Equipment used: Erica Synths Acidbox, Erica Synths Zen Delay, JMT DNVO-1, JMT Noisy Mic, XL13 Shard, and a prototype noise machine that was built for PSYWARFARE by the great, Max Wainwright
This was an interactive LIVE performance where the crowd was invited to participate.
Each individual in the audience performing upon the wireless synth became the 1st track.
During the 2nd track the audience took turns shouting vocals into the wireless noisy mic.
Erica Synths pedals created the infrasonic low end rhythms that pulsed and vibrated both the venue and the audience throughout the evening.
Ω)Reading this you are tainted, and now body compromised you are warned: kill the impulse or face your stolen ground. ______________________________________________________________
Following up on 2021’s Order, Anglo-Australian EBM/Synth-Punk band PC World return with the EP, Infinite Dream Weapon, a 3-track preview of intent and a sonic flag-planting PSYOP. Guiding the masses to anticipate next year’s full length LP, these tracks have been chosen to put the listener in the crosshairs.
At Heaven’s Gate jump-starts the dream at its logical endpoint, leaving the bystander lifeless. Inspired by our Industrial forefathers with its throbbing basslines and strident Keith LeBlanc-esque drums, At Heaven’s Gate seizes you into the locked-door communities feared throughout the days of Satanic Panic, poisoning the fantasies of the domesticated mind.
The eponymous track, Infinite Dream Weapon, is an instrumental pursuit designed for when you have no mouth and you must scream. Taking cues from Klaus Schulze and Cabaret Voltaire’s unfinished Earthshaker project, the filmic atmosphere shows PC World at their most introspective, letting the listener project their own paranoid nightmares through the Infinite Dream Weapon.
The band’s third sonic thread, Doublevision, is a pulse raising statement that targets institutional terror and human destabilization, motivated by the corruption that inhabits spaces of colonial guilt, aligning itself with the idea that a life of lies can become existential horror, waking in fright for all eternity.
With the Infinite Dream Weapon, we open a new force to ionize the air in one more bastardised direction. It is only in the consumption of this sonic parasite that the fantasy truly lives on as we make the approach toward tomorrow’s dream. Now, weapon in hand and back against the wall, the vision lodged in your cerebral fantasy, ask yourself “do you believe?”.
The collaboration between Klara Lewis and Nik Colk Void somehow seemed inevitable. Both artists having seen their releases published by Editions Mego, individually carving out idiosyncratic voices in the worlds of extreme, abstract electronic music.
With Full-On, Lewis and Void explore and assimilate the very edge of their individual practice where a unique collaborative interface allows two voices to combine and morph into a third voice.
Lewis and Void play ping pong with the conversation of sounds, generating ideas and bouncing them off each other, simultaneously encouraging the other to go further with their ideas opening up an opportunity to engage with previously unexplored terrain. Guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voice, sampling and outboard processing are folded in a playful unification with a propensity to tease, explore and extract new ideas and shapes, sometimes brutal, sometimes playful.
Trust was also a compositional tool allowing instinct to freely move on any aspect of the sound and space. This sound/feeling/instinct/association let this wild and wonderful material grow organically into something new.
The result of this exploratory interplay are 17 intense miniatures reveling in the process of unadulterated experimentation and whimsical interplay, not just between the humans, but the machines themselves. United in an endless series of sonic U-turns, this daring duo intertwine pop and noise whilst also bringing together visions of tender techno and forthright ambient.
The various zones manifest from all this reveals vocals shifting in mysterious ways, dust drenched beats churning limpidly and devilish string loops navigating a disorientating domain. The experience of listening to Full-On is to be confronted with a range of ideas resulting in a platter of emotions. A place where beauty and the beast collide with the impulsive and outright weird. What a wonderful world.
Welsh post-punk unit Chain Of Flowers return with their lofty and long-simmering sophomore full-length, rich with reckonings, reverb, and redemption: Never Ending Space. Despite some of the songs dating back a few years, the record first began materialising in earnest during the pandemic, by which point most of the band had relocated from Cardiff to London. Reunited and rejuvenated, they picked up where they left off, booking two multi-day sessions at Hackney hub Total Refreshment Centre with producer Jonah Falco. In this time they successfully channelled their kinetic chemistry into 10 full-blooded anthems of torn dreams, poetic delirium, and “hope stretched too far.”
Musically, Never Ending Space skews notably more maximal than the group’s previous work, fleshed out with trumpets, saxophone, synth, percussion boxes, and spoken word. (Smith jokingly calls them The Chain Of Flowers Orchestra). Yet the songs still swing and soar with a charged heart, ripe with hooks, drama and ragged melody. Opener “Fire (In The Heart Of Hearts)” stirs to life on a tide of wiry guitar and defiant horns, facing down the embers of love that still glow in the wake of pain: “Peace came tumbling like a shower of bricks / The mind twists slowly till everything fits.” A tense energy ripples throughout – from the nocturnal rush of “Serving Purpose” and “Amphetamine Luck” to the bruised battle cries of “Torcalon” and “Old Human Material.” Outliers like “Praying Hands, Turtle Doves” hint at proggy possible futures, while instrumental vignette “Anomia” offers an intriguing glimpse at a lesser heard facet of the band: swaying, shadowy, subdued.
The album’s title track is also its closing cut, a stomping, sparkling ode to “the wrong side of the night, where time goes to die.” Smith describes the scene: “Everyone’s talking, screaming, trauma bonding, but no one’s listening. Broken dialogue. Shouting over each other. You want to switch off, but everyone’s too fucked.” The guitars spiral and slide towards the oblivion of dawn, the chance to crash and do it all again. The song’s refrain captures the elision of time, spilling through the haze of days, from chaos to acceptance: “I can’t see the clock through the shrouds of smoke / Does it matter? / Common ground / In a never ending space.”
Debut full length vinyl from the UK/Italian duo of Ecka Mordecai and Valerio Tricoli, working together as Mordecoli. Individually these two travellers have carved out a path of ghostly musique concrete (Tricoli) and textural cello wandering (Mordecai). Alter is proud to present the album Château Mordécoly a result of two musicians (and friends) coming together to explore the middle ground of their individual investigations. The results of a red wine induced residency at London’s Cafe Oto, Château Mordécoly is a panoramic audio field exploring both the physicality of sound, informed by the voice, cello and pictish harp of Mordecai, and the artificial manipulations of Tricoli’s revox tape machine. The delicate tension between the physical ‘real’ and the distortive ‘new’ leverages this release far beyond a tipsy residency and shifts it into a top tier electroacoustic take on the zeitgeist. Solo cello and voice appear rooted in the timbre of time. The magnetic tape is both a friend and covert manipulator. The physical elements open themselves to disfigurement as a means of propagating the fantastical audio that unfolds from the initial enquiry. There’s no witchery or wizardry on part of either player but rather a symbiotic passing of the baton as the line between the real and the non-real flow in and out of themselves. The results are at once sedate, shocking and subversive. Château Mordécoly is a disembodied sonic landscape; a phantasmagorical world of fantasy unfolds as the delicate beauty of Mordecai’s playing and singing is transformed into a playful and unusual landscape. Epoch’s are evoked as the visual stimuli resulting from these alchemical transformations conjure everything from a haunted house to the Middle Ages. At once sleek and modern mental images of a marriage between the ultra present and the deep vast past. A heavenly cloud unveils a clear symbiosis of the Italian church and all of its cobwebs frolicking amongst pagan Britain.
New 7” from Sydney’s Low Life featuring two previously unreleased tracks which tie up loose ends from the band’s first wave period. ‘Catholic Guilt’ was originally leftover from their ‘Dogging’ album sessions and re-mixed at the tail end of 2019 with additional overdubs. A signature blast of the group’s downer punk with washed out chorus-y guitars and self-deprecating lyrics. The B side has a remix of ‘Dogging’ album track ‘Dream Machine’ transformed into a minimal-synth banger by fellow Australian travelers Total Control. The sound of the Cosmic Psychos channeling the Pet Shop Boys.
