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

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

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

RYLEY WALKER & KIKAGAKU MOYO – ‘DEEP FRIED GRANDEUR’

Collaborative record between psychedelian Ryley Walker and recently departed psychonauts Kikagaku Moyo. Two long, portentious tracks of sweltering sandy Psychedelia, cosmic soft rocking, phosphorescent, dusky and ponderous. Eastern tinged Raganic melodies, opium atmospheres with coils of smoke swirling into the air currents… Acid caravan music, shambling percussion and drifting guitar reverberations conjure the dunesmen wandering beneath triple suns in kaleidoscopic attire, propulsion towards kraut rock passages, stumbling with gathering momentum to passionate upswell of afrocentric rhythm and pearling opalescent lead work, walking Bass lines heavy with the incence of improvisation. Modal melodies and rhythms ensorcel the mind and massage the body, guitar melodies emerge and express the sun-dance, stoned shimmer of pocketed purcussion, bright cymbals clatter through the crisp production. Miraculous and mercurial.

Husky Pants Records

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

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

MEDIC VOMITING PUS – ‘THORACOABDOMINAL VISCERECTOMY’

Medic Vomiting Pus is a one-man Slamming Brutal Death Metal project from Japan, here with their only full length album, released on Bloodcurdling Enterprise. Haruka Kamiyama was also a member of Gorevent and is still a member of the ludicrous, fantastic Shinda Saibo no Katamari/死んだ細胞の塊, and here summons an impressive and vehemently regressive feast of barbaric Slam. Ultra hyperblasting and double bass deathrolling drum machine slams programmed in rigid groove patterns and forged of murderous volume extremity, timbre-focused sluicing riff chug slaw throws surprisingly memorable slam shapes, with superlow vocal insolence adornments. Gory and putrid. The imperious, superloud programmed drum style and sound really adds some spice to this project for my tastes, I find the unwieldy blasting and Neanderthal aggressive slams completely addictive. Fucking sordid.

Bloodcurdling Enterprise

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

LIFE – ‘OSSIFICATION OF CORAL’

LiFE’s most recent full-length album, a pulverizing Crasher Crust bastard sword strike, swung in desperation at planet earth’s capitalist overlords. Hard charging hammer drums churn out lightning quick D Beat barrage and neanderthal Crust Metal rolling gallop, blasting thunderous acrid fuzz Bass mids shot through Guitar fuzzkrieg chorded fury and minor Blues leads of ruin, rudimentary and dynamic metal riffs in punk overkill arrangements, supercrust puke Vocal horror – dramatic terrifying fukked up noize with heavy Peace Punk/Anarcho vibes… a long time staple of the international Crust scene, ‘Ossification Of Coral’ further compounds LiFE’s status as one of the scene-at-large’s most relevant and consistent voices, if not one of the most prolific. A deft balancing act between Punk noise and intensity, and Metal mastercraft and arrangement, leading to orgasmically heavy, wild-eyed results. Extra loud, noisy blitzkrieging Crasher Crust from dying earth’s hell! The Bass tones on this thing need to be heard to be fucken believed!

Acclaim Collective

Desolate Records

Not Enough

 

PAIN JERK – ‘1993’

Archival release from Pain Jerk, featuring both tracks that would make up their abortive first 7″ release, and the track ‘Rocketry’ from the ‘ペイン・ジャーク’ cassette release of the same year, an early 90’s work of out-and-out Harsh Noise. These tracks are some of the few that feature Pain Jerk as a two piece operation. A fascinating fulminated electronic howl, catastrophic conveyorbelt channel-switch mayhems of early-ish so-called Japanoise, featuring abstruse cut up technique and volume immersion/endurance testing, battering extreme temperature maligned signal electronics to sear and confuse, dotted liberally with mangled, half audible bludgeoned sampling. Extremely hazardous and ego-killing. Archaic, difficult and perfect. Even as early as ’93 Pain Jerk was already setting new standards in the Noise of coldly implacable cut up electronics, removing new perceptions of objectivity and furthering the genre into furtive plateaus of electronics enmity and extremity. Pain Jerk’s Bandcamp page is a Noise fan’s nirvana, be sure to check through the various other releases hosted within.

Bandcamp

BUTCHER ABC – ‘NORTH OF HELL’

Butcher ABC’s 2017 full length ‘North of Hell’ is a grand guignol of bloodthirsting groovy fucking DETH – they’ve been kicking it since the early 00’s and this is their only full length so far. It’s a festering triumph! Goregrinding Death Metal mastery full of Crust and Thrash, super enormous hell Guitar and Bass barbarities with hades groove riffing and surprisingly melodious metallicrust denouements and soaring leads, domineering heavy as fuck drumming with lots of single foot blasts and slobbering pitched low vocal grotesqueries with crusty old school outcry vocal, too. Loud and booming production job. Head-banging crusty Gore/Death with lots of simple as sin Death and Roll influence, this really is a drunken orgiastic delight. Bullldozing, grinding, disgusting, gurgling, and totally deadly, striking a masterly match between metallic melody and punk provocation. If you enjoy Carcass, Sacrilege, Autopsy or CBT (who doesn’t?) wait no longer!

