EFFLUENCE – ‘PSYCHOCEPHALIC SPAWNING’

The first full length offering from one-man monstroddity Effluence, a sacrificial mutating slaughter in the name of Death Metal’s boundless, fractal tomorrow. Fusion jazz ‘Free Death’ slam brutality and truculence melts down and spews cosmic space death tech metal abstraction through intense instrumentation and atypical grinding pounding percussive flagellation and battery, amid a nuclear fallout of mind-flaying absurdity. ‘Song’ structures unfurl inconceivably, guitars and bass wrench and vomit atonal chord wall collapse with skronking macro dissonance, immutably deft pinch harms and genetically warped shredder pealing prog death solos, lockjaw intense dexterous drumming veers and careens through exceptionally tight patterns impossible to discern, leading each track through vortex and vacuum with absolute disregard for form, synths, keys, sax and winds loom beneath in abstract deliquescence, appearing within the maelstrom as piques of perfect absurdism, seams bursting with moments of insanely longhaired thousand-eyed progressive tech death expulsion, super low intonated bdm vocalwall and cosmic death warcry vocal battle for host supremacy, piles of writhing blasting grinding viscera toxify and strangulate in surrealist ecstasy. Totality Star Death and horrendous unimaginable rebirth. Megametal.

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

TJOLGTJAR – ‘VRUGUUN’

Tjolgtjar’s final record ‘Vruguun’ is a drugged and rockin’ descent into Psychedelic Black Metal hades, and a perfect summation of what makes Tjolgtjar so special. An amazing amalgam of influences making for a formidably unique redneck Black Metal record, drunk on potent ‘shine. King Diamond and Speed Metal, Kiss and WASP, raw Darkthrone and Burzum style Black Metal, Country, Bluegrass and Southern (gothic) Rock,13th Floor Elevators and Roky Erikson, Ted Nugent and Charles Manson, little nods to Post Punk, all manner of psychedelia, Goblin, Synths and Organs, raw and reedy Black Metal Guitars with killer riffing, rasping evil vocal mixed with impassioned singing and Metal wails, wailin’ solos over hard rocking anthems, psilocybin-laced Black Rock and Metal of a completely unique formula. Satanic and Occult, raw and obscure. Some tracks adhere to a more traditional Black Metal composition, others hew closer to 70’s Hard Rock or ancient spellbound Heavy Metal, and others still combine these elements into an incredibly heady listening experience. Slight differences or emphases in production across these 24 tracks amount to a very home-made, underground sound, very high concept and low fidelity. Vruguun is an absolute delight of non traditional Black Metal Magick, deftly handling dirt-rune experimentalism and drunk as fukk anthem bangin’ across it’s running time. Crucial.

Illinoisan Thunder

Super Sargasso

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

 

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

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

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

VARIOUS ARTISTS – ‘CADAVER MONUMENTS’

Banger 4 way split (sorry Andy, compilation) out on wax by Totem Cat Records in France, with each band loaded with un-reformable lifers. Malcontent sour Noise Rock, misanthropic Sludge and forlorn Doom sharing label/tape/board space, killing beers and stinking up the joint something heavy, Man’s Ruin/Shifty/Rage of Achilles style. -(16)- ploughs into their lumbering skate shunt Hardcore crush and downer Alt Sludge Rock scowl, leaning into waxed punk deadweight fury and austere, downer groove of scapegoathood, spots of clean vocal detailing personal tribulations. They never miss. Deadbird glowers and grieves in plodding, prideful Heavy Metal Doom reminiscent of Maryland titans The Obsessed with a dash of that Peaceville 3 sou(r)nd, here occupying the most wax (i think) and sticking out from their split peers with a mournful, heartbroken dirge into grandiose galloping original with falling Icarus lead work, and a pitch perfect Celtic Frost cover. Then Nightstick shift things down a gear or 4 into gibbering psychedelic sledge rock, nightmare fuel greyscale repeater psych that clowns would fear and Larry Lifeless(or Mark E Smith for that matter) would be ever so proud of. Slumped, inert and disturbed Noise Rock, barely cogent and sloughing out of time in their downtuned solo soaked abandon, freewheeling into occasionally tight-as-fuck blues drenched lucidity. Bad vibes. Fistula bring things to an anvil close with corpulent, stomping anti social Sludgecore that will rip your fucking arms off. Lumpy spiky chords, rumbling syrup Bass and leaden drumming, adorned with seriously spiteful, mental harsh vocal, drawing down the moon of Morrow and conjuring the fucking demon. Indispensable, particularly with that seriously silly/seriously fucking cool album cover.

