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A split CD commemorating the Japan tour by MARK FELL, RIAN TREANOR, and KAKUHAN in September and October 2023 is now available!
Known as a giant of electronic or experimental techno music since the 90's, they have released many works on labels such as Mille Plateaux, Line, Mego, and Raster Noton. In recent years, Mark Fell has been going beyond the boundaries of "techno" to offer a truly "modern" sound.
In 2023, NYEGE NYEGE TAPES will release "Saccades," a collaboration with Ugandan/Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and RIAN FELL is creating music at the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music, with new deconstructions and linkages. RIAN TREANOR creates music that involves new deconstruction and interlocking from the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music.
KAKUHAN (Koshiro Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa), who started his activities in 2022 after various collaborations, "stirs" as the name implies, the poles/tunes possessed by various types of music such as "electronic music/strings," "contemporary music/club music," "composition/ improvisation," etc. that the unit is equipped with.
This 9-song split CD, which includes completely new compositions by these three artists, is not a mere "split (mish-mash)," but rather an approach that transcends and melds the boundaries of "physical/metaphysical" on the periphery of music after techno music is evident in each of the compositions. The ongoing attitude of the three artists toward music is truly and casually expressed in this work, which should be listened to beyond genres.
Dark Entries picks up Severed Heads yet again for Ear Bitten, a double LP reissue of some of the band’s earliest material. As originary Aussie industrial legends - although founder Tom Ellard would balk at being branded as such - Severed Heads shaped the continental subcultural sound with their kitchen electronics, chaotic tape loops, and quietly infectious nursery-rhyme-esque melodies. In 1979 Ellard, Richard Fielding, and Andrew Wright abandoned the moniker Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign and adopted the edgier name Severed Heads “to pretend to be an industrial band such as Surgical Penis Klinik & Throbbing Gristle.” Noise-rockers Rhythmx Chymx had placed an advertisement in a local shop looking for a band to share the costs of pressing an LP. The Heads set about recording a Dadaist racket on a pair of open reel dictaphones and a cassette deck using a TRS-80 computer, Kawai Synthesizer 100F and Korg Mini Pops drum machine. Ear Bitten was released in 1980; original copies now fetch obscene sums, in part due to most of Severed Heads’ copies perishing in a fire at Richard’s home. The band’s next endeavor was a cassette titled Side 2, a collection of free-form experiments fashioned as Ear Bitten’s second side. For this reissue, Dark Entries has collected both Ear Bitten and Side 2 on the first disc, presenting the album in its full form. Disc two includes the original first version of Ear Bitten, which was only unreleased because it was recorded in a format not suitable for pressing. The album comes in a gatefold sleeve designed by Eloise Leigh and includes photos, liner notes, and reproductions of the original Xerox inserts from the 1980 issue. Ear Bitten delivers 22 tracks of pain you can dance to!
At a recent DREAM_MEGA performance, Joel Kyack stood alone on stage, directing a lava flow of sound at the audience. Overwhelmed by the haunted-house frequencies, the invasive rhythms, the untethered, untuned vocals, one attendee bent against another to whisper, “I think this guy’s channeling demons.” Whether spoken in terror or esteem, this accusation is useful in the face of DREAM_MEGA’s second LP, ‘Control / You Are Not the Center.’ The record is laced with menace. You hear it in the mutant war marches, in the dancehall reflux, in the tolling bass. You hear it in the crystalline melodies and the yearning ascensions. You even hear it in the Guided by Voices cover. Joel’s relationship with unsettling sound—demon channeling—is now decades long. His long-standing service in Landed, the band he co-founded in 1997, runs parallel to Joel's contributions to Six Finger Satellite, Men’s Recovery Project, Megafuckers, Dos Mega, and Street Buddy. This relentless dedication points a straight line to the feverish decay of his present day work, but Dream Mega stands distinct. Borne out of Joel’s near-death experience in 2020—a debilitated week spent isolated in Thailand, coughing blood and drenching bedsheets—DREAM_MEGA commandeers a unique space at the overlap of confrontation and abandon. Drawing on his own experiences at both hardcore shows and at street performances, Joel pushes DREAM_MEGA into an antipodal state where hyper-awareness and liberatory transcendence coexist. The songs on ‘Control / You Are Not the Center’ stare unblinking at our dumb, dangerous world the same way a Dropdead song might, but they simultaneously lift the burden of this disaster, pushing toward airy respite. Some of this is Joel’s compositional approach, setting ancient woodwinds against digital synthesizers, crossing unnatural circuitry with human breath. But the heart of it is Joel’s dire, middle-of-the-night need to address his fear and sadness and glimmers of hope and twist it into something that might keep his heart beating, despite. It is an act of clarity and self-preservation so skillfully wrought that every listener is able to feel the demons at work on their own heart. ‘Control / You are Not The Center’ features sonic contributions from Ryan Weinstein (Coffin Prick), Cordey Lopez, and Lisa Anne Auerbach. It is recommended for fans of Hassell & Eno’s ‘Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics’, Houston’s chopped and screwed scene, and Captain Beefheart.
