MUSIC

Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. 

Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams. 

The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam". 

The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression. 

A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories. 

Also known for its collaboration with The Body. Lingua Ignota has reigned supreme over the last few years as the pinnacle of jet-black, anomalous extreme music, and here we stock their unforgettable 17-year debut album, which marks the beginning of a legend! The album is a neo-folk - gospel - modern classical work that passes through post-industrial, and is truly eternal as one of the best albums spawned in the late 2010s.

Largely recognized as their breakthrough album, Khanate was confident enough by the two-song, forty-minute Capture & Release (2005) to peel back its layers of thick mossy drone and reveal the minimalist underpinnings, a change either interpreted as maturity or an implied threat. "It's a grim, avant-garde exercise in tension and paranoia. Dense, leaden drones fill up the spaces between O'Malley's sparse, deeply sustained guitar chords.Vocalist Alan Dubin's anguished vocals seem to convey the tortures of the damned as if there were not a shred of hope left for existence in this world. Capture & Release is not dissimilar to black metal in how it so violently conveys such a bleak and ultra-nihilistic world outlook. But while the standard tempo on a black metal album typically strays into the triple digits in terms of beats per minute, Khanate's plodding pace keeps the BPM soundly within the single-digit range.

One of the most eccentric characters to emerge from Lisbon's musical underground, Teteu has operated under a variety of shadowy monikers including Qraqmaxter, CiclOFF, and Erre Mente. A gifted visual artist as well as a composer, he's known for developing a philosophical mythology with his drawings, mostly using a ballpoint pen to sketch out elaborate, anime-style projects. Normal Nada is Teteu's most enduring project, and a full eight years after the game-changing ep "Transmutação Cerebral" he has finally assembled his long-awaited debut album. "TRIBAL PROGRESSIVE HEAVY METAL" materializes into Nada's meta-kuduro multiverse, developed from his deep knowledge of African and Portuguese musical forms. Years ago, he was an established archivist and genre historian, sharing archival material, mixes and rips alongside his original tracks, and while his online presence has faded, his rate of production hasn't. His tracks are rooted in Angolan kuduro and tarraxinha structures, but Normal Nada uses this only as a starting point, poetically overlaying and superimposing elements from trap, bass music, heavy metal and ambient sources to tell a story that's personal and unique. Listening to the album is like channel hopping through an interplanetary animated matrix, blasting off from colorful opener 'Beautyful Caos' with its grinding syncopation, crash-landing on the subversive 'Batida Hard Trance 2' that dissolves awkward European dance tropes into industrial-strength Portuguese electronix, and scuttling towards the album's bizarre title track, that juxtaposes crunching, overdriven drones 'n tones with kinetic kuduro rhythms. 'Alive' is even more cacophonous, layering machine-strength orchestral hits over militaristic, rolling 4/4 beats and unsettled subs. Born and raised in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, Normal Nada migrated to Portugal at 13 and was based for many years in Lisbon's San Antonio Dos Cavaleiros housing projects, after previously having lived in the Algarve. Teteu's compositions are a spiked expression of Lisbon's patchwork of batida styles, making a direct link to West Africa's vibrant musical legacy. Now he's returned to Guinea-Bissau and his music reflects this outstretched knowledge and energy, with a 360 degree view of the world's complex assemblage of cultures and conflicts. The album's somber finale is the best representation of his philosophy, a minor-key downtempo slow-burner that could sit comfortably alongside Actress or tarraxinha pioneer DJ Znobia. Called 'Dedicated to the Homeless', it shines flickering neon light on the world's unseen population, searching for hope where too many of us choose to look away.