Totem Cat Records

PYFYXFYRU – ‘OCCULT THEOCRASY VOL 1’

Pyfyxfyru is a solo project from Alcoholonomicon, it of Tjolgtjar, Blood Cult, Ängelust and Xexys infamy, among many other uniquely wyrd bands and projects. 5 tracks of deranged, possessed Black Heavy Metal in lunatic throes of devotion to the dark one, blasphemous to an obsessive, absurd degree, and preserved in a starkly dry and up-front recording quality, hiding none of it’s thrills behind lo-fi fog. Lithe deadly NWOBHM riffs entwined with frosty stabbing Black Metal riff sweeps and luscious lustful lead work, melodious and imperious Bass and alternately minimally hypnotic and severely rockin’ drumming driving the songs forward, with breathless passages of sweeping Black Metal leading around unseen mirrored corners to more psychedelic early-Kiss-channeling Hard Black Rock’n’Roll sections straight from blazing fucking hades, embellished with ecstatic melodic vocal and clean soul-chilling key tones. The Bass playing in particular is stellar, provoking unforseeable melodic textures and galloping rhythm in these orgiastic odes to Satan. This is a seriously addictive, killer sound, reveling in it’s over the top 70’s occult lunacy with a wry wink and a hard on. Gleaming, gloaming, deliciously purple Black Heavy Metal Satanism!

Illinoisan Thunder

THE DWARFS OF EAST AGOUZA – ‘HIGH TIDE IN THE LOWLANDS’

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza are a criminally undervalued avant-garde power trio whose arabesque synthesis of West African free jazz and krautrock has precious few parallels in 21st century music. Comprised of Cairo-based composer Maurice Louca, Land Of Kush guitarist Sam Shalabi and Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls notoriety, the band’s modus operandi is mind expansion via the scenic route, a fact nowhere better exemplified than on their latest, and arguably most ear-boggling album to date. Recorded live in Brussels, ‘High Tide In The Lowlands’ manifests as two 20+ minute excursions through a teeming jungle of polychromatic sound that once entered blocks off all clear avenues of escape. Zone in or zone out, these are trips where the destination may be predetermined but the satnav has been sabotaged. Opener ‘Baka Of The Future’ ignites in a sunburst of Eastern guitar curlicues before a fitful motorik groove propels the track across the entropy Rubicon and it begins unravelling, tendrils of atonal ambience snagging at the synapses until disorientation sets in. ‘The Sprouting Of The 7th Enterainment’ follows a similar but even more tortuous path, variously channelling the spirits of Damo Suzuki, Sun Ra and Mulatu Astatke whilst remaining wholly placeless and divorced from obvious influence. Like the oeuvres of other absconders from the plane of premeditation (Skull Mask, The Necks) this is music that has magnitude but not direction; scalar fields of pulsating noise that teeter on the brink of complete abstraction yet grip like a vice from first minute to last. The Dwarfs are cruising some strange spaceways here. Hitch a ride.