The follow-up to 'High Art Lite', 'Ruins' is an album shaped by grief, reflection, and transformation; a record that captures both the weight of loss and the strange beauty that comes with it. Written after a self-imposed break from songwriting, it represents a shift in focus and perspective for Joseph Oxley. “I wanted to step away from what I thought I was supposed to make,” he explains. “The worst advice anyone can give you is, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ It’s always broken. It always needs fixing.” At its core, 'Ruins' explores loss not as emptiness but as presence, something that reshapes the world around you. The album finds Oxley wrestling with the dualities of human experience: the tension between what’s said and unsaid, between humanism and nihilism, public and private, despair and acceptance. “Hope and despair don’t cancel each other out,” he says. “They can co-exist — that’s what makes it feel real.” Somewhere within a lifetime of repeats, reruns, and reboots, TVAM lives, crafting work that touches on our memories while toying with our fears, creating a world in which broadcast becomes performance. Since his debut album 'Psychic Data' burst from a small bedroom studio in Wigan, TVAM has defined the sound and spectacle of nostalgia’s grip on modern life, from the sloganeering of 'Porsche Majeure' to the electioneering of 'Semantics', his music has gained daytime playlisting on BBC 6 Music and has been featured on TV including groundbreaking series Succession. Musically, 'Ruins' is expansive and immersive. Dark but magical, it is filled with reverb-drenched synths, fractured textures and hammer-blow snares. Guitars weave through the mix with a newfound restraint, creating space for atmosphere and emotion to take centre stage. "Broken reality” textures collide with driving rhythms, recalling the cinematic pulse of Floodland-era The Sisters of Mercy, and the melodic melancholy of Disintegration-era The Cure. The result is a record that finds beauty in dissonance and light in the wreckage.
Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder. An evolution of her early 1980's Edinburgh-based punk band The Freeze, she launched the project upon moving to London, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. After a series of celebrated albums for the Midnight Music label as well as collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, Cinder migrated to the United States, becoming involved with various underground techno collectives around the Midwest and West Coast. Subsequent relocations to Hong Kong and Japan further expanded Cindytalk's horizons, resulting in a fruitful partnership with Viennese experimental institution Editions Mego, for whom she released five full-lengths of swooning, granular atmosphere. 2021 finds her as engaged as ever, at the precipice of long-awaited back catalog reissues alongside multiple new works, guided by her lasting love of discovery and deviation: “new pathways always being uncovered.”
The 3rd album by Scottish industrial enigma Cinder aka Cindytalk began life as the soundtrack to an experimental film by English director Ivan Unnwin entitled Eclipse (The Amateur Enthusiast's Guide To Virus Deployment), and was originally slated for release via Factory Records' video division, Ikon. Inspired heavily by Alan Splet's eerily disembodied sound design in David Lynch's Eraserhead, the collection's 15 pieces seethe between field recordings, wistful piano vignettes, and lurking metallic haze – a hybrid palette Cinder characterized at the time as “ambi-dustrial.” Unfortunately Ikon collapsed on the eve of the project's completion so the film was never distributed, but the Midnight Music imprint repackaged Cindytalk's score as an LP in 1990 under the name The Wind Is Strong... (full title: The Wind Is Strong - A Sparrow Dances, Piercing Holes in Our Sky).
