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

DOPE PURPLE & BERSERK – ‘THIS IS THE HARSH TRIP FOR NEW PSYCHE’

A portentous cosmic collision between Dope Purple’s spaced out throwback Psychedelic Rock and Beserk’s fulminate alien Harsh Noise, released by the mercurial WV Sorcerer Productions label. Dope Purple ramps, stages and launches 5 tracks of motorik, tumbling Psychedelic Rock, crystalline brittle Guitars and longwinding louche Bass lines summit and plummet both gently and desperately, glistening with delay and reverb, beats treading a dusty caravan path of fulsome, feeling groove, echo-drenched dude vocal appears like the aural Sherpa up the mountain of the omnistoned. Bersek looms without like awesome cumulus cloud formation, allowing for Dope Purple’s spacious interplay and sonic oxygenations, gathering momentum and power before ejaculating his roiling, combustible Harsh Noise asunder, exploding in star destroying Guitar solo mimicry cascade of brutally loud audial magma, smothering the florid instrumentation beneath and sealing it’s essence within like the petrified humans of Pompeii. When Berserk truly lets rip to maul and malign Dope Purple’s intense, generative psychedelia their collaborative power is orgasmically revealed, rupturing the prone instrumentations at their seams and bursting their sweet juices and potent fluids all over the innerspace. This is an addictively harsh tapestry of delirious voluminous psychedelia. Heads & Hearts only.

WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片

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

WRESTLING WITH GLUTTONY: TAKESHITA – ‘DUMMY NOISE’ [2023]

Meet Mr. Garg, the elusive creature behind monikers like Kwashiorkor, Pizza Burrito, and the grandiose Cloak of Displacement. Under the alias Takeshita, he unleashes wrestling-flavored cacophonies on the unsuspecting masses. The album ‘Dummy Noise’ is a bizarre dedication to Yoshihiko, an inflatable sex doll turned wrestling sensation for the Dramatic Dream Team in Japan. Yes, you read that right – an inflatable sex doll in the wrestling ring. Move over, Hulk Hogan.

Further, this record boldly proposes that ‘Harsh noise is Free Jazz’ and tries to prove this daring hypothesis with about an hour’s worth of material. True to form, this high-concept album is a chaotic wrestling match – ‘Yoshihiko vs. Kota Ibushi‘ features crowd noises colliding with spastic drum fills, creating an atmosphere that’s like stumbling upon a band’s wild soundcheck. This opening track is genuinely cool but overstays its welcome at seven minutes. Think of it as the musical equivalent of a wrestler flexing for way too long.

Now, let’s talk about ‘Spinning Head Scissors,‘ where Takeshita generously throws in a bunch of bleeps and bloops, like a digital rendition of a toddler playing with a shiny new toy. It’s not exactly a spectacle – more like the auditory equivalent of finding spare change in your couch cushions. Not groundbreaking, but hey, it doesn’t make you cringe either. A solid “meh.”

And then we dive headfirst into the abyss of ‘Untranspressive Transpression.’ This track features various chopped-up vocals narrating absurdities about a gig in ‘CHICK-A-GO’. It’s like listening to the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist who stumbled upon a thesaurus. Cool concept, but spoiler alert: it’s about as drawn-out as a lecture on the history of lint.

Now we come to the heart of the album, a noise jam called ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey’ that lasts a whopping 16 minutes. Imagine a hypnotic blend of synth flickering, a symphony of beeps and boops, and various noise movements that’ll make your eardrums do somersaults. It’s like Takeshita decided to throw a carnival for your senses, and you’re not just a spectator – you’re getting body slammed by a sex doll.  ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey‘ boldly steps into the ring with the heavyweights, earning a spot up there with the best of Merzbow. Yes, you heard it right – Takeshita is flexing those noise muscles, proudly claiming a throne next to the maestro of cacophony himself

Now the album is running on full steroid infused stream! “Sax Doll” emerges as a standout, with electronic chops, echo-laden saxophone riffs, and a disorienting atmosphere. The sax solo is sliced, delayed, and layered, creating walls of sound that feel both surreal and captivating. Another banger! Takeshita is on the juice!

