Stone Tape album, he can naturally slide into a Velvet Underground groove with ease and enthusiasm, for instance on ‘Leave Nobody Behind’. With Stone Tape, I sent myself on a wild goose chase – or ghost chase – looking for hauntology themes that probably weren’t there, while today’s record instead contains dark hints about the physicality of death and disease, faced head-on in Lawrie’s no-nonsense manner. You get the feeling he could stare down the Grim Reaper in a duel at fifty paces, leaving old “Mr Bones” a quivering wreck.

Other listeners may simply savour the very raw distorted textures that emerge from our man’s lo-fi set-up, which compel us to stir our stumps in a dance of the dead just as surely as the mesmerising repetitions, intense organ drones, and relentless nature of these performances – plenty of repeated chants, simple lyrics, and staying on a steady course with a core of iron on board the yacht of steel he uses to glide across the oceans of acid. This release includes remixed versions by Black Market Karma (Sten Belton, a London-based devotee of psychedelic fuzz guitar) and the unknown Mosaic Runes. Black Market Karma does add a lot to ‘Leave Nobody Behind’ with his guitar breaks and live drums, but maybe he adds too much; listening to his mix, already I miss the simplicity and insistent quality of solo Lawrie, and this just sounds like any Bevis Frond track (although the wobble effect on the vocal does add a nifty lysergic touch worthy of Sun Dial). The Mosaic Runes take on ‘45E’ is a real spooker, though – isolating elements from the original track in a dubby manner, he succeeds in exposing some of the real damaged voices of instruments, which might otherwise be concealed under layers of nasty fuzz. From 15th Jan 2024.

Having made all these proposals and comparisons, in fact this group of three Mexicans and one Frenchmen would likely refuse any form of musical categorisation, especially two labels which others have thrown at them to wit Krautrock / Kosmische and New Weird America, in the form of No-Neck Blues Band and other such overly-ritualistic improvising groups. Instead, they simply regard music as a “magical” action, claiming in their own words that “we rise to draw from the sources of the cosmic Grand Souk”, indicating I suppose that they don’t over-think it or analyse their performances, preferring to simply play. While this LP might be regarded as a concession to “conventional” rock music by this otherwise far-out label, on the contrary we find in these recordings the same concerns with pure sound production and an unvarnished honesty which exactly matches other releases in the (admittedly small) catalogue of L’Eau Des Fleurs. What I particularly like is the unaffected, simple approach of Los Lichis; here are genuine players who don’t care to puff themselves up with ambitious grand designs, utter pretentious or incomprehensible statements, strike poses, nor set themselves high-minded targets on which they cannot deliver. The plain, unadorned nature of the recordings – almost DIY in their lo-fi starkness – are all part of the charm and the aesthetic.

Given their occasional meanders into lysergic turf here and there, one is tempted to liken them to The Grateful Dead (around the time of Anthem Of The Sun), only without the bombast and without the slickness. Issued with a full-colour booklet insert containing some incredible images, paintings, and collages. Excellent. From 20 Feb 2024.

My impression from previous hearings is that Jani Hirvonen is a compulsive overdubber who doesn’t know when to quit, layering performances together into a delirious psychedelic swirl in hopes of a lysergic result. Today’s record is similarly oriented, reaching even higher extremes with cosmic freakery and intensity on these 2022-23 recordings make in Turku. At one time it might have been convenient to align Uton with “Finnish Folk”, a journalistic invention not unlike “New Weird America”, which covered a lot of the music coming from the Finnish underground from the mid-1990s onward; one of the more prominent successes was Kemialliset Ystävät, but they also blended free improvisation and psychedelia into their mostly-acoustic music with its odd song forms and highly idiosyncratic reimaginings of the history of free music. Even the use of the word “Folk” in this unhelpful term implied that we would be hearing songs and acoustic guitars and recorders, none of which was necessarily true. I mention this as today’s album What On Earth Are We Doing Here is mostly electronic (as far as I can make out), and its murky dimensions seem to be underpinned by queasy synth gloop, even as wayward guitars and fragile percussion are inserted into the upper layers, possibly joined by treated and distorted field recordings.

