Kerridge’s 3rd long player marks a more fluid, or effluent, refinement of his sound, blurring the boundaries between organic audio sources and custom-constructed synths to flooding the senses with waves of bristling, oxidising industrial tones and coruscating texturhythm seemingly intent on separating flesh from bone. It’s evil stuff, all seven tracks of it, forming a closed feedback system of guttural, choking frequencies and cardiac arrhythymatics.
SNTS Records expands its reach with solo Positive Centre, who has released on Our Circula Sound and Stroboscopic Artefacts. This EP, with the intriguing title of Vorticist, shows the artist’s most visceral and raw side.
Jealous God arrive at their tenth issue and it’s yet another label debut, with Berlin-based New Yorker Hayden Payne getting his most high profile release to date under the Phase Fatale name. Once heavily involved in New York’s cold wave scene, Payne’s move to Berlin and the adoption of Phase Fatale has seen him develop an EBM flavoured style of techno that is eminently suited to the Jealous God cause. Lead cut “Steel” sounds like Silent Servant hocked up on steroids, contrasting nicely with the stealthier pump of “SOL740”. On the flip, the rhythmic construction of “Cut” is reminiscent of Jam City reworking Front 242, whilst “Castor” is pure sonic brutality.
Contort Yourself with 4 strong outings for its fourth EP ! To begin with we have the grimacing visage of Volition Immanent, an intense live act made up of Parrish Smith and Mark Van de Maat (Knekelhuis). Nastiness is taken up a notch as noise ne’er-do-wells Zombies Under Stress take over. Static is bent and doubled across thick chords and collapsed clap in the 1986 ”Maan Zal Zijn” before the raw and raging battery of ”In Onze Tijd.” L.I.E.S. regular Svengalisghost grapples with ”Maan Zal Zijn, channelling the original’s rage into a mechanical monster. The 12” is bookended with bite as Mark Forshaw (Tabernacle/Berceuse Heroique) closes with the tortured and torrential thump of ”Submission.”
In addition to his prolific output as Not Waving, London-dwelling Italian Alessio Natalizia has developed quite an interest in profiling the vast archive of music that surfaced from his motherland in the 1980s. After Strut tapped him to curate the Mutazione compilation back in 2013, Natalizia has taken to square his focus on more specific artists, with this Tapes retrospective following a similar profile of Daniele Ciulini last year. Selected Works 1982 – 1992 spans a decade of recordings from Tapes, aka brotherly pair Giancarlo and Roberto Drago whose style of industrial music absorbed the counter-cultural influence of William Burroughs or Throbbing Gristle, and the sci-fi dystopia of J.G. Ballard and John Foxx. The 21 tracks here will delight anyone with an interest in the obscure annals of European primitive electronics.
Continue reading “The Tapes – Selected Works 1982 – 1992 [ELP017]”
Spain’s Domestica are up to their usual antics, and this time it’s the second instalment of their excellent Domestic Landscape series, a varied and much-coveted collection of perfectly contemporary post-punk and coldwave oddities from the 1980s. We’re in love with every track on here, and we’re not exaggerating, this gear is of the highest calibre, and all very much relevant in a DJ nowadays. Think Optimo in the midst of a smokey, mid-morning set in a dark basement, and you’re almost there. Track upon track of solid gold discofied industrial music. Killer; highly recommended.
The Rubber label may proudly hail from the iconic Lowlands area known as Den Haag, yet their sphere of influence clearly stretches much further. First up is secret Amsterdam weapon Robert Bergman, laying down some deviant acid box action in the shape of “Broadcast From Ceres” which dovetails nicely with the more psychedelic overtones of “Masquerading As Stars” from Brussels-based duo Tav Exotic. The master Das Ding opens the B-side with the subaqueous “Divebomb” whilst the unheralded Safe Swim plunges into the deep end of experimentation on “Pictures Of Skies”. It’s left to Diagonal pair Bronze Teeth to wrap up matters with the rip snorting squat party techno of “Easygroove” which was clearly produced with The Hague in mind.
MRT release number four is a relentlessly loud outcry. Bruno Belluomini delivered three overwhelming techno pieces that dive into rough, violent, dirty waters. The EP is fast and unforgiving, and if one lets it, it will take one down and never let go. The outcome is clear, as it is well known, we all did terrible things to survive.
In interviews, Alessio Natalazia has freely stated his next album would be “very different” and “very intense”. That album, his first for Powell’s Diagonal stable, has finally arrived, and it’s as ballsy, robust and full-throttle as he promised. While it contains nods to the woozy, shoegaze and ambient influenced soundscapes that have been a feature of his previous full-length excursions, these are well hidden behind clandestine fusions of techno and industrial, surging EBM-influenced workouts, post punk-goes-post rock explorations and atmospheric analogue electronics. For those well versed in his back catalogue, Animals makes for arresting listening.
Optimo’s prolific DJ/producer/label boss JD Twitch aka Keith McIvor has curated a compilation of early ‘80s synth, industrial and cold wave classics and undiscovered gems in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, titled So Low. The 16-track collection had its genesis in McIvor’s irregular club night of the same name in his hometown of Glasgow. “So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987,” McIvor explains. “At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced but then shortly after, when House music arrived I found a different audience who actually liked to dance. In response to my wife’s deep love of this music and requests from some friends who were too young to hear it in a club at the time, or indeed were not even born when most of this music was made, I was persuaded to revisit a lot of records I still loved but rarely played out, and So Low was born. It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like.”
