THE LAST SOUND – ‘VEERED’

The Last Sound is the nom de plume of Barry M, co-conspirator (with Magnetize) in Whirling Hall Of Knives, whose dissident exsanguinating techno has put the constitution of many a seasoned club-goer to the sternest test. In simple terms, WHOK rip while The Last Sound ravishes, and ‘Veered’, a previously unreleased album recorded between 2006 and 2010, documents the forging of the latter’s own distinctly less confrontational sonic identity. 9-minute scene-setter ‘Drugged On The Rugged Plain’ (no-one knows their way round an evocative title quite like TLS) captures this artful evolution in real time, morphing from tunnelling acid house to zero gravity psychedelia as gaseous whorls of synth inexorably envelop the rhythm track like a swarm of iridescent damselflies. It’s an arresting opening gambit but what follows is a transmission direct from the motherlode, nine bolts of the sweetest, sourest, most pigeonhole resistant psych-pop you’re ever likely to hear. ‘Outskirting’ seasons the cut of ‘Darklands’ era Jesus And Mary Chain with the thrust of early New Order, Barry icing the cake with a vocal so blissfully languid, it makes Kevin Shields sound like Flowdan. ‘Regenerative’, by contrast, is a gorgeous peal of peach-tinged ambience redolent of A.R. Kane at their most diaphonous, while the stunning ‘Kicked In’ flirts with both the astral and abyssal planes, a fully laden bass juggernaut ploughing full tilt into a grotto of fizzing guitar and synth. Utterly untarnished by the passage of time, ‘Veered’, offers a fascinating glimpse into the formative years of one of avant-pop’s most mercurial artists. Superb.

In anticipation of the album’s release on 22/02/24, Cruel Nature Records have kindly furnished GK with an exclusive video stream of ‘Underling’. Watch the action then head straight over to Bandcamp to grab a cassette or a digital download.

Cruel Nature Recordings

 

ANDREJA SALPE & OLIVER MITKOVSKI – ‘POETRONIKA’

Skopje-based imprint PMG has been resequencing the genome of Slavic jazz for more than five years, but in a catalogue packed sardine tight with left turns, this audacious new venture from arch electronicist Andreja Salpe and actor Oliver Mitkovski is unquestionably one of the sharpest. Marrying shady spoken word (the word in this case being post-war Macedonian poetry) to acid-flecked minimal deep house, ‘Poetronika’ is the new paradigm of concepts that shouldn’t work but absolutely do, a slow-burning 80-minute art attack that unspools like the soundtrack to some low budget ultra-noir detective flick. Key to the album’s atmospheric gut-punch is the riveting dynamic between its creators, two artists who, on paper at least, appear to have precious little in common. Masters of syncretic dreamweaving, the duo assemble a sequence of interlocking tableaux, Mitkovski’s shadowy intonations streaking Salpe’s lambent beatscapes with the grit and grain of the dankest hip-hop. Reductive though it is to single out individual tracks from a project designed for unbroken live performance, the astonishing ‘Nataša Celaskoska’ is ‘Poetronika’ in microcosm. Ominous syncopations and an aromatic corkscrewing acid line are pebbledashed with notes from Salpe’s omnipresent Fender Rhodes while Mitkovski lurks in the shadows, waxing cryptically lyrical with the scuffed, taciturn diction of a barfly reciting passages from a Raymond Chandler novel. Evocative as the setting of a subterranean sun, ‘Poetronika’ offers escape-proof sanctuary from a deepening winter. Bask in its dark radiance.

PMGJazz

TOLLUND MEN – ‘DEDICATED TO P.F. LACENAIRE’

One of the scant few Tollund Men releases hosted on Bandcamp, available from the excellent label Total Black. Singular, seedy and disconcerting, Tollund Men create a world of sound drawn from an 80’s psychogeography, a sonic mass of ultra lo-fi Post Punk, Dark Wave and Industrial, casting a ruined landscape of the perverse and insane topography of man’s innerspace. These four tracks sound like Throbbing Gristle covering Soft Cell, lacquered black Bass pulses and crunchy click percussion slathered in echo distortion working a slow to mid-paced rhythmic dirge, vocal groaning and whispering, jizzing into the vantablack, with gloriously fuzzy synths swelling and swaying with ambient, haunting, downcast melodies, glistening with in-the-red bleeding noise. The final track abandons melody entirely and we exit with a foul, moody trudge of swollen minimal synth noise and thumping kicks. Dreamy, anguished, shadowswept, darkside horny. Dig it.