Selfmadegod

Power It Up

Bandcamp

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

WATARU NOMURA – ‘WIPE KARMA’

An intoxicating, sultry abstract Jazz mix from hidden form Wataru Nomura – expertly selected, brilliant weird Jazz cuts and Ambience to get you contact stoned, totally inverse and extrospective abstract perspectives on dissonance and quiet. Being the novice that I am, I’m not familiar with all of the artists involved, so I can’t offer insights relative to their individual discographies beyond the obvious and easily researched. Paul Bley’s ‘Albert’s Love Theme’ opens the suite with spectral piano and bass groan, oblique and ponderous, flowing into some masterly percussion and Sax entanglements, stepping and dancing, leading to explorations of fusion types and Free Jazz improvisational expressions. Eddies of lone percussive motions and arcing slews of reverberating noises, spectral and diasporic horns, licks of field recordings, tracks flowing from form abstraction to formless reverie. Furthest out!

Bandcamp

JAH EXCRETION / SEAL TEAM 666 SPLIT – ‘AMPS FOR JAH’

Most high split between Jah Excretion and Seal Team 666, a meeting of Dub-minded pothead Harsh Noise advocates made in Mecca. This dime was released by Dread Rocks Records in Japan on pro CD, although it is now sold out at the source, and digitally on Grindcore Karaoke. Jah Excretion sparks and blasts two tracks of hyper minimal Harsh Noise reverb-beration, for smoke up sesh of only the most zooted, head-crushingly heavy and ionic positive charge, Hashishian Harsh Noise for heads. This material hews closer to Iwasaki San’s older releases as Jah Excretion, leaning less into the voluminous ambience he would later explore on his Meditation EPs and doubling down on the ear bleeding piercing treble frequencies. Seal Team 666 pulses up a confounding slow-rolling smokestorm hotbox of Harsh pulsing Noise laden with samples, and dub siren distortion jam on OG Augustus Pablo and Jah Shaka Dub versions, super Harsh red-eyed stoned as shit Noise Dub pulsation to provide a psychedelic lungfull – Positive bliss reception, tripped delay tokes and oscillation inhalation contours within the smokestorm of low end frequency. Perfectly packed between each artist’s contribution is a highly impassioned reading of Shel Silverstein’s “Smoke Off” by A. Kenyon. Stoned ascension. SMOKE VOLCANIC DOPE.

GK#493

Bandcamp

GRINDTAMAGOTCHI -‘1’

One-human Cybergrinding Noisecore from Japan. Free flowing, process oriented and formed in extreme pressure chambers, dense and overdriven Myspace-era Cybergrind reminiscences in a poorly erased memory bank, reinterpreted to Noisegrinding magnificence – rendering mammalian brainstems obsolete! AI generated hypergrind, reams of psychedelic blasting programmed drum concussion and/or midistrings electronics dissonance in the extreme, pealing out looped melodies to aggravate and scramble, tracks stopping and starting without warning. This first release is without vocal accompaniment, too. Heirs of early 2000’s Myspace Grind genetics mixed right out of the test tube to inoculate new and bio-variable Noisecore forms. If you dig on Kusari Gama Kill or A Beautiful Lotus, I recommend allowing Grindtamagotchi to delete your idiot protein-based consciousness.

Bandcamp

BLACKPHONE 666 – ‘PTN​.​YLW / HARM’

BLACKPHONE666 has been operating for years now carving a high-def niche with tactile Harsh Noise damage inflected with Dub siren low end abandon. Here, he masterfully applies Speedcore/Hardcore blast and power to his extant Harsh Noise Bass distortion paradigm to incendiary result – <666PROTECT> required for survival! Round after round after hollow-point // Gabber kick rounds! Corrodent, irritant, a dangerous electronics substance capable of melting extremities when mishandled, fumes like hard ethanol or solvents – ignorant Speedcore hammer kicks sampling with little relent, insensible sequencer melodies swimming in brutal effects are established and punctuated with distorted P.E. vocal hallucinatory terror and blasts of Harsh as Fukk tonal distortion, overdriven system mangling production, reverence to old terror Dutch Hardcore abound. Overwhelming psychotomimetic Electronics power! The cassette features an exclusive and endurance testing HNW Speedcore amalgam of dangerous intensity and fearsome unapproachability. Hype as fuck.