But beware of ‘Inflatable Sticks & Stones,‘ a track that’s pure filler, a gluttonous addition to the buffet. This is followed by ‘Not a Sex Doll‘ featuring iwkok$10 – a LightningBolt-esque freakout set to noise. The tragedy lies in the sporadic moments of brilliance, drowned out by long passages that sound like simultaneous clashes of disparate tracks that mix like oil and water. It’s like trying to appreciate a Picasso painting while someone’s aggressively playing hopscotch on the canvas. Someone get the editing scissors – trim the fat, trim it now!

‘Yoshihiko vs. Minora Suzuki Dream Match,‘ unfortunately, follows suit as another filler track, lacking substance. It acts as a palate cleanser after the dense freakout before it.

And now, drumroll, please! We reach the grand finale – ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call.’ A sparse and ominous soundscape into the abyss of creaking noise and infernal Japanese moaning. It’s like stumbling into a haunted kabuki theater, where the ghostly performers traded their traditional instruments for an arsenal of dissonant noise.  This track is a journey where the lack of a clear rhythm wraps you in a tense atmosphere, gripping your attention like a suspenseful thriller. It’s like Takeshita handed the director’s baton to Hitchcock and said, “Make it weird, but make it captivating.” 

And so the curtains close on this avant-garde spectacle, ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call‘ manages to conclude the album on a high note – a note so high, even Mariah Carey would give it a nod of approval. It’s the musical equivalent of the wrestling sex doll deflating in the ring, bidding farewell after a decade of brawling. Picture an entire card of wrestlers solemnly putting the inflatable warrior to rest, as if it were the end of an era. Takeshita, you’ve managed to give a wrestling sex doll a fitting send-off, and for that, we salute you in the most avant-garde way possible.

Overall, ‘Dummy Noise‘ deserves a solid 7.5/10. Cut out the filler tracks, and you’ve got yourself a noise record that’s not just a banger – it’s a sonic knockout waiting to happen.

Available on CD and as digital download here:
https://ruralisolationproject.bandcamp.com/album/takeshita-dummy-noise

VOMIR AND LEGION OF ANDROMEDA – ‘HARSH METAL WALL’

Collaborative CD release from post Metal barbarians Legion of Andromeda and the high lord wallmaster Vomir, a co-release between At War With False Noise, Decimation Sociale and Turgid Animal Italian Division. Total obstinate truculence made audial in incorrigable torpor. Each unit presents a track each of their own material, which is exclusive to the CD release, and contributes to 4 collaborative tracks, each just a hair over 18 minutes in length, which are available to stream and download. Noise Metal singularity, the brutalist monocrush doom-mongering of LOA’s unremitting cyclone 1 dimensional Industrial Death barrage beat anvil strike pattern and repeat roaring vocal invocation, alloyed in heresy with Vomir’s non-entity static wall noise perma-surge, exacting and entirely non-negotiable. Repetitious punishment, warping volume endurance, zealous flagellation meted out by faceless, indifferent inquisitors. Each project’s individual contributions sit comfortably within their respective discographies in a qualitative sense, with LOA’s ‘Hatebeat’ providing a particularly cruel, brusque, lengthy dismantling experience, but the collaborative tracks here truly strike a hammerblow to the collective artistic ego and objective prejudice, non-art annihilation stretched across timeless minimalist millennia, metronomicon Noise Metal from beyond myopia. A cudgel of perfect repetitious obstinance.

Decimation Sociale Releases

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

NDOX ELECTRIQUE – ‘TËDD AK MAME COUMBA LAMBA AK MAME COUMBA MBANG’

