MUSIC

An album Maximum Rock 'N' Roll deemed not punk enough to review, Unwound’s 1994 sophomore effort was a lethal depth charge aimed at major label grunge and independent hardcore alike. From the off-kilter, vertiginous rhythm of “Entirely Different Matters” to the neck-snapping velocity of “What Was Wound” to the relentless pounding at the end of “All Souls Day,” New Plastic Ideas is the Sonic Youth loving older sister to Fake Train's post-punk-obsessed little brother.

By the end of their career Unwound were whispering their disgruntled musings over sinewy guitar lines into a bucket of lo-fi, but they initially skewered a far more hardcore sound, screaming and yelping their baby nihilism over crashing instruments and repeated noise bulletins. Fake Train proves it and Numero Group have reissued this piece of pissy brilliance for proof. If you didn't know by now: there are classics at either end of this band's discography.

Recordings of The pale faced family on the hill took place over a week in January 2020 in a small church hall on the outskirts of London. A small number of electronic music producers decided to form a collective and make heavy ambient music for raw pleasure in the agreement that their identity be withheld. They invited Oliver Coates as a live musician to contribute cello drone which they would then add to, process, subtract from and mix with weather recordings and esoteric ways of generating sounds, including old sample packs and whatever else they had to hand. The results were mixed down to tape live without further editing or arrangement. Wishing to work under a cloak of anonymity, the process freed the producers from their other lives and released output, allowing them to enter a new group alias, to induce heady states of sound and to become a group without hierarchies.

Runhild Gammelsæter and Lasse Marhaug are two Norwegian musicians/sound artists. Both started in the early 1990s music underground and have worked in many constellations with a wide range of collaborators. Despite knowing each other for a long time, Gammelsæter and Marhaug’s first collaborative work was the “Quantum Entanglement” LP in 2014. The album ignited a collective spark that both wanted to pursue further. Still, other commitments got in the way, and the project lay dormant until Stephen O’Malley, and Greg Anderson invited them to open for Sunn O))) for a special gig in the St. James Church of Culture in Oslo in the autumn of 2019. The two gathered for a long series of rehearsals, and after the successful performance, it was clear that it was time to start working on new compositions and recordings. That process initiated in late 2019 and continued to early 2021, encompassing before and after the world went through the lockdown. The result of this long development to be heard accumulated upon their new album “Higgs Boson” on Ideologic Organ Music. Throughout the profound process of creating “Higgs Boson”, Gammelsæter and Marhaug drew inspiration from various subjects and artists. For Marhaug, it was concepts informed by the structuralist experimental cinema of Japanese directors Takashi Ito and Toshio Matsumoto, futurist worlds of French comic book artists Philippe Druillet and Jean Moebius Giraud, landscape photography of Fay Godwin, Kåre Kivijärvi, and Tamiko Nishimura, amongst others. It became a metaphysical juxtaposition involving Gammelsaeter’s research and lyrical ideas based on several seemingly unrelated principles. A process of association inspired by “the Glass Bead Game” by Herman Hesse. The discovery of the Higgs Boson as a confirmation of the physical universe. The work of Ernst Schrödinger on the uncertainty principle. The four forces of physics. The Force. Helplessness under armed forces - as the war sailors in World War II. The influence of magic as expressed in tarot. Gammelsæter experiments with a boundary involving the thresholds amongst various states of focus and legibility by forensic experimentation with techniques such as exclusive expression of consonants, syllabic repetition, retrograde text vocalisations and multi-lingual layering. Her vocal inspirational sources include Sidsel Endresen, Diamanda Galas, Natacha Atlas, the choral works of Rachmaninov, and the bands Carcass and Grave. Two worlds coming together, making the music special. Mixing hard facts with science fiction helps create a kaleidoscopic cross point between the complex realities of the past and a possible future. “Quantum Entanglement” featured two long-form pieces centred around a prepared piano and layered voice, while “Higgs Boson” developed a much more elaborate and ambitious compositional work. Across eight parts, the two artists brought a broad palette of instrumentation and sound. Electronic and acoustic, objects and field recordings, and pipe organ define the structures of which the centre is Gammelsæter’s magnificent voice. She has become known for her legendary voice, with her vast and unique range of inflective techniques and affective colour through her 30 years creating music. In the mix, Lasse approached the instrumental elements like landscapes, then Runhild’s vocals as characters that inhabit those worlds. Often, Gammelsæter multiple characters fused with the landscape. Make them occupy space, sometimes blend into it, sometimes dominate it. Constructing and setting visual guidelines helps set focus and open possibilities. As an album, “Higgs Boson” is direct and focused, drawing on song structures. Within these tracks are vast strata of sound, an immersive multi-dimensional depth of music. Creating a feeling of depth while working with a flat two-channel stereo format - and how dimensions of texture and distortion can help develop the illusion of a space. The album structure is a story-like arc, a malleable subjective path, set as the album traverses oblique and suggestive areas, opening the concepts for the listener to unpack as they like. – exclusive consultation with Gammelsæter & Marhaug, edited by Stephen O’Malley, June 2022