A new double single by Hey Colossus for ALTER. Carcass is taken from their latest “Four Bibles” album and leaves a poppier impression, albeit Hey Colossus style, with dual vocals and searing guitars. Medal is a 2:41 blast of their signature dirge with a hook as big as the sound itself. The track debuted on their recent Marc Riley session for BBC6 Music but this is the studio version, with music recorded in Bristol and vocals completed in a cabin on the Ms Stubnitz ship. Two tracks, the two sides of Hey Colossus – half melodic downer pop and the other a destruction tune with no respite.
Cardiff’s Chain of Flowers return to Alter with their first new material since 2015’s self-titled debut album. A double A sided single, ‘Let Your Light In’ and ‘Flesh, Blood and Bone’ are two tracks which see the band moving beyond the dense shoegaze sonics of their debut, bringing forward a more spacious and streamlined sound that emphasises the powerful urgency of their live performances.
Despite ‘Let Your Light In’ offering a more optimistic tone to what fans of their debut may be used to, the charismatic guitar hooks, hazy vocals and fist-to-the-horizon anthemic qualities of the group are no less present. On this new found optimism, vocalist Josh explains: “Relationships of all kinds keep this world moving. We live in times of profound darkness, though I somehow find myself lucky enough to be surrounded by people that pour some light and inspiration back in to my life and this is not to be taken for granted. This song is an ode to love and companionship around the world, a gratuitous nod to the better aspects of the human race. A thank you for being you.”
‘Flesh, Blood and Bone’ on the other side appears to follow a darker and more pensive path at first with Josh singing at his most baritone and ominous. However when the chorus hits with its searing synthesiser melody, a switch is flipped. Musically it channels perfectly the bombastic new wave ambition of early Simple Minds, alongside the dramatic post-punk melancholy of the Chameleons. With this, Chain of Flowers are evidently making an effort to find a light within the darkness of the world and their own collective souls.
After a rugged debut EP for Hospital Productions last year, London’s Shallow Sanction up the ante with a brand new single. Two anthemic tracks of misanthropic, boot stomping deathrock that mix the dramatic lurch of Killing Joke, Part 1 and Christian Death with the primitive attack of the 4-Skins, Rudimentary Peni and early Blitz – so incase you were wondering if that strange mix was ever a thing, it is now. Features extra synth and electronics by Zen Zsigo / Cremation Lily
Damien Dubrovnik are Loke Rahbek (Lust For Youth, Var, Croatian Amor) and Christian Stadsgaard, two Copenhagen residents who are known for running the highly respected and prolific Posh Isolation label. ‘Patterns of Penetration’ is a new EP which comes relatively hot off the heels of a USA and UK tour with Helm and their first new material since last year’s Alter debut, the ‘First Burning Attraction’ LP. Lead track and recent live staple ‘Penis Corset’ is the most potent and pointed piece the duo have penned yet – the main body of the track is driven by a crude and primative rhythm made from an electronic bass pulse and blown out synth noise, punctuated by feedback and guttural vocals. The result is probably the closest the duo has ever come to creating something that fits the traditional ‘song’ format yet fully retaining an industrial atmosphere that is consistent with previous DD releases. On the flip, title track ‘Patterns of Penetration’ presents a calmer side of the duos work yet also find them at their most complex and rich, sonically speaking, with a two note synth lead, spoken vocals and washes of analog tape noise. Edition of 400 copies with artwork by Danish artist Martin Erik Andersen.
Finlay Shakespeare is an electronic musician working from the UK and across Europe. A childhood obsession with his parents’ record collection led him to both create his own music and build his own synthesizer equipment throughout his teenage years. After studying audio engineering, he was invited to become in-house engineer for the Moog Sound Lab UK, leading to collaborations with acts as diverse as Suicide, Charlemagne Palestine, The Grid and Mica Levi & Eliza McCarthy, both in live and studio environments.
In 2017, Finlay began recording a series of monthly “Housediet” releases – all improvised and captured at home utilising drum machines, modular synthesis and processed vocals. After several encounters with Peter Rehberg of Editions Mego, a compilation of the Housediet tracks was drawn up by Rehberg and Shakespeare, culminating in the release of “Domestic Economy” in early 2019. “Solemnities’ ‘, a second album for Editions Mego appeared the following year. In the period since Rehberg’s untimely passing, Finlay has recorded for Superpang, Modulisme and his own GOTO Records imprint. “Illusion + Memory”, meanwhile, continues on from where “Solemnities” left off, with Finlay once again aiming to work at the fringes of electronic pop.
Alter is proud to present “Illusion + Memory”, the third full length physical LP of Shakespeare’s utterly unique and sophisticated output.
Shakespeare’s obsession and knowledge of late 70’s and early 80’s electronic pop music is once again at the forefront of this intense and dynamic release. Alas, this is not some retro throwback. Shakespeare’s deep understanding of his machines breathes new life into a genre of music once defunct. Supporting the likes of Blancmange bolstered his reputation for sublime synth hooks and dark lyrical content.
Building on his previous work in the field “Illusion + Memory” is an unabashed pop record, as joyous as it is intense, moving from the brooding opening ballad “Your Side of the River” through the punchy “Theresa” which could be read as a love song to Throbbing Gristle’s United. Elsewhere “Climb” unleashes the opportunity to the dancefloor as wild electronics snake into all manner of schizophrenic shapes.
There is a romantic side to this music. In its homage to electronic pop of the late 70’s and early 80’s but also in the emotional punch Shakespeare injects into every second of every track. Shakespeare’s reboot of these musical forms is technically impressive, one rich in feeling and deep in emotion, atmospherically and vocally. The two come together to create a unique visceral sonic experience… today!
‘Water Temple’ is the debut album of the Berlin-based group Property. Comprised of Marijn Degenaar (NL) and Vivant de Non (AUS), the group use the theme of hydromancy to straddle the poetics of reverb from a post-punk perspective. The album wanders through dense end-of-world sensations without keeping away from piercing melodic instrumentation. As hazy as ‘Water Temple’ can get, Property just as easily trade the murky side of their post-punk sound for analogue synthesisers that feel almost celestial. Used to striking effect on ‘Water Temple’, the chorus-heavy bassline is interwoven with a strident melody that punctures the rhythm and accents the Neue Deutsche Welle energy that the pair play on at certain moments. Similarly, the vocals on ‘Water Tempel’ flirt with our cracked times from another angle, rendering a remarkable first transmission from this new duo. Foggy synthesisers fill the cavities of every track, though the driving leads ensure the ambience never overtakes the song-structures across the album. This tendency is best captured on the downer-anthem Blood Cube with its sharp drum machine rhythm, just as Clear Boys reprises this rowdy pop edge for a forceful album closer. The burning melancholy of ‘Water Temple’ is as shadowy as it is enlivening.
It’s by some strange inversion that since his untimely death in 1999 Bryn Jones’ Muslimgauze project has become evermore enigmatic as his publicly available recordings have become evermore vast. The Mancunian artist’s sudden passing at the age of 37 prematurely resolved a body of work that remains as experimental as it is diffuse, with an informal archive that was left spread between favoured labels and confidantes. And though this monadic project never abided by genre specifications, it all feels as if it is taking the critical pulses of its time and rendering them into something other than the sum of its obscure compulsions. Jones’ double album ‘Veiled Sisters’ from 1993 is no exception, and it persists as a magnificent outlier in his singular and bewildering discography.
Originally released by the label Soleilmoon, an early and lifelong supporter of Jones’ work along with Staalplaat, the album is a notable example of the uniquely recombinant fragility and fervour of Jones’ work. This 3LP edition marks the album’s first appearance on vinyl. Like much of the Muslimgauze catalogue, ‘Veiled Sisters’ is dedicated to the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its two halves—Sister One and Sister Two—calling on the history and conflicts of the modern Islamic world through opaque titles and snatches of musical oration.
Forgoing the raucous timbre and abrasion that Jones could occasionally employ, this album balances a medley of shrill instrumental bursts with a complex patterning of ambient atmospheres. ‘Veiled Sisters’ moves with a hypnotic gait across its extended runtime with a dynamic ensemble of electronics grounded in a pulsing yet evasive combination of low-slung kicks and dub-soaked bass. The hissy wash of drums, both played and machined, decorate a restless patina all over, and the cacophony of samples send impressions scattershot into Jones’ idiosyncratic yet readymade psychedelia. With a quiet intensity that is not often captured this succinctly in the Muslimgauze catalogue, this new edition of ‘Veiled Sisters’ is a reminder of the haunting wonder that Jones was capable of manifesting.