Since they connected in Kampala back in 2019, Elvin Brandhi and Lord Spikeheart have been recording restlessly, developing a shared musical language that compliments their individual expressions. Both innovative improvisors motivated by the extreme potential of performance, they manufacture a synergistic shriek on their debut set, fluxing between jagged DIY noise, chilly sacred ambience, ratcheting hard dance and quirky leftfield pop. And despite their backgrounds, neither Brandhi nor Spikeheart have approached anything quite so piercing and direct. It's music that sits a few paces from the established timeline, doggedly avoiding contemporary trends and screaming hoarsely at passers by.Born and raised in Bridgend, Wales, Elvin Brandhi has built a reputation for her virtuosic collision of rubberized freeform vocalizing and skillful, irreverent production. Since breaking out as half of father-daughter improv duo Yeah You when she was just a teenager, she's released a slew of acclaimed solo projects including 2019's 'Headroof' recorded in Uganda with a host of Nyege collaborators. She has also collaborated with artists like Drew McDowall from Coil, Pat Thomas and Ziúr. Nairobi-based rapper-producer Lord Spikeheart meanwhile is best known for lending his unmistakable growl to Sub Pop-signed noise-metal duo Duma. Anyone who's seen their live shows will be acutely aware of Spikeheart's power on the mic, and he brings that same energy to this project, trading snarls and syllables with Brandhi over rasping industrialized detritus.The duo's fierce vocal interplay is the heart of their collaboration. On 'Cruxify all the prophets', Brandhi's guttural croaks appear to dematerialize into granulated electronics, transforming into emotional wails before Spikeheart's unmistakable death metal shouts writhe into the sunlight. Intermittently piped through electronics, the voices alternate between chilly cybernetic wails and sickly human spits and coughs, finding an unsteady balance between grindcore gutter punk and Atlanta street rap. Songs spark into life and then flicker into nothingness, switching momentum seemingly randomly before taking unexpected turns; 'DEATH CODE E666' is a terrifying noise lullaby that pivots into classical abstraction, 'whiom8warwomb666' is a long-form rhythmic tongue-twister that oscillates through pneumatic dizziness into grotesque sound art expressionism, and 'do you like feeling awakeee33' reforms squelchy hyperpop into cogwheel whirrs and disquieting cackles.Truly labyrinthine and never predictable, this partnership is a reminder that experimental music can be crucial and progressive without losing its vitality, or its wit.

Howling blasts of blackened metallurgy by Hamburg miscreants Scheich In China, chasing a killer mixtape for V I S with 13 blistered instrumentals sure to tickle the fancy of Bathory, Wold and Death Metal fiends. One of two hellish new Scheich in China albums, the malefic form of ‘Arschgesichter des Todes’ looms like a soundtrack to petrifying night terrors with a devil-baiting parade of ungodly pleasures. The harder hearing among you may be familiar with Philipp Meiers and Alsen Rau’s work in this guise from a number of LPs issued on local Hamburg labels since 2014, and should also recognise this one as closest to source, mostly ditching the drone and technoid elements in favour of pure death metal throttle and blizzard dynamics. Riddled with dread and venom, the album shells a cavalcade of enslaved drum machine and wiry guitars (ir)resplendent in typically lo-fi recording virtues and hungry to gnaw the nerves of any poor soul in earshot. Of course it’s an outright buzz if you like this stuff, shy of the sort of vocal theatrics that can put some heads off, but with steely, uncompromising focus on the textures, energy and an end-of-earth primordial thrust that makes Death Metal, proper, such a uniquely extreme proposition. At its longest, ’Nosebleeding Diarrhea Pus Mucus’ sums up the sound literally and viscerally, while the rest of it tends to more succinct assaults on the senses, spanning the heck-raising charge of ‘The Virgin Witch’ thru the inferno-in-the-next-room of ‘Deine Gebeine’, tape sodden squall of ‘Satan Needs no Forks’ and martial mini-epic ‘Postatomicwat Hookers’, with their sick sense of humour epitomised in the title and grindcore flay of ‘The eBook of Dead’.

DJ Desecrator smelts 70 minutes of radical metals and synth gloom on what TTT are touting as “our best mixtape?” - a must-check for anyone who copped the DKR session or Tom Boogizm's 'Hardcore' shotta. Utterly reeking of Ork armpits and putrefied meat, ‘Ritual Giblets’ lays out a feast of extreme hard rock and metal entrails by artists who have us by the short and curlies for the duration. Bookended by cinematic scenes of doom and decay in the opening blast of horns and drizzle, and its sublime closer, the meat of the mixtape is pure BM, grind and death metal sequenced for optimal possession, replete with the sort of synth intros Conrad Schnitzler made for Mayhem, or the foul medieval atmospheres to When’s ‘Black Death’ which inspired the Norwegian BM scene and are also found on NTS’ dungeon synth survey. Not for the faint hearted but manna for headbangers. full gnarrr.

For over two decades Jonathan Katsav has used his Crave project to fray rap at its fringes, using Memphis and Houston's low-and-slow legacy to inform sounds that have as much in common with Merzbow as they do Tommy Wright III. Working under a variety of different monikers such as Lieu Noir, Sniper Bait and Soul Collector, the French producer is most prolific as Crave, and "Inner War Delirium" is a substantial and broadly cinematic addition to his canon. Katsav approaches each track as if it's a scene from a movie, using real life experiences to explore separate characters and contrasting emotions. Using different narrators and disparate vocal styles, he navigates grim, blown-out landscapes, driving neon drenched trap synths and horror choirs against overdriven kicks and waterlogged industrial atmospheres. Mangled field recordings, squealing static and gurgling synthesized bass opens 'PHYLLIS', goading the cautious with serrated, carnival synths and cacophonous vocals that sway lugubriously between rap and grindcore. The relationship between dark and light, death and rebirth, is at the heart of "Inner War Delirium", rippling through every track's oozing amalgamation of inebriated hip-hop and buzzsaw noise. Katsav's sounds are an attempt to subject us to the physicality of his own life's puzzle, and he cuts them into vignettes like a director. On the album's final track, listeners are swiped from in front of the speakers and bundled into the trunk of a car, rain rattling on the metal and the album playing on in the distance. It's a way for the producer to turn the camera back on the audience and ask them to consider their own complicated reality - it's Crave's story, but everyone's a part of it.