olina project emerged at a time when CDJs became standard in clubs and artists from many disciplines began exploring their possibilities. In Lolina’s records and performances, they are used as a live sampling tool allowing her to move between composition and improvisation. On “Fast Fashion”, discarded vocal takes and phone recordings made while watching videos online or walking down the street are re-sampled across long-form collages. “Mark Ronson’s TED Talk Intro (Using Computer Remix)”, restyles a lecture about sampling and constructed of samples into a track that can’t be contained by any of its elements. Relaxed beats break down into stuttering, jokes turn into abstract situations, and meaning is altered through repetition. With transitions between different parts defining the listening experience, “Fast Fashion” reveals a process by which one thing can be changed into another. “Fast Fashion” is Lolina’s fifth album and first working with Deathbomb Arc. Digital to be released on Oct 27th with vinyl to follow in early 2022 ~ both on pre-sale now. Lolina previously released music as Inga Copeland and was a member of the band Hype Williams between 2009 — 2013.

Pow wow singer and Bon Iver collaborator Joe Rainey directs his astonishing voice thru industrial grit, widescreen orchestrals and chaotic DIY synth noise on "Niineta", his debut for Justin Vernon's 37d03d label. Completely singular music. Rainey was brought up in Minneapolis, with a heritage that links to the Red Lake Ojibwe - an indigenous tribe that has a sovereign state in northern Minnesota. And while he didn't grow up there, he long felt the pull of a culture that at various times has been blotted out by the USA. Rainey has been involved in pow wow singing since he was just five years old, and has performed in bands as well as building up an immense archive of field recordings. 'Niineta' is his debut album, but he's been performing for years - in 2016, he even brought Justin Vernon to tears during a festival show in Wisconsin. It was enough for Vernon to invite Rainey to contribute to his last album, and sign him to the 37d03d he runs with The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner. The record is an example of how pow wow traditions can be synthesized into different forms without losing their musical core; Rainey's range and vocal style roots the album in tradition, but his production and willingness to experiment fires "Niineta" into the future. With help from Fog's Andrew Broder, Rainey has put together a distorted, abstract backdrop that happily ducks from jagged beatscapes into luscious orchestral cinematics without any unintentional jerkiness. The music is consistent with Rainey's pow wow tradition, but acknowledges decades of music that too often has sat distant. 'b.e. son' loops vocal phrases across each other over blown-out percussion and sweeping strings, and 'easy on the cide' foregrounds a beat that sounds rougher than gravel, Autotuning Rainey's lead vocal and contorting it evocatively. On 'no chants', a frazzled TR-808 kick booms beneath tape saturated pulses, creating a soundscape that's not a million miles from Kanye West's game-changing "Yeezus" - but this isn't homage, Rainey uses the distortion to hint at darker elements, a disturbance in his culture that's violent, deafening and charged with emotion. The album's lengthy finale 'phil's offering' is also its most impressive, building slowly over looped crackle that gives a rhythmic click to Rainey's unforgettable vocal performance - eventually the track disappears into an industrial blur as processed field recordings reveal Rainey's heritage. Trust us, this ain't like anything you've heard before.

On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English’s home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as “uneasy and unsettling,” awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world – a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling “like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera.” A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album’s seven potent compositions. Opener “The Long Dream” sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. “A Gate Of Light” and “Magnetic Traps” both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. “The Visit” and “Black Thicket” operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence like gunfire swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unknowable: brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. Discussing Akita’s music, English refers to its “intense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds.” The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender: “this saturation of the senses can be a euphoria.” Proof comes halfway through “The Golden Sphere,” when the howling mayhem subtly recedes, revealing an eerie siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star galaxies away. Slowly a seething, venomous wall of volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray, whipping away into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravagement; it’s the sound of dissolution as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, finally freed from form.

Recorded live at Morden Tower, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 8th. June, 1983. Originally released together with Changez Les Blockeurs as part of a 2LP box set, has since been released as a single LP. Limited edition of 349 hand-numbered copies.