Total Black

TYRANNUS – ‘SERPENTSLAYER’ EP

Tyrannus’ 2018 EP ‘Serpentslayer’, three odes to Summoning and Darrell K Sweet. Prideful, dusky no MIDI/VST Dungeon Synth from the Pagoda Mast sect, now no longer active. Dedicated to heroes lost in bloodshed battling wyverns, I presume. Meditative, rousing Synth patch sounds, sparse beats plodding beneath, mournful yearning for the strength to topple evil and bury it’s seed deep in the heaving earth… iconoclasm and high fantasy balefully rendered in spectral Synths. Pagoda Mast having fallen fallow, Phantom Spire now playing host to Tyrannus Einhorn’s works in Black Metal and Dungeon Synth (I’m not certain he still works with Harsh Noise Walls). Pass these mossy graves and pay respects.

Pagoda Mast

RUHAIL QAISAR – ‘FATIMA’

Ruhail Qaisar expands and transmutes his work as previous Harsh Noise entity SISTER into a rumbling, fearsome, semiotic Dark Ambient noise engine on ‘Fatima’, applying an alchemical aesthetic with supremely impressive results. The album yawns open with ephemeral, disturbing spoken word poetry (a drugged voice from Thee End Commune…?) atop lingering Bass pulses like gently threatening Power Electronics in menacing audial feedback. Tension mounts through layering synthesis and a vast array of inert earthy sampling, spatially muddled to obfuscate, bucolic and bubonic, adorned with futuristic science fiction drones and sparse geysers of sulfuric Harsh Noise burst, restrained ambient textures grow and envelop in calming exhalation, mellifluous expanses of abandoned melody… an expression of restless human landscapes draped in fear and violence, at once confrontational and powerful, yet soft and yielding, like a predatory animal purring in an urban darkness, fire reflected in it’s azure feline eyes. Mesmeric and frightening Ambient beyond convenient classification.

Danse Noire

VARIOUS ARTISTS – ‘SPECTRUM’

A prime mover in the resurgence of cassette culture, Newcastle-based imprint Cruel Nature boasts a catalogue of near unrivalled sonic eclecticism and its commitment to championing outsider music is nowhere better exemplified than on ‘Spectrum’, a gem-studded 23-track anthology compiled to mark the label’s 10th anniversary. Featuring artists drawn from an enviably deep talent pool and sequenced like the tasting menu of a cutting-edge restaurant, the album bodyswerves through a plethora of contrasting styles without once losing focus, highlights arriving thick and fast throughout its marathon 110-minute runtime. In the banger camp, VHS¥DEATH’S ‘Sacrifice’ is a hard-charging, Berghain-ready headrush, whilst the vertiginous ‘Nu-shunting’ by GK favourites Whirling Hall Of Knives, splits industrial techno’s atom sending quarks and gluons of percussive fallout skittering across the dancefloor. Otherworldliness abounds here too. The Durutti Column-gone-slowcore filigree of Charlie Butler’s sepia-tinted ‘Eagle’s Splendour’ is a transport of introspective delight but Dublin-based experimentalist Katie Gerardine O’Neill steals the strangeness show and then some with ‘Along The Shoreline’, a mind-warping odyssey into deconstructed chamber jazz that dazes and confuses in equally large measure. Elsewhere though, far darker forces are at work. ‘I Have Cherished Our Season Of Friendship’ from Esmé Lousie Newman’s Petrine Cross project is doom-laden ambient black metal at its most balefully cinematic and if blunt force trauma lights your candle, Lovely Wife’s bass-heavy sludge blowout ‘Letting Go’ delivers its payload with all the subtlety of a backstreet kneecapping. Packed sardine-tight with brilliance, and with all profits going to youth autism charity The Toby Henderson Trust, ‘Spectrum’ offers an unmissable glimpse into Cruel Nature’s singular soundworld. Here’s to the next 10 years.