Audio remastered for vinyl by John Hannon. Audio remastered for digital by Cam Deas. Artwork restored by Ryan Tong.
Justin K Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, JK Flesh) breathes new life into his FINAL project for an album on Helm’s ALTER label. Formed in 1984 out of an obsession with the industrial, noise & power electronics acts of the early eighties, FINAL made its public debut at the legendary Mermaid pub in Birmingham when Broadrick was just 14 years old. A string of cassette releases via his Post Mortem Rekordings label established the name within the underground noise scene of the time until increased activity with his various groups (Napalm Death, Head of David and later Godflesh) meant that FINAL naturally fell by the wayside before the end of the decade. Broadrick reactivated the project in 1993 during the British ambient “isolationism” period and FINAL’s sound became focussed more on texture, producing beatless ambient work with a number of albums for labels like Sentrax, Utech, No Quarter and Neurot. ‘It Comes To Us All’ is the first FINAL album to appear on vinyl since 2015’s ‘Black Dollars’ on Downwards and continues to explore the textural nature of Broadrick’s ambient work – this time through a filter of blown-out harmonic noise that reconnects the project with its harsher roots. Rather than channelling the angst of early power-electronics, the noise here rumbles along blissfully through 8 untitled tracks, sombre in tone and at times beautiful. Melodies sampled from pop music are put through a process of decay, stripped of their form and worn down with a rusty, melancholic afterglow. Reducing all its parts to slow-motion shadows of their former selves, ‘It Comes To Us All’ is an exploration of the decay of all living things that we face collectively, day after day.
From Squats To Lots: The Agony And XTC Of Low Life
Low Life
2021
ALT66
THE BAND: Low Life are a rock band from Sydney, Australia.
THE RECORD: Low Life’s 3rd LP is called From Squats to Lots: The Agony and the XTC of Low Life.
NOTES ON HOW TO LISTEN TO AGONY AND XTC OF LOW LIFE:
1. Some records hit you with an instant impression of timeless brilliance, and Low Life’s Dogging is one of those records, what the wise call “an instant classic”. 2. From Squats to Lots: The Agony and the XTC of Low Life is more like their second album Downer Edn (read Edition), a little more withdrawn, a little more textured. Complex. Rich. Which is to say: you’re going to need some time with it. 3. Some show, some grow. Low Life have done both. This one is a grower. Spend some time with this one. It’s got that nuanced flavour. Don’t guzzle. Sip. Savour. 4. Sip it, and sense the recurring brilliance of Mitch Tolman’s lyrics, exploring the usual territory of gutter life, lad life, punk life, low life. The dirge. Disgust and shame in white Australia. Council housing, bills piled to the neck, substance abuse and rehabilitation, the fallen lads and lasses who stood too close to the flame, loss and loneliness, from squats to lots. Un-Australian gutter symphony. 5. There is a celebration of resilience and that’s a central theme of this record and a time like ours needs a record like Agony & XTC. Low times are coming through, but if you’re low they won’t get to you. 6. Iggy Pop’s Bowie produced studio rock masterpieces ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust For Life’ are important reference points to the 3rd album sounds of Low Life. Here comes success! 7. ‘The Agony and Ecstasy’ is a 1985 novel by Irving Stone about the life of Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo. Stone wrote another novel about the single eared painter Vincent Van Gogh called ‘Lust For Life’. This synchronicity hit me. 8. Iggy and the Stooges are a pretty safe reference for Low Life (and all good rock music). Iggy and the Stooges are a low life’s Michelangelo, but solo Iggy like Lust for Life is a better reference for this particular incarnation of Low Life, which is to say they are studio rock albums. 9. Bowie later referred to this period of his life as profoundly nihilistic. But Iggy looked at it as the period of his life that saved him from an early grave. This confrontation is Low life lore. 10. Let’s stick to this, because there’s something about this era of Bowie that makes sense with Low Life’s new album, particularly Low. One should never miss the Low in our new album from Low Life. Producer and studio boss Mickey Grossman has the ear for the Low, and he has carved out a little statue of David right here. 11. Mickey’s ears are recording, mixing and producing the best of Sydney, most notably the Oily Boys Cro Memory Grin. A great companion record to this one. Use Agony & XTC AFTER Oily Boys. Not on an empty stomach, and don’t try to operate heavy machinery (bobcat, bulldozer etc). 12. The relationship between Low Life and Sydney hardcore should not be understated, but it also shouldn’t guide how to listen to Agony & XTC. This is not austere, disciplined music. 13. Think, like, if Poison Idea were given the kind of studio time and budget as Happy Mondays. You wouldn’t play it to a teenager. It’s not for children. This is a mature flavour, one for the adults who have had to contend with failure and hardship, medical bills and disappointed family members, betrayed lovers and worrisome growths, police brutality and tooth decay, humiliating bowels and collapsed septums, detoxing and drying out, for those who have seen themselves as corrupted and putrid and unloveable, for those who endure all of this and aren’t willing to lie down and cop it sweet: Low Life are still here and they ain’t going nowhere.
NOTES ON HOW NOT TO LISTEN TO AGONY AND XTC OF LOW LIFE:
1. Don’t think of shoe-gaze. It suggests a safe passage to 90’s reminiscences, a vogue style of our time, but nothing to do with Low Life style. Low Life style is always of its time. The content changes. Agony & XTC shares weight of records like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Slowdive’s Kebab, records that were laboured on after the songs were recorded, songs that were written as they were recorded. 2. We can call these “studio albums” as opposed to albums built in the heat of live performance. Studio albums from the 90’s are called shoe-gaze by some journalist nerds, but we know better than to use words like this. 3. Studio albums are excessive and, at the same time, so empty. Agony & XTC, Loveless, Kebab, Rumours: excessive! And empty. This is not to suggest this is Low Lite, some throwback, soft. A band like Low Life can make an overproduced studio rock album without having to use the word shoe-gaze. So, don’t think studio albums mean anything especially 90’s. Don’t look back. 4. Let’s lose these distasteful labels, like “shoe-gaze”, “rehab rock”, “stab”, “guitar OD overdrive”, “western Sydney wonder”. They can fade out. A low life was once referred to as a vagabond. Who uses this term today? Nobody. Language can murder. Words can die. Kill ‘em all!
First new single in 4 years from Welsh post-punk band Chain Of Flowers. ‘Amphetamine Luck’ is produced by Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Jade Hairpins) and serves as a taste for the bands second album, due for release in 2022.
White Flexi Disc 7″ w/ silver foil print and fold-out printed cover. Limited to 200.
MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice. The debut release XMIT, an eight-track album featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder, is out on 16 April 2021.
Tucker’s ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with this collection of harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. On the new album, MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions. In a move away from previous projects XMIT investigates erasing the self, removing obvious traits of the hand and voice, and allowing a focus on the humanoid rather than the human. Instead of recognisable lyrics and coherent imagery, MICROCORPS evolved synthesised voices to generate alternate characters.
He expands, “I was investigating how language brings our world into being and how manipulating the actual grain of the voice could open up momentary shifts in perception.”
Each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured. Setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance, using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing.
“I’d been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space.”
The album artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker that originally featured in his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2. XMIT refers to a time in which information both physical and nonphysical transfers at an alarming rate beyond human comprehension into an age which is at once banal and terrifyingly alien.
Since 2010, Adam Keith’s solo project Cube has been supplying a steady run of records and cassettes that capture songwriterly fixations and frustrations in a dextrous style of wounded electronics. Though Cube has been the centrepiece of his activity for some years, he’s all the while remained active in collaborations, playing in bands such as SPF and Mansion to name just a few. Rounding off a decade of dialogues and agitations, Alter now presents Keith’s third LP under the moniker of Cube, ‘Drug of Choice’
Based in New York, though managing a functional transience that takes in California too, Keith’s latest iteration as Cube launches a panoramic set of sonic touchstones into a gristly and hypnotic orbit. Seismic drum machine parts partition an album that layers industrial-tipped takes on digi-dub with roaming guitar lines, piano vignettes, and breakbeat theatrics. For all the abrasiveness and rhythmic allusions that Keith employs, his use of voices alongside lush manipulations of errant samples and atmospheres tempers the commotion, delivering something that feels as much focused on artful constructions of private experiences as it does the cathartic qualities of noise.