If any of this heightens Jani Hirvonen’s status as an electro-acoustic composer of some sort, it’s also fair to say that there is a good deal of spontaneity and instant-invention in his benign and balmy works, which is the only way I can account for the formless nature of these drifty sprawls. That’s not intended as a negative comment, and indeed the open-ended structure may bring the listener closer to the sort of enlightenment and epiphany which is suggested by titles like ‘An Astounding Notion’ and ‘The Knowledge of the Hidden Ages’. I shan’t say that hearing this record will open the collective third eye of the audience, but a bit of me believes we do sometimes need to work our way out of traditional, logic-based thinking, and this is just the sort of music to help you do it – inserting a rubber screwdriver into your brain, with the most benevolent of intentions. Six examples of Jani Hirvonen’s colourful and charming artworks can be found on the panels of this release, likewise collaged and layered and psychedelic, and promising the revelation of hidden beauties.

Steve Fricker is the English fellow behind this label and distribution channel of the same name, which began in the early 1990s and used to feature a good deal of hard-edged electronic noise for its earliest releases. I think we last heard from them in 2003 with A Marble Holder From Andover, credited to Onomatopoeia (a Fricker alias); as I recall produced largely by tape collage, which might be one area where he overlaps with Uton. From 10 April 2024. Available in the UK from Cold Spring.

Spinning Live in (A) Basement (SPLEEN COFFIN SP-59-CS) now, I’m happy to report this listener is both charmed and excited by this strange mix of demented songs, guitar rock, collage, noise and general air of barmy loopiness released on my favourite underground US label (one of many favourites), Spleen Coffin. This band (if indeed it is one) has a handful of funny-looking releases on their Bandcamp page, go by several aliases and misspellings – Pidare y Gerreo, PidarryJarryOh, and Puhdarre EE Jerio – and their lineup varies from one release to the next, indicating they might be more of a loose collective of like-minded happy-loon types, joining in each project as needed, much like a hippy commune rotating the farm chores. On this release, I can read credits for Dara Mysliewicz, Chris Mathison, Pierre Plantevin, and Patrick Foley, plus other persons who are “siphoned ethereally”.

While I personally wish for more of the noisy dementia of ‘Corpulent Ether’ which opens the tape, there’s much to be said for the tripped-out semi-acoustic songs ‘Golden Hour’ and ‘What Am I Saying?’, reminiscent of lo-fi geniuses like Sebadoh but enriched with occasional harmony vocals in a psychedelic sunshine pop mode, and interrupted by incongruous robot rhythms from a drum machine. All of side B is taken up with ‘The Endless House’, an oddity which departs from whatever template they have set themselves on the A side…a bad-trip organ drone enriched with added spooky detritus, on top of which are distorted and cut-up spoken-word tapes recounting a supernatural event, a nightmarish dream, or both. It gets even more unsettling, as more voices join the episode, so grimly altered as to appear like damned spirits attempting to break through from the other side. This must be the “ethereal siphon” at work. A horror-movie in miniature in just 20:12 mins.

If one can dare to invoke that old canard of “New Weird America”, here’s a band who come much closer to delivering the sort of cranky, ornery mix of songs, rock, and crazy homebrew lysergic noise that we’d hoped to get from Sunburned Hand of the Man, but never really did. A fine slice of dark imagination from the underground. From 18 December 2023.