Long out of print, the album remains one of the most elusive and adventurous in the Cindytalk discography, a mix of musique concréte, haunted reverie, and desolate beauty. Even unaccompanied by their intended visuals, this is overtly cinematic music, conjuring forests at dusk and shadowed corridors, equal parts remote and reflective. Cinder cites a belief that “all sound is music,” which fully manifests here, utilizing tape hiss, ticking clocks, flicking flames, and distant whispers as evocative accents in tapestries of luminous negative space.
Although Cinder included the subtitle “A Cindytalk diversion” in the sleeve notes, The Wind Is Strong... is crucial to the project's canon, demonstrating the depth and versatility of her unique ear and intuition. She describes each album as a direct response to the previous one, and in that sense The Wind marks a bold break from the coiled song-oriented post-punk of 1988's In This World, venturing into unknown, unnamed terrain, and finding foreboding new futures to call her own.
Running Out Of Time return with a bass-heavy desert combat 12-inch. It's time for cashing back, no more BS.
DON'T MISS!
East Kilbride’s Scott Fraser finally comes good on a 25 year promise to his younger self with his debut solo album on his own label DX Recordings out of London. This record represents the closing of this chapter and the opening of a new one.
A truly international and collaborative project pulling together the help and talent of friends around the world with mastering by Radioactive man Keith Tenniswood, cut by Frank Merritt at The Carvery and world class US visual art and design legends, Tim Saccenti and Nick Martin on photography, artwork and design.
Limited to 300 solid red heavyweight vinyl copies, brown kraft sleeves; individually hand stencilled and numbered by the artist, printed inserts feature a collection of moments and images from the last 25 years - the studio, the equipment, the people and the places that came together to make this release. Japanese rice paper inner sleeves.
Limited edition hand printed screen print by Niall Greaves at Newbridge Print Studios in Newcastle on the first 30 copies exclusively available via the DX Recordings Bandcamp page.
Musically diverse, crossing styles, flavours and moods, threaded meticulously with razor sharp Roland TR606 programming and glued together with a Space Echo, Expanded opens with the sub aquatic funk of ‘Eden And After’. Side one takes you through banging electro on ‘Energy In Constitution’, the dark dub techno of ‘To The Letter Of My Oath’, leaves you disappearing through a black hole on ‘The Path Of Helium Rain’ and the sound of aliens talking through FM synthesis on ‘Collected Stills’. On side two: a slice of dark, heavy instrumental hip hop gets things started with ‘Where Is That Perception? ‘. Next we get into some straight 4/4 club techno with cut up drums and bumping baseline in ‘Mi Dominante’ before moving through some blissed out Detroit vibes on ‘Earth Looking Inwards’, a rough as you like TR606 driven experimental electro groover ‘Object of Life’ and finally closing out with the Ectomorph inspired stark electro of ‘Steel (NB_BLOOD cut)’
Limited of deep dub influenced music from 12' from Greville.
Irrflug are:
Mark Kanak - Concept, sound design, electronics, noise, lyrics
Ian King - Voice
BoBo - Voice
Ella Sturmvogel - Voice
Also featuring:
Blixa Bargeld Voice on “Pulse” and “She lights the earth with her silver”
recorded March 2025 for the “Lügendetektor” sessions
at AndereBaustelle Tonstudio in Berlin by Boris Wilsdorf
Text on “Spirals” taken from WB Yeats “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”
Text on “She lights the earth with her silver”, Ovid (translation Mark Kanak)
Recorded at Die Höhle, Berlin-Niederschöneweide 2024-2025
Mastered by Ilari Larjasto
Cut by Stefan Mitterer at Manmade Mastering Berlin
Front sleeve painting by Arsi Keva
Painting disobeyed by Tanja Koljonen
Graphic design by Tommi Grönlund
Sähkö Recordings 2025
PUU-61
Jordanian producer Taymour teams up with Palestinian rapper/singer Bareetlblad on a killer mini-album of skewed gothic pop, like some auto-tuned, arabic-language re-imagining of Faith-era The Cure via Dean Blunt, Cocteau Twins x Future. Trust, it’s exceptional stuff, curving melancholy, PNL-style biomechanical rhymes around heartfelt new wave/post-punk loops, like little else.