Cruel Nature Records

SALAC – ‘BURIED’

Avon Terror Corps affiliates Clíona Ní Laoi and Max Kelan Pearce, aka Salac, are going down in unrighteous flames. Forged in the decelerating isolation of lockdown, the duo’s third and apparently final album is a grievous abrasion, the grim soot-blackened churn of their previous two outings taken to its (patho)logical extreme. As demises go, it’s about as ugly as it gets. Eschewing industrial music’s more frenetic tendencies, ‘Buried’ obliterates at the sluggish yet inexorable pace of an oil slick, filling every crevice of headspace with thick sulphuric slurry to which resistance is futility defined. Catastrophically mistitled opener ‘Elixir Of Life’ serves immediate notice of the horrors to come. Ballasting mephitic squalls of bass distortion with an injuriously colossal kick drum, it seems purpose built to target the pain receptors, a supposition reinforced by the agonised screams that circle just within earshot on the track’s greasy periphery. ‘Unforeseen Demise’ is similarly pitiless, its rust-sloughing grind accentuated by a diseased polemic from Pearce who hectors into the void like a cyborg street philosopher with seconds left to live. Think a doomed Psychic Graveyard stripped of their smirks and you’re on roughly the same cancer ward as this cadaverous creation. Ni Laoi, by constrast, is a specialist in juxtaposing the ghostly with the ghastly. On ‘Bask’, her narcotic siren song is the winding sheet around an egregiously overdriven bassline, whilst ‘Caoin’ is an ambient dream turned nightmare, the plaintive lament of a seraph tapped forever in the fetid confines of a sulphur mine. Salac have checked out with a seismic death rattle. Buried? You will be.

Bandcamp

PABLO GĪW & MARIEL ROBERTS – ‘KRYO’

The use of jazz instrumentation for non-jazz purposes is scarcely a novel concept but ‘Kryo’, the astonishing debut collaborative album from trumpet virtuoso Pablo Gīw and experimental cellist Mariel Roberts, looks so far beyond existing horizons it’s almost completely devoid of reference points. Trips seldom come much stranger than this. Key to the record’s unearthly, decryption-resistant vibe is the battery of extended techniques and electronic processing employed by both musicians, each alchemically generated sound dubbed, dissolved and recrystallised until the relationship between it and its parent instrument is near impossible to deduce. 15-minute opener ‘Icicle / Carámbano’ is an exercise in meticulously curated instability that pairs flocculent vapour trails of over and underblown trumpet with a loop of deadened pizzicato that rumbles like the engine of an idling bulldozer. Gradually, the Sturm und Drang deliquesces into a watery expanse of drone, its muffled percussive undercurrent reminiscent of Hieroglyphic Being’s experiments in (a)rhythmic cubism, albeit slowed to a torturous crawl. ‘Japanese Creation Myth’ is uncannier still, a fragmentary collage of thuds and groans that comes within a hair’s breadth of ambient techno before collapsing in on itself, and although closing epic ‘When The Spell Actually Worked’ trades bump-in-the-night scare tactics for fusion reactor ambience, it remains strikingly baleful, dissonant tendrils of cello and trumpet intertwining ever tighter until their tones eventually coalesce and become indistinguishable. ‘Kryo’ is more than just un-jazz; it’s a gateway to unseen worlds. Stunning.

Bandcamp

OF ONE / WHIRLING HALL OF KNIVES – ‘RECOIL’ / ‘GREYWASH’

Essential double header that unites the prodigious talents of Irish underground legend Alan O’Boyle, aka Of One, and mercurial noiseniks Whirling Hall Of Knives for two epic excursions through electronic music’s storm-lashed hinterlands where the usual rules of engagement are broken with gleeful impunity. Of One fires the first broadside with ‘Recoil’, a menacing deep techno leviathan that pivots around the most incendiary acid line since Barnt’s remix of C.P.I.’s ‘Proceso’. Burrowing through a thick loam of distortion and bass viscera like the Graboid from Tremors, it periodically breaks cover to snap its scabrous jaws, spatters of caustic 303 eating away at the track’s juddering wheelbase until it comes perilously close to disintegrating. It’s a face-chewing monster of a tune that simply begs to be cranked through a skyscraper-high system, but no less formidable is WHOK’s astonishing ‘Greywash’, the sonic equivalent of a malign Lovecraftian cryptid with more tentacles than an octopus farm. For the first half of its 15-minute runtime a fractured rhythm is slowly strangled to death by thistly creepers of static like Skee Mask getting out-jammed by Rafael Anton Irisarri. Almost without warning the chokehold is broken by a skyrocketing blast of superheated Galaxian-esque electro before a plangent ambient coda irradiates the soundfield and silence finally descends. So good it should probably be illegal. Indulge.

