Swedish droner Jarl continues his experiments with process art and probing those areas of the mind where no man should venture. Today’s item Receptor Radiation (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 333-2) isn’t too far away from his previous conceptual monsters, which have dealt with such sensitive areas as mental illness, hearing defects, and assorted psychological terrors. I think this time the music may be reflecting on the way the human nervous system processes information, and thus determines how we mortals apprehend the world through vision and/or sound. As ever with Jarl, he reduces this proposition to something quite primal and fundamental, tending to see all human interaction as nothing more than a basic exchange of transmitted and received signals. It can leave the listener with no room to negotiate as we enter the intense world of drone and mesmerising sequencers pulsating away inexorably. I do love Jarl’s music, but I can’t stick with it for very long before it makes me uncomfortable and nauseous. (09/01/2025)
Escape From Warsaw here with Transit / The Specter of War (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 343-2), a very poignant title given the disastrous state of world affairs, and now in 2026 that “specter” is looming even closer in everyone’s hearts and minds. Karol Su/Ka proudly describes his hard-hitting music as “lo fi distorted electronic beat” on the cover; only the records of Kotra come close to delivering this degree of steely punch, landing with precision on chin of enemy wearing army boots. The record label are always looking for material that yokes together dance beats with the powerful surge of “dark industrial”, and here’s a record that aligns perfectly with that plan. The militant subtext of this album surfaces not only in the title, but in songs like ‘Panzerbrigadier’, the relentless forward-march mode of almost every track, and even the sound of gunfire represented as synthesised stabs. Drum machines have rarely seemed so ominous. (09/01/2025)
We’re still in the “war zone” with Bunker Musick (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 342-2), a heavy-going record credited to Düsseldorf…in fact it’s a German-Polish collaboration, conceived by Tom Axer of Düsseldorf and played by Elektrokraft, the German duo of Leander Rönick and Patrick Woitaschek who have been releasing their brand of “EBM” electronic music since 2017. I hope this record is not sailing too close to the sort of territory previously staked out by other industrial and “dark folk” players, and I worry the swastika may surface at any moment, but no – it seems Bunker Musick is intended as a story-telling piece that depicts a symbolic bunker of the mind, a “place from which there is no return”. It might refer to memories of past wars or to current conflicts in Europe, say the creators. Hmm. Not an easy listen, if you have no appetite for strident vocal chants set over equally strident electric music, and the samples of jubilant cheering crowds aren’t helping much. We heard Tom Axer in 2022 on the very melodramatic Amok, with his drummer Jacek Sokołowski. (09/01/2025)
Entering a mystical and unfathomable realm with the album by Galaktyka Mięsa, a band name which translates as “galaxy of flesh”…yes, there are still people in the world who worship at the altar of David Cronenberg and wish for nothing more than to recreate the themes of his 1980s movies such as Videodrome or Scanners, in audio terms. However, there’s a lot more going on in the strange groovular indentations of Lejek Bólu (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 341-2), evident even to non-Polish speakers. These songs are mostly intense, chaotic outbursts of strange screes of information, situated somewhere in a nightmarish version of experimental techno with added electronic noise-mayhem, plus the declamatory vocals which seem to be reaching us through a distorted telephone receiver with their urgent, cryptic messages. Quite untypical of the slow drone ambient-scapes which often feature on this label, this Galaktyka Mięsa item is packed with teeming life-forms. The incomprehensible press release suggests influences from shamans, apocalyptic imagery, and even Korean culture (which apparently is very close to Polish culture – perhaps they share a certain pessimistic frame of mind). This might be a duo of Jakub Knoll and Łukasz Bejnar from Wroclaw, and either they have composed soundtracks for troubling futuristic movies, or they have a strong desire to do so. (09/01/2025)