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.
A prime mover in the resurgence of cassette culture, Newcastle-based imprint Cruel Nature boasts a catalogue of near unrivalled sonic eclecticism and its commitment to championing outsider music is nowhere better exemplified than on ‘Spectrum’, a gem-studded 23-track anthology compiled to mark the label’s 10th anniversary. Featuring artists drawn from an enviably deep talent pool and sequenced like the tasting menu of a cutting-edge restaurant, the album bodyswerves through a plethora of contrasting styles without once losing focus, highlights arriving thick and fast throughout its marathon 110-minute runtime. In the banger camp, VHS¥DEATH’S ‘Sacrifice’ is a hard-charging, Berghain-ready headrush, whilst the vertiginous ‘Nu-shunting’ by GK favourites Whirling Hall Of Knives, splits industrial techno’s atom sending quarks and gluons of percussive fallout skittering across the dancefloor. Otherworldliness abounds here too. The Durutti Column-gone-slowcore filigree of Charlie Butler’s sepia-tinted ‘Eagle’s Splendour’ is a transport of introspective delight but Dublin-based experimentalist Katie Gerardine O’Neill steals the strangeness show and then some with ‘Along The Shoreline’, a mind-warping odyssey into deconstructed chamber jazz that dazes and confuses in equally large measure. Elsewhere though, far darker forces are at work. ‘I Have Cherished Our Season Of Friendship’ from Esmé Lousie Newman’s Petrine Cross project is doom-laden ambient black metal at its most balefully cinematic and if blunt force trauma lights your candle, Lovely Wife’s bass-heavy sludge blowout ‘Letting Go’ delivers its payload with all the subtlety of a backstreet kneecapping. Packed sardine-tight with brilliance, and with all profits going to youth autism charity The Toby Henderson Trust, ‘Spectrum’ offers an unmissable glimpse into Cruel Nature’s singular soundworld. Here’s to the next 10 years.
Newcastle’s storied underground imprint Cruel Nature is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of ‘Spectrum’, a 23-track charity compilation that highlights precisely why the label has become a byword for sonic diversity. No better time then for a chat with ever generous founder Steve Strode.
First of all, congratulations on reaching your 10th anniversary. Could you tell us something about your background in music and how Cruel Nature first came into being.
Thank you very much!
My background in music started in my early childhood. My parents enjoy music and records were played a lot at home; mainly old rock n roll, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, all sounds which I love today. My dad saw Eddie Cochran’s last ever gig at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1960. Aside from a couple of 7s, there were no Beatles in the house; although there was an album of a session band doing Beatles covers, and throughout my childhood I thought they were the Beatles. When Elvis died in 1977, my auntie came over to the house and Elvis records were played all day well into the night. When John Lennon died in 1980, the Beatles session band covers album was played. Which is both amusing and strange. Recognising and remembering John Lennon by playing his music performed by a fake John Lennon. I don’t think my parents cared for the Beatles much really. I remember my uncle playing me T Rex singles when I was a child, although it could be the fact that they were named after a dinosaur which was the main attraction there.
I was in primary school when punk entered my world. For some reason, we always used to listen to Radio Luxembourg on a little transistor radio when on family caravan holidays, and I recall hearing The Clash and others played during the summer holidays. It was the very late 70s when I started wanting my own records and still under the influence of punk, I asked my mum to buy me Never Mind The Bollocks, which of course with a title like that she refused. So, I got Parallel Lines as a consolation, which I find a better album. I still have that original copy from 1978. After that I got into the 2-Tone movement, then The Cure, Joy Division, The Birthday Party and so on. I was also a goth for a bit. But it was the Jesus and Mary Chain who influenced me to form my first band and play my first gigs when barely out of high school, leading to more bands, gigs etc.
At various points, I’d have several music ventures on the go. Playing in bands; putting on gigs; running a tape distro; publishing a short-lived zine with my mate Paul, that my mum used to duplicate for me on the photocopier at my old primary school, where she worked. We’d then sell it at gigs and through Revolver Records in Bristol. It ran to three issues, although issue three never went to print, even though it had a Big Black interview and a feature on The Ex in it. I don’t recall why. Maybe the photocopier had broken. Or mum was found out. Family has played a supportive part in my creative vocations, and it still does today.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, I formed Distraction Records with Darren Hubbard in 2002, releasing vinyl and putting on events. I don’t think Cruel Nature would exist without that experience and the subsequent involvement and collaboration with global labels and artists via MySpace, music forum / boards in the mid-2000s.