Tom James Scott holds a unique position in experimental music. With a soft brush approach Scott, who currently lives on the North-West coast of England, has explored delicacy in music with a variety of sublime releases on a variety of labels. Predominantly known for gentle investigations of guitar and piano, Scott has shifted to incorporating different technology and tactics over time. All of this, either in performance or recording, is embedded with a spirit that is quintessentially his own. Nightshade is the latest in his expanding catalogue, one which ignites an alarmingly new take on his approach to music. Echo on Water initiates proceedings with the unmistakable sound of tape. Any instrumentation is buried amongst the woozy sway of the medium itself, with its rough dynamics soon morphing into an overwhelmingly swirling mass of emotionally decayed sound. The movement of matter takes on a haunted shape with sounds looping and falling apart as the physicality of the medium holds it all together. The second track Blue Mist furthers this approach with its smeared haze of gorgeous emotion. This is deep exploration of ideas meeting matter. Wasting Stars takes up the entire flip side with the sound of tape recoiling a bit to allow the delicate glow of instruments to come more to the fore, with gentle effects that weave the musical matter. As a skewered take on Scott’s earlier piano explorations the atmosphere here is a subdued soundscape evoking the spiritual sadness found in the piano works of Gurdjieff/De Hartmann, with a modern lo fi angle. Nightshade is a deeply effective journey and one of the most exquisite examples of Scott’s delicate approach so far. Two sides of form which inhabit contrasting yet complimentary clouds of sound communicating in a stunning emotional flow. As music with only trace elements of melody, Nightshade is a beautiful take on tools being used to explore paths both highly idiosyncratic, deeply moving and discreetly personal.
Brand new full length from the Pheromoans, a companion piece to last years ‘County Lines’ LP. ‘I, Mustard Mitt’ finds the band at their most esoteric and free, producing one of the most intriguing sides in the bands discography so far. 7 tracks of skeletal guitar work, drum machine jams, spoken word and minimal electronics. A collection of songs both confounding and intimate, utilising the production work of guitarist Sticks to bring some clarity from the chaos of their origins.
Little Movies are an improvisational electronic music duo from Dublin comprised of Morgan Buckley and Ben Donohue, both affiliated with Wah Wah Wino, a label & collective whose release announcements cause literal heart palpitations amongst fans of weirder contemporary underground electronics. “Live At Cafe Oto” is the duo’s second release, a crystal clear and direct recording of their performance from when the Winowagon rolled into town for a showcase back in 2018. A 27 minute stream of razor sharp synthesised tones, burnt out drum samples and strange computer processed sound poetry presented in a relentless jump cut style – nothing repeats a single time. Add to the mix some deep mastering by Wino’s in-house engineer “The Bastard”, faint OTO audience ambience and you have an ideal night on the tiles for ALTER HQ. I can practically taste the Kernals from here.
Limited to 100 glass mastered CD, presented in PVC wallets with glossy transparent stickers. All profits from this release will be donated to MASI – the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (www.masi.ie) and Cafe OTO to help with their outgoings during the pandemic.
Back in 2019, Ravioli Me Away debuted their hyper-surreal operatic work ‘The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Terris’ across the UK, including two sold-out shows in London. Difficult to contain, and wound-up with a truant’s sense of narrative, it presented a wondrous cacophony of erupting media and performances patched together with wit and existential alarm.
A suite of songs circling themes of aspiration and the everyday run through the opera, and these were released in parallel by Wysing Polyphonic, one of the commissioning institutions. A selection of these songs were then reinterpreted and reshaped into forms that befit a club setting, debuting at Supernormal festival in the same year. Entitled ‘Naughty Cool,’ Alter now presents these collective club reworkings by HMS RMA for the first time on vinyl.
Uplifting and delightfully crooked throughout, the tracks are shuffled together and stitched as a ‘DJ mix.’ In six segments of vocal-led missives and soft drops, the sunniest hooks of early Chicago house are recalled, all cross-pollinated with the collective rhythms and tones of the UK’s rave subconscious. A freeform, DIY rowdiness lurks around every corner, equally evoking punk’s flings with disco.
The familiar sound and presence of Ravioli Me Away’s Alice Theobald, Rosie Ridgway, and Sian Dorrer aren’t lost in the edits and adaptations, and they come backed-up with Tom Hirst (Design A Wave), opera singer Siobhan Mooney, and Dean Rodney Jnr (The Fish Police), all of whom took part in the original opera itself. “Naughty Cool” was engineered by John Hannon at No Recording Studios and mixed and mastered by Amir Shoat in London. Photography by Amy Gwatkin.
This record is dedicated to the memory of Donna Lynas.
What happens when you arrive to a party and everyone is leaving as you are walking in? If a bass drum booms in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it even boom at all? Can you build a mansion with playing cards?
Nick Klein returns to ALTER with the cryptically biographical ‘No Shortage of Rope’, his third release for the label and significantly, potentially his first full length album. Consisting of 7 tracks, ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is a consolidated collection of recordings Klein made after leaving his long-term base of NYC to become a full-time resident of Den Haag, Netherlands. Using some newfound free time post-move, Klein wanted to approach his working process in the studio a little differently to create something long form, something that felt more like an album as opposed to being built with the club music paradigm as a given. Describing his time in the studio, Klein says it was “the most hermetic studio endeavour I have ever undertaken”. It certainly seems that Klein harnessed this period of productivity to make the most of what his music could offer as ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is the man in his most pointedly pure form.
As an artist Klein has followed his own path around the fringes of the contemporary American underground without much worry of where he may end up as a result. This has led the majority of his work to be best contextualised by the rough beat-music associated with artists like Beau Wanzer, Shane English or Container and the celebratory unpretentious world of noise. Opening track ‘Sitting In Glass’ sets an irreverent foundation with gratuitous chainsaw-like synth noise that sucks the air immediately out of the room. If this is a record made without the club in mind, then we’re made aware fairly quickly. The subsequent tracks are more or less Klein back at the office in beat-based terrain, but with some noticeable differences. The kicks are harder and percussive elements have been chosen and rendered with sharp detail, taking up more space and disguising how minimal these pieces are despite their bombastic delivery. The biggest surprise comes in the final track “French-Property.com”, a book-ending piece of percussion-less glacial electronics and maybe the most expansive thing Klein has made to date.
Regardless of Klein’s intentions regarding the club, it couldn’t have been too far from his mind purely for the reason that ‘No Shortage of Rope’ just bangs like fuck for the most part. This is hard rhythmic electronic music built for basements and the record-boxes of adventurous DJs, just very much made on his own terms.
Recorded live at Holocene in Portland, Oregon whilst on tour with Blanck Mass and Steve Hauschildt.
Saxophone samples courtesy of Karl D’Silva. String samples originally recorded by JG Thirlwell at 30 Below, NYC.
With thanks to Benjamin Power, Steve Hauschildt, Will McAndrew, Jeff Witscher, Daryl and all staff at Holocene. Special thanks to Grayson and Willow for driving all night to Oakland right after the gig.
Cover photo by Robin Christian. Mastered by Jack Callahan.
PRIVAT is a band based in Vienna. With one live show and a compilation appearance under their belt, the duo of Robert Pawliczek and Robert Schwarz are short on extant information. Despite this, there’s a wealth of novel tact and flashpoints in the wicked intensity of PRIVAT that makes sense as a consolidation of the duo’s cumulative activity across music and the visual arts in the last decade. Their debut album, ‘Ein Gedachtnis Rollt Sich Auf Der Zunge Aus’, is an annihilating introduction to this new collaboration.
