CTENIZIDAE – ‘HUMENICIDEG I’

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

Eerie Silence Productions

STCLVR – ‘POST SELF ABANDONMENT’

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

Phage Tapes

Crucial Blast

Bandcamp

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

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

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

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

STCLVR – ‘PREDATOR’

STCLVR’s 2017 cassette release ‘Predator’, 20 odd minutes of filthy Industrial Dance Noise and blistering Harsh Pop. Crushed and crumpled Industrial sizzle beats and squonk electronic pulse Bass fried to death, unmaligned claps snap through the audial grease, howling echo vocal Power Electronics style, but abstracted to fit a perverse dancefloor no one should dance upon. The ghoulish spectre of industrial, lurking electronic instrumentation menace, synths overloaded to shitting hell, dance music trussed up into a garish, prurient noise amalgam, dark electro nightmares in a damaged brain. If you dig on Plack Blague, Mutwawa or Backxwash, seek no further, strap on the leather and fuck shit up. Throbbing and gristly.

Chthonic Streams

Bandcamp

SANTAKA – ‘NO RIVERS HERE’

Santaka is the lockdown-birthed brainchild of Lithuanian drummer Marijus Aleksa and producer/DJ Manfredas whose symbiotic fusioneering expertise has resulted in one of 2022’s most audacious sonic statements. ‘No Rivers Here’ offers jazz without parameters, a fact writ vast by the undulating topography of the title track, a lurid, psychogenic shiver-fest that treads the path of most resistance for 18 breathtaking minutes. Alchemically concocted from aquaplaning percussion, pungent squalls of synth reflux, and a propulsive, slasher flick bassline, it has as much in common with Can and rRoxymore as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, which for those of us in the purist-baiting community, is A Very Good Thing Indeed. ‘555’ brings the low end into even sharper focus, dub-modulated congas and hi-hats swarming like bees around a honeypot of rapidly congealing sax. Unstable as neat nitroglycerine, it’s a potent intoxicant, but better still is ‘Opening Chasms (In Four Parts)’ which assembles a quadridimensional Rube Goldberg contraption from woodwind, brass and hand-drums that bears favourable comparison with Shackleton & Zimpel’s far-flung ‘Primal Forms’ and the Kryptox school of krautjazz outernationalism. Santaka are playing with divine fire here and to describe ‘No More Rivers’ as head-wrecking would be a galaxy class understatement. Fill yer boots.

Byrd Out

GOD IS WAR – ‘WORLD MUSIC VOLUME 1’

God Is War’s 12″ ‘World Music Volume 1’, released on Phage Tapes in 2020, is a spiteful statement of ongoing hostile intentions towards the electronic music scene at large. Mack Chami’s war will go on forever – Harsh Industrial Eurorack modular Synth Death, pulsing waves of Harsh Noise beats crush your mind while a sample feed of prayer call, decries and misery will pluck out your heart. Body splitting mega beats, hyper aggressive evolving arrangements, and belligerent frequencies scraping and shredding your third eye down to a bleeding nerve stem, slow revelation of patterns emerge from modular synthesis minimalism. Themes hew closely to classic P.E. via Muslimgauze, perhaps a sly nod/wink/bird flip to the many comparisons Chami has received to Muslimgauze over the years in interviews and reviews with reference to his older projects, based on the racist pre-supposition of his incorrectly supposed Islamic beliefs – imperious, arrogant and castigating war electronics to nuke the game.

Phage Tapes

FAT MAN MIAMI – ‘FAT MAN’S MIAMI’

The Fat Man’s first foray, registered in frosty Norway but psychically and sonically channeling the Miami haze windz –  An amalgam of miasmic Vaporwave and bombastic Synthwave blizzard, Future Funk/AOR adjacent super-soft rock chops and Smooth Jazz piano licks appropriated from the forgotten realms of commercial music and thoughtless Muzak, drifting melodies and repeated hooks sizzling and degrading in loops in your headphones, plumes of crispy elite beats romanced by unfurling ketamine haze diapason, slow and overdriven, drowning in numbness and the sense that things could have been better – illusory and saccharine sweet, a vaporizing, unreal delight of filtered as fuck Vaporhouse radiance. Killer.

