CDR – ‘NOVEMBER 21ST’

Breakcore Noise synesthetic collage from the hyperactive CDR. Demonic breaks ad infinitum and eccentric hardcore bangers fused together, swirling in and out of aggression and elation like surging serotonin deficiency, catastrophic sampling mutated and cut to ribbons, stacked into a canon and blasted across inky vacuum Bass burbling into bleeding-red audial overload, stream of consciousness divides clattering break-sodden eclecticism and audacious bubbling ambience, super stepper staircases up and down like MC Escher looney tunes, expressions of old breaks Hardcore enmeshed within, everything sealed in Harsh Noise production potentialities. A whole cavalcade of weirdo, sweaty, aggy fun. I was first made aware of CDR from his Harsh Noise heavy ‘Public Sick’ release (GK#169), and he’s still cranking out noise contaminated breakcore with Ritalin devotion. A real one. Also, scope out a killer CDR longsleeve with this release and peacock your superior tastes and styles to those inferior devotees of the algorithm.

Bandcamp

CTENIZIDAE – ‘HUMENICIDEG I’

Filthy necrotic Black Noise from the obscure Eerie Silence Productions, shadowrealm of projects such as Ärid, Virulent Specter, Astral Tomb of Yearning, and a few others. Groaning minimal noise loops render a Black Ambient shade, spooky crepuscular tones hover above pulsing spectral presences, daring those mortal to provoke their malignant powers! Rueful, broken dirge synth tones appear from the black mists tape and dire throbbing amplifier sounds, the sombre insanity, black mood of the mourner driven mad in hateful despair, glaring pulses and loops build and mount in sweat dripping nightmare tension and insect hate, rhythmic passages thrum and boil, tapes rolling over into the void, aggravating and haunting, eyes rolling back in the head, capillaries bursting with clotted black blood… suffocating Black Noise, bad vibes from beyond life’s domain.

Eerie Silence Productions

STCLVR – ‘POST SELF ABANDONMENT’

Unkind Power Electronics, Noise EBM and nightmarish Darkwave perverted and decontextualized by some horny masked puck,  a foul, rogue fulminate of scalding alkaline electronics, accurately named by it’s author ‘harsh industrial bedroom pop’. Classic wobbly-signal power electronics vocal fluctuation spits slathered over (curb)stomping darkwave arrangements, pulsating grinding Bass surges and funky thumping kicks, synthesizers purge and ooze pure menace, glowering tyrannical production booms and blats like a motherfucker. Danceable and decimating in equal awful measure. Kitsch, cute and criminal, like being beaten to death by a super sexy leather demon of indeterminate gender. Greasy, perverse and aggressive , dense and autoerotic, ‘Post Self Abandonment’ represents an apotheosis of design in STCLVR’s sound, equally sensual and bared-teeth furious, a cornucopia of fuming paradoxes. Fucking exceptional.

Phage Tapes

Crucial Blast

Bandcamp

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

TOLERANCES OF THE HUMAN FACE IN CRASH IMPACTS – ‘OCCUPATION’

A work of low rent bulldozing passionate Gore brutality from solo project Tolerances of the Human Face In Crash Impacts, as ballardian as their name may (or may not) suggest. Massive, disgusting, moronic DI electronic Goregrind shot through with a horrid Crust influence and a loud, earscraping mix, exuding the raw stench of anti-human hatred and paradoxical low effort creative compulsion. Catchy groove soaked Bass-less crust riffs pockmark the gore drenched noise wall, crispy burned Drum sounds clatter, crash and boom, bubbling roaring tarman vocal consecrates a vile experience of underground alienation. TxOxTxHxFxIxCxI also experiments with tempo, souring into midpace sturm und drang with minimalist banger ‘Fed Their Own Brains’ and their impressive cover of D-Beat warriors Disclose’s ‘Conquest’. Bearing a striking, sickening resemblance to the various projects of A. Ringdahl or the mighty Dysmenorrheic Hemorrhage,  TxOxTxHxFxIxCxI reminds the intrepid, exhausted seeker of a valuable lesson: never stop plumbing the murky depths. Unheralded excellence.