François Cambuzat and Gianna Greco are specialists in building bridges between worlds. Having cut their teeth fronting art noise provocateurs Putan Club, the duo journeyed to the Djerid desert in south-western Tunisia and forged an unlikely alliance with performers of the indigenous Banga ritual, an adorcism which invites, rather than seeks to reverse, spiritual possession. The two albums which resulted, both released under the monicker Ifriqqya Electrique, were fervid fusions of glowering industrial post-punk, transcendental chant-singing and frenetic hand percussion that stand amongst the most startlingly original cross-cultural collaborations ever brought to fruition. Upping the ante yet further, Cambuzat and Greco’s latest project relocates their theatre of off-grid operations to the isolated Cap-Vert peninsula in western Senegal. A joint enterprise with members of the resident Lebu community, Ndox Electrique capitalises on an uncanny symbiosis between brawny avant-rock and the polyrhythmic cacophony of the mystical n’doëp ceremony to create an electrfying hybrid, the ultimate in sonic polarity inversions. Crucially, it’s the paths Ndox Electrique DON’T tread that make ‘Tëdd Ak Mame’ such a formidable proposition. There are no concessions here to the pappy dietary requirements of the mainstream, nor does fusion equate to dilution. This is dissident, soul-stirring music that thrives on a commonality of intent, banger following cathartic banger in an uncompromising onslaught. Marshalled by lead vocalist Rokhaya “Madame” Diéne and featuring a trio of indefatigable percussionists, the band’s Lebu contingent generate onrushing waves of ritualistic rhythm and rhyme to which Cambuzat and Greco apply a treacherous undertow: scything, doom metal-heavy guitar riffs and an interlocking matrix of saw-toothed bass and electronics. Social media is cluttered with proclamations from the cloth-eared that there’s nothing new under the sun. For those of us who take a contrary position, Ndox Electrique have just delivered a motherfucker of a citation. Essential.

Les Disques Bongo Jo

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

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

ELEPHANT MAN BEHIND THE SUN – ‘COLLECTED TRACKS’

EMBTS was James F. Tarr, a legendary lo fi Gore/Noisecore project which may be known to you if you, like me, spent much of the late 00’s and the 10’s seeking out Grind, Gore and Noise across a plethora of blogspot caches and soulseek profiles. Iconoclastic Noisecore from beyond taste or decency, living contaminant pre-genre Gorenoise formed in radioactive poverty, low tek aqueous shitnoise bubbling with misanthropic rage and psychotic confusions, industrial trash, lo fi smash and grumble, groaning screaming vocal nauseatingly mashed with effects, super raw lo fi savant blasting drums, a massaker of Bass noise crackles and fizzes amidst a deleterious din of unidentifiable source, seemingly recorded on a boombox or 4-track. Mechanically separated gorenoisecore, cultural and social refuse made sonic mass, absolutely crude and resolutely berserk in it’s outsiderness. Along with bands like Anal Birth and Decomposing Serenity, EMBTS forged a new low in acceptability and hostility, a rebuke to civility and consensus wrought in blast beats and home made opprobrium. A singular vision. Be sure to check out this retrospective w/ New Noise and also, take a look at Tarr’s blog Tapes and Poverty. RIP James F. Tarr.

Breathing Problem Productions

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

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

SLACKING – ‘ROUNDHOUSE A BOOTLICKER’

Slacking is a newer Harsh Noise project from the States, whose name I’ve heard mentioned on social media and podcasts as an up and comer to keep an eye on – this was the first of their releases I checked out, and it is immense. ‘Roundhouse a Bootlicker’ (what a fucking title that is) presents two tracks of crude, yet considered, befuddling sample Harsh Noise psychedelerium. Rolling brownout crush of roiling electronics and crumpled squashed sampling, frequency manipulation and sample mangling clutter and crash, battering frequencies rising and falling in drunken hypnosis, harsh and crisp as fukk, with apparent vocalisation samples appearing within the sound confusion. It’s dirty and massive, a take on the classic Americanoise sound, loops and layers shift in and out of focus in suffocating array, pinball sampling stitched within a tapestry of filth, low frequency rumble foundation with smeared, obfuscated sample loops. Track two is a cutting from a live session with Mallard Theory, junky pedal electronics pasting and pulping less-than-visible samples to mulch, overwhelmingly saturated and blown out waves of sound effluence wax and don’t wane, that ends on a total dead stop. Fucking exceptional.