Cruel Nature Records

TUJIKO NORIKO – ‘CRÉPUSCULE I & II’

The genre-fluid music of Osaka-based sorceress Tujiko Noriko has long played footsie with unearthly beauty but her empyrean new album is something else entirely, a masterpiece of weightless ambient worldbuilding that mines the same rarefied strata as canonical landmarks like ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ and ‘The Disintegration Loops’. Fittingly dedicated to late Editions Mego head Peter Rehberg, ‘Crépuscule’ stakes its claim to transcendence from the first crystalline note of its mammoth 106-minute runtime, Noriko stretching skywards to lacerate the exosphere allowing rivulets of polychromatic sound to bleed through. Wintery electronics that glisten like starlit icicles form the bedrock of tracks like early highlight ‘The Promenade Vanishes’, yet the primary source of their massive gravitational field is Noriko’s extraordinary voice, a seraphic bliss-blitzed soprano, light as a hummingbird feather, impactful as a howitzer shell. Wisely, she deploys its magic sparingly, punctuating her airborne exhalations with lacunae of nebulous drift, the sound spread so thin at certain points, it’s a micron away from absolute silence. As Crépuscule turns for home, its beatific dreamscapes begin to distend and take on a darker, more amorphous form that demands deep and attentive listening. ‘Golden Dusk’, for example, blends fractured peals of luminescent synth with a plethora of apparently incongruous field recordings (shrieking toddlers, the distant rush of wind) to head-spinning effect, and by the time closing epic ‘Don’t Worry, I’ll Be Here’ fades to black, the sense of rapt disorientation is almost palpable. It may seem premature to hail ‘Crépuscule’ as ambient music’s new high-water mark, but aficionados of the beatless arts should set sail for its gilded archipelago without delay. Sublime.

Editions Mego

GOD IS WAR – ‘PREDATION PERFECTED’

God Is War’s modular Industrial complex continues to crush all in it’s path to electronics ascendant supremacy with ‘Predation Perfected’. M.Chami has elevated this particular corner of Noise-adjacent Electronic music to such aggressive, dizzying heights as to render much competition invisible. Militarist psychedelic Electronics, cryptic beat patterns emerge from entropic modular waters shimmering with warping audial toxin and variably mutate, dropping bass kicks like massive spent shell casings, claps reverberate at unpredictable intervals through beds of abraded granulated Bass and appropriated drugged sample, modular synthesis layer application and development like military virus in secret compound blacksite. Combat stimulant ambience to build tension and nervousness, chill paranoiac, smoked out and poised to wreak havoc. Refined and more accurate than previous releases, ‘Predation Perfected’ stalks from the shadows in beaded-sweat death squad calm and readiness, bristling with illegal psychotropic weaponry. God Is War is an AC-130J Ghostrider, far out of sight and well within lethal range. Murderous.

Closed Casket Activities

BASTARD NOISE & MERZBOW – ‘RETRIBUTION BY ALL OTHER CREATURES’