Bandcamp

JAH WARRIOR – ‘DUB FROM THE HEART’

Producer Jah Warrior’s 1997 full length ‘Dub from the Heart’, a collection of devout hard as nails psychedelic Dubs from The UK, tuff deadly steppers rendered in smoky digital studio production, fired with red-edged siren, system crushing electronic sub bass haze rolling in swollen waves, and drifting electronic percussion punch echo/delayed to decay, dread digital melodica(?) flutters and floats above the miasma with Jah minded power and manifest consonance, a shade of light above the murky Bass aquatics. As a cannabinoid sidestep into the tangential, I recently played this record repeatedly whilst re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time in a long time, Jah Warrior’s retrofuturist hard Dub vision syncopating beautifully with the cyberpunk narrative’s storyscape. Far out. I also can’t help but quote the exceptional Rewind Forward record shop review on the digital liner – “… this is one 100% crucial documentation of Jah Warrior’s signature, dreader-than-dread UK steppers sound, deep, kind of dark and fierce, overwhelmingly bass-loaded and reverb-drenched, but still mightily uplifting, in roots reggae style and fashion.”  Rock solid beginning to end. Thank you and blessings to my youngest brother for putting me on to this marvelous LP those years back, the man’s tastes and interests defy his age.

Bandcamp

B L A C K I E – ‘CATHARSIS ONLY’

B L A C K I E’s latest release, a short and ear-battering trip continuing the Houston artist’s edgesmashing sound into basically pure Power Electronics territories. The man stands far outside and further beyond Hip Hop’s dogmatic scriptures than most, manifestly evident in the artist’s latent if quiet influence on the mainstream of the genre. Short harsh blasts of ephemeral beatwork kicked and mauled by malign synthesis process to cumulate Power Electronics bitter screen/wall of howling crackling bass frequencies and snowblind white noise, lo-fi bleeding-red productions of surging Industrial textures colliding with contaminated sampling and thumping sub bass kicks, light on easy beats and heavy on dense avalanching noise and awkward loops, over which B L A C K I E screams, yells and cries in brutal minimal sloganeering like a soul possessed. Head crushing banger beats surface at key moments on the record, steaming and hulking, appearing all the more monstrous and bludgeoning for their scarcity, like on ‘mean nothing’ and closer ‘stay elevated’, and B L A C K I E’s furiously introverted self-denigrations and blood drenched personal/political roaring raving vocal hits like a fucking teargas cannister to the dome in this context. Crucial.

Bandcamp

THIRDORGAN – ‘SPACE CADILLAC’

Thirdorgan’s ‘Space Cadilac’, released on Akihiro-san’s own Alienation digital label. Science Fiction radiowave signal hi-jack and abuse, experimental prototypical technology, surging modulated waves of sound slapped silly, punched and probed wickedly. Wiggling waving sample exploration mangling and fomentation of frothing digi sound process creates waves of electronics seasickness, swollen volume pitch spikes, building migraine sweats and ominous salivary response – I’m going to fucking hurl! Howling blown out alarms crest and eat their tails, panning left and right to bewilder and irritate the objective mind.  An interesting detour from purely Harsh sound from Thirdorgan into something more akin to soundscape work or Musique Concrete, albeit shot through a malign, bruised, psychedelic slow rolling cut up lens, cockeyed and bizarre, broiling harsh digital tones rising from the sampling like the surges of eye peeling nausea and vertiginous terror. Excellently difficult.

Bandcamp

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

PING PONG SELF TITLED

Rome-based imprint Raw Culture isn’t exactly renowned for its conservatism but the astonishing new album from Italian duo Andrea Renzini and Stephano Passini pushes the boat so far out it disappears over the horizon and gets crushed to matchwood by an alien species of squid. Lashed together from field recordings of Korean table tennis matches and a bijouterie of bizarre instrumentation (filter bag, aerosol flute, yoga balls), ‘Ping Pong’ is a riot of gnarly free jazz and motorik machine funk that charges, battering ram in hand, at the portal to a future of infinite possibility. The four pressurised jams that comprise the album’s A side (‘Master Ping’) showcase the band at its most organic and untamed. Cacophonous drum cannonades delineate a sequence of volatile grooves made all the more unstable by the miasma of caterwauling sonic detritus through which they corkscrew. It’s an outlandishly heady concoction, but the flip (‘Master Pong’, natch) is where Ping Pong’s singular vision comes fully into focus. Homing in on an irresistible sour spot ‘twixt Föllakzoid’s virulent technoid krautrock and the clammy sleaze-disco shenanigans of Decius, tracks like ‘Zilch’ and the jaw-dropping ‘Welcome’ are crammed with spadefuls of such dizzying detail they could trigger synaesthesia in a breeze block. Despite closing out with ‘Future’, a garish synth-punk hoedown that sticks out like a pilchard in a blancmange, there’s a pervasive sense here that Ping Pong are hovering on the cusp of a giant evolutionary leap; a metamorphosis into some higher, deeper and more vaporous form even they can’t conceive of. For now though, this is more than sufficient. Keep watching the skies.

