Uruk here with their fourth long-player, The Great Central Sun (ICI D’AILLEURS MT17) which has a cosmic Tangerine-Dream-styled cover and two side-long tracks within. The duo of Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo have some connections to that lineage of UK underground music that includes Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and especially Coil; Thighpaulsandra appeared on their later records Astral Disaster and Musick to Play in the Dark, while Pupillo from Zu is one of the main members of This Immortal Coil, the excessive supergroup tribute band that’s been active since 2009, presumably pandering to the legions of long-standing Coil fanatics. Uruk’s Mysterium Coniunctionis which we heard here in 2018 was as flat and boring as today’s drear-fest, but at least it had the added dimension of alluding to Jung, psychology, and unknown mental conditions. Here the duo are not even referring to anything specific, and simply cloak everything in quasi-esoteric riddles, hoping to be mistaken for students of Dr Dee. Slow-moving, tuneless, and solemn ambient drone will be the portion of all who listen; not especially inventive sonically, and hopelessly lacking if you crave some sense of internal structure. Timothy Lewis, the Welsh creator who is Thighpaulsandra, has been much more challenging; whatever happened to the determined, awkward spirit that made the outrageous Practical Electronics for Editions Mego in 2019? (24/10/2023)
Emanuele Porcinai here under his WSR guide – Dicasmia (STRAY SIGNALS STRAY011 / WSR002) came out as a 12-incher and contains seven reasonably short and punchy tracks, and indeed the opening tracks are real “bruisers” – aiming for the jaw with well-placed puncheroos and seeking to wrest control from the attacker by means of flying kicks to the heart. ‘Flatwound’, ‘Aria’ and ‘Thrust’ do tend to leave us gasping for breath with their concreto-beats and aggressive aspect, but thereafter the record may slope downwards into another dimension with slower drones, unnatural sounds, heavily abstracted tones that have passed through the filtration unit for a few blood-letting circuits. On ‘Hindered’ and ‘Within These Walls’ you may even find something resembling a melody in among the dissonant notes clashed together for maximal depresso-emotional-impact. Porcinai may use samples and electronics, and on this occasion I think we can make out bass guitars and cellos, but it’s the skill behind the knobs and dials that’s of interest. He would like to be seen as a “composer and acoustic engineer”, and a “researcher”. He runs this label in Berlin and sometimes appears as Aperture with his sister Elisabetta, who is a poet and an artist, and were heard in 2023 on their Stanze record. Cover art shows a pastoral scene with two beasts grazing peacefully in a field, but the array is being disrupted with overprinted red lines, as if some architect were planning to build an evil power station to transmit evil signals across the land. Which might in fact be WSR’s true intention. (24/10/2023)