Bandcamp

SPIRITCZUALIC ENHANCEMENT CENTER – ‘CARPET ALBUM’

Jazz is anathema to countless otherwise eclectically-minded music fans, and perhaps understandably so given the over-sufficiency of hamster-cheeked modality merchants noodling themselves numb at the trad end of the spectrum. Wisely however, outernational collective Spiritczualic Enhancement Center spit in the eye of such tedious virtuosity signaling, opting instead to establish their commune beyond the mainstream’s manicured banks in the lawless hinterlands where dissidence trumps orthodoxy and fusion takes a back seat to fission. The result of multiple recording sessions by an 18-strong cast of conspirators, ‘Carpet Album’ (no, me neither) is the musical equivalent of a fly agaric binge; a multi-tentacled chimera that, despite sporting the speculative friction burns of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, actually cleaves closer to krautrock’s serpentine inner spacefaring and the outré œuvre of such contemporary mystics as LCSM, Mansur and The Heliocentrics. Piquant with percolating synth, dub-flecked percussion ricochets, wah-wah guitar spume and aromatic Turk-psych curlicues, this is sonic alchemy of the highest esoteric order; a mind-dilating pleasure cruise to rattle the resolve of the most fervent jazz detractor. Your magic shagpile awaits.

Kryptox

GOD IS WAR – ‘APEX’

12″ on Breathing Problem Records. ‘Apex’ consists of 5 tracks of shapeshifting, warlike, lurking electronic menace, smoke-flooded modular eurorack Industrial synthscape designed to inspire trigger sweats and terminal paranoia shootings. Rugged, taut, disturbing, with exemplary sound-system punishing production. Psychotropic/psychotic Industrial Armament test clinic audio with an armory of sampled weapon discharge amid assassination and terror soundscape atmospherics and ambience, clipped off at a high rate of fire through modular synthesis, sweating cordite, drug labs raided in brutal psychedelic outrage, dripping with narcotic contempt and cold, murderous remove. A secret military exercise in remote chakral overstimulation and psychokinetic disembowelment. Absolutely insane artwork and layout, too.

Breathing Problem Productions

DUGHPA – ‘III’

On ‘III’, Kumulonimbus’s Dughpa adopts a long form means of expressing cosmic images of spacefaring at the endless frontier, eschewing the shorter songs of his previous works for two lengthy pieces of ambient soundscape and kosmische atmosphere, shimmering, blackly beauteous and expansive, pressed to hissing tape. These two pieces remind me in timbre and colour of Schulze’s ‘Cyborg’, each runs a varied yet thematically solid gamut of the lo-fi synthesized sounds as you’d expect from Dughpa, a very ponderous and foreboding listen bristling with detail and intent. The postcard sized cardboard Flex that comes with the LP is hilarious and brilliant, too; two very short tracks of bleeping and blooping from the dashboard of the corrigated sillicon voidcraft, recorded onto chippy cardboard, barely audible and entirely reliant on the format to accent the sound. It’s just great, fun and serious in equal measure. Regain Records still has copies of the LP available, with aforementioned Flexi and a wicked little art Zine. Get one.

Brugmanziah

Regain Records

SPIRIT POSSESSION SELF TITLED

Spirit Possession’s Self Titled full length delivers the lunatic promise of their excellent demo – shrieking, hysterical Black Metal virulent with Speed/Thrash/Heavy Metal influences, menacing glowering poltergeist energy aura of boundless possessive savagery!  Trill and treble drenched Guitars and killer Bass work form unorthodox, mind bending Thrash tinged riffs in obstinately rocking arrangements, at once angular, dissonant and mindlessly catchy, fiercely conjured Drums display similar unorthodoxy and chaoticism amidst straight forward hammering grooves and rocking the fuck out, a summoning of upheave vocal glossolalia dribbling with madness and dripping with delicious delay decay, haywire synths and noise pieces fomenting madness and weird unsettling auras. Sounds similar to the works of Funereal Presence, Craft, Negative Plane and Aura Noir, for reference, although Spirit Possession’s particular angular edges and incensed vocal delirium are all their own. Excellent.