About three years ago, I watched a programme on the art of Japanese cherry blossom gardens. The dedication and commitment that goes into creating these horticultural wonders, often involving individuals solely focusing on one task (picking certain buds off, so the blossom grows according to the required aesthetic, for example), developing and excelling at it for many years, with a Zen stoicism.
This got me thinking about the activities I was pursuing at the time, trying to balance playing in a band, doing gigs, and running the label alongside the priorities of day job and family, which were all becoming very challenging to sustain.
With that in mind, after almost three decades of pursuing many music ventures simultaneously, taking a steer from the art of Japanese gardening, the only music vocation I am now dedicating my focus to, is the label and the curation of sounds that support it.
Cruel Nature has one of the most eclectic catalogues of any independent record label. Was sonic diversity part of your original vision?
Absolutely. In the very early days, it was coming from a left-field, experimental and sometimes extreme angle which has softened over the years, but if you look at the first three releases: you have industrial dark ambient soundscapes, post-punk / no-wave, and harsh noise wall, so it was already crossing genres. That’s how I’ve always worked. The Distraction Records catalogue was eclectic and it’s reflective of my own eclectic taste. When listening to music at home and when I used to DJ in the late 90s / early 00s, the selections will go from dub to funk to techno to punk and then pop in a matter of minutes. It’s that mix tape mentality, when you’d pull together a collection of random sounds for someone, with the sole message being ‘you gotta hear this!’
Cruel Nature specialises in limited edition cassettes. Why that particular format rather than vinyl or CD?
We have released some CDs and vinyl (mainly as made-to-order lathe cuts), to compliment the cassette releases, but from the outset, the label was established with cassettes as the format of choice. Cassettes are what I grew up with. Making tapes of tracks recorded off the radio, John Peel’s Festive 50 was great for that. All the band demos and my own sonic tinkering, all recorded straight to tape. Recording gigs of bands. Running a tape distro. Long before CDs, downloads etc, cassette was the only physical format for people to get their sounds out without having to take the big risk of shelling out on expensive vinyl. And arguably it still is. The DIY community thrives through cassettes. You buy one at a gig; it slips nicely in your pocket. Portability. Cassettes are DIY. The cassette is there in the mosh-pit or at some 10 band bring your own drink, pass the bucket around for donations, gig in a rehearsal space, the backroom of a pub, a community centre. Cassettes are punk.
Through running Distraction Records, I learned about the restrictions and constraints imposed financially through being mainly vinyl based. The basis behind Cruel Nature is to provide a platform for new artists, irrespective of location or genre. I can’t really fulfil that mission with vinyl and such an eclectic catalogue. Cassettes give me more freedom to take risks with the sounds I’m publishing, and you still get the warm analogue organic feeling that you do with vinyl, along with the ability to be creative with the packaging, so overall a perfect work of art.
For the first 3 years, the label was 100% DIY. All the cassette releases were home-produced. I moved to pro-production due to time constraints and a desire to improve the quality of the releases, along with wanting to give better art and packaging options to the artist.
Of the many tapes you’ve released over the last 10 years, do you have any favourites?
I can’t really say. It’s like asking if I have a favourite child. They’re all loved equally for their own individual special ways. But if I need to call out some for significance, then At The Heart Of All ‘Cotard’s EP’ will be an obvious choice as it’s the first-born, the tape that launched the label. The one that I started the Cruel Nature learning experience and journey with. ATHOIA were from Bristol, and I’d been speaking to Aaron from the band for maybe a year before the tape came out. We’d been collaborating on some sounds before I’d considered starting the label. It was the only release I did for them. The band ceased a little while later. Aaron is now an artist and did the amazing artwork for the ‘Spectrum’ compilation.