'NOS INSAN (نص إنسان)' is such a potent fusion of ideas that you wonder why no one tried it sooner. Billed as a break-up record, it's dripping with intensity, finding fragile harmony between Future's slow-burning emo-rap milestone 'HNDRXX' and Martin Hannett's moody canon. If that sounds odd, just imagine a pulverised version of Dean Blunt's catalog: 'Black Metal'-era songwriting, Hype Williams-era beatmaking and Babyfather's plasticky rap commentary.
Haifa-based vocalist Bareetlblad is captivating on 'Sort Akrhek, Ad Ma Ba7ebek (صرت أكرهك ! قد ما بحبك)', singing and rapping over Taymour's beatless, chorus-heavy guitar loops. It's a flawless opener, isolating a mood that's potent and fully unique. There are no beats, just rain-soaked Vini Reilly-style shimmers over Bareetlblad's soaring AutoTuned vox. The album title means "half a man”, a reference to a hollowed-out stretch following a breakup, referencing vintage grunge and shoegaze while at the same time scraping life-or-death imagery from traditional Arabic poetry and the region's melancholy folk music.
Peep 'T2ddamet (تقدمت)', a track that pulls on the interplay between Taymour's '80s Cure-style drum machine splashes and Bareetlblad's melodramatic love-drunk rhymes, or the all-too-brief 'Bdounik (بدونك)', a minute and a half of washy industrial-cum-dreampop guitars over robotic, overdriven sweet nothings that sound as if they're being broadcast through an empty mall on a busted tannoy. Best of all, 'Msafreh (مسافرة)' rounds things out with a euphoric gust of strums and a half-heard vocal that you'd more likely expect to find on one of Cocteau Twins' late-period fantasies.
One of the best rap/R&B mutations we've heard in ages, a small, perfectly formed cult classic in the making.
Since 1992, Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering post-industrial band Zoviet*France) has been creating innovative and thought-provoking music under the Rapoon moniker. Drawing inspiration from his early days with Z*F, he continues to push the boundaries of ambient, industrial, and world music genres, earning him a dedicated following across the globe.
Originally available in 1994 as a limited-edition DAT tape through Staalplaat Records, Cidar was later included as a bonus CD in the reissue of another Rapoon classic, Fallen Gods. Now, after years of anticipation, fans can experience this mesmerizing work as a stand-alone release—remastered and expanded with three previously unreleased tracks from the original 1994 recording sessions.
Cidar showcases Robin’s signature sound - a seamless blend of Z*F-inspired drones and loops intertwined with vibrant African percussion and hauntingly beautiful Asian string instruments. This combination creates an immersive, trance-like atmosphere that transports listeners into a world of meditative sonic exploration.
With its enchanting rhythms and deeply textured layers, Cidar stands as a testament to Robin's unparalleled ability to craft music that defies genre boundaries while remaining instantly recognizable. Fans of both Zoviet*France and Rapoon will find themselves drawn into the hypnotic sounds of this timeless masterpiece.
The standalone release of Cidar marks an important milestone in the history of experimental music, offering audiences worldwide the opportunity to rediscover or experience for the first time one of Robin Storey's most influential works.
Since 1992, Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering post-industrial band Zoviet*France) has been creating innovative and thought-provoking music under the Rapoon moniker. Drawing inspiration from his early days with Z*F, he continues to push the boundaries of ambient, industrial, and world music genres, earning him a dedicated following across the globe.
Originally available in 1994 as a limited-edition DAT tape through Staalplaat Records, Cidar was later included as a bonus CD in the reissue of another Rapoon classic, Fallen Gods. Now, after years of anticipation, fans can experience this mesmerizing work as a stand-alone release—remastered and expanded with three previously unreleased tracks from the original 1994 recording sessions.
Cidar showcases Robin’s signature sound - a seamless blend of Z*F-inspired drones and loops intertwined with vibrant African percussion and hauntingly beautiful Asian string instruments. This combination creates an immersive, trance-like atmosphere that transports listeners into a world of meditative sonic exploration.
With its enchanting rhythms and deeply textured layers, Cidar stands as a testament to Robin's unparalleled ability to craft music that defies genre boundaries while remaining instantly recognizable. Fans of both Zoviet*France and Rapoon will find themselves drawn into the hypnotic sounds of this timeless masterpiece.
The standalone release of Cidar marks an important milestone in the history of experimental music, offering audiences worldwide the opportunity to rediscover or experience for the first time one of Robin Storey's most influential works.
