VOLCANO – ‘FOOL 2 THA GAME’

Volcano features Cody from Putrid Stu, Murderman and Sanguisugabogg, among others. Their debut EP dishes up an inexorable meeting/mugging of heaving beatdown Hardcore bombast and Death/Gore weight and scale, riddled with aptly pitched samples from ‘Bad Lieutenant’ (1992) – brutalising and violent with an outsider down and out mindset and murder on the mind, ousting rats and turning enemy cranium to pulp – on the warpath of boogie beatdown inhumanity! Super loud, crisp phat production, dry scooped banger guitars crush the shit out of you in chugging, muted blunt abandon, thugger drumming kicking your ass in muscular deathrolling groove, marauding breaks and outrageously dialed snare ala Goregrind, steamroller Bass, junkyard dog vocal. Alienated, castigating Beatdown with little to lose or gain. Snitch heads on a swivel, look the fuck out! Killer, perfect artwork from Pierre Braindead, too. Marks beware.

Daze

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DON BRADSHAW-LEATHER – ‘DISTANCE BETWEEN US’

Don Bradshaw-Leather was an avant-classical sorcerer from the golden age of Brit-weird, but aside from this extraordinary work of entrepreneurial art which earned him an entry on the fabled Nurse With Wound list, he appears to have left little mark on history, musical or otherwise. Recorded in a purpose-built, CBS Records-funded studio then self-released after the label’s execs heard it and threw up their hands in horror, ‘Distance Between Us’ is the last word in Byzantine sonic overreach, a record which, from that alarming cover photo (Attila Csihar eat your heart out) to its sheer vertigo-inducing ambition, oozes bloody-minded lone wolf iconoclasm from every grime-encrusted pore. Comprised of four side-length epics pieced together using multitrack tape, the album unfolds like the seditious acid-fried flipside to Deep Purple and the RPO’s bombastic ‘Concerto For Group And Orchestra’, each track a deceptively haphazard assemblage of distorted Hammond organ, tribal drumming, frantic Liszt-on-crystal-meth piano arpeggios and dive-bombing string squalls that lacerate the soundfield like a flock of razor-winged nightingales. Fifty years on from its original release, it’s tempting to describe this astounding aural bijouterie as ahead of its time, but that presupposes its time will eventually come, something I doubt even Don Bradshaw-Leather in his wildest flights of fancy ever envisaged. Listen and be confounded.

Cold Spring

LIKE WEEDS / BASTARD NOISE SPLIT – ‘HUMAN FREE EDEN’

Fearsome split cassette release from two of the most vital artists in the old guard of the international Harsh Noise scene. Like Weeds piledrives vibrating synthetic coils into your fear response centre to conjure the lizard hate for the ‘other’ – Brute Industrial action informed by the bleeding edge of Harsh Noise, with some reference to Powernoise and mutilated Hip Hop. Isolating, alienating, frightening. Protracted blasts of disrhythmic Noise erupt amid a fetid ambience, reverberations inside a factory of unknowable and reprehensible post-brexit productions, bristling edges of Bass pulses leaving contaminated grit and soot in fresh, deep wounds. Sanderson’s oeuvre always bears the indelible marks of urbanity and disillusion, and his contributions here are no exception. The Bastard Noise then inflicts a mortal wound on the psyche of Mancruel, from behind the master control panel of the Trogotronic battle computer they loose a staggered rhythmical audial barrage, a kosmische thermonuclear salvo to strike the surface of HIS world with Alien weaponry in sonic swordplay, sabres rattle/death rattle as the last of Bastard is repaid it’s fucking debt in kind!! 20 minutes + of richly designed Insect Electronics retaliation from TROG, meticulous Skullscapes to envelope in ambience and constrict in merciless signal abusing Harsh Noise, paced with baited breath, slowly unfurling the muted sonic troposphere and freak-out pulsing force of synthesizer mutation meltdown audia amid airlock atmospherics, peppered with outraged primitive vocal outcry. Essential tape.