Mirrored Lips ‘были у меня длинные волосы, но разве они принесли мне счастье’ I was introduced to Russia’s Mirrored Lips in 2016 via an email from Sasha, asking if I’d like to publish an album for them. I checked out their Bandcamp and what I heard just blew me away. Off-kilter improvised free-form no-wave noise-punk, that had a sense of urgency that just commanded your attention. In October that year I released the album ‘MOM’, their first UK release. We corresponded a lot and started talking about arranging a UK tour and by March 2017, I’d booked a 7-date tour, across the north and south of England, accompanying them along the way. They were so good live. Amazing stage presence, such intense performances, drawing in and captivating audiences everywhere they went. While here, they checked into Gateshead’s Sound Rooms and recorded ‘были у меня длинные волосы, но разве они принесли мне счастье’. It was a studio live recording of the set they were playing on tour. Released in June 2017, for me that tape represents Mirrored Lips at their peak.
Being one of the labels involved with last year’s release of Nadja ‘Labyrinthine’ was a pleasure. I’d worked with Aidan on a couple of solo albums previously and was asked to handle the UK cassette release for Nadja. It was a good demonstration of how several global labels can come together and work collaboratively on a single release, each bringing their own stamp through individual artwork and presentation.
In the same vein, after working with David Colohan on a number of solo releases since 2015, it was an honour to pick up the cassette release of United Bible Studies ‘Return Of The Rivers’ last year.
I have solo works for Aidan and David in the schedule for this year, but it’ll be great to work with both Nadja and UBS again.
‘Spectrum’, your mammoth 23-track 10th anniversary compilation, has just been released. Could you tell us something about it and how you approached the process of track selection.
Whilst daunting at the outset, I did follow a process to select the artists involved. This was based on those who are still active; those I had worked with on many releases; those whose work had a significant impact on me; and then an overall sonic cohesion. The original list was more than twice the size of the final 23 so would’ve been a box set if I included everyone. The tracks provided were all at the artist’s discretion. There was a limit on duration, and they needed to be exclusive. Aside from that there were no restrictions.
The other aspect of the compilation is that all proceeds from the release are going to The Toby Henderson Trust, an independently funded charity in North East England which supports autistic youth and adults, as well as their families and caregivers. My son Davy – who is the same age as the label – is autistic with ADHD, so I have a close connection to the challenges faced by affected individuals and their families and understand the importance of the support that charities like TTHT give.
Since initiating the compilation, some of the artists involved and supporters of Cruel Nature, have highlighted their own connections with neurodiversity, either personally, through family or providing support, so it’s good that it is also raising awareness and getting people talking about the subject.
Looking forward, are there any artists you’re keen to add to the Cruel Nature roster, and how do you see the label progressing?
I have a steady stream of submissions and a growing release schedule, with this year already almost booked out, so we’re continuing at a prolific rate. Time constraints mean that occasionally I do miss an opportunity with submissions, but I always endeavour to listen to everything, and if the content of the accompanying note grabs my attention, then I’ll jump right in. Sometimes, a conversation might start with someone about releasing something and it can take a couple of years or more before anything is published. Katie Gerardine O’Neill is a good example. It was the start of 2021 when we first spoke about possibly working together and it was 2 years later when I published ‘Into The Beyond’. I don’t push or pressure artists. Everything must proceed at their pace, ‘don’t worry, there’s no rush’ is a stock phrase. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen. Equally, I respect the patience of the artists, as with a busy schedule, it can sometimes take months for work to be published.
There have also been times when albums have been submitted, artwork produced and then not actually released as the artist has withdrawn the work. With Chihuahua, their amazing album ‘Crythor Du’ was released, and the band split up 9 days later! A big shame as they were excellent. I’m glad I managed to get the album published before the split.
In the next few months, there will be material from Pound Land, Tunnels Of Āh, Aidan Baker, David Colohan, Clara Engel and Charlie Butler; along with Gvantsa Narim, who produces amazing emotive electronic ambient soundscapes inspired by religion, esotericism and Georgian polyphonic music. We’re also welcoming Waterflower to the Cruel Nature roster. A Latvian artist merging interdisciplinary performance with a fusion of art pop, experimental noise, avant-garde, and ethereal melody. There’s also the debut from Tyneside based Dissociative Identity Quartet, who produce enigmatic minimalist techno and a singles collection from frenetic Leeds post-punkers, Volk Soup.