Vexation Records

Profound Lore Records

 

GOD IS WAR – ‘KING OF THE ARABS’

Psychotic, despotic modular synthesizer Electronics from God Is War, alias of operative Mackenzie Chami of Koufar and Terror Cell Unit, among many others. Cassette released on No Rent Records. The supplanting and application of harsh Power Electronics and noxious Industrial textures, moods and aesthetic to a rugged, tough as fuck Electronics sequencer pattern paradigm – merciless, menacing bad guy music to dominate and debase. Crushing turbine sequence of building Bass pulse pressure in the nuclear reactor, irradiated Noise steam hissing from the seams of hulking, coiling, bombastic waves of synthesizer death. Reminds me in a lateral sense of the Power Noise sound akin to something like Converter, but even more harshly textural and gritty. “…This album is to signify the dawn of Hyper Violent Industrial music. Cower in your seat as the great purge commences. Gaze in awe at the aura of cosmic red blood as it swirls around the heads of those executed at gun point. Suffocate as the gases at Halabja fill your lungs. Go to your death defiantly. GOD IS WAR.” Crucial.

No Rent Records

FILMMAKER – ‘VLAD TAPES’

Filmmaker has been lurking at the edges of ebm and affiliated sounds for two or three years, with a sonically varied yet aesthetically cohesive discography of outlandish, dreadful ebm and crimson minimal wave electronics. ‘Vlad Tapes’ is 4 long, lo-fi mixes of different darksynth tracks, a grimoire of castle-dwelling, clammy synthesized Noise beats, a recontextualistaion of repetitious videogame music loops and lobit vampiric aesthetics to a techno bloodrave praxis – Impaling Synth drillers, funky as fuck (which is a real plus), grave and gruesome, decaying and changing, minimalist and crude, stitched together as long beatworks for blooddrinking solo. This shit is heavy and weird, referential to old school Techno and second wave Industrial, head music for fucking basehead freak vampires!

BODY MUSICK

TYRANNUS – ‘FLAMES OF TYRANNY’

Outsider Symphonic Black Metal recorded on a burning 4-track, singular blazing hot synths lines smoking speaker cones, simplistic kick-snare drum machine combo underpins sheet metal blizzard of buzzing minimal riffs, folkish pristine melodies and insanely noisy vocal screeching, scratchily atmospheric and yet noisy as fucking hell. Tyrannus walks a line between all out noise and smoky atmospheres, masterfully lo-fi and DIY, full of internal concepts unknown to the listener. Raw as fuck, blazing hot like white phosphorus, absolutely miserably infernal. Amazing stolen artwork, too.

Pagoda Mast

OH SEES – ‘PROTEAN THREAT’

Recent LP from the mindscape of John Dwyer and his magical marvelous Oh Sees (or OC’s, or Thee Oh Sees…) A shattered kaleidoscopic squirt of noisy acid Kraut Garage Rock, adorned in liquid metal mirrorsuit and ready to launch into orbit. Crumpled Bass distortion, psychedelic surfin’ Guitar leads, squealing effects and synths in hyperactivity, catching incessant melodies and riding them down to a nub – a multitude of strange singing, whispers and chatters amidst the driving and driven Spacewar Punk Rock, dancing and swinging, buzzing Bass lines run the gauntlet, unwinding speed blast Space Rock-ish, sci fi synths and mad earwomy shit, grooves forever. Rocking and chilling, freaking out and grooving too – ‘Protean Threat’ is Krautrock squared, taking the Motorik mesmerism of Can or Neu!, and melting it down into a pool of psychedelic Punk Rock contamination. Predictably wonderful.

Bandcamp

VORVADOSS – ‘A PULSE FROM THE SHIMMERING BEYOND’ EP

4 tracks of crackly, shimmering Dungeon Synth and magisterial mystical Syntheziser sounds from the faceless one, with occasional martial percussion elements and chanting intonations and incantations from beneath the hoods of the apprentices – unknown dimensions and dread horrors, cultist priests summon the ancient uncanny folkish melodies through arcane rites with militarist drumming, layers of synthesized ambience and shamanist prophecy. Darkly dreadful and forboding, singularly adventurous, solemn and cosmically imperious. Battle the ancient gods and ascend!

Bandcamp