Schwarz’s background lies in both architecture and computer music. Across a handful of labels, he’s presented field recordings and experimental works, and he’s participated in exhibitions with some of Europe’s most prominent institutions for adventurous art practices. He is also the co-founder and curator of the Viennese festival PARKEN; Or, Live in the Park, which aims to mediate experimental forms of music in public spaces. Pawliczek is a conceptual artist and musician, and it’s his work that graces the sleeves and can be found in accompanying video material. He’s been involved in some exceptional groups and projects that have been centred in and around Berlin in the last years. These include Bobby Would, Heavy Metal, Itchy Bugger, and Pitva.
Having met in Antwerp in the orbit of Dennis Tyfus’ former gallery Pinkie Bowtie, the pair initially began to work on PRIVAT back in 2018 around a shared affinity for repetitive electronic music and an aesthetic preference for spartan coldness. ‘Ein Gedachtnis Rollt Sich Auf Der Zunge Aus’ makes good on their pact. The album presents a set of works that carefully balance the galvanising propulsion of rhythmic electronics with the kind of textural palette that betrays the pair’s experimental roots. Deadpan vocals are delivered throughout, developing a kind of frosty symbiosis. Tempered by just arrangements, there’s a song-writerly core that’s organising the album’s sombre meditations, piquing moments of comparison with Moroder’s rawness as readily as anything that’s cultivated in industrial music’s tape-worn dirges.
ALTER is proud to present ‘Tendrils’, the first LP release from London based artist & musician Malvern Brume. After gathering some hushed praise from the UK underground for a couple of excellent cassette releases and strong local live performances, ‘Tendrils’ is the first definitive document of the Malvern Brume sound world. His instrumentation and sound sources would be considered familiar staples in the world of “experimental” music, but Salter does an admirable job of making them his own. Comprised of 8 pieces, this is electronic music at its core but a kind that sounds as if it’s being played through fog. Like spores growing on a damp surface. Densely composed and thick with an almost asphyxiating atmosphere – even during the record’s more minimal moments – track titles like ‘Caught In The Exhaust Trails’ and ‘Sunk Into Plastics’ only heighten the tone further.
Salter was originally born in the countryside and since relocated to London, a place he finds “over stimulating in every sense”. Much of ‘Tendrils’ could be taken as a response to the city and a means of equating the two. Camberwell is listed as the location for composition, but field recordings are attributed to rural landmarks. The Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire / Warwickshire border and Seven Sisters Cliffs by the English Channel are two in case, but despite their picturesque origins Salter renders them into abstract clatter. As if dubbed from the private tape archive of an old eccentric. In addition, synthesised electronic tones hum and buzz, occasionally giving away to strange, slurring sequences that sound like lost transmissions from the radiophonic workshop. Despite the nod to this electronic music institution, it’s lacking the sincere level of esteem that can turn one into a heritage act. There is a strangeness and distant other worldliness to the music that feels unselfconscious and keeps Malvern Brume from being easy to define by contemporary terms.
Salter says the album is defined by movement and the environments that have inspired him over the years. In his own words, “each of these tracks is inspired by a journey or moving through a space, an audible A to B”. With that in mind, ‘Tendrils’ is perfect music for solitary inner-city marshland walks and urban bike rides to forgotten local suburbs.
Container is the project of American noise veteran Ren Schofield, originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and now based in London. Container first appeared at the turn of the decade with a slew of freakish tapes for various small labels. In wake of these releases, Editions Mego offshoot Spectrum Spools – run by old friend John Elliott of the band Emeralds – took the punt to release his debut LP, a collection of mutated Techno tracks simply titled ‘LP’. The record gained attention quickly in the Electronic music scene largely thanks to Schofield’s unique production style that separates him from forms of conventional dance music. Whilst the music of Container sits perfectly fine within the genre and is functional enough to blow apart the walls of any club, years on the US noise circuit have given Schofield’s brand of techno a rawness and direct intensity that stands out in the club and crosses over into other sub-sections of the underground. His modest set up of Roland MC-909, a four-track porta studio and an array of pedals allowed him to hone his scuzzy and bewildering beat music over the years, leading to three more well received, and literally titled, LP’s. Over this time period Container also released some EPs on Morphine, Liberation Technologies and Diagonal, did a variety of remixes for acts like Four Tet, The Body, Panda Bear and Fucked Up plus maintained a healthy touring schedule that reached over every continent. His exhilarating live show has hit pretty much every major electronic music festival and club in Europe, as well as tours and gigs with a diverse range of acts such as Wolf Eyes, Zola Jesus, Daughters, Pharmakon and Ryley Walker.
Almost a decade since his debut, Container arrives on ALTER with his first non-”LP” titled album called ‘Scramblers’. The title taken from both a Baltimore street drug and a Rhode Island Diner he used to eat at with his father. Schofield elaborates: “The juxtaposition between these two Scramblers is a great one. I wanted to pay homage to a nice name that lends itself to both depraved and wholesome contexts and do my part to carry on the tradition.” The eight tracks have their origins in live performance and a more high-octane delivery is noticeable when compared with previous Container albums. ‘Mottle’ sits in a mysterious zone between the productions of EVOL and early Ruff Sqwad. Fierce electro cuts like ‘Trench’ and ‘Nozzle’ work alongside the nauseous slink of ‘Duster’, which in typical Container fashion morphs into a frenzy in no time. A frenzy which may be linked cosmically to the fact that ‘Scramblers’ was recorded, mixed and mastered in one day, reinforcing further his unorthodox and fun approach to club music.
The Processes And Instruments Of Normal People (Remastered 2020 Edition)
Cremation Lily
2020
ALT51
ALTER presents a remastered edition of Cremation Lily’s second album, on vinyl for the first time. Recorded whilst living in Hastings and originally released as a double cassette on his Strange Rules label in 2017, The Processes… forms a trilogy of albums in the CL canon that were influenced by the life and atmospheres within British coastal towns. Composed using a rudimentary set-up of synth, drum machine and two modified walkmans, CL draws upon a broad range of influences from the underground electronic music spectrum. Noise, tape music and ambient techno are all referenced and align to form a cohesive collection of tracks, flowing fluidly in sequence. Melancholic synth pads and deep kick drums intersect with crude field recordings and occasional bursts of feedback, evoking a claustrophobic uncertainty that feels more like being pulled under than carried above.
Features additional piano and violin by Theodore Cale Schafer. Remastered by John Hannon.
The stark, rattling percussion and morbid howls into the ether of ‘Theme 7’ signal not just the return of NAAAHHH but kick start Alter’s fiftieth release with suspense. ALERT dredges the depths of grimy UK bedroom studios, old computer hard-drives and budget lager-soaked gallery sonics in search of presenting a unifying vision of a particular brand of the here and now. Label associates Chain of Flowers take us deep into hypnotic motorik territory, whilst similarly driving new work from Teresa Winter shows a more frantic side to her productions than last year’s LP for Death of Rave. The underground sound of puddle country shines through with contributions from anarcho sample-mulch legends Cru Servers and Night School mastermind Apostille. Fellow Glasgow-based Helena Celle delivers an old-school jack trax style rhythm work out alongside The Modern Institute trying their hand at deranged happy hardcore and the finest Mancunian ambient you’ll hear all year from Space Afrika. One of the most enthralling moments comes from Raime side project Moin, a claustrophobic, tempo-disregarding marriage of sound that makes us feel like we’re lost at sea and seconds away from drowning. Positively unholy.
Each piece on ALERT is bound by a distinctly punk attitude, a form of experimentalism that skirts across genre markers and forces you to sit up and pay attention. Zero coffee house easy listening or functionality here – there’s metallic clanging, skittering drums and screeches, tough as nails gabber compression (check the Acolytes track ‘Feelings’) and dirgey guitar feedback all fighting for space in a surprisingly coherent manner. Sound artist and broadcaster Mark Vernon’s ‘The Object Invoked…’ lulls us into quintessentially British, nightmare-inducing radiophonic territories with terrifying fragmented media chatter, making for one of the highlights of the compilation. If anything, we can agree on the fact that this double LP stands to highlight the fringes of carefree, convention defying abstract electronics that currently permeate our little island in an illuminating and necessary way.
The Australian duo of Jarrod Zlatic and Nisa Venerosa harness expansiveness through a sepia-tone collage of intangible digital textures and adapted vocal chamber music. Formed in the early 2000’s, previous albums for cult-labels like Chapter Music and Siltbreeze waded through dubby psych-rock territories but their latest for ALTER stands alone. Recorded in Melbourne by Sam Karmel (F ingers, CS + Kreme), the album occupies an eerie, pastoral kind of twilight zone. Venerosa’s stark singing style challenging the ambient textures weaving in and out of the stereo field.