I’m also keen to publish some more work from Tibshelf, aka Lee Etherington, the man who established Newcastle’s Tusk festival. His debut ‘Supreme Flounder’ is plunderphonic heaven, cutting and pasting all kinds of samples into mind-bending sound collages. Funk, hip-hop, techno, ambient, soul, it all gets thrown in the mix and along with Summer Night Air’s ‘5’, is another example of Cruel Nature pushing the boundaries of sonic diversity.
There’s plenty to get excited about!
‘Spectrum’ is available now from Bandcamp as a limited edition double cassette and digital download. All proceeds will be donated to the Toby Henderson Trust, an independently funded charity in North East England which supports autistic youth and young adults together with their families and caregivers.
Essential double header that unites the prodigious talents of Irish underground legend Alan O’Boyle, aka Of One, and mercurial noiseniks Whirling Hall Of Knives for two epic excursions through electronic music’s storm-lashed hinterlands where the usual rules of engagement are broken with gleeful impunity. Of One fires the first broadside with ‘Recoil’, a menacing deep techno leviathan that pivots around the most incendiary acid line since Barnt’s remix of C.P.I.’s ‘Proceso’. Burrowing through a thick loam of distortion and bass viscera like the Graboid from Tremors, it periodically breaks cover to snap its scabrous jaws, spatters of caustic 303 eating away at the track’s juddering wheelbase until it comes perilously close to disintegrating. It’s a face-chewing monster of a tune that simply begs to be cranked through a skyscraper-high system, but no less formidable is WHOK’s astonishing ‘Greywash’, the sonic equivalent of a malign Lovecraftian cryptid with more tentacles than an octopus farm. For the first half of its 15-minute runtime a fractured rhythm is slowly strangled to death by thistly creepers of static like Skee Mask getting out-jammed by Rafael Anton Irisarri. Almost without warning the chokehold is broken by a skyrocketing blast of superheated Galaxian-esque electro before a plangent ambient coda irradiates the soundfield and silence finally descends. So good it should probably be illegal. Indulge.
Most recent release from Midwestern cyberdemon DJ Speedsick. 4 tracks of homebrewed hard as fukk Techno hell bubbling with fertilizer and gasoline. Super harsh acid head melter beats, gelatinous and cartilaginous wizz migraine bangers with hyper clap distortion emergence from unstable miasma, fermented funky wobbly sequencer pile-on, crushingly dense Bass kick thuds to death in skittering Speedcore hard-on triplets/4×4 hats Hardcore excellence. ‘Concrete Hell E.P.’ really cranks the fucking tempo to throb, pushing speed through sense in funk chaos delusion, never losing the furor of groove amidst the haste. Innerspace outcast delirium manifested in some seriously hateful hard tek Industrial Techno shit, pulling influence from hellscape rave obscurities, triple dosed in lysergic lo-fi system-crusher production and cast into blazing 4 track inferno. Another artist who has carved themselves a unique spot within Noise-adjacent Electronic music, a seedy corner of ruinous electronics for those who walk outside the circle of taste, keepin’ it tru with his headbanger scum punk industrial Techno, amphetemised to living fuck forever.
The notoriety of Bristolian technopunks Giant Swan stems largely from their apocalyptic live shows, but their studio work scarcely marks them out as shrinking violets. Atypically, the duo’s latest EP targets the dancefloor rather than the padded cell, though it would be a mistake to assume the dearth of redlining discord equates to a Swan with clipped wings. ‘Fantasy Food’ may be leaner, cleaner fare than the dungeon-dragging likes of ‘Do Not Be Afraid Of Tenderness’, but it still packs a ferocious punch. Audio-terror notwithstanding, attention to detail has long been a Giant Swan hallmark and their finely whorled fingerprints cover every burnished surface of this blistering record. Take ‘Sugar And Air’ in which an onslaught of woody kicks and serrated hi-hats vie for attention with a hyperventilating female vocal sample that backflips through the clangour like a gymnast in a breaker’s yard. In unsteadier hands, such anarchic sound design could easily descend into slapstick, but every haymaker thrown here lands with pinpoint precision. Likewise, ‘RRR+1’ is a laser-guided buzzbomb that cycles through multiple overlapping phases, its concrete-cracking 4/4 beat the only constant amid a sandstorm of whipping digital detritus. Even the beatless title track, which on first pass sounds like a skipload of euphoniums being fed through a woodchipper, is a mini-masterpiece of tightly controlled chaos. Closer to the rambunctious mischief-making of Pariah and Gesloten Cirkel than the grit ‘n’ girders pile-driving of JK Flesh and Regis, ‘Fantasy Food’ is full-tilt techno with a lascivious twinkle in its eye. Dance, motherfuckers.