Raw Culture

DREAMS WEST SELF TITLED

Mix tape from producer James West’s Dreams West project, a now classic and slightly forgotten cut of plunderphonic early vaporwave breeze. Ludicrously warped pastel delirium, vaporous and effervescent tape deck 90’s Pop loops embellished with intoxicating and absorbing sequencer melody, saturated and filtered to haze heaven. Microwaves of nostalgia…luminescent Pop Muzak, lo-fi Chillwave, vaporous recontextualization of Funk grooves, filter house claps for days of the dying sun. How absurd to think that this is already older than a decade, a shimmering simulation of pre internet music and muzak, a simulacrum now conjured and consumed ad infinitum to both greater and lesser result… interesting to note, Dreams West was using original melodies in their compositions right off the bat,  something that many of the first wave Vaporwave artists eschewed in their wake. Shitfaced hammered on screwdrivers, making meaning of a completely dead two dimensional capitalist consumer reality, Dreams West and their ilk render me to tears. So awash in narcotic emotion are these utterly ‘meaningless’ works, so flat and circular are these saccharine experiences as to become cartoons, revelations of truths so brazen as to require constant inebriation and euphemism to manage them. Keep on dreamin’, meat puppets. This has all got to mean something.

Bandcamp

ISMATIC GURU – ‘II’

Lo-fi liminal Post Punk weirdness polarity swing from the mad creative forces behind Science Man/Swimming Faith Records and Clump/Steak and Cake records. Razorwire taut, amphetaminic funky, cute little less-than-2 minute post punk no wave numbers dripping with pungent outsider swagger, hopped up on nitrous oxide and god knows what else. Gurning loopy badass crooner vocal commands the routine, a throb of cocky Bass lines saunter and groove beneath tongue lash treble guitars, cumulatively tapping out complex, intricate typewriter riffs and chord girdered to thin metronomic drums riddled with details and danger. Dynamic, melodious, minimalist brilliance. There’s an air of the likes of Minutemen or James chance and the Contortions, though neither of these references truly signposts the weirdo sounds within. Get into it!

Swimming Faith Records

RAJA KIRIK – ‘PHANTASMAGORIA OF JATHILAN’

Indonesian duo Raja Kirik are first magnitude futurists whose adrenalised, sui generis fusion of the traditional and the Promethean is light years removed from the blanched banality of mainstream rock and pop. The follow-up to 2020’s astounding ‘Rampokan’, ‘Phantasmagoria Of Jathilan’ (a five act performance piece inspired by a Javanese folk dance from the Dutch colonial era) channels the mudslides and magma flows that spewed in all directions from its tumultous predecessor into a precision guided pyroclastic surge that, if anything, hits with even greater force. The swathes of new ground this revelatory racket breaks are vast and its massive heft is further enhanced by the quicksilver ululations of guest vocalist Silir Wangi which provide an arrestingly poignant counterpoint to the onslaught unleashed by the band’s formidable arsenal of homemade instruments and electronics. A fluxional matrix of jackhammering dance rhythms, post-industrial noise and shamanic folk noir, the album is harder to pin down than a kangaroo on a trampoline but its intrepid aesthetic is perhaps best exemplified by ‘Act III: Perangan’ a supercharged electroacoustic techno banger (gabbelan anyone?) that sounds like Perc trading blows with Senyawa. Frontier music in the truest sense of the term, ‘Phantasmagoria Of Jathilan’ joins Sanam’s ‘Aykathani Malakon’ and that bolus of holy terror recently hawked up by Elvin Brandhi and Lord Spikeheart as one of 2023’s most out there transmissions. Essential.