Plain Songs slowly unfolds through a mesh of processed drones, flickering static and fragile yet propulsive bedding loops. G.B.H sees the pair utilising layers of spoken word and keyboard motifs atop spiralling background whirs and softly uttered harmonies. The late-night atmosphere pervades with On Temptation and Forever Turned where slow, dissonant passages work in tandem with Venerosa’s spectral vocal shifts. Zlatic’s trumpet howls into the ether on ‘Flowers and Fade’ accompanied by drum rattles, repetitive mantras and oscillating synthesisers to mark one of the LP’s most unique and isolated moments. There are hints of Nico’s Janitor of Lunacy and Meredith Monk’s Book of Days at play, where the icy screeches and distortions give way to the wax and wane poetry of ‘A Short Confession’. The overall power of Plain Songs hinges on the strength of the voice and the way it interacts with the sound world around it, Venerosa demonstrating an ability to flit between moods and assume control. It is ever present and in sync with the cosmos, fighting its way through the dark and igniting the beacon.
ALTER presents the debut LP release from Melbourne’s Trevor, aka graphic artist and Total Control drummer James Vinciguerra. ‘Becoming A Bed’ gathers seven tracks that run the gamut between battered drum-machine beats, minimal-wave, scratchy noise and spoken word. ‘Romp with Monty’ is the album’s least demented moment and delightfully evocative of it’s title with simple melodies and rigid drum machine patterns. A sharp contrast to ‘Cabbage Land’s flailing gabber and breaks combination, resembling something akin to Jamal Moss or Beau Wanzer experiencing a severe breakdown of both mind and hardware. These hybrids of erratic, free percussion and wild synth blurts (see also ‘Midi 2’) lend the album a charming edge, favouring a playful kind of experimentation which extends to the album’s calmer moments too. ‘Bedtime Story’ provides one such bit of respite and the only appearance of Vinciguerra’s voice, processed here in a cold, curious monologue that ruminates on lethargy and illness, atop looping dark ambient textures. It’s position in the album providing a centrepiece of cavernous and confounding simplicity.
Elsewhere, tongue-in-cheek end skits sound as if they were heckled at the end of a gig and then decidedly left on the tape. The reckless rave of closing cut ‘Speed Ave’ reflects this in-the-moment sensibility, the machines being close to escaping their captain. It may provide the most didactic dancing effort on the record, but neatly aligns with a loose and uninhibited mindset that skirts around the same warped techno vision as label affiliates Cru Servers or Acolytes. This is music for the most fun of dancefloors.
Coming out of London and the South West of England, Hey Colossus are one of Europe’s great live bands. Since 2003 the 6-piece has been driving around the continent with their “pirate ship” backline of broken amps and triple-guitar drang, elevating audiences in every type of venue imaginable; a doctor’s waiting room in Salford, an industrial unit in Liege and a vast field next to a river in Portugal. Wherever they may roam.
Four Bibles is their twelfth studio album and the first to be released by London label ALTER, whose sole proprietor (the electronic producer Helm) encountered the group at their first gig in 2003. Recorded by Ben Turner at Space Wolf Studios in Somerset, it’s their most direct album yet and follows a well-documented trajectory of evolution that began (in the truest sense) with 2011’s RRR for Riot Season and continued across three albums for Rocket Recordings. Lead vocalist Paul Sykes sounds more in focus than before, dialling down the effects and using reverb / delay to carry his lyrics rather than smother. The band has also fine-tuned to leave some room for extra depth. Piano, electronics and violin (by Daniel O’Sullivan of This is not This Heat / Grumbling Fur) all find a way in amongst a familiar mesh of interlacing guitars, wrapped round a taut rhythm section. Like every other Hey Colossus record before, the line-up has altered and the sounds reflect this.
From the weight of “Memory Gore”, to the subtlety and swag of “It’s a Low”, via the sonic extremes of “Palm Hex/Arndale Chins” this is exactly as the band are live; raging & rail-roading but somehow in control. Grooves for those who want to dance or for those who want to hug a wall and nod…bleak dystopian imagery submerged in relentless rhythms and low-end rattle. The songs breath life and soul – Hey Colossus have never sounded fresher or more on point.
There is a book release to coincide with the album written by bass player (and founding member) Joe Thompson. It’s part of a new series called “Sleevenotes” by Pomona Publishing and the first four are out this year. Joe’s book sits alongside other contributions by Bob Stanley (St Etienne), Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees/Solo), David Gedge (The Wedding Present) and contains a diary of the years leading up to the release of this record. Touring with bands Sumac and Grey Hairs through Europe, recording the album, line-up changes, the band’s history and the big question is answered: Why?
For the last twelve years The Pheromoans have occupied their own peculiar niche in the UK’s DIY music scene. Initially known for primitive garage-esque repetition on their early releases, two LPs for Upset! The Rhythm saw the group develop a more pastoral sound before being mutated by electronics on 2016’s ‘I’m On Nights’. ‘County Lines’ is their fifth full-length and takes in each aspect of their past sonically, providing a wry tonic for today’s heady exhaustion.
More of life’s banalities and stale daydreams are given a good airing in Russel Walker’s lyrics. Delivered with the usual droll lethargy, he’s a septic entertainer par excellence who teases out just enough of the very real horror of the UK’s current predicament to keep his aggrievements charming. At times—see Troll Attack—it’s a crushing lament. ‘County Lines’ weaves Walker in and out of meandering guitars and crude drum machines that waltz and tumble with live drums. Brittle synths light the way to the album’s aggravated sections, which ever so gently hark back to the group’s earliest recordings. The penultimate piece, Ultra Skies, offers the clearest trace of The Pheromoans’ past. The frenzy edges us into a reverberating trance, pulling a sucker punch like an inconclusive nightmare.
The whole “five band years = a lifetime” biz trope is justified, if not negated, by the second album from Sydney’s Low Life. Arriving with an aura of anticipation, ‘Downer Edn’ (read: Edition) feels like a collective document of the band’s timeline since their unforgettable debut ‘Dogging’; an album which made enough of a mark on the punk landscape in 2014 to justify a reissue on London’s Alter in 2017.
Recorded over two years and mixed in 2018 by Mikey Young (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring), ‘Downer Edn’ sees the core trio of Mitch Tolman, Cristian O’Sullivan and Greg Alfaro expand their ranks to a five piece. Dizzy Daldal of Oily Boys & Orion was brought in to reinforce the thick wall of guitars, whilst fifth member Yuta Matsumura, also of Oily Boys & Orion, re-joined the group later to free Tolman up as a dedicated front man for live duties. The hours of studio work have resulted in making the band sound more confident and fully realised, reaching for and finding a sound that was perhaps unattainable 5 years prior. However, lurking behind the bigger vision and polished production ‘Downer Edn’ is a complex proposition and remains a dark blast of an album. Expansive and cohesive, yet shimmering and rough; something they can be proud to call a definitive statement.
As far as Australian punk is concerned, Downer Edition not only shatters the boundaries applied by that descriptor, it does so with the lushest attack conceivable. Like their (admitted) influence, the enigmatic Ohio legends of obscurity, V3, seldom has the f*** word been sung (repeatedly) in such a believable and poetic manner. The visceral pounding of melodies throughout the album transforms their inspirations; desperation, neuroses, trauma, survival, hooliganism, violence, hope, rejuvenation, and their hometown of Sydney’s full architectural and social scope – from a realm of intangibility to the very, very tangible. In the words of Mitch, “We’re influenced by Sydney as a whole, whether it be the hot and muggy concrete streets of the West and South West, the “glorious beaches” of South Sydney, the racial tensions left over from the putrid Cronulla riots of 2006, the pompous and superficial fake tan/ bleached teeth combo suburbs of Bondi, as well as Sydney’s iconography: The Harbour, the Bridge, the Opera House, Kings Cross. All the desperation embedded in and around these areas, including the eternal influx of troubled people looking to get into trouble, is our experience and main influence.”
