Cellarkalt is Benedikt Schmidt. Both alias and real name sound kinda German, but he sent us his latest cassette from an address in Spain, where he operates his Jetztwelt label. Neus Licht an Unbestimmtem Morgen (JWS 01) is a nifty piece of home-made DIY electronica moogling and mongling, playing around with synths and sequencers and noisy buzzer-type machines…according to his own bio, the Benster started his musical journey in the late 1990s, doing it in the basement of the family home, making his semi-alienated sketches directly onto the cassette tape. Presumably the heating didn’t extend this far in the house, hence his name which translates as “cold cellar”. But that’s all to the good. Too much physical comfort is bad for art; better to shiver and go hungry than be warm and well-fed, but with a guilty conscience. Some 20-odd years later, things have changed or even improved in the technical department and the equipment budget may stretch to an extra device or two, but Cellarkalt remains true to his DIY and slightly absurdist ethos. I like his claim to be “poetic and imperfect, weird and raw” although for me it’s not quite imperfect or raw enough. True, there’s a slightly nasty surface patina which could repel the odd mosquito, but having claimed his turf for freedom of expression Schmidt doesn’t quite go far enough in exploring it, or colonising it. Too many of these tracks start out really promising, but then just repeat the same idea or stay in the same place for longer than they should, not really mutating or transformating enough. We need more maggots in the cheese, more enzymes in the bucket of sewage. Even so, he’s carving out a potentially distinctive voice for himself with his fingers, and to prove it there’s a large gazonga of home releases available on his BC page, all with similar black-and-white covers of skewed photos and odd collage artworks. (05/09/2022)
Latest offering from Colossloth, UK one-man industrial noise manufacturing plant spread across two or more counties, called Promethean Meat (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR315CD) and arrives decorated with engravings from classical antiquity to bolster its Greek myth subtext. Besides the image of the famous Prometheus himself having his liver gnawed by vulture on front, there’s also Laocoön and sons being eaten by large serpents, plus two other pictures which I feel I ought to recognise…these pages from engraved books could be taken as a linkage to 18th century emblem books, from where we could make a connection to printed alchemical texts and symbolic engravings, which I mention as the press are claiming that Colossloth is an “esoteric electronic alchemist”. This is the third item we’ve heard from Wooly Woolaston, and either I’m getting more used to his brand of deadly crushing noise, or he’s changed up his process somewhere since we last heard him bemoaning the bad state of affairs on Plague Alone. Sure enough, three new tricks up his sleeve – (a) inclusion of live recordings (b) addition of vocal chants and recits and (c) added Black Metal elements on some cuts, possibly in the form of heavy beats. All of this is making Colossloth, whose brilliant name suggests a cross between a titanic figure and a three-toed tree monster, one of the more digestible packages of intense power-electronic death horror music in the current Cold Spring catalogue. He’s also keeping things concise – few of these blasteroos go beyond the four-minute mark, moving on after they’ve completed their quota of scorched-earth and mortar-attack work for the day. However, curious listeners should still be prepared for remorseless themes of negativity, pain, and death which inform every moment of this airless and intense sound. (05/09/2022)
So, the Prostir label run by Dmytro Fedorenko has recently founded a little sub-label called I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free. Seems its main purpose is to support the Ukrainian struggle against the Russian invasion, channelling any profits towards “humanitarian foundations”, which we can all agree is a good thing to be a-doing. An early release we have here called Keskipäivän Hetken Sumea Vaillinaisuus (SONG 06) from the great Ilpo Väisänen, Finnish electronic hero of Pan Sonic fame. Title translates as The Fuzzy Emptiness of the Midday Moment, a phrase which may sound non-committal or abstract, but there’s nothing vague about the creator’s intention which expresses itself in words on the press release… “I want to point out that there is a genocide currently happening in Europe,” rails our stern Finn. “Damn it, it’s here now.” Impressively, despite subject matter of conflict and oppression, there’s not much real violence in his steely and disturbing music here, comprising terse and clipped statements of non-specific nature, clean lines, very little fuzz or distortion…amounting to a vision, or at least a glimpse, of an unwelcome scenario and landscape which he sees with terrible clarity. With an unblinking stare, the music continues to pull us into the central core. A short mini-album spinning at 45 rpm delivers less than 23 mins of music, but its concision is part of the overall statement. Good it be that musicians can contribute to the propagation of some truth in our lives, at a time when our politicians continue to play their malign games of obfuscation, spin, and widespread dishonesty. Ilpo Väisänen hasn’t been flooding the world with excessive amounts of self-indulgent product, and in fact we haven’t heard from him since Syntetisaattori Musiikkia Kuopiosta in 2016, but when he does make utterance there’s iron in his words. (06/09/2022)