Having defined a multi-dimensional sonic universe on their acclaimed eponymous debut album, composer/filmmaker Chris Hunt and Korn's James "Munky" Shaffer abandon the familiar and drift towards a kingdom of recursion on EXINFINITE, staring down a tangled mass of mirrored wormholes that hum with eldritch ambiguity. VENERA's sophomore full length is darker, heavier and more percussive than its predecessor, but there's something more intimate wired into its circuitry that's harder to define - something mystical, mysterious and melancholy. Songs materialize from the void only to be dissolved by acidic synths or pierced by Hunt's whetted beats, while Shaffer's dense, tortured riffs are offset by euphoric, time-dilated vocals from FKA twigs, Dis Fig and Chelsea Wolfe. Following their encounter with vastness, VENERA have peered inward, ruminating on the limits of existence and excavating their most deeply buried emotions.
VENERA emerged in 2022 when Hunt and Shaffer veered into their own musical territory after recording with Albanian artist Xhoana X. Improvising together and experimenting with cinematic, sci-fi-inspired sound design, the duo realized the collaboration had potential, so they began developing and evolving the sound further, bringing in assistance from former Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks, Queens of the Stone Age's Alain Johannes, post-punk duo VOWWS and LA noise rock legends HEALTH. And after their debut album appeared on Mike Patton's Ipecac imprint in 2023, VENERA kept deconstructing and rebuilding their approach to songwriting, swapping out ambient Eno-esque atmospheres for blown-
out beats and dense textures, and figuring out how to extend the narrative they'd opened up without retreading old ground.
On 'Tear', the duo's new direction can be heard clearly as Shaffer's primal guitar noises are reformed into eerie widescreen expositions that Hunt punctuates with pneumatic kick and snare cycles. Broken up by airlock hisses and luminous synths, the track proposes a backdrop that VENERA continuously transmute, reforging the concept as the album develops. Cult singer-songwriter Wolfe adds a gothic American flavor to the crepuscular 'All Midnights', crooning powerfully over VENERA's vacuum packed rhythms and gaseous synths, and Berlin-based noisemaker Dis Fig follows work with The Body and The Bug on 'End Uncovered' lending breathy, emotionally layered tones to Shaffer and Hunt's tape-damaged industrial pops and whirrs. They launch squelchy, decelerated techno into occult noise reflecting pools on the slithering 'Asteroxylon', and Hunt replies to Shaffer's reverberating plucks with foghorn groans on the ominous, pensive 'uuu773'.
'EXINFINITE' perpetually builds momentum until it hits 'Caroline', an intense collaboration with FKA twigs that isolates her most unearthly tones. Initially curling her words around ominous electrical distortions and mangled, ghostly voices, twigs launches into a charged operatic cry that Shaffer and Hunt meet with skittering cybernetic beats and dense walls of guitar noise. It's this track that fully cracks open VENERA's concept, merging the synthetic with the natural and prompting dysphoria, loss of self and infinite regress. So the blood-curdling noise and sinister ambiance of 'Decreation' acts like a dissociated coda. In the 'EXINFINITE', destruction and death are not overcome, they're intensified until they metamorphose completely.
Gen’s fabled copy-of-1 acetate, made in 1968 with schoolmates, is reissued for wider consumption, offering an unmissable glimpse at the early stirrings of a notorious “wrecker of civilisation” and one of the most significant artists of their time .
Before PTV, before Throbbing Gristle, and leading up to action with COUM Transmissions, one Neil Megson made their first foray into recorded music with some pals in their parents attic in Solihull, West Midlands. Spurred by readings of occult literature, Fluxus and John Cage, and footage of psychedelic “happenings” by Bohemian beatniks in London, Megson and pals experimented with janky equipment to make a cute lo-fi racket of giggles, chants, brays, bittersweet witter and poetry, as recited in the instantly familiar nasal tang of ‘Rather Hard to Libel’. It’s effectively the sound of grammar school boys having a laugh in the late ‘60s, but also serves as the seed for a remarkable, notorious, and enduring oeuvre that catalysed countless others to write, make art and music in their wake.