Sub Rosa Label

ASTRAL TOMB – ‘SOULGAZER’

Fiendishly psychedelic psychotic slamming Grateful Death Metal from Colorado three piece Astral Tomb. Mutating psyched-out Slam Death Metal via Fusion Jazz expressing effluvic cosmic jam sesh vibe, spiraling deadly riffs curl from the indifferent abyss in obtuse parallel shapes atop some of the most rapturous, innovative and intuitive drumming I’ve heard in quite some time, replete as it is with constant accents and astral fills. Super low burly cosmic cube vocal drifts across the timescapes, absolutely gigastoned technical riff patterns and ego deleting solos emerge and develop amidst exceptionally compelling, pummeling rhythms that lurch, slam and blast. Heavy use of synths, including a portentous separate synthscape track, trap the mind in the negazone as the power trio returns through a timewave portal to truly flay the prone mind with monstrous proggy Death Metal riff miasma. Red-eyed, long-haired, DMT addled, farsighted and utterly fucking brutal. I recently indulged a cranked as fukk listen through of ‘Soulgazer’ with the venerable Werewolf Hippy in his lair; his stoned drooling visage, profane exclamations and cackles at each unexpected deathly, slamming, tie-dyed turn delighted me no end. A triumph of xenomorphic Metal.

Blood Harvest Records

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

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

VINYL WILLIAMS – ‘OPAL’

Vinyl Williams has been plugging away at the kaleidoscopic grindstone for several years now, both creating his own works of florid soft rocking psychedelia and producing other band’s works of a similar sunshine-dosed bent. His 2018 album ‘Opal’ displays a peacocking, unabashed reverence to Turkish Psychedelic Rock, early Tame Impala, Prog Rock and contemporaries Khruangbin. Intriguing, portentous hypnagogic Psyche Pop swirling with progressive momentum and infested with deep ear-worms. Smooth as funk smoky atmospheres with buttery bass and ghostly nostalgia psych Guitar, not without a noisiness to the layers of spacious, spacy Guitars & Synth interplay, weaving complicated melodies with deeply jazzy chords and masterful Pop hooks in resplendently melodic phrasing, preserved in slick gossamer production. Hypnotic sunsoaked Pop, dreamscape mercurial Psychedelic Rock. Introduced to me by my youngest brother, a man of exceptional discerning, on a hot drive down to the coast to drink stout and eat oysters on a hazy, stoned scorcher last summer. The record seems to encapsulate that experience perfectly for me. Glorious.

Requiem Pour Un Twister

Bandcamp

MABE FRATTI – ‘SE VE DESDE AQUÍ’

Attempting to pin down the chameleonic music of Guatemalan cellist and composer Mabe Fratti is like trying to knit a hovercraft out of soup. A lysergic concoction of Latinate avant-folk and piquant chamber jazz, it inhabits a strange grottoed dimension where melody is the best friend of discord and pop’s usual rules of engagement are broken with impunity. Psychedelia of the common or garden variety it most certainly ain’t. Departing from the hazy introspection that marked Fratti’s lockdown masterpiece ‘Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos’, ‘Se Ve Desde Aquí’ spins a web of more inscrutable allure that centres on the ever-shifting dynamic between order and chaos. Where once her songs were noctilucent billows of variegated sound, here they more resemble a sequence of clockwork Fabergé musical boxes, each one more finely wrought and intricate than the last. Backdropped by clouds of pepper spray synth and efflorescent sax, Fratti’s oblique cello lines spool out in glistening platinized filaments, but it’s her glorious bell-clear voice that’s the real show-stealer, wheeling through the dissonance like a bird of paradise in a vast barbed wire aviary. Comparisons with so singular an artists are near impossible to draw, but if the effulgent esotronica of Camila Fuchs, Jenny Hval’s orchidaceous art-pop or the brambly jazz nouveau of Mirna Bogdanović light your candle, you’ll find much to love here. Stunning.