The seventh Surgeon album. Anthony Child claims that the inspiration for his seventh artist album came from using hardware to receive transmissions from far-flung galaxies. He then hooked up with astrophysicist Dr Andrew Read – a former collaborator – to work out the bewildering track titles. That’s the concept. The reality is that From Farthest Known Objects is a dense, grainy work. It feels like Child has deconstructed or in some more extreme situations has hacked away at tropes like minimalism, clicks and cuts and dub step to reveal an inner, hidden world. On the first few tracks, this alternate reality resounds to a sluggish pace, amid the crackle and groan of cleaved percussion and tortured subs, but it gradually comes round to stepping, broken beat techno and lunging rhythms. That these also descend into pulverising walls of white noise and nausea-inducing frequency shifts at times also serve as a reminder that Child has tuned into something other or inner-worldly.
Special limited cassette of I.B.M. aka Hieroglyphic Being’s ”Eat My Fuck” which was originally released on vinyl in 2014 & is out of print. Limited to 100 numbered copies worldwide. Includes 2 stickers. A demented sonic painting of rhythmic cubism & synth expressions.
Mannequin Records announce ‘Laugh Tool’, the debut full-lenght of Maoupa Mazzocchetti, pseudonym of Florent Mazzocchetti, young and talented French producer based in Brussels. Maoupa Mazzocchetti is finally bringing back to life the earlier days of electro-industrial, in a mixture that is very close to the late 70’s/early 80s period of Fad Gadget, Throbbing Gristle, Portion Control, Cabaret Voltaire and Front 242, crossed with the more fresh and innovative deep electronic experiments of Beau Wanzer and Charles Manier. Strongly addicted to a DIY ethic, and so to a punk ideology and anticonsumerism, most of Florent’s releases are recorded in his bedroom without any professional equipment, using analog synth and sequencers, modified drum machines, tape loops and a load of pedal effects. Florent started to experiment with the rhythm since his early age. Developing a passion for the drums at the age of 10 years, soon after he was moving to rock records and guitar, which became his instrument and one of the keystones of his perception of music. Florent approach with rhythm and drums was never traditional, making him feeling more a researcher than a musician. To an audience of contemporary electronic music consumers, who had only closely followed techno, electro and disco, the sounds of ‘Laugh Tool’ will appear unearthly, entirely unexpected, withering comets of strangeness. A 10 tracks album ready to change their minds…
Fantasy Techno collective DUST – a trio comprised of audio engineer Michael Sherburn, DIY nightlife entrepreneur John Barclay and multi-disciplinary artist Greem Jellyfish – will release their nightmarish, alien horror narrative debut full length, Agony Planet, on Mike Simonetti’s new 2MR imprint. Immersed in Brooklyn’s DIY rave community, all three mem- bers held roles in the genesis of notable extinct venues 285 Kent and Trip House, and now Bossa Nova Civic Club. In 2012 Sherburn and Barclay joined forces to found DUST and were joined shortly thereafter by Jellyfish; the following year they released their first 12′, ‘Onset of Decimation,’ on Man- nequin. Between 2013 and 2015, they released several more 12’s, two on Mannequin, as well as one for Sci-Fi & Fantasy and one for 2MR. Over these years, with Sherburn at the helm, the framework and themes for Agony Planet began to be conceptualized. Twelve tracks, spanning in genre from digital hardcore, dun- geon techno, and celestial ambience, are all held together by a theme of extravagant extraterrestrial warfare. Club-savvy techno engineering accompanied by frontwoman Greem Jellyfish’s bizarre monologues and warped screams beckon listeners on a journey through the occult mysticism of the nightmarish and torturous deep ocean of an alien hell. Agony Planet is an unrelenting and bold debut from a trio not afraid to explore the dark caverns of the underground.
Palais Des Bauzards pursued an industrial and electronic variant of the sound that swept into vogue during the first half of the ’80s. This compilation digs into the original material provided by the band and offers an amazing selection from start to finish. The sometimes rudimentary though gripping tracks tracks on the first side are emblematic for their early period, for example “Money” a song driven by a screeching rhythm box, distant guitar lines and a nonchalant voice. Cabaret Voltaire comes to mind. They’re not afraid to experiment and to explore new horizons (the track “Lies”). The second side shows a more developed dark wave sound with In The Grassfield and Knowing Too Much both produced by legendary Belgian producer Ludo Camberlin. On top of this there are two dark goth rock stomper hidden in the selection, they hide by the names My Life Is A Sin & Eat Out Of My Hands. Overall it’s a broad selection of tracks which show the capability of the band to do something different with the new wave genre. Initially the group was formed in 1983 in the Belgian city of Leuven by Danny Jacobs, Dirk Van Regenmortel, Chris Serré (+2006), Frank De Wit and Rudy Stuyckens. In 1983 they released two tracks on the Mask Live LP together with Front 242. In the three following years many of their home recorded tracks were published on a bunch of cassette labels.
The Hipodrome Of Music 