Unified on ‘RBB,’ ruminating on ‘92’, chasing the escape on ‘Rave Slave,’ and unwillingly defiant on ‘Warrior,’ Downer Edition reaches past the wild ride of Dogging – this truly is the album that Low Life have been threatening to make for nearly a decade.
Downer Edition is out on March 15 on Goner Records in North America, Alter in Europe, and Cool Death in Australia.
Alter follow on from the bilingual dark ambient theatricals of Liberez with this four track EP from veteran Hamburg producer Christoph De Babalon. As an affiliate of Digital Hardcore, Fat Cat and the recently founded V I S, CDB has tirelessly explored the intersections of breakcore, illbient and drum and bass. His work is at once uncompromising yet stylish – broken, punishing rhythms collide with dreary, doom-laden melodies and those eerie in-between spaces of vintage Unit Moebius or Deutsch Nepal. With Hectic Shakes he delivers a meditation on the ‘inner abyss’, the sort of abyss that lulls the listener into his sound world with next to no resistance. “Shakes and Shivers” fixates itself on deceptively playful grooves with eerie, nightbus-to-nowhere atmospherics whilst opening cut “Harakiri” manages to distort familiar jungle tropes into something even die hard devotees of the sound will find fresh. The EP closes with what we can only describe as a homage to 90s ambient techno in a ruff, post-hardcore fashion. Skittering drums weave in and out of longing, futurist synth lines and enough breakdowns to satisfy the dance floor.
Southend-on-Sea experimental outfit Liberez deliver the end result of a year and a half long recording process, an amorphous new line up and advanced studies in sound collage. On ‘Way Through Vulnerability’ new members Reay, Saunders and Ugarteburu channel the projects previous outings on Alter and Night School by conveying the same firm grounding in rhythm, though this time via Flamenco time signatures and eerie, repetitive clapping. At times sounding indebted to the ‘tribal ambient’ of decades gone by, at times sounding fresh in their approach (‘Here is the Proof’ is of note) the trio manage to export motifs from Italian avant-garde circles, UK industrial and dare we say post-rock all at the same time. The sound design on ‘Derelict Intentions’ makes heavy use of background ambience and bleak, world-weary minimalism to lull us into a false sense of calm before harsh and unexpected blurts of noise break the equilibrium. In doing so they swiftly side-step any preconceptions of ‘easy listening’ and opt instead to drag us deeper down into their own dark waters. At times we almost seem to delve into lost theatre soundtrack territory; fragmented neo-classical elements dance with punchy drum machines (‘Cara En La Foto Pt II’) and things draw to a close with the end credit worthy swansong of the album’s title track. The group repeatedly utilise Basque country language, Hungarian dialect and ancient Russian to lend their compositions a cross-cultural underpinning and eschew any clear geographic origin, a decision which all but adds to the perplexities of their unique brand of electro-acoustic purgatory.
Vast, expansive and introspective works utilising place-specific found sound on this second Cremation Lily LP for Alter. Contemplating mortality, illness and the perennial bleakness of British winter in a seaside town we find Zen Zsigo experimenting with piano, violin, synthesiser and walkman tape players. Layering field recordings of the Hastings shoreline atop druggy, stretched out 303 basslines and snippets of spoken word there seems to be an overarching thematic of memory and reflection at play. From vignettes of crumbling glass and bittersweet drones through to sprawling, semi-rhythmical pieces (‘As a sea creature…’) it seems as if Zsigo is trawling the coast for fragments of its former glory. The end result of his study manages to echo the work of Yoran, Leyland Kirby and even Jacob Kirkegaard yet the rare moments where he lays bare his own vocal narrative seemingly transforms In England Now, Underwater into sonic diary territory. Mixing salt-water soaked cassette loops with haunting, minimalist piano motifs and warped recordings of crashing waves and bird noise an intense atmosphere of Ballard’s drowned world is evoked through sound.
Departing from the band based setup of previous releases, Acolytes continue their exploration of loop based paradigms with Rupture. The release expands upon the murky jarring patchwork asthetic of the 2012 release, replacing brooding song structures with a more driving, visceral and relentless sound.
Rupture encapsulates the paranoia and agnst felt in an increasingly unrecognisable world. Liquified rhythms attempt to define an unmappable headspace typified by IO overload and wired hyperactivity, become mired in deep delays and sedate unease.
While ostensibly computer music, tracks such as “feelings 2” deviate from the clinical “on the grid” sensibilities associated with the genre, where out of sync drums and synth lines in eliptic orbits take it to messier lofi territories with no defined sense of shape or tempo.
YEAH YOU are MYKL JAXN and ELVIN BRANDHI. A father-daughter fluke who started making music as often as possible in 2013, under a variety of inordinate conditions; much of which has been made on drives in the family car. VHOD (the Slovene word for Entrance) sees Yeah You continuing to inscribe within the interstices. A new access point. Turning roadsides, refuse hubs, traffic islands and pylons into backdrops for this particular series of detergent routs.
Nick Klein’s new record, ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin,’ was recorded in Brooklyn, NY, on an economic set-up. With a spartan modular synth and Korg MS-20, Klein describes the process of recording as “focused around the relentless role of filtering out and managing the anxiety of existing in a metropolitan area in the current political climate.”
Though ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin’ starts on an almost uplifting note with the glistening melodic cycles of ‘Burning Mattresses,’ the asphyxia soon takes over, and the vertigo of the metropolis comes into lurching clarity for the remainder of the record. The height of the following track, ‘Peña Adobe,’ has the panicked terror of an archaic ringtone hitting the volume of an air raid siren, ‘Smelling The Sheets’ skulks rather than bangs, its momentum stifled and edgy, as if not enough was on Klein’s side when making his way to the studio that day. The anguish doesn’t taper, but rather culminates in the despairingly titled ‘The God In Vodka.’ At nearly 14 minutes, its disfigured rave stabs and blunted military tattoo-snare furiously pace into a clammy, toxic rush.
Despite the wry funerary image of its title, ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin’ is far from a lament for better times, nor a report on descending into contemporary hell. Like a frenzied metronome, the record syncs itself with the dynamics of unrest in order to grasp the brazen tactics that perpetuate the seemingly boundless inequalities in the world today. Klein forges this link with his own minutiae in stride, tethering the conceptual motivations to a fidgeting, personalized atmosphere of rhythmic dysphoria.
Pitching agitation in this way, the record unapologetically presents itself as a soundtrack for participatory intervention, forcefully side-stepping the queues
Mastered by Jack Callahan. Photos by Lazaro Rodriguez. Dedicated To Shannon Michael Cane.
However you might try to find the words for it, Total Control’s caustic charm is stunning and oblique. A sensible account of the band typically focuses on its parts—the associated groups, the touring configurations, etc.—as if finding ways by which Total Control is divisible gleans critical information for breaking through their cryptic sheen. With tonic, wry twists, and forever employing aphoristic brevity for the comic/cosmic dynamite that it is best reserved for, the band seems to indulge this with each new release, or tour, or whatever’s put on the counter. The bands European tour tape from 2015 was a sure reminder of this.
Their new 12″, ‘Laughing At The System,’ is a succinct statement, but it feels like the sharpest thing they’ve ever assembled. Written and recorded over the past couple of years in various lounge rooms, bedrooms, and rehearsal studios, across Melbourne, regional Victoria, and Western Australia, Al Montfort, Daniel Stewart, James Vinciguerra, Mikey Young, and Zephyr Pavey are—for the record—all accounted for in the process.
‘Laughing At The System’ is bookended by a title track in two parts. The scattered mania of the opener is an unsettling beginning, with cascading madhouse-riffs somehow finding a ricocheting unison. The closing part has the familiar head-charge of Total Control’s most gnashing moments, with the guitars balancing the equation between running-too-fast and drinking-too-fast in one queasy commitment. With a brilliantly acerbic wit, we’re implored to gather that there’s some equivalences here. And it’s this kind of impulse that’s kept up throughout the 12″.