Eric Wood and Masami Akita collaborate again following 1996’s ‘Voice Pie / Bastard Noise’ split, an early transmutative release in the Man is the Bastard Noise canon, and a few other tracks, notably ‘Killing Friends’ from the intimidating and frankly amazing ‘Our Earth’s Blood IV’. ‘Retribution By All Other Creatures’ finds the two creating an audially and spiritually cohesive statement of Animal Rights, summoning the collective survival will of non-human life on earth to deliver 4 litanies of humble misanthrope outrage, delivered in HI Def surround sound and heavy high grade card stock courtesy of Relapse Records. Harsh Noise, Power Electronics, Death Industrial, Black Ambient… each a flinty arrowhead in the arsenal, sharpened with singular intent – savage reprisals against mancruel, a total ear-bleeding tirade against HIM. TROG Prog ambient Kosmische overdriven arrangements, ambient slow burn punctuated with harrowing bursts of temporal shift Harsh Noise, volume accent pitch spikes unbearable, sub-Bass frequencies hulking and steaming beneath. Tracks one and two carry Woods’ unbelievably impassioned vocal emanations bursting from seething electronic squall and rhythmic dynamic synthesis, whispering and bellowing the furrow plough of man’s ruin. Pitiless and poignant haywire signals and looping feedback of hazard alarms, brute half melodic passages of alien synth weapon discharge, arranged to mete violence to the spiritually blind and stoke internal awakening in those who care to see. Merzbow’s hand(wing/claw/hoof…) is felt more distinctly in the second half of the collaboration, bubbling mimicry of avian and ungulate cries channeled through imperious Harsh Noise, slithering frequencies emerging from loops and escaping, furthering blackly psychedelic events within the mind’s eye guided by chittering, skittering, mimetic audial event, machines become animals borne of terror and beauty,- a disquieting barrage, a mayhap of natural un-intended art and a clarion call of wakefulness in a world of dead minds and calcifying hearts. A vital collaboration.

Relapse Records

KATATONIC SILENTIO – ‘LES CHEMINS DE L’INCONNU’

Katatonic Silentio is the alter ego of Milan-based radiophonic researcher and sound sculptor Mariachiara Troianiello whose recondite production witchery smashes the safety glass separating genres like techno and broken beat enabling a host of thorny new hybrids to coalesce and propagate. The feature length follow-up to last year’s febrile ‘Tabula Rasa’ EP, ‘Les Chemins De L’Inconnu’ is a breathtaking tour de force; dub techno centrifuged to a darkly iridescent elixir composed only of its most volatile and astringent elements. Beats are routinely decentralised and although a dauntless DJ might be tempted to drop one of these lysergic bombs into a 4am set (‘Dans Le Cadre Du Relief’ stalks the corridors of inner space with the levitational cadence of prime Porter Ricks), this is music primarily for the mind rather than the body. Throughout, KT’s gift for labyrinthine sound design is nothing short of revelatory, a fact nowhere better exemplified than on the album’s quartet of dread-drizzled ambient cuts. Too often the insipid afterthoughts of an artist bereft of ideas, here they span the width of the foreground; lagoons of churning isolationist murk that reveal swathes of microscopic new detail with each successive playback. The epicentre of this magisterial mindquake though is ‘Hypothèse D’Hypnose’, an 11-minute acid dub nightmare that recalls the grim post-apocalyptic doomscapes explored by Samuel Kerridge circa ‘Always Offended Never Ashamed’. Remorseless in its crushing of convention, ‘Les Chemins De L’Inconnu’ is the Luna marble capstone on another stellar year for left-field electronic music. Listen deep.

ITLP13

 

CLEARED – ‘OF ENDLESS LIGHT’

It may seem counterintuitive, but the closer music approximates to silence, the more forceful its likely impact. It’s a fact plainly not lost on Chicago-based duo Cleared whose breathtaking new album is the turbid, thrice-distilled essence of quietude, an inchoate foam of dimensionless un-sound that enters via the pores rather than the auditory canal. At a considerable stretch, one COULD argue ‘Of Endless Light’ falls within the parameters of dub techno, but only by implication, its signature rhythm-centric sparsity smeared and splayed to the very brink of breakdown. Proceedings commence with the ultra-refracted blur of ‘First Sleep’ which crests the horizon like a gust of smog across moonlit moorland. Fragments of wounded melody bleed through the blanketing static until decomposition inevitably sets in and the track slowly expires to a mo(u)rning chorus of axes being sharpened on a distant grindstone. By contrast, ‘Pulse’, ‘Dawn’ and ‘Waking Field’ are gorgeously eroded simulacra of Chain Reaction-esque avant-minimalism, dance music passed through a fine-mesh sieve to remove almost every joule of kinetic energy. Kick drums – or rather the muted metronomic clicks that pass for them – are so subsumed by grainy swathes of ambience, they barely register as rhythm. The album’s piéce de rèsistance though is the stunning ‘Blue Drift’, a darkening pall of drone and reverberant carillon bells that rivals Sarah Davachi’s ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ for stentorian solemnity. Step inside; the silence is DEAFENING.