Katatonic Silentio is the alter ego of Milan-based radiophonic researcher and sound sculptor Mariachiara Troianiello whose recondite production witchery smashes the safety glass separating genres like techno and broken beat enabling a host of thorny new hybrids to coalesce and propagate. The feature length follow-up to last year’s febrile ‘Tabula Rasa’ EP, ‘Les Chemins De L’Inconnu’ is a breathtaking tour de force; dub techno centrifuged to a darkly iridescent elixir composed only of its most volatile and astringent elements. Beats are routinely decentralised and although a dauntless DJ might be tempted to drop one of these lysergic bombs into a 4am set (‘Dans Le Cadre Du Relief’ stalks the corridors of inner space with the levitational cadence of prime Porter Ricks), this is music primarily for the mind rather than the body. Throughout, KT’s gift for labyrinthine sound design is nothing short of revelatory, a fact nowhere better exemplified than on the album’s quartet of dread-drizzled ambient cuts. Too often the insipid afterthoughts of an artist bereft of ideas, here they span the width of the foreground; lagoons of churning isolationist murk that reveal swathes of microscopic new detail with each successive playback. The epicentre of this magisterial mindquake though is ‘Hypothèse D’Hypnose’, an 11-minute acid dub nightmare that recalls the grim post-apocalyptic doomscapes explored by Samuel Kerridge circa ‘Always Offended Never Ashamed’. Remorseless in its crushing of convention, ‘Les Chemins De L’Inconnu’ is the Luna marble capstone on another stellar year for left-field electronic music. Listen deep.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the closer music approximates to silence, the more forceful its likely impact. It’s a fact plainly not lost on Chicago-based duo Cleared whose breathtaking new album is the turbid, thrice-distilled essence of quietude, an inchoate foam of dimensionless un-sound that enters via the pores rather than the auditory canal. At a considerable stretch, one COULD argue ‘Of Endless Light’ falls within the parameters of dub techno, but only by implication, its signature rhythm-centric sparsity smeared and splayed to the very brink of breakdown. Proceedings commence with the ultra-refracted blur of ‘First Sleep’ which crests the horizon like a gust of smog across moonlit moorland. Fragments of wounded melody bleed through the blanketing static until decomposition inevitably sets in and the track slowly expires to a mo(u)rning chorus of axes being sharpened on a distant grindstone. By contrast, ‘Pulse’, ‘Dawn’ and ‘Waking Field’ are gorgeously eroded simulacra of Chain Reaction-esque avant-minimalism, dance music passed through a fine-mesh sieve to remove almost every joule of kinetic energy. Kick drums – or rather the muted metronomic clicks that pass for them – are so subsumed by grainy swathes of ambience, they barely register as rhythm. The album’s piéce de rèsistance though is the stunning ‘Blue Drift’, a darkening pall of drone and reverberant carillon bells that rivals Sarah Davachi’s ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ for stentorian solemnity. Step inside; the silence is DEAFENING.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a gutful and a half of the oleaginous flagshaggery that’s been clogging the arteries of this blighted nation since a certain overprivileged nonagenarian turned up her toes. Sanctuary from the forces of the fawning is urgently required and who better to provide it than ex-Napalm Death drummer and iron-fisted ringmaster of Circus Dubquake, Mick Harris. A timely reactivation of his fearsome Fret alias, ‘Because Of The Weak’ is industrial techno armed to the teeth and with mayhem in mind; a shockingly graphic illustration of man’s inhumanity to machine with little apparent purpose other than to destroy and be destroyed. Imagine the breakbeat-strewn arrhythmia of Skee Mask or the Zenker Brothers fermented and condensed to a toxic black magma and you’re in the vague vicinity of this mile-deep bomb crater, but the severity of the punishment Harris metes out here has precious few parallels. The menacing tone of track titles like ‘20oz Gripper’ and ‘Shut That Dog Up’ is reflected in the music’s withering hostility. Asteroid-sized kicks and breaks smash through ramparts of chest-crushing bass like boulders launched from a trebuchet, parabolas of ionised dub and hi-hat hiss glowing blood red in the fallout. Released via New York’s L.I.E.S. imprint whose roster of sickos and seditionists have long plied their trade at the seedier end of the hardcore continuum, ‘Because Of The Weak’ melts down techno’s hedonistic throne and recasts it into stun grenades. Obscenely wealthy monarchs, consider yourselves warned.