Orb Tapes

AFRIKAN SCIENCES – ‘GENOME BENTLEY’S HERITAGE DRUM CORP’

In the domain of left-field electronic music, few artists cut such an elusively idiosyncratic figure as Eric Douglas Porter aka Afrikan Sciences. His recondite, Afrofuturist slant on house and its adjacent forms positions him in the exalted company of individualists like Jlin, Zamilska and Sam Shackleton whose work bears such a unique stamp of provenance, it practically births its own subgenre. Following hot on the heels of February’s astonishing ‘2220022 (Tiger Dynamics)’ (which, in typically capricious fashion, Porter deleted from his catalogue three days after it was released), ‘Genome Bentley’s Heritage Drum Corp’ is another fabulously out-there portfolio of possibility that reconfigures house to the point where it’s easier to describe in architectural rather than musical terms. Of course, this being Afrikan Sciences, the geometry of these precarious constructions is strictly non-Euclidean, each track a jazz-gilded labyrinth of illusion and improbability, like an M. C. Escher lithograph brought to angular sonic life. Booby-trapped with rapid-cycling time signatures (nothing so trite as a four-on-the-floor DJ tool here) and sampledelic whorls of every conceivable abstraction, this is music that, even at its most minimal (‘3 Things’, for example, is little more than an acidulated rumble of bass and percussion that spools out for almost 11 minutes), remains as resistant to decryption as the Voynich manuscript. It’s also an absolute fucking blast. If you’re an Afrikan Sciences virgin, pop your cherry with this then work back until you hit 2014’s twin masterpieces ‘Theta Wave Brain Sync’ and ‘Circuitous’. Trip isn’t the word.

The Student Body Presents

BLOOD STAINED CONCRETE DEMO 2018

Blood Stained Concrete’s first demo, furiously nihilistic Grindcore with a carbonized pallor of burnt out urban mindset and hopelessness, with Hardcore and true Power Violence influences. Domineering crushing Guitars working out nasty chord patterns in old Hardcore shapes, girded to grinding Bass & tooth smashing blast/stomp Drum amalgam, blunted out ultra-pissed ham sandwich vocal. Devotional single footed blast beat deluge and storming tom heavy pit-killer parts, raw and loud production. Brilliantly simple and excellently executed Grindcore heavily influenced by Excruciating Terror and In Disgust – The heart-broken oldies samples between tracks really bleaken the tone in that unique west-coast way, each one a rose thorn to slip between your ribs and bleed your vitals amidst slabs of sledging Core. Great demo, I’ll be checking out their more recent 2019 demo next.

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HARVEY SUTHERLAND – ‘BOY’

Recent LP from Australia’s Harvey Sutherland, which made it’s way into listening rotation from the bandcamp recommendation page. The Werwolf Fuzz Whore and I threw this on for a hungover burn amidst the fallout of a night’s previous endeavors at Desertfest, and we were both quickly ensnared and enraptured (and dare I say ensmokened) by the smooth, saccharine grooves. Jazzy futuristic Funk quickened by the gods – a hyperbolic slide into an obscure, resplendent amalgam of Donald Fagen neato jazzer Soft Rock and extraloud electro-disco-Efunk, florid and florescent with bright melodies and offbeat introvert lyrical focus, misty kraut rocking motorik drive and punch with keys in exploratory mode and vaporizing butter bass ghee grooves. Richly dynamic photonic fusion Funk. Syrupy, meticulous, with a joie-de-vivre that floats on a vaporous breeze. ‘Boy’ is a nerd delight of AOR/Funk/Fusion preening and perfectionism. Extra cool.

Bandcamp

HESITATION WOUNDS DEMO

An alkaline blast of melted Hardcore fury and Fastcore kung fu force from the US – hyper fast drumming on speed, gurning noise rocking riffs and mangled chord shuffle in ear-shredding treble extremity, vocal derision and insensitivity encased in hissing noise, tape echoes bounce like ricochets, lithe yet punchy Bass impenetrable. A perfect demo, totally overblown violence! I downloaded this thing off of TERMINAL ESCAPE years ago, and it’s remained one of my favourite Hardcore demos of all time, one that I return to again and again. Incidentally if you’re unaware of the above mentioned blog, click the link immediately and check it out. THE best tape blog ever in my humble opinion. The amount of KILLER shit on there is just insane, each post involves lots of scans of J-Cards and inserts, memories and recollections of live events from up and down the west coast, and insights into the sounds within that I wholeheartedly steal from in style and execution. The Wizard is doing the fuckin’ lords work over there. Long may he reign!

Bandcamp