Touch.

ÄRID – ‘XII – FROM ANTHROPOPHAGIC WASTE BREEDS A WRITHING MUTAGENESIS’

Ärid is a one-man Black Metal project from the States, seemingly bent of reducing the current romanticism and Goth leanings of the Raw Black ‘scene’ to greasy cinders and returning the sound to something minimal, ugly, bleak and animal. Melted, necrotic Black Metal grounded in gnostic cadaver worship with extremely intense drumming and dead, thanatologist ambient atmosphere – grinding, rattling and gurgling in lunatic hyperblasting anti-human Black Metal putridity, scathing boiling extra-fill abstruse blasts forming the basis of hypnotising Raw Black Metal of rancorous, scabrous chords in minimal diving drone patterns, bending, warped noise guitar parts scaffolded to horrifically violent atavistic drumming, detailed with clattering fills, with some slower moments to let the pestilence breathe between rictus tom rolls, resplendent with subhuman croaking grotesque goblin vocal. Many of these songs register in a similar fashion to the best Grindcore, careening at inhuman speed through a dirge of chords in demented, frothing abandon before abruptly concluding. This album shimmers with black flames of irradiated necrotic energy and anti-human spite, truly fulfilling a descriptive remit as simple as ‘Raw Black Metal’ with supereon, fevered energy and filthy, phlegmy, necromantic abandon. A scowling masterpiece.

Eerie Silence Productions

SHACKLETON – ‘THE MAJESTIC YES’

Peerless is an epithet lazily ascribed to legions of artists who are patently nothing of the kind, but in the case of arch dreamweaver Sam Shackleton, it’s the only appropriate term. From the arabesque dubstep extrapolations of his Skull Disco years to masterpieces of polyrhythmic psychedelia like ‘Music For The Quiet Hour’ and ‘Departing Like Rivers’, his trailblazing exploits in the sphere of contemporary electronic music have resulted in a discography that, in terms of sheer eye-popping originality, is all but unparalleled. His first release on Honest Jon’s in five years, ‘The Majestic Yes’ is Shack in microcosm; a gravity-defying exposition of rhythm as rapture that showcases his trademark rococo sound design in arguably its most otherworldly iteration since 2018’s lavishly abstracted ‘Furnace Of Guts’. Comprising three long-form tracks structured around the shamanic rattle of Senegalese percussion maestro Beaugar Seck’s sabar drums, this is expansive, sense-heightening music of the first order; swirls of opalescent synth, harmonium-filtered glossolalia and crepuscular sub-bass that permeate every quadrant of the soundfield like a cloud of opiated pollen from some alien species of orchid. It’s a scintillating, if concise, tour de force, but it doesn’t end there. To the majority of producers, remixing an artist as singular as Shackleton would be a poisoned chalice and then some, but his idol Mark Ernestus steps valiantly into the breech, splitting the difference between Basic Channel and Ndagga Rhythm Force with an arachnoid, dub-frosted (in)version of ‘The Overwhelming Yes’ that closes the EP on a deliciously sinister note. Majestic? Yes.

Honest Jon’s Records

JAH EXCRETION – ‘PILGRIMAGE DUB 1’

Exceptionally stoned offering from Jah Excretion, a meditative solo mission into mesmeric Ambient Dub Techno territory, very Rhythm&Sound/Basic Channel influenced. Shimmering aqueous field recordings manipulated over blip radar Dub percussion motions and subsonic Earth’s crust Bass frequencies, with detail only truly revealed though the smoked-out haze at pealing volumes, using the voluminous excesses of his Harsh Noise influence to carve a sonic form of minimalist sound at maximal volume – This is as far from Harsh Noise as Iwasaki San has ventured, with sumptuous, smothering results. I found myself wanting longer songs here, as the entrancing sounds would possibly benefit from more play time room to breathe (smoke) – however, this is still an exceptional little recording,  Dub heads & Techno listeners would do well to explore this one. Play it unbearably loud.