D. Petri now claims ownership of the label and stewardship of the recordings, and even has a Bandcamp page now rather than put his messages in a bottle in the form of oddly-packaged cassette tapes. Even so, the package on today’s CDR is not one of your standard brands, what with the unusual folds and hand-made charm, plus thew added insert – “Booklet encloses a small slip of blank notebook paper of specific significant origin, given randomized coverage of transparent shimmer. The recipient is invited to utilize this paper in a personally meaningful fashion…” Directives may be a solo turn by Petri, and evidently Glimmer represents a lot of labour-intensive effort on his part, recording multiple parts solo and grafting them all together. He’s proud of his lo-fi stance and where possible will try and use recordings made at home on cassette recorders, or even on his iPhone; there’s very little if any use of computers and software, and he likes to go for a “live” feel, hopefully not too many takes or retakes, perhaps in pursuit of a spontaneous result. It’s the collaging and assemblage of his source materials that seem to give him the most pleasure, and when things spark into flame and the ratchets fall into position he arrives at some genuinely original moments of music and sonic amazement here, doing things that could not possibly be played in real time – not even by a small chamber orchestra of seasoned rock veterans.

I’m sure we’ve used Krautrock predecessors as a reference point before, not least because of the steady clonking rhythms which resemble a warped version of Can, but the studio technique here is almost on a par with what Kurt Graupner did with Faust in the recording room. All the more poignant that Petri did it all on such modest set-up and (presumably) a limited budget, but the drivers are his own musical vision and imagination, for which you don’t need a hundred digital levers, workstations or Ableton licenses. Petri claims influences from all over – psychedelic rock, Cologne glitch, Japanese electronics and industrial music, and anything from the self-produced heaven of DIY cassette culture, but still emerges with a very distinctive and personal musical voice. Even his “beats”, when they appear, aren’t those faceless digital whacks and thumps that most program-happy gonks settle for with their $2000 boxes, and they trundle forth with a rustic hand-knitted charm. In the UK, one who operates in more or less the same space is Andy Rowe (Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers), and although Petri doesn’t use any voice elements or samples, I think these two luminaries could bond over a shared approach to extended instrumentals, efficient use of tape loops, and squeezing all the goodness out of a one-man band set-up. While D. Petri might not be aiming for the accolade of most original guitar-player in the Western hemisphere, his style of playing is just perfect for the kind of rich, strange, and layered music he makes. Very good. (SEP 2023)

It’s a pity this album, the second by Portuguese act Durvena Cabina, has come out quite late in 2024 as (for me anyway) it’s certainly a contender for Album of the Year in 2024: inspired by the folklore and legends of northern Portugal, and using samples of the folk music of this area, “Contos da Casa do Lobo” (in English: “Tales of the House of the Wolf”) lays out an extraordinary sonic tapestry of hilly and mountainous landscapes, cold rainy winters and peoples of Celtic, Iberian and other mysterious origins whose beliefs revolved around human contacts with otherworldly beings both benevolent and maleficent. I am not at all familiar with Durvena Cabina – I only heard of this act very recently – but the artist behind DC also runs a black metal project, Sokushinbutsu. Durvena Cabina’s music here embraces black metal as one of several inspirations and core elements that include neofolk, psychedelia, ambient and musique concrète in a setting of long droning shamanic freeform ritual pieces, each and every one of which is highly absorbing, hypnotic and magical.

Although the album is divided into six tracks, it’s best heard as one complete unit from the first track to the last, or even with the tracks mixed – though individual tracks, even the shorter ones like “Solstício”, are enchanting enough that you’ll be quickly drawn deep into the mysterious dimensions behind them. Each track reveals a lush soundscape that can contain unexpected power and menace as well as charming beauty and sometimes plaintive melancholy. Tales of wolves and their ability to inflict disease and suffering through their evil gaze, and of other hostile beings and spirits, often magnified through long periods of isolation and cabin fever during inhospitable weather, come to terrifying life in tracks like “Caí no Poço, Morri no Campo”, a spooky ambient work of ghost voices and effects made even more chilling by constant background metal-sawing noise drone. Samples of folk chanting are given a sinister edge through distortion and a wave of harsh BM noise guitar drone accompanied by eerie fragments of flute melody and space ambient effects in “Ela que chamou o Fumo”. Closing track “Luna” starts off as the most soothing and song-like piece, though it has the mood and atmosphere of a keening elegy, but the simmering chaos of the Otherworld and its denizens is never far away.