“POLITE WARNING by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, 2008: Previously thought to be missing, these never before available songs were created on extremely primitive equipment in the attic of 6 Links Drive, Solihull, Warwickshire, England by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and friends using Thee Early Worm as their collective group name. Only one copy had originally been pressed on an acetate. This disc and its corresponding analog reel-to-reel master tape were discovered in the Porridge With Everything Archives by Ryan Martin during a recent re-organization. This album is mastered directly from the original reel to reel tape and is made available to devotees of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s life-long musical body of work as a missing link, and curiosity, that reveals significant structural themes and sonic textures that, with hindsight, can be seen to have remained central to her creative processes ever since. Please be aware that this is inevitably a low-fi recording intended for collectors and researchers.”
Arriving two years after the first chapter, Absurd Matter 2 isn’t just a sequel, it’s an evolution, redrawing the boundaries established by its acclaimed predecessor. The Berlin-based Italian producer tempers his confrontational sonics with rare moments of introspection, shifting seamlessly between blown-out noise, warped hip-hop, mutant club experimentation, and weightless ambience. Textures disintegrate and reassemble, rhythms flex and crumble, and every detail balances on the edge of fantasy. It’s a poetic, layered response to Nino Pedone’s changing physical reality: the gradual hearing loss and perceptual renegotiation triggered by Ménière’s disease, which struck him in 2022. At first, the experience felt like betrayal, a brutal disconnection from the very sense that had shaped his life. But over time, the disorientation turned into a strange kind of focus. The silence between sounds became as expressive as the sounds themselves.
The first Absurd Matter was a visceral reaction to trauma; the second is more reflective – an ambiguous chronicle of sensory recalibration. Pedone doesn’t represent his altered inner reality through extremes, but through depth, zooming in on illusory distortions, tense rhythmic fluctuations, and fragmented sonics. Dense, immersive, and mystical, the album mirrors Pedone’s evolving relationship with perception itself.
Tinnitus-like feedback wails and noir-ish strings introduce “Repeater”, making it immediately clear that Pedone is painting a more delicately finessed image this time around. Fleshed out by raps from cult MCs billy woods and E L U C I D, the track is marked by subtle, sophisticated contrasts: the blurred, inverted rhythms that couch Armand Hammer’s haunted back-and-forth, and the glitchy interference that offsets the lavish orchestral phrases. Backwoodz associate Fatboi Sharif lends his Lynchian drawl to “Bandage Chipped Wings”, grounding Pedone’s lysergic rhythmic distortions with syrupy, horror-inspired couplets. Pedone also invites discomfort into “Crash Landing”, with droning, metallic tones that contradict South Central rapper ICECOLDBISHOP’s elastic flow. “Bitch, I don't give a fuck about anybody,” he squawks over Pedone’s incongruous rasping textures and time-warped beats, “cash out at any party.” Working alongside London’s Loraine James on production, Pedone reunites with Moor Mother on “I Saw The Light”, blending James’ soft-focus atmospherics with soundsystem-damaging, overdriven bass hits and rusted percussive snips. Moor Mother’s assertive words hover over the wreckage, tightening Pedone’s themes of overstimulation and altered awareness as they stutter and veer off course, vanishing into the backdrop.
Contrasting his more pensive experiments, Pedone’s dancefloor deviations are more concentrated on Absurd Matter 2 than ever before. He torches a stuttering dembow structure on “X”, obfuscating the rhythm’s familiar energy with disturbing audio hallucinations. On “Splintered”, he reunites with Kenyan prodigy Slikback, mangling neon-lit trance arpeggios with dissociated trap rhythms. He sharpens his skills to a fine point on “Oblivion Step”, observing 2-step through a lens of distortion and personal abstraction, shaking blipping synth leads over neck-snapping drums and counteracting the momentum with airless sci-fi soundscapes.
Perhaps the album’s most surprising moment arrives with “Viel”, which features vocals from Los Angeles-based composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Together, Pedone and Smith chance upon their notion of dub techno, fogging synth stabs and ghostly vocal traces into eerie harmonic distortions. On some level, it’s almost pop music, a far cry from the bleak dissonance of Absurd Matter and a hopeful way to reframe turbulence as transformation.
Absurd Matter 2 doesn’t simply document a process; it enacts one. It doesn’t offer clarity; it invites disorientation. It’s not a map of the labyrinth, but a foghorn piercing the darkness.