Born from the fractal innerworld of Vymethoxy Redspiders, better known as Urocerus Gigas from Leeds-based xenofeminist crisis energy rock duo Guttersnipe, The Ephemeron Loop's debut is a synaesthetic acid bath that cracks open the doors of perception to reveal a sonic landscape of ineffable beauty, divine femininity and continual transformation. "Psychonautic Escapism" sublimes Guttersnipe's teeth-gnashing spacegrind aesthetic leaving washes of dream pop ambience, dilated speedcore fusillades and shapeshifting psychedelic dub effects. It's an album that lodges itself creatively between Cocteau Twins, Arca, Basic Channel and Napalm Death, lysergically fluxing imperceptibly between seemingly contradictory sonics and philosophies. Miss VR took 14 long, difficult years to write the album, which developed cautiously as she broke through the misery of her pre-transition life with shoegaze music, rave and psychedelic drugs in Leeds' queer underground. An existence languishing in negativity, soundtracked by extreme music was replaced with the opportunity to experience euphoria, elation and ecstatic freedom, emotions that coalesce sensually on "Psychonautic Escapism". These formative experiences are the album's initial building blocks, assembled between 2007 and 2018 as Miss VR came to grips with her reality as an autistic/ADHD trans woman and the multi-dimensional psychotropic experiences that assisted that realization. And as V's worldview expanded and shifted as she lived a fresh life, the music itself developed spiritually. In 2018, after being impressed with producer Ross Halden's work with Guttersnipe, Miss VR asked him to assist her with developing The Ephemeron Loop's fragmented songs and visions. "I learned a lot about why people don’t usually combine various kinds of sounds or styles in music," she admits. "It is very difficult to get it to all work together!" But after two-and-a-half years of the duo navigating a "labyrinth of fragmented Reason 5 and Logic projects," re-recording and processing, and working tirelessly on complex arrangements and compositions, they eventually found a light at the end of the tunnel. The finished album is towering and ambitious, Escher-like in its illusory reconstruction of familiar elements into brain-altering forms. The album begins with 'Psychonautic Escapism (Cold Alienation)', decorating Miss VR’s disembodied moans with throbbing dub techno synths, insectoid digital percussion and disorientating high-BPM electronics. Her vocals hover weightlessly between My Bloody Valentine's Bilinda Butcher and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, and on 'Lattice Dysmorphism of Lysothymic Oneiroid Cytoterrain' drift against grinding industrial hardcore kicks, serrated bass and Lorenzo Senni-esque trance pointillism. On 'Trench Through Pink Death', Miss VR’s voice mutates into a shrill scream as she directs the music from splattered free-flowing doom into harsh hyper-speed death metal and breakcore. Woven together with both precision and delicacy, "Psychonautic Escapism" turns a rough patchwork of ideas, experiences, feelings and vivid emotions into a glorious neon tapestry. In living and exploring the realities of autism, ADHD and trans identity, Vymethoxy Redspiders has masterminded a sonic language that feels fresh, urgent and shockingly honest. Psychedelic is a term that gets thrown around far too loosely at the moment - in this case there's just no better way of describing the album's scope.

Origin of the Alimonies is Liturgy’s fifth full-length album and their first to fully integrate Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s vision of total art, or what she calls Perichoresis, with her musical compositions. The music amplifies a dramatic narrative addressing the question of the origin of all things, which itself aesthetically grounds the content of Hunt-Hendrix’s ongoing philosophical YouTube series on her System of Transcendental Qabala. The album is by far Liturgy’s most meticulous and radical statement, pushing their characteristic synthesis between black metal, minimalism, experimental club music, and 19th–century romanticism to new extremes. Exploring microtonality, free improvisation, polymetric structures and Richard Wagner’s ideas of musikdrama and leitmotif, Hunt-Hendrix employs her unique “burst beat” technique to bind together the rhythmic signatures of metal, experimental club and classical music in the service of speech patterns and narrative flow. Featuring the virtuosic playing of bandmates Leo Didkovsky, Tia Vincent-Clark and Bernard Gann, the entire album also includes flute, piano, harp, strings and horns performed by a 8-piece chamber ensemble drawn from New York’s various avant-garde music scenes. Influenced by kabbalah, German Idealism and French post-structuralism, the opera tells the story of a cosmogonical traumatic explosion between OIOION and SIHEYMN, a pair of divine beings whose thwarted love tears a wound from which civilization is generated, producing the Four Alimonies of the intelligible universe and the task of collective emancipation. Outside the narrative frame, the piece is meant to foster productive discord between the modes of attention and political commitments that implicitly accompany its various genres, as well as to hover in the liminal territory between the music industry, the art world and the contemporary philosophy community, reiterating the message of Jesus via William Blake by belonging nowhere, only half-comprehensible within any established framework, puncturing hypocritical ideologies while crying out in the name of love. The album is accompanied by a new, eponymous album-length operatic video written, directed, shot, edited by and starring Hunt-Hendrix, who uses her evolving body, in the wake of her recent gender affirmation as a trans woman, as the medium for the story. credits released November 20, 2020

