Not a few assorted horrors and monstrosities in this month’s Zoharum envelope, I must say…let’s start with Sect7 and Obsessiveness (ZOHAR 291-2), and it’s the debut full-length from this female audio-visual creator who’s from Lodz and may be named Kat in real life. This label also put out her Subliminal Stimuli single in 2020. Sect7 is preoccupied with dream-states, trances, mental illnesses and the clinical dissection of same, parlaying these preoccupations into seven punchy tracks of electro-horror more or less in the industrial mode, with the addition of “EBM” beats and rhythms which bring her music an inch or two closer to the dance floor. Her troubling themes are further illustrated with the judicious use of TV and movie dialogue samples, an old trick which goes back to the 1980s if not earlier, but Sect7 does bring a certain frisson with these ghastly hints of fear, submission, nightmare states and such like, using fragments of breathless and terrorised voices to convey distress and helplessness. Although it’s menacing music, it’s also oddly upbeat with its hammering drum sounds and remorseless execution, as though Sect7 were doing her best to exorcise these unwelcome demons, and challenge their existence, rather than wallow in the misery they may inflict on her troubled soul. Cover art photo-collages also contain more than a hint of physical violence – bombs, bullets, and steel. (13/12/2023)
Harmony Of Struggle here with their second album Brutal Aesthetics (ZOHAR 310-2), following on from their 2022 horror Tearing Your Mind To Pieces. I confess I am still finding absolutely nothing to enjoy or recommend in Neithan’s brand of noisy power electronics, nor in the visceral cover art and confrontational track titles, with multiple references to suicide, despair, pain, and futility. If Sect7 is flirting with dark themes, as least she exhibits a modicum of empathy for the human race; Harmony Of Struggle would rather annihilate all of us, I suspect. The label take a different view, persuaded that HOS’s music has “gained a lot in sound…thanks to the new production” since 2022; further, that he’s engaged in some sort of sociological survey by examining the “techniques of manipulation” that result in these mass suicides and acts of cruelty, some of them given legitimacy by societal laws. Hmm! That’s as maybe, but it’s hard to make out the underlying message when our professor is shouting brutal obscenities at us through a megaphone, in a sea of distorted noise. It’s degrading to the audience; I’m making a mental note to not review any further records from this Neithan. (13/12/2023)