Recorded from 1984 to 1986, The Impossible Humane is the sole album from The New Blockaders side project Mixed Band Philanthropist. Originally released on the German Selektion label in 1987 and impossible to find nowadays, Staubgold makes this rare gem of industrial-goes-musique concrète available again in a strictly limited edition of 400 copies. Furthermore, the reissue contains two bonus tracks taken from the 7" single The Man Who Mistook a Real Woman for His Muse and Acted Accordingly. The album is assembled of exclusive source material by the who's-who of the industrial music scene of the time, including contributions from Nurse With Wound, Organum, Andrew Chalk, The New Blockaders, Etant Donnes, H.N.A.S., P16.D4, Asmus Tietchens, Controlled Bleeding, Smegma, Merzbow, and many more. "A classic chunk of destroyed concrète. Assembled from a variety of musical and spoken sources, this is a nonstop barrage of genius. Filled with headsnapping changes, sexual innuendo and general confusion, it's a totally great listening experience," said The Wire. Idwal Fisher wrote: "This car-crash tape collage still stands today as one of the best examples of the genre. Its perpetual barrage of split-second samples are a dizzying mess of '60s pop songs, scrapes, industrial whirr, uncategorizeable racket, ghostly voices, electronic beebles and burrs, sped-up records, tape whizz, machine rumble, snatches of reggae, bucket damage, kazoo farts, disco spots and about three-thousand or more (I'm guessing) other samples that really shouldn't work, but, by some sleight of hand or genius, actually do. On paper, snatches of steel bands shouldn't be found on the same side of tape as Geordie MCs, Michael Jackson, pneumatic drills, early Merzbow and '50s doo wop, but here they are and it works. Totally. Then comes the added bonus of being able to listen to this to the point of ad nauseam, mainly due to the fact that there are so few reference points that every listen brings something new."

Edition of 180 copies in digipack. First official re-issue. The New Vortex Blockaders Compaign was released on tape in 1984 and was bootlegged on LP in 1998. Both editions are now sought after collectors items. This release went down in noise history as a big classic, and is now reissued, in nice remastered form. 'Extreme, nihilistic Musique Concrete which creates unrelenting walls of sound... Images of chaos, collapse and extreme violence dominate.' Aeon 'This will rip your face off and wear it as a mask!' CMS Foundation

Masami Akita is one of the most influential noise artists of our time. Known as Merzbow, Akita has developed a recognisable sound with his harsh, confrontational and abrasive sonic emittance. Lawrence English is a curator of sound, vision and thought. As the founder of Room40, English has released countless records and has worked alongside some of the most notable and adorned sound pioneers of our time – in turn becoming one himself. To coincide with Akita and English’s involvement in issue 02, English compiled a Merzbow Mixtape of hidden gems from Merzbow’s expansive archive.

Merzbow is a Japanese noise legend who continues to advocate a thoroughgoing ahincer practice and experiment with alternative expressions that transcend the boundaries of "noise". Recorded and mixed at Munemihouse in 2021, this is the latest release from Merzbow. It's a powerhouse masterpiece, and I can't say enough about it. Don't miss it!

Lucy & Aaron is the debut collaboration LP from the duo of Lucrecia Dalt (RVNG Intl.) and Aaron Dilloway (Dais Records). Full length LP in full color cover with printed inner sleeve featuring art by artist Pieter Schoolwerth. File under Electronic / Tape Music. “I met Aaron in Madeira around 10 years ago, and I was blown away by his set, when I was going to tour the US for the first time, Forest, my US my booking agent asked me if I wanted to tour with someone from his roster and I suggested Mr Dilloway, the first show we played together was in Toronto, he started with a very groovy loop, some kind of soul extract that felt just right. With that, he levelled the dynamics and the atmosphere of the room, moving back and forth from the stage to the audience to double check if everything was sounding right. I have never seen such an elegant, disturbing and powerful show at the same time, it was a wild combination. We played a couple more shows together and on my journey throughout the states I was never in a place where his name didn’t pop up with a positive comment of admiration. We became extremely close and utopian. We started this record during a two week visit of mine in NYC, we crossed our signals, sometimes his affecting mine, or the other way around, we just wanted to make a fun, weird and inevitably emotive record that somehow captured so many things we love about music, to put oneself in character and go with the flow.” — Lucrecia Dalt “Lucrecia and I met briefly 10 years ago while performing at a festival together. We traded some releases and I was very excited by what I heard. Her records stuck out to me over the years as something very special. I was a fan. We met again recently while performing on a bill together in Toronto, and while watching her perform, I was mesmerized by her selections of sounds, as well as her movements and control of the mixing board. I felt like we worked similarly. We struck up a very close friendship and what followed was a year of intense discussions about art, music, performance and recording. Immediately we began working on music together and her expertise in mixing and her highly trained ears and overall drive were very inspirational. This album was recorded in 3 different locations, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY where Lu was doing a residency, sessions at Lu’s home in Berlin, Germany and finally at my home in Oberlin, OH. It was one of the most inspirational periods of my life and helped me overcome some intense musical and psychological obstacles. I learned so much by making this record.” — Aaron Dilloway Recorded by Lucrecia Dalt & Aaron Dilloway 2019 – 2020 Mastered by Rashad Becker Cut by Warren Defever Art by Pieter Schoolwerth