I started Void Ov Voices in 2006 to create ritualistic music for the moment, to play only live performances while capturing and interfering with the energy of the space and the time of the location.

The first time I travelled to Lebanon was in 2008 for one particular reason: to visit the Trilitons and the giant Monoliths of Baalbek. I was deeply impressed by the level of ancient civilisations engineering technology and the intense magical atmosphere of the whole area.

I have been fascinated by ancient ruins, prehistorical sites and monoliths for a long time. In the last decades, I visited many of these places around the world. I always felt this very particular fine physical energy among those ancient ruins, which interestingly opened my imagination and mind’s eye. Besides that, all these structures are footprints of a forgotten high advanced technology and civilisations. Moreover, these masses of stone often lie in alignment with astrological events and sacred geometry.
The Trilitons of Baalbek are extraordinarily special to me as they are pure evidence of technology from before the Roman period, a technology which could lift and transport blocks of stones, each weighing around approximately 900 tons (which equals approximately the weight of 900 VW Golfs, but in one piece!). To do that transportation itself today would be a huge challenge even with our cutting edge technology, if it’s possible at all.

There is a massive plateau in Baalbek made of these sized stones, on top of which the Romans built their famous Jupiter Temple, considered to be one of the largest Roman structures in the world.
Baalbek used to be called The City Of The Sun in ancient times, and I might have one theoretical question: could it be connected to the story of The Tower Of Babel?
There are many stories and theories around these mystical places. But, those stones have been just standing and waiting there in time and space throughout history. And they will be there till the end…
To make recordings as close as possible to these unique structures always triggered my mind.
When finally I could make a recording outdoor on the top of the “Stone of the South” in Baalbek, I fell into a trance kind of meditative state of mind, in that welcoming an enormous ancient energy which is present and is also captured on these recordings. Music is magical itself on many levels as it goes through all of our bodies, not only through the sensations of our ears.

As years passed, I researched Baalbek more. One of Hungary’s most significant painters, Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar (1853-1919), was also deeply touched by the same spot in Lebanon. When I dug more into Csontváry’s life story, I found many similarities between his and my personality and artistic philosophy. He was profoundly spiritual yet not religious. He was an apothecary and scientist who started to paint in his middle age only because of a transcendental impulse he received. He gave up his pharmacist career and, for the rest of his life, focused only on art and painting to fulfil his soul’s desires and not for any other earthly or egoistic reason. He never had an exhibition, and he never intended to sell any of his paintings. He became a vegetarian and an outsider of society. Towards the end of his life, he even wrote some advanced philosophical writings challenging the hidden hands behind the governments and world leaders. Unfortunately and typically, he was only recognised decades after his death. His paintings were forgotten and almost sold as canvas to cover trucks after WWII. Then, at the last minute of an auction, somebody recognised their artistic value, bought up and saved these priceless paintings, which was like a miracle itself. Csontváry is now considered to be one of the most critical and influential Hungarian painters of all time! Sometimes I wonder how much invaluable art might have disappeared through the dark times of our history.
Anyway, Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar and Baalbek gave me such deep inspiration that in 2012 I decided to travel back to Lebanon to the same ruins to Baalbek to create a ritualistic recording and try to capture that energy for myself and for forever.
I chose this rare painting from Csontváry called “Sacrificial Stone” for the album’s cover artwork. He painted this surrealistic painting in Baalbek too. No debt to me that he was inspired by “The Stone Of The South”, which became the “Sacrificial Stone” in his vision.
When I first saw that painting, I could not believe my eyes: in Void Ov Voices, I use blocks of sounds repeatedly to create a wall of sound. I could not visualise my music better than Csontváry on this beautiful painting.

I was not sure if I should ever release this personal recording but thank my friend Stephen O’Malley’s strong inspiration through the years. Finally, it can happen.

– Attila Csihar
Budapest, September 2021