Disinclined to toe the self-limiting line of genre fundamentalism, Brooklyn-based imprint Ohm Resistance may be a broad church, but the primacy of bass over all other sonic prerogatives is, and always has been, its raison d’être. The fourth, and apparently final, instalment in OR’s annual sampler series, ‘Perihelion Infinite’ is a comprehensive showcase of the label’s lurid, low end-led aesthetic, featuring sixteen exclusive tracks (un)lovingly crafted to rupture every gas main within a 9-mile radius. Despite the occasional nod to stylistic orthodoxy (‘Subterranean’ by Metalheadz stalwart Jaise is a case study in drop-forged industrial jungle), the majority of these beasts are defiantly chimerical; scaly, multi-appendaged hybrids with their gaze fixed firmly on the future. Atsushi Izumi’s ruthlessly overdriven ‘Casaurius’, for example, fuses drum & bass and techno at the spine whilst a cannonade of scimitar-sharp breaks ensures the happy hardcore sugar rush of DrillBasser’s ‘Even’ leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste. Elsewhere there are forays into critical mass post-dubstep (DEFCE’s suffocating ‘Pain Centers’) deconstructed breakcore (the alarmingly vertiginous ‘Eat Sleep Repeat’ by Belfast belligerents Slave To Society) and even Emeralds-esque kosmische (Bob Rogue’s luminescent ‘Asteroids’), but the predator at the apex of this sub-chomping food chain is Sagana Squale’s nightmarish ‘Blood Goddess’, a paranoia-wracked bolus of malice aforethought trip-hop Portishead would have killed to concoct. Embrace the bass.
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.
Justin K Broadrick has upped the tempo of his release schedule lately and barely four months on from the power techno slugfest that was ‘New Religions Old Rules’, he unpacks the nunchucks for another six belts of spleen-rupturing Sturm und Drang. ‘Veneer Of Tolerance’ though is a very different kettle of sabre-toothed piranhas to its predecessor. Hobnailed kicks still stomp through brackish mires of bass yet there’s something far more insidious at work than mere brawn and belligerence, an undercurrent of subliminal dread that levers open the mind’s eye and injects it with a pupil-dilating serum. After a brief Godflesh-flavoured aperitif, the walls close in with frightening rapidity, and with them the reality of just how ruthless a purge of dance music’s hedonistic trappings Broadrick has effected, though it’s less their mechanics than the images these tracks evoke – troupes of zombie gymnasts bouncing dead-eyed on a trampoline made of human skin; the heads of guillotined heretics thudding wetly onto concrete – that serve as the EP’s primary instruments of antagonism. Were an incautious DJ to drop one of these psychoactive bombs into a peak time set, a Mixmag editorial headlined ‘BERGHAIN ABLAZE AFTER CANNIBALISM OUTBREAK’ might be the least of their worries. Boom.