A beautiful and enthralling album of mystery, magic and menace, this particular collection in sonic form of dark folk tales is a unique achievement indeed.

On the August 2022 item, recorded at Cafe Oto in London, it’s as if Sun City Girls slowed down their natural instincts for high-speed murder, and visited even lesser known parts of the Arab world on their exotic voyages. Or the alternate soundtrack for an Iranian science fiction movie beset with purple foliage. Tremendous invention from Hniu and Pérez, who keep finding new ways to restate their droney themes and lifting yet another lid to uncover a new secret compartment in their instruments. You’ll believe a guitar can also be used to store magic potions, and the hurdy-gurdy can make dead bones dance.

Three days later they swooped down into the Supernormal Festival. I have never assisted at this event, but I assume it’s a foregathering of warm and friendly freakish types, and I expect that The Skull Mask must have exceeded all expectations. This second performance gets my vote as it’s more impassioned and much more unpredictable, conveying the sense of a wheel spinning off its hinges and mutating into a multi-tentacled monster. And the sounds are also weirder. The hurdy-gurdy seems to be whining like the siren on a spaceship, and Pérez is reinventing himself as the best acoustic guitarist who never had a record on Tacoma.

Both Gosha Hniu and Miguel Pérez are part of the Staraya Derevnya collective, a combo of improvisers often producing open-ended porous music of such cavernous space that you could live in it. From 15 May 2023.

In contrast to its black metal / ambient twin “Sils Maria”, released on the same day (17 July 2024), “Limbs of Dionysus” is a ferocious beast of blackened psychedelic sound art. Two long and twisting tracks take listeners through a dark labyrinthine cosmos of jangly guitar riffs and speedy thudding percussion, all overseen by a mysterious spectral vocal that appears now and again as if to guide the music down further shadowy and indistinct paths. Where “Sils Maria” is a restrained work that is light, even elegant in its execution, “Limbs of Dionysus” is feverish and desperate in tone and pace, and the music can appear very dense and convoluted in its structure as it barrels along like a wild cyclone.

At 23+ minutes, Track I is a sprawling soundscape piece of dissonant jangly black metal guitar, set in the same space as “Sils Maria” with a similar clear sound and a sparse minimalist approach, accompanied in the main by blast-beat percussion and wraith-like cries and screams in the far background. Riff after riff after riff is thrown up in the music though each does not repeat for very long and as a result listeners can have a hard time getting a-hold of anything in the music that might serve as a reference point. The one thing that does impress this reviewer is the resonant ringing quality of the guitar tones, however far deep in this dark abyss the guitars may be. The music is urgent and desperate, and listeners can feel overwhelmed by the claustrophobia such desperation produces after over 20 minutes of non-stop rush-about. Eventually a point of exhaustion or release is reached, and the heavy droning tones of church organ swamp the listener, as though God or some such other deity is pronouncing judgement on us lost souls.

Track II may be the shorter track but it is more tortured in form and emotion as the music quickly passes through many moods and the vocals, becoming clearer, reveal anguish and torment in their ranting and shrieking. The music quickly becomes just as fast and frantic, close to hysteria, as the first track as it dives and dashes about; riffs rarely settle into a particular groove before they are swept aside by another frenzied detour into yet another part of the darkness. As with Track I, the organ glides into the music in its last few moments, seemingly to offer comfort or judgement.

Like “Sils Maria”, no matter how intense or aggressive the music becomes, “Limbs of Dionysus” actually sits quite lightly on the ear and the result never becomes overly dramatic or histrionic. In their linear structures both albums turn out to be thoughtful and meditative works, perhaps contemplating the present sorry state of humankind and its uncertain future in a universe indifferent to its children. The twin albums may appear opposed to each other in style and mood, but when heard together they complement each other so well that they really have to be heard together for their strengths to be fully appreciated.