“Kachouzu” is a limited-edition lathe-cut release by Merzbow, also known as Masami Akita. It presents the pinnacle of harsh noise, with Merzbow’s signature metallic and extreme sound unfolding throughout. Unlike standard pressed records, the lathe-cut format delivers a uniquely raw sonic texture that further amplifies the intensity and impact of the work.
Clay oven-baked ruffneck beats and fragrant vocal delicacies from the endless archive of Bryn Jones’ Muslimgauze, offered up in a series of genuinely, previously unreleased - rather than repackaged - material.
The sole 12” in a four part series (the others are 7”) serves two variations on a theme as part of Muslimgauze’s near-ritualistic, everyday practice, at The Abraham Moss studios, north Manchester. Taken from typically untitled DATs sent to labels almost as quickly as they were recorded, the session opens with a wickedly coarse piece of looped, pitching hand-drum rhythms pushed into the red are swirled with a patina of tense cries resembling a glitching muezzin, and peppered with spoken word shrapnel. Its longer B-side variant locks much deeper into that groove with a beautiful wistful vocal loop vapourised into ether whilst the drums are clipped to a cleaner trot, but still riddled with satisfying amounts of sinewy noise in the mix, between its teeth.
Debut under the AICHER moniker, Defensive Acoustics is a collection of recordings channeling a performance that was presented alongside R. Rebeiro in the worn basement of the Ishiguro Building, an aged and abandoned pharmaceutical store in Kanazawa, Japan in Feb. 2024. Reinterpreted and releasing November 7 on the honourable Downwards Records of Birmingham, England.
"Colossal industrial minimalism from Downwards on a sick debut album from AICHER who deploy sheet-metal percussion and immense bass weight like some ice-cold collab between Valentina Magaletti, Emptyset and Einstürzende Neubauten, captured in an abandoned warehouse in graphic monochrome.
AICHER is the work of longtime label veteran Liam Andrews (MY DISCO, EROS), with additional production from his MY DISCO spar Rohan Rebeiro — an experimental percussionist and erstwhile collaborator of Roland S. Howard and HTRK. Together, they make resoundingly coarse, bullish industrial musick, distilling fascinations with tone and space through eight gristly and darkly sublime cuts, sharpened by production from Boris Wilsdorf of Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans fame.
Through 8 cuts, Defensive Acoustics reveals a clammy touch of reverberant buzz and below-the-belt shudder with a creeping, sensual signature of authority that strongly reminds us of Alan Wilder’s Blasphemous Rumours-era sound design for Depeche Mode, stripped to absolute skeletal fire. Tectonic plates of sound are pushed to an extreme biting point in a sort of structural stress test that feels like an oil rig in action, or perhaps more acutely, junked at harbour.
We go from the lurching buckle of ‘Ascertain’ and bilious atonality of ‘Harness Pleads’, to the vertiginous scale of the title piece and the brutal momentum of ‘An Exhausted Image’ - almost collapsing under its own bass weight, while the pranging girders of ‘Constriction’ makes us think of that 101 version of ‘Stripped’ - propulsive, full of primal energy and clanging, clipped reverb. ‘Possessions’ ends the album with a passage of bleakly romantic ambience, a judicious emotive counterweight to the preceding gnarl.
Powerfully transfixing, heaviest possible gear."
— Boomkat
Salty club dogs Beau Wanzer, Lukid & Tapes agitate each to stuttering 2-step, juke and rave noise extents on a frazzled session for TTT
The five trax of ‘Borez’ see all three flock around mutual poles of briny electronics and nervily restless rhythm programming within a framework of shattered but sharply effective club music. The gibber-jawed juke garage of ‘Point of Some Return’ pitches them into diciest wormholes of teeth-chatter 2-step, next to the dry-humped slam and almost Drexciyan lines of distorted, scudding, coruscating leads to ‘Rubber Eater’ on its 7’ arc to lusher resolution.
‘Darnell Can’t Polish a Turd’ pulls focus to sourest, piquant frequencies and bolshy bass blasts in a sorta bucking roll cage like Somatic Responses gone happy hardcore, and ‘Xylone Xylophone’ follows down that metallic wormhole like Evelyn Glennie on a mazza to the fizzy machine funk of ‘Lomp’.