Murder Channel

Bandcamp

MORTIFY – ‘GROTESQUE BUZZSAW DEFILEMENT’

Check it out kids, it’s Japans amplifier imploding death grind super trio MORTIFY, returning to the scene of the crime. The offense: eviscerating frontal lobes with their patented brand of HM-2 powered Swedish death inspired grindcore madness. Continuing where “Stench of Swedish Buzzsaw” left off, Grotesque’ is slightly shorter, clocking in at under ten minutes with 12 original songs & an Agathocles cover. Sonically it’s even more blown out that the first full length with the guitar tone dialed in through multiple HM-2 pedals, screeching through every track, while the drums fill the back end just as loudly & twice as fast. I ha e to say, when the instruments are running through just two humans playing at this level, the stop/go precision is usually more prevalent & shines a bit brighter than most (see Assück/D.A./Ruins/HIRS), and MORTIFY definitely fit into that category. The songs feel more thought out while keeping that sporadic element you need in grind. And the voice work on this entry elevates this production to even higher peaks as Adam Jennings wretches & snarls his throat muscles into the reverberating abyss like the corpse of a rotting lunatic murderer being brought back to life mid-kill spree. MORTIFY have even worked a couple cinematic soundbites into this venture, adding to the overall gruesomeness of the affair & showing the right amount of growth without cheapening the impact (or worse yet, slowing down!). Everything crammed into this 9 minute horror show is a solid A+. Musically, lyrically & aesthetically (the art & logo work/layout on all their releases are top notch) they hit all the right notes & manage to not roll out a lazy chunk of laughable cheap shit you’ve heard before (something I’ve noticed many many many grindcore bands have been extremely fucking guilty of as of late, especially a lot of these “super groups”). Hearing this gets me even more pumped for their upcoming split 7″ on 625 Records w/ LA’s H.A.R.M. And hopefully after that we get blessed with another installment of the MORTIFY tale, because I don’t think these guys are ready to put down the buzzsaw & stop killing just yet. So if you like GOOD grindcore, get this thing. If you like death metal but hate that they fuck around & play way too long, get this thing. If you hate your neighbors & have a CD player with a loop function, get this thing. 

LISTEN & BUY IT HERE!!!

PAIN JERK – ‘MISSION INVISIBLE: KILL THE POOR’

Massive Harsh Noise from an absolute master. 5 tracks of pulverizing Noise recorded at around the time of the immense ‘Gallon Gravy’, originally intended for release on Relapse/Release. Timbre unbearable massacre and source overload, agitating audial deluge, ego death and overwhelming sensory input, a wild live electricity energy and irreversible cataclysm that registers a fight or flight response in mammals – ‘Kill The Poor’ may be the tongue in cheek mission statement or the sincere call to arms, and in a sense it really doesn’t matter. Interpretive language in titles (Damon not Demon), the use of previous Pain Jerk covers as collage, rhythmic looped effects maligned into further shapes of noise and crushed out of all temporal recognition, high and low registers repelled from each other by massive magnetic shifts registering a million motives at once, squalling feedback channeled through unknowable processes. An assertion is here made that Pain Jerk is in many ways the de-facto old head of classic ‘dynamic’ style Japanese Harsh Noise. ‘Mission Invisible: Kill The Poor’ is behind the fuckling wire of consciousness, annihilating rationality and listening objectivity with terrible prejudice. Instant classic.

Hospital Productions

THIRDORGAN – ‘SATANICO PANDEMONIUM’

Thirdorgan from Japan. Originally released on CDr by UK label Dead Sea Liner in 2006. Opening with a loop from Dawn of the Dead, ‘Satanico Pandemonium’ then blows the gates wide open to a dimension of the psychic dead walking the earth amidst collapsing, hallucinatory psychedelic scrap Harsh Noise audial event deluge, psychotropics summoned, controlled flooding Noise dam destruction, samples inhumed and corroded slowly in effects chain, a languorous but methodical pace of piercing experimentation – Harsh Noise pandemonium and cudgel psychedelia – swirling visual vapor trails achieved via concussion and painkillers. I’m less familiar with Thirdorgan’s output than I should be, barring some of their most well known and loved early cassette releases like Heavy Metal Battle Fighter, Mirrorman, Pessimistic Cyborg, and The Pornography of Despair, (recently reissued by the excellent Hospital Productions) – in remedy to this alarming oversight I’ll be diving into their well curated Bandcamp page right here. ‘Satanico Pandemonium’ is a total fuckin’ mindpeel!

Bandcamp

K2 – ‘CRUEL TRUTH’

Another fat banger from your new favorite noise tape label by way of
premier Japanese noise offender K2. Two live sets for each side of the brain.
The listener is treated to a sound akin to willingly dragging your half dead body onto a loading dock for the sole purpose feeding what’s left of yourself to an angry machine. Ever changing thunder bass broadcasting through ten thousand increasingly louder channels of breaking windshields and flaming helicopters in perfect intervals. It says something special to an individuals sound manipulation abilities when they can conduct rhythmic pulses in simultaneous bursts of serenity and volcano-like digital bile. 50+ min & not an ounce of fat. Get blown out.
Highly recommended.

Deathbed Tapes