Tin Angel Records

RINUWAT – ‘DUA NAGA’

The glorious noise emanating from the Indonesian diaspora grows louder and more intoxicating with each passing day. A case in point, the eye-opening debut album from Melbourne-based ritualists Rinuwat, whose attritional fusion of grit, guitars and gamelan is crushing cousins with the far-flung furore of iconoclasts like BIG|BRAVE and Senyawa. Released late last year and given a vinyl reissue by that lightning rod for aural esoterica WV Sorcerer Productions, ‘Dua Naga’ is less an art-for-art’s-sake casting to the wind of drone metal’s touchstones than a fundamental reordering of its power structure. Heaviness just appointed a new cabinet. Drop the needle on opening track ‘Sewu’ and the nature of this chameleonic beast quickly becomes apparent. Less than one minute in, a colossal Krakatoan doom riff suddenly vaporises into choking ambient smog fitfully illuminated by the ominous clinking of metallophones and vocalist Karina Utomo’s hateful blackened rasp. It’s a dramatic yet seamless transposition that provides a template for the album as a whole, although ‘Dua Naga’’s breezeblock to the forehead powerplays are largely confined to its pitiless opening stretch. Venture deeper and as the darkness congeals around an eerie susurrus of gongs and flutes, Utomo’s extraordinary voice undergoes a paradigm shift, ascending from the abyssal to the astral plane like a seraph with its wings on fire. ‘Nagaloka’ brings the curtain down with one last burst from the apocalypse gun, but it’s impossible to resist an immediate rewind. A far cry from the humdrum holding patterns of so much contemporary metal, ‘Dua Naga’ employs the tools of tradition to build skyways to the future. Prepare to be ravaged.

WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片

SHACKLETON – ‘THE MAJESTIC YES’

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

Honest Jon’s Records

PURIFICATION – ‘DWELL IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD FOREVER’

Portland, Oregon’s Purification, with their third full length in as many years. Deeply morose, darkly florid psychedelic Doom of a dogmatic yet experimental mode, moldering in a musty stoic trip-state, drawing influence from many corners of psychedelic Rock, Traditional Doom and Old Skul Heavy Metal.  A sort of drugging and muddling of Trad Doom revivalist sounds like Reverend Bizarre, adding shades of psychotic purple and infernal green to an already lurid palette of sound and blurring the audial edges with mouldy production fuzz und drang phantasia  –  foreboding and prosaic psychedelic Doom dripping with pungent atmosphere. Stately Guitars shimmering and swimming, unfurling prideful/mournful melodies and some smoker leads, astride a rather separated armoured Bass low end and dripping slow Drums full of swing interlocking wickedly, topped with demented vocal dramas of the insane clergy, fervent and possessed with the rapture of antitheist irreverence. ‘Dwell In The House Of The Lord Forever’ plays a bit like an EP, soaked as it is with ambient passages and instrumental dirges, and features two exceptional covers from the deep recesses of obscure Doom. This one’s still available on CD from their bandcamp page – dig it, sinner.

Bandcamp

AVALANCHE KAITO SELF TITLED

An inspired collaboration between Burkinabè urban griot Kaito Winse and Belgian noise-punk ne’er-do-wells Arnaud Paquotte and Benjamin Chaval, Avalanche Kaito follow up their astonishing ‘Dabalomuni’ EP from earlier this year with an incendiary debut album that refashions their crotchety head-wrecking clatter into a cornucopia of exotic new shapes. Never a band to abide meekly by the ossifying precepts of ‘world music’ (fuck that self-complacent A&R doublespeak and the donkey it rode in on), Avalanche Kaito bring the noise by the truckload, ram-raiding the repository of outernationalist wonder once plundered by freebooting firebrands like Faust and 23 Skidoo. Lashing together an exoskeleton of plangent bass and corkscrewing polyrhythms with sinews of caustic electronic dissonance, Paquotte and Chaval are the Igors to Winse’s Frankenstein who jolts this fire-breathing postmodern Prometheus to life with his high voltage vocal callisthenics. Able to switch seamlessly from incantatory croon to the sort of strident glossolalic hectoring that was the late, great Grandmaster Masese’s stock-in-trade, Winse is an unstoppable force here, spinning lyrical gold from the proverbs of his homeland amidst a heat-haze of twanging jaw-harp and effervescent peul flute. Picking favourites is next to impossible but ‘Goomde’, a paranoid psych-dub lurch that sounds like World Domination Enterprises on the wrong end of a three day speed comedown, is heavy with a capital H. Not black midi, THIS.

Bandcamp