Violent and fierce noise assault on Nothing But The World (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 286-4), a cassette from the duo who call themselves Ampscent. The team of Jacek Doroszenko and Marcin Sipiora want to have it both ways – they want the cold alienation of industrial power-noise, and they also want to exhibit influences from club and techno, so their sharp-edged take on Cold Wave is laced with plenty of beats. No club in Europe would welcome this very extreme form of disjunctive noise, even more incisive than recent efforts from Kotra, but Ampscent struggle bravely on; the title track alone drags us through more harsh territories than is conceptually feasible in the space of 16:43 mins, indicating their world-view (refracted through a hundred broken TV sets and a malfunctioning social media app) is a nightmare of distorted information, through which leaks an endless spew of unpleasant facts. It’s hard to get a purchase on this near-incoherent music, but the very form it takes can be read as a reflection of how bad things are in the modern world. (27/02/2023)
Heavy political history lesson from Brandkommando on his 1989 (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 281-2) album…the cover art may help to clue you in, but if not the press notes helpfully explain that it’s about the Christmas Revolution that took place in late 1989 in Romania, of which one outcome was the deposition of Nicolae Ceaușescu. As serious scholars (unlike me) of history know, this was part of a wider pattern of civil unrest involving other countries in Eastern Europe, leading eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Brandkommando, Karol Wachowski has been making socio-political records since 2005, with titles like Pax Vobiscum and Time Of Violence, some of them using highly objectionable imagery for cover art. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt when he claims to be “attacking ideologies stemming from propaganda in authoritarian systems”, but it’s awful to see musicians are still using death camp photographs on their records. Brandkommando may represent a diehard school of power-electronics maniacs in Poland, but 1989 isn’t an overpowering wall of feedback and shriek, often achieving its unsettling effects by very simple (albeit very insistent) means. That said, most of you may tune in and hear nothing but a guy shouting slogans and harsh rants over a degraded, abrasive blanket of noise. (27/02/2023)