Collaborative issue between JK Flesh and Echologist. 4 tenderising tracks, head-enveloping brittle fibrous Techno with an entropic bent, diminishing returns and total futility, miserable, menacing and mangled – experiential and longform, syrupy, banging as fuck. Runs awkwardly through a delay haze yet with lots of swingin’ kick funk. Hyper-designed hardtek expanse unfolds at a menacing pace, minimalist layers of damaged radar bass, skullbreaking sequences of archaic hats and manacled claps drift to and fro across the delay field, paranoiac with potent shifting pulsing rhythm, loops swinging in and out of lockstep with purcussion and Bass in broken mandala alignment – shadowswept and lunatic, jaundiced heads float in decompressed airlock zero gravity, treading a fine line between science fiction cannabinoid innerspace inhabitation and dancefloor melting extro-expression. Brilliant.
The duo of Stephen Gethings (Magnetize) and Barry Murphy (The Last Sound) have been wreaking various shades of aural havoc for more than fifteen years, but ‘Blown Vestige’ is Whirling Hall Of Knives as we’ve rarely heard them before. All but absent is the redlining kick-drum carnage that made albums such as ‘Decate’ and ‘Voix’ such ear-savaging delights (think Regis after six pints of ayahuasca) but don’t go equating beatlessness with toothlessness. WHOK still have a full compliment of fangs, but this time, it’s your heart, not your throat they want to sink them into. Predictably though, for an outfit whose usual œuvre is the techno equivalent of cluster munitions, their take on ambient is about as far from cachou-scented New Age wallpaper-hanging as it’s possible to get. This is visceral, attention-demanding music that, despite its relative lack of gratuitous bloodletting, still lays siege to your consciousness with the same steely intent as their more rhythm-centric experiments. Amorphous billows of exfoliative distortion scud across the stereo field like storm clouds; chrysalids of crimson noise rupture and drip acid syrup into your ears, but it’s WHOK’s uncanny ability to conjure the organic from the inorganic that sets ‘Blown Vestige’ far apart from the pack. ‘Deconthroat’, for example, is so redolent of a slow-burning cello arabesque it wouldn’t sound out of place on a Clarice Jensen album, whilst the subaquatic swoon of closing track ‘Saw-tail’ is a sublime reimagining of A.R. Kane’s nebulous guitar shimmer blissfully untethered from the prosaism of wood and wire. Over the years, I’ve used many adjectives to describe the mighty WHOK’s irascible sonics, but ‘beautiful’ has never been one of them. There’s a first time for everything.
2016 release from mysterious trip entity TM404, released by Kontra-Musik in Sweden. Slimy, decaying, outsider acid Techno saturated in heavy Dub and born of low-tek process, shimmering caustic wet work sounds to soothe and sicken. High minded sound design and resultant smooth-brain groove and thump, each maligned kick/hat/sequence is drenched in ectoplasmic/xenoplasmic slime production and dripping with acidic melted Dub and Techno textures, glistening details bouncing light from the rotund edge of near-formless gelatin Bass pulse, ambient wet electronics and tunneling entropic Techno, drooling in corroded satiation. Stalking the acid rain soaked alleyways of sense and sobriety, solitary bad ass vibes, peripheral to Dub Techno and Acid House, sideways ketamine wonk vision. Pass the petroleum jelly.
There are matches made in heaven and there matches made somewhere altogether hotter, and given the fearsome track records of its two protagonists, it scarcely takes a genius to figure out where this meeting of minds and murderousness was conceived. An alias of sound sadist Kenny Sanderson, Like Weeds destroys techno with the zeal of a latter-day Savonarola, torching its vanities on a bonfire and fashioning something ugly and misshapen from the smouldering, blackened embers. The four tracks he offers here are baleful in the extreme, looming escarpments of greyscale noise that split the difference between power electronics and the heaviest industrial dub. Beats thud with contusive force, every micron of space between them choked with a boiling tar of static that corrodes the lungs like phosgene. By the time the death march of ‘Unauthorised’ fades into silence, the chest-crushing pressure is overwhelming, but don’t look to Andrew Nolan for succour; he’s too busy torturing trip-hop to mop your fevered brow. Ogreish and blood-spattered, it lurches from his dungeon, a Hallowe’en parade of grotesque miscreations primed to rip off your eyelids and drag you face first into a conscious nightmare of obliterating dub. As deadly as the blooms they’re named after, these shambling horrors may be short-lived but the bass bin-blowing havoc they wreak is prodigious. Gird your loins. It’s clobberin’ time.