Tribe Tapes

Bandcamp

GORGONN – ‘SIX PATHS’

The technical expertise of Berlin-based sound engineer Gorgonn has been utilised by some of electronic music’s most illustrious artisans, but as a recording artist, he’s perhaps best known as Kevin Martin’s co-conspirator in G36, the low end terror cell lately encountered going toe to toe with JK Flesh on last year’s monstrous ‘Disintegration Dubs’. Conceptualised around the Japanese Buddhist idea that there are six paths through the afterlife, Gorgonn’s debut solo album is every bit the cratering bout of aggro-bass pugilism his pedigree predicts, and though there are firm nods in the direction of his eminent partner in grime, this is far from a blow-for-blow Bug pastiche. As you might expect, dub with the destruction profile of a starquake is at the heart of what makes ‘Six Paths’ tick, and tick it does, like a limpet mine with a faulty detonator. Every track seethes with malevolence; bass and drums in murderous lockstep, waves of brackish dread crashing relentlessly against the mind’s fragile defences until inevitably, they crumble. Even ‘Deadman’, the album’s sole beatless cut, offers no respite, its queasy slo-mo lurch precisely replicating the moment when a ketamine binge goes suddenly and irreversibly wrong. Gorgonn has uncaged a fearsome beast here. Surrender to its scaly embrace.

SVBKVLT

DJ SPEEDSICK – ‘CONCRETE HELL E.P.’

Most recent release from Midwestern cyberdemon DJ Speedsick. 4 tracks of homebrewed hard as fukk Techno hell bubbling with fertilizer and gasoline. Super harsh acid head melter beats, gelatinous and cartilaginous wizz migraine bangers with hyper clap distortion emergence from unstable miasma, fermented funky wobbly sequencer pile-on, crushingly dense Bass kick thuds to death in skittering Speedcore hard-on triplets/4×4 hats Hardcore excellence. ‘Concrete Hell E.P.’ really cranks the fucking tempo to throb, pushing speed through sense in funk chaos delusion, never losing the furor of groove amidst the haste. Innerspace outcast delirium manifested in some seriously hateful hard tek Industrial Techno shit, pulling influence from hellscape rave obscurities, triple dosed in lysergic lo-fi system-crusher production and cast into blazing 4 track inferno. Another artist who has carved themselves a unique spot within Noise-adjacent Electronic music, a seedy corner of ruinous electronics for those who walk outside the circle of taste, keepin’ it tru with his headbanger scum punk industrial Techno, amphetemised to living fuck forever.

Bandcamp

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

FLOWDAN X ABSTRAKT SONANCE – ‘NO CELEBRATIONS’

Collaborative work between Grime OG Flowdan and sound architect Abstrakt Sonance, released in 2020. 4 tracks of mean, gritty outsider Electronics arrangement draped in Grime camouflage urban commando style, replete with dark concepts and murderous bars care of the don Flowdan, shelling down as impressively and imperiously as ever. His presence is both menacing and mercurial, drawing you in to the music like the pull of a black hole, up at front of the productions you can feel the grit and purr of his low vocal expression drawing you closer. Moody, murky mid-paced instrumentals getting merky with eastern Biwas, beds of swollen strings cut into neoclassical refrains and lurking swells of Bass, bursting shuffle of beats building to complex patterns, shifting audial and volume frequencies which at times resemble modular synthesis processes, walking a path between smoked out head-nod chill and chilly head-spinning experimentation. Forward thinking, highly evolved and proper dangerous.

Spentshell

මහසෝනා – ‘(මහසෝනා​)​* – යන්ත්‍ර​.​මන්ත්‍ර​.​ගුරුකම්!’

‘මහසෝනා’ (Mahasonā) from this anonymous project from Sri Lanka. Nearly 15 minutes on cassette, Noise Metal dismal ritual hate and occult death to invoke the summoning of Sinhalese folkloric demon. Deathly yakseya evokation of soul-killing Noise and Black Drone of no-riff Doom, minimalist martial drums shimmer in unnatural heat haze, bass frequencies shudder and throb through lo-fi obscured audio, darkly psychedelic and ritualist, pulsing nahash vocal of the insane. Werewolf beast visage looms through the vibrating sonics, you can hear the candles flickering and smell the shitty amplifiers burning like some vile censer. Conjures a similarly mental atmosphere to Abruptum, Nirriti and Black Mass of Absu, being extremely forbidden and haram, harmful and dangerous in it’s esoteric intents and operating outside any specific scene paradigm. The work is an offering to Maha Sona, who will crush your shoulders with four hands, four eyes blazing through your cursed soul, filling your body with choleric pestilence. Be warned!

විරූපි Propaganda