Drizzled with Vinciguerra’s fraught fills, which have the rare quality of being unmistakably his in both electronic and acoustic form, this punctuation comes in and out of focus between elegiac moments and breezy experimentation, the latter including the elated instrumental ‘Cathie and Marg.’ Throughout, Stewart scripts a tumultuous wake for a flatlining reality, forever nudging the listener to second-guess themselves about the sincerity and intent. Far from cynical, but earnestly neurotic, the potency of the atmosphere that Total Control has mustered across ‘Laughing At The System’ registers as a deeply commanding, though bleak, psychedelicism for the future.
Mutant jungle forms, hazy glitch experiments and trance inducing downtempo collide with sharp percussion and dense low end on this latest Alter 12”. Helm’s recent ‘World In Action’ EP for The Trilogy Tapes is reworked by a whole host of favourites including Laurel Halo and Parris who offer up two distinctly different takes on ‘Blue Scene’. No Symbols boss Beneath turns his hand to title track ‘World in Action’ with that typically murky, deconstructed club aesthetic whilst Parisian mainstay Low Jack gets deep on the A2, his five and a half minute version of ‘Candy’ sounding like a cross between Nuno Canavarro and Whitehouse. Delivering what might well be the records most subdued moment, Brussels’ Sky H1 slows ‘After Dark’ way way down with some barely there auto-tuned vocals helping to bring things into the fold.
There’s an ordeal that underpins Low Life’s ‘Dogging,’ and looking back at it, perhaps this was inevitable given the album’s exceptionally derogatory attitude to its own scattered sense of time and debris. It’s an attitude that’s been hosed down in bore water-stained stupor, with all the anguished but forgivable hope and charm of plain packaged cigarettes.
‘Dogging’ crawled into the world desperately and painfully. Originally slated for release on Brisbane’s singular Negative Guest List Records in 2012, the label’s owner sadly passed away before it got there. It eventually emerged two years later as a split between two labels from the band’s home turf of Sydney, Disinfect Records and R.I.P. Society. It’s fitting that the latter had reissued Venom P. Stinger’s Dugald McKenzie-era material the year prior—arguably the only other Australian band that compares to the tough, shit-kicking intensity found on ‘Dogging.’
Comprised of Mitch Tolman, Cristian O’Sullivan, and Greg Alfaro at this point (the current 2017 line-up includes Dizzy from Oily Boys), the reckless ferocity and defeatist’s humour is pointedly nihilistic. It’s not kitsch nihilism either, it’s the kind that enlivens. Indexing happiness, fear, lust, grief, and sorrow, the wry indulgences outlined in Tolman’s coded and scheming lyrics amount to white-knuckle sincerity. It’s disarming, but it’s blunted by a weighty smirk. If all this weren’t delivered through a sardonic curled lip, the violence at the edge of it all would perhaps come off a little less real. There’s a bitterly angry confrontation with the contemporary Australian psyche once you enter Low Life’s estate.
Thugged out and at pace, there’s a genuine rush to ‘Dogging.’ The mindless logic of ‘harder and faster’ could never get you to where they were at this point. Even at the marginally calmer moments the guitars glance you like a headache revealing just how bad it is. There’s no respite, but on the the whole it’s a very functional arrangement between the three of them. Each song is belted out with a short, sharp fit, with some synthesisers occasionally glistening out at the edges. The restraint is all the more fierce as it amplifies everything that’s fucked about them. Low Life pull you through it all on all their terms, and that impact feels as untimely and excessive now as it did then.
Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ is the horrifically wry new album from The Bomber Jackets. Following on from ‘Lister,’ their debut for Alter, ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ has a restlessness that takes broader strokes. It finds and holds a register of meandering hope by setting the perverted detail of domestic minutiae against an acutely self-conscious melancholy that cynically daydreams its way into an awkward middle-ground between profundity and platitude.
Following the stop-start formation that plagued the group’s early days, the three-piece of Russell Walker, Daniel Bolger, and Sian Dorrer remain intact. Both Walker and Bolger will be familiar from the ticklish post-punk of The Pheromoans, whilst Dorrer has a varied CV with groups such as Plug, and Ravioli Me Away, and with involvement across London DIY nodes.
At times they give it a bit of a desaturated garage bump, other times there’s the throb of marching mono-synth wave. ‘Deranged Sauce Mum’ comes off as a chopped and screwed hardcore, though with Walker’s vocals it’s less gurning glee and more furrowed brow, it should be said. There are very many disparate elements across ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ that come to give the new album a kind of uneasy grace, which is perhaps the groups singular force, the unchaining of an ingenious familiarity that’s dizzyingly bizarre and equally bleak.
Lyrically and musically their new album contains the traces of many surfaces both interior and exterior. Its dream-like qualities are formed through a kind of musical frottage, always preserving the trace of the hand, arriving at its surreal heights through fidgety non-sequiturs of an aesthetically acerbic persuasion. In this way it never quite replicates anything that you feel to be present in its parts. ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ indexes petty despondency for better days, imagining some unforeseen and unremarkable circumstance that makes up for it all.
Welwyn Garden City’s former shredded wheat factory is on the cover. Redevelopment plans for the site are in progress.
If there’s a single guiding motif to this debut recording from Love Theme, it’s the melancholic throb of love learnt and love lost, a descent that tumbles and slips through the overall feeling of looking back. As intimately and carefully as its parts cohesively lament a narrative, it’s the after-image that catches your breath, like a memory morphing as it is observed.
Comprised of Alex Zhang Hungtai of the now defunct project Dirty Beaches, along with Austin Milne, and Simon Frank, ‘Love Theme’ is arranged from an improvised session with twin saxophones, synthesizer, percussion, drum machine, and voice. Over the course of a year the material was edited remotely from the members’ home cities of Montreal, London, LA and Taipei.
The record’s sullen ambience is never left too long to set in. The aching wane of the saxophone arrangements frisk the propulsive aggro moments of the mixed percussion, forcing a melancholic halo upon the queasy stupor of the synthetic swing that closes each side of the record. It’s a bizarre lust for life that’s being divined from equal parts dislocation and invigoration, a potent remedy which perhaps Love Theme can call their own.
Percolating and finding form over time, the record instinctively follows a travel narrative, moving across a series of landscapes, reflecting the innate experiences of the expressions and voices that were first collected in South London back in February 2015.
Rawabet is a live album from Helm documenting a special performance that took place on a bill with Maurice Louca in front of a sold-out audience at the Rawabet Theatre in Cairo on October 22nd, 2015. It’s also a snapshot of a period of pan-continental touring which took Helm from Egypt to Austria and then to Canada in three days. During these shows material from his recently released Olympic Mess album was re-imagined, expanded and performed alongside new and “other” material to add an alternative perspective to the original recordings. What ended up being performed in Cairo that night owed a lot to the energy of the city and thanks to a superb recording and mixing job by Khyam Allami, Rawabet can be seen as the definitive live document of Helm to date.
Live at Rawabet Theatre, Cairo, Egypt, 22 October 2015
There is a playfully cryptic euphoria embedded in Luke Younger’s work as Helm. An expansive constellation of references from across electronic music converge in his output, driving its narrative in and out of the heights of exploratory sound practices, covertly repurposing pop’s prosthetic limbs on the side. His latest record, World In Action, broaches the ever-present—and ever agitated—political thread that has been pulled through the project’s most opaque regions with a reinvigorated immediacy and purpose.
Recorded across East London, South-East Kent and Snaresbrook Crown Court at the height of the UK media’s attempt at divining integrity from the orchestrated turbulence of Brexit, World In Action presents four pieces that juggle the documentation of this particular moment with the desire to discern motivation from despair.
Frenetic woodwind instrumentation is guided through cyclonic synth pads in slow motion, while Valentina Magaletti’s percussion scatters the surface, scrambling the after-image of each piece as it propels us to the next. With a nod to industrial rock’s breakbeat excursions, field recordings drenched in longer than long ago gather these elements into a worn path through unimaginable terrain.
The track titles recollect a time of just accountability and presence in the UK’s mass media. This is a direct manoeuvre on Younger’s part, setting World In Action up as a sceptical, yet hopeful work, unafraid of the deep political anguish that underpins its intent.
I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me
Basic House
2017
ALT31
The second album from Basic House takes a sober turn towards the thematic intersection of occult knowledge and globalised black operations, brokering a piercing anxiety throughout from the tension between the scale of the