Yes No Wave Music

NORMAL NADA THE KRAKMAXTER – ‘TRIBAL PROGRESSIVE HEAVY METAL’

Guinea-Bissau born producer Teteu aka Normal Nada The Krakmaxter is a maverick’s maverick. Arguably the most enigmatic denizen of Lisbon’s vibrant electronic underground, his refractory hybrids of kuduro, tarraxinha and a host of other kinetic non-regional styles are amongst the sharpest serrations currently lending bite to dance music’s cutting edge. Released via Ugandan experimental imprint Nyege Nyege Tapes, Nada’s long-awaited debut full-length is nothing short of glorious; a flash flood of surging rhythmic improbability purpose crafted to rip a dancefloor from its foundations and send it hurtling towards the asteroid belt. Opening salvo ‘Beautiful Chaos’ offers a perfect summation of the album’s buccaneering ethos, exploding like a nailbomb in an ether huff of strung out syncopations and hornet swarm bass fuzz. The title track is even less constrained, its somersaulting snares and peals of haemorrhagic synth-grind seemingly beamed in from a parallel universe where the Young Gods have wrested control of clubland. Late highlight ‘Nai Na Chi’ flirts tantalisingly with the sort of zero gravity footwork that made DJ Rashad’s ‘Double Cup’ such a frisson-inducing mindfuck, but the album’s most startling transmission is also its least frenetic. A languid counterpart to the preceding half-hour of mayhem, ‘Dedicado ao sem abrigo esperanca ou quando a esperanca morre’ is a delectably creamy slice of downtempo tarraxinha that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Space Afrika album. Put some metal in your macrocosm.

Nyege Nyege Tapes

BARSTOOL MOUNTAIN – ‘III’

Barstool Mountain is a project of Mattias Gustafsson, they of the astonishingly consistent Harsh Noise unit Altar Of Flies.  ‘III’ represents a high water mark of uniquely textured psychedelic sound design, auditorily exotic Harsh Noise, ramped up to 11 and blown to fucking shit. Known for a meticulous working process, ‘III’ finds Gustafson in a seriously drunken, bad barbarian mood. Purest electronics abuse, audial shapes in unbearably bright migraine-inducing constellation, chunky ruptured analogue frequencies thrown and hurled from the source, juddering and spitting sonic shrapnel and effluence as new forms emerge through force of will, signal choking pedals and caveman divination – fissures in frequencies torn asunder with tumbling sonics pouring out, standing backflips of rotating/retarding Harsh audio. To be honest, even ‘reviewing’ this record at all is laughably redundant – one need only to read Soddy’s word-perfect summation of their Harsh Noise bacchanal in the bandcamp liner notes to understand ‘III’s maximal essence. The man nails it to the post in a way only he can. “Texture. A nice word, wouldn’t you say, settling into the audible dis-course with whiffs of sophistication, complexity, depth…”

Absurd Exposition

Altar Of Flies

ANDREW NOLAN & GOD IS WAR – ‘THE HUNT’

If dub-centric music is heading anywhere in 2023, it’s to the earth’s core. Recent releases by such extremist dreadmongers as Sightless Pit, Gorgonn and The Blood Of Heroes suggest the quest to reach the very bottom of the sinkhole, to excavate until rock gives way to magma, is nearing an apocalyptic conclusion. An apposite moment then for serial noise terrorists Andrew Nolan and God Is War to disgorge their debut collaborative album, a confluence of warped minds that harnesses the menace inherent in hip-hop and dubstep and inflates it to Brobdingnagian size. Grinding inexorably through the gears like a meths-powered half-track, ‘The Hunt’ is a fearsomely exacting show of low end strength, every neck-snapping beat and bass tremor pre-marinated in a tank of liquid hostility to maximise its potential for destruction. Killer outweights filler 10 – 0, but first among equals is the sumptuously concussive title track, a slow motion punishment beating ramped up in intensity by a fragmentation grenade of baleful bars courtesy of lava-spitting No Face Krew lynchpin New Villain. Such is its potency, it’s hard not to wish Nolan and GIW had engaged the services of a few more dissident voices to flesh out the feature count, but minor quibbles aside, ‘The Hunt’ is business end belligerence in excelsis and a crucial transmission from dub’s point of no return. Going, going, GONE.

Survivalist Deathcult

Closed Casket Activities

Absurd Exposition

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