per customer 1 copy. Within the history of noise music, there are few artefacts, as seminal as The New Blockaders' Changez Les Blockeurs. Anyone who has even a casual interest in noise music should need no introduction to The New Blockaders. Hailed by Ron Lessard (of legendary US noise label RRR) as, ‘The first truly devoted noise artists,’ TNB self-released their debut LP in 1982. That original LP is now one of the most sought-after (and expensive) noise records ever. The fact that Changez Les Blockeurs is held in such high esteem by the likes of Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), who was the first person to hear the LP back in 1982 and recently reworked the album as NWW Plays Changez Les Blockeurs, David Jackman (Organum), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Masami Akita (Merzbow), Toshiji Mikawa (Incapacitants) and countless others is testament to its greatness and well-deserved legendary status. Laying in wait for almost 40 years, the LP emerged again in 2004 as a limited edition on the German Vinyl-On-Demand label, and since then has remained rare, elusive, and coveted - until now. 2022 will mark the 40th anniversary (or, more accurately, antiversary) of Changez Les Blockeurs and in celebration of this Urashima is proud to present a limited reissue which has been expertly remastered at Audiplex Studio in Hamburg by Asmus Tietchens, himself a well-know German avant-garde composer. ‘’Changez Les Blockeurs caused a lot of fuss back in the early ’80,with its two ‘tracks’ of disorientating junk noise, squeaks, scrapes and the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof. Lumps of metal get thrown around in a bid to resurrect the ghost of Tristan Tzara, two invalids in wheelchairs fencing with broken car aerials, two elephants fencing on bicycles, two squeaky wheelchairs fighting over a slack spring, it could or an army of tin men dismantling a Jean Tinguely sculpture while bouncing around on pogo sticks in need of 3-in-1. We’ll never know, and that’s half of the appeal. Changez Les Blockeurs sounds like nothing else before or since. It’s magnificent in its absurdity. Its construct is simple but yet devastatingly effective. Today you’d be hard pressed to find anyone involved in Noise who doesn’t cite TNB as an influence. ‘’Mark Wharton Pressed on 100% black virgin vinyl to ensure optimum audio quality, Changez Les Blockeurs is a true wonder to behold. A beautifully presented LP which includes a 12”x12” insert, limited to just 199 copies. Absolutely essential.

Time for your booster! More childish theatricals from everybody's favourite 'bone heads. Comprising seven previously unreleased subterranean events. Out of The Ground. 500 limited edition digipak C.D.s

After 20 years of incubation, My Bloody Valentine's third album, m b v, was suddenly released in 2013, and was at once their most experimental and most melodic and immediate work, proving their insatiable appetite for reform. Highly acclaimed as an astounding work that pushed the boundaries of musical and genre concepts even further, it also featured a type of music that had never been heard before. At once otherworldly, familiar, and intuitive, this album is a masterpiece for a new era, a stunningly beautiful transformation of the sound synonymous with MBV as it had been known up to that point. The album's final track, "Wonder 2," is a testament to this, with Shields' hypnotic guitar sound mixed with drum'n'bass that has left many awestruck.

Mastered from original 1/2" analog tape using Studer A80 VU-PRE and Neumann VMS 80.
Mastered from original 1/2" analog tape using Studer A80 VU-PRE and Neumann VMS 80
180g weight vinyl
Standard gatefold outer sleeve
Produced and mixed by Kevin Shields
Includes five 300 x 300 mm art prints
Includes DL code (24-bit | 16-bit | mp3)

Originally recorded and mixed at ZSF Produkt Studio 1995. First released in 1996 by the A.I.P.R. label in German in an edition of 200 copies. A very rare record nowadays. This beautiful re-issue comes in a completely handmade cover. The front cover has a metal mesh attached to it. The cover is spray painted on both sides and is completed with alluminum adhesive tape and stickers. Remastered at Munemihouse in 2019 by Masami Akita. Edition of 200 copies.