Bead brings the fucking basement dungeon funk straight out of the sex cult nihilist’s compound with this one, the paranoia is palpable and the feds are outside with weapons drawn but we’re nodding the fukk out anyways – brain smoothing Bass, greasy as oil-slicked hair Techno tracks with a slather of wicked funk hats and slow working venom trippin’ sequencer lines, outsider and paranoiac with a hint of come-up euphoria atmosphere and menacing vocal samples drifting in the ether of wizz, minimal low tek and lo-fi as fuck. This project never ceases to intoxicate and alienate, setting a paradigm for no wave experimental Techno that only a select few nutters and weirdos are operating within. Still available on cassette from Nice Music, mine came with a cool sticker too. Properly fucking sweaty.
Techno. Clearly not the final frontier it was 35 years ago, but to an inveterate nightmare-weaver like Justin K Broadrick, still an axe well worth grinding. Unpacking his formidable JK Flesh alias for the first time since last year’s monstrous dub double-header with Kevin Martin’s G36 project, Broadrick returns to the granite-hard beat butchery that made blowouts like ‘Rise Above’ such a fearsome proposition, the acrid pall of industry hanging heavy in the air. A paranoia-laced treatise on humanity’s enduring obsession with indoctrination, ‘New Religion Old Rules’ wastes no time in getting to the point, opening salvo ‘Brain Wash’ churning up the soundfield like a moonshine-powered rotovator, spraying swarf and slag in all directions. The kick drums are colossal, but the breaking wheel of this particular torture chamber is the bass, an evil stentorian grind ripped straight from the attrition section of the Samurai Music playbook. Broadrick’s masterly sound design keeps the action just the right side of wanton thuggery, but the deeper you descend into this hellhole of hostility, the thicker and more claustrophobic the atmosphere becomes. ‘Herd Mentality’, is a rancorous acid-damaged deathstomp that stings with the potency of cobra venom, and by the time ‘Willing Servant’ drives the last of its nails through your forehead, you’ll be yearning for the mercy of unconsciousness. Stunning. Literally.
Excellently reductive heavy Techno split with plenty of manacling Funk to move your shackled feet to. A meeting of Napalm Death Side A alumni, here treading rather different yet no less alienated waters – scabrous ancient Techno beats and rugged Bass thuds, crushed production to turn inner-verse spaces into quantum realms, minimal melters to cleanse the bacteria. Mick Harris’ Monrella brings turbine thrust menace and grooving thud kick drive, maximalist and malformed Techno, gritted teeth and havin’ it all alone. Brutal and thuggish. Justin Broadrick’s JK Flesh churns the black aqueous liquor of his recent works into a fine elxir of Techno tar, scabby lo-fi and Industrial-heavy in inference but by way of hard-hitting old tek influence like Basic Channel. Furiously funky and fucking derelict stoned, murderous and diabolically driven. Fire this through an indecent sound system and further alienate yourself from your IRL peers and betters. This split is hard as fukk.
Broadly speaking, there are only two types of techno producer; those who fuck about, and those who don’t. Slovenian industrialists Warhorse fall emphatically into the latter category as evidenced by ‘Atlatl’, by some distance the most addictive discharge of rancorous aural effluvium it’ll be your pleasure to get smoked by this side of Christmas. Clearly disdainful of the tweak and twiddle brigade and their stultifying micro-manoeuvres, Warhorse pursue a hardline scorched earth production policy here, slashing and burning their way to headfuck nirvana with scant regard for the hardware they destroy in the process. Backing up the threat implied by its track titles (they’re all named after torture devices, mediaeval and more modern), ‘Atlatl’ applies the thumbscrews the moment the needle drops and just keeps on tightening them. A viscous agglomeration of angle-grinder bass, radioactive synth splatter and diseased kicks that burst like bodies on a battlefield, this is sadism you can dance to although it’ll probably blow your legs off. If you’re content to watch techno’s freight train coast gently into a buttercup-strewn siding, please look away now. If, on the other hand you’re the sort of casualty vampire longing for it to hit the mainline buffers at suicidal velocity and catapult fifty tons of scrap iron straight onto Starbucks’ veranda, pull up a deckchair. Crushingly good.
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