Bandcamp

LF58 – ‘AI​-​19: ALTERAZIONE’

Crisp, crystalline minimalist psychedelia from Italiant Ambienauts LF58 – microtextual magic beach blanket bong-out in the macrocosmic reality of unending space, the sounds of neural pathways lighting and connecting in the universe-mind cathedral mothership amid cannabinoid focus and micro-frenzy-process of ever expanding computation. Quiet and introversive, vastly spaceous and dense with weight and scale, at once revenant to EDM, Ambient and kosmische Zeuhl, four suites unfurling very slowly across the album’s running time, an expanse of lush textures and audial ascendant worship. This is my first look in to Astral Industries, I’m totally enamored with and intrigued by their consistent aesthetic and blotter paper comic illustration. I’ll be digging in to some more of their roster as immediately as I’m able. Silent Running.

Astral Industries

WHIRLING HALL OF KNIVES – ‘BLOWN VESTIGE’

The duo of Stephen Gethings (Magnetize) and Barry Murphy (The Last Sound) have been wreaking various shades of aural havoc for more than fifteen years, but ‘Blown Vestige’ is Whirling Hall Of Knives as we’ve rarely heard them before. All but absent is the redlining kick-drum carnage that made albums such as ‘Decate’ and ‘Voix’ such ear-savaging delights (think Regis after six pints of ayahuasca) but don’t go equating beatlessness with toothlessness. WHOK still have a full compliment of fangs, but this time, it’s your heart, not your throat they want to sink them into. Predictably though, for an outfit whose usual œuvre is the techno equivalent of cluster munitions, their take on ambient is about as far from cachou-scented New Age wallpaper-hanging as it’s possible to get. This is visceral, attention-demanding music that, despite its relative lack of gratuitous bloodletting, still lays siege to your consciousness with the same steely intent as their more rhythm-centric experiments. Amorphous billows of exfoliative distortion scud across the stereo field like storm clouds; chrysalids of crimson noise rupture and drip acid syrup into your ears, but it’s WHOK’s uncanny ability to conjure the organic from the inorganic that sets ‘Blown Vestige’ far apart from the pack. ‘Deconthroat’, for example, is so redolent of a slow-burning cello arabesque it wouldn’t sound out of place on a Clarice Jensen album, whilst the subaquatic swoon of closing track ‘Saw-tail’ is a sublime reimagining of A.R. Kane’s nebulous guitar shimmer blissfully untethered from the prosaism of wood and wire. Over the years, I’ve used many adjectives to describe the mighty WHOK’s irascible sonics, but ‘beautiful’ has never been one of them. There’s a first time for everything.

Cruel Nature Recordings

GOLDEN CAT PAGODA – ‘ENTROPY’

There’s a strange irony in the fact that as black metal hurtles towards middle age, it’s the genre’s least orthodox practitioners (Cloak Of Altering, Sleepwalker, the magnificently deranged Mamaleek, et al) who, in spirit if not sound, seem most to embody its founding principles of dissidence and extremity. Take – if your constitution can handle it – Vancouver-based Golden Cat Pagoda 金猫塔, a one-man(iac) fever dream generator who, rather than play footsie with the corpse-painted avatar of tradition, spikes its drink with adrenochrome then abandons it gibbering and paranoid in the mirror maze of a derelict funhouse. Warped and contorted into outlandish configurations, the black metal of ‘Entropy 熵’ (an apposite title if ever there was one) is a miasmic morass of paradox and incongruity where genre touchstones like blast beats and tremolo riffs are reduced to bit part status and chaos of an altogether more inscrutable kind reigns supreme. Lean in close (but not TOO close, mind) and the glistening innards of this nightmarish sinfonietta come fully into focus; sibilant vocals that percolate like gas bubbles through radioactive glycerine, acrid geysers of darkside vaporwave and jazz-mangled crypto-prog, and as if that wasn’t enough, a brief but utterly unhinged foray into no-fi surf rock that has more in common with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns than Gorgoroth. ‘Entropy’ may not be cvlt in the inflexible sense perpetuated by legions of identikit second wavers, but as an exemplar of black metal’s transgressive ideals, it’s as authentic as it gets. Essential.

Pest Productions

Bandcamp