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

BULLET CLENCHED IN TEETH – ‘STEWED, SCREWED AND TATTOOED’

Depraved War Noise Sludge from the shell shocked minds of K.S. and D.N.E., also of the irrepressible and inexplicable Tsalal and  Black Abyss. Barbarous and corpulent black sludge noise, looming sky-blackening barrages of artillery blast percussions mix mid paced war blasts and yet slower canon dirges, bass heavy drudge of grinded mangled riffs blown apart, insane battlefield distorted echo wyrd vocal incantations proclaim orders and liturgies across the line, drone infrared patterns exposed prone forms in the sweltering jungle, tracers shatter the treeline… doomed wartorn Psych(o)edelia, dread violent Sludge and Grind sturm und drang. Bloody mud in the fields of fucking death! The cassette features some excellent prison art style, demonic forms painted across riverbanks as manifestations of conflict like battlefield phantasm trading cards, vile totems of pyrrhic victory. Canned heat – Contents under pressure – front towards enemy.

War Vellum

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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

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

MARTÍN ESCALANTE / TETÉ LEGUÍA / WEASEL WALTER – ‘KATYUSHA’

3 long tracks of multi-directional improvisational malfeasance to the destroy the illusion, reality shaking expressions of exuberance, power and lunacy. Totalitarian, maximalist torrent of free improvisation, an explosively intense expression of Free Jazz, a wordless primal scream dialed to 11 and vibrating with humming radioactive power. Delicacy and intonation wither like prone digits in a subzero torrent. Weasel pummels and plummets down the stairs in bursts of terminal velocity, crashing through the firmament with fearsome idiot energy and incredibly dexterous, choppy runs full of off-kilter hyper blast beats and endless rolling double bass. Leguía applies a tormenting, synapse poisoning saxophone performance best experienced behind bulletproof glass, each singing, stinging, screaming volley forced into life, choked and strangled, threatening to destroy your precious inner ear, and Escalante conjures a bass performance of the unfathomable, an iron curtain falling in plumes and rotten ruffles, coiling and piling beneath and amidst the insane percussion. Quieter moments serve to wane the friction and crank up the foul ambiance of these three demons at work(&play). A maelstrom of hyperkinetic aplomb and sweat-soaked interactive fervor, challenging and socially challenged. If you enjoy Painkiller era Zorn, Sissy Spacek or Peter Brötzmann, seek no further. Entirely essential, fun as fuck.

ugEXPLODE

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

TSALAL – ‘צָלַל’

Shadowy, fiendish and chaotic Noise Black Metal, reeking black incense, rehearsal room ritual provocation ambience, echo-laden guttural djinn vocal gibbering, summoned eruption of random guitar solos striking from the dark in obscene and unknowable forms, grinding bass noise, unwieldy blasting drums. Hallucinatory and bizarre. Black Ambient, Harsh Noise and Power Electronics, Noisecore, Black Metal warped into a hideous and incorrigible form of primitivist rite. A merciless, perverse and perplexing black lightning bolt of total chaos maelstrom – otherworldly, extremely disharmonious Black Noisecore to silence the Gods, wielding profane erect phallus and thousands of severed heads.

Larval Productions

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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

NAEGLERIA FOWLERI – ‘DISSOLVED IN SUBSTANCE’

Excellently executed Gorenoise meatgrinder, bulldozing body-shaking Gore of terrifying heft and abstracted Brutal Death Metal stature and bludgeon. Ultra-blasting drums form the ‘structure’ of Noisecore/Gorenoise within, surprisingly complex and dexterous, hellacious super heavy bass drum in particular hammering dents in your chest plate with pinging snare insanity to balance, grinding mush of mechanically separated Bass distortion noise enmangled beneath the chopping blasts, gurgling corpse vocal sloshing about atop the surface like some sort of plasmic scum. There’s enough production dynamics here to match the intensity of the noise within, giving the Bass frequencies a swinging axehead bottom-end that it’s worth accounting for in playback for super hefty and weighty results. Abstract as fukk but still totally headbanging. Trenchantly heavy, starkly intense and dynamic, deeply unmusical. Gruesome shit.

Pathologically Explicit

Bednoiseroom Records

Heretic Impalement Records

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

FENTANYL TAPWATER / DISPOSAL UNIT SPLIT

Recent split on Ohio’s Bizzaro Warrior, filthy shirtless Sludgecore and idiot toothless Noise Rock. Fetty Tap’s tracks feature some burgeoning, burning hot Sludgecore contamination, headache aura ambience, blown out bass harsh noise squall, loping hardcore beats set pace fearsomely beneath impossibly mountainous bass chord beatings, tempos plummet and we are repeatedly lumped about the face and neck with swinging, downcast bass sludge hate, with deathly low vocal brutality, a killer addition to already difficult to swallow sound. Although operating in quite separate areas of Hardcore, this Fetty Tap material reminds me of Matt’s previous band Water Torture, less the blasts. And fuck me, the Poison Idea cover is just perfect, too. Disposal Unit then switches things up from previous Industrial-leaning releases with a scraping, emollient exhaustion of Noise Rockin’ malaise, very weird and leftfield, repeating low-chi obstinate gurning riffs met by lolling percussion clatter and an am-rep disturbed reverend vocal. Dulled edge guitars, slurred vocal spite addled with ritalin, despicable black mood music like a motherfucker. I could have done with one more track on the DU side, but this is a great split of complimentary, horrible sound. Dig in.

Bizzaro Warrior

WHITE BOY SCREAM – ‘TENT MUSIC’

White Boy Scream is the solo avant-classical project of Los Angeles based opera singer and composer Micaela Tobin, however, a recent chance meeting with prog folk artisan Joshua Hill has given rise to ‘Tent Music’, an enrapturing tour de force that glazes baroque experimentalism with the lustrous lacquer of oceanic rock. So named because its genesis occurred during two nights of improvisation in (surprise, surprise) a tent, the album’s immense force of attraction derives from the frictional dynamic between Hill’s latticework string arrangements and the unearthly effulgence of Tobin’s gravity defying vocals. ‘Overture’, for example is a palpitating crescendo of vinegary violin drone and calamitous percussion that could easily derail were it not for the starstream of oohs and ululations that reroute it towards to the nebulous realm inhabited by dreampop outliers like Cats Of Transnistria and Tan Cologne. Elsewhere, ‘Fade Away’ and the stunning ‘Fire In My Hands’ recall the seasick psych-blues roil of latter-day Swans, whilst ‘Beautiful Creature’ casts Tobin as strung-out balladeer, her mellifluous soprano melding with the aether like Björk serenading the bat population of a ruined mausoleum. The fulcrum on which ‘Tent Music’ pivots though is ‘Closer’, a chimerical epic that mutates from crystalline chamber folk to haunted abattoir clatter-fest over the course of eleven ear-strafing minutes. Addictive as chocolate-dipped crack, the allure this extraordinary record exudes is properly preternatural. Succumb without delay.

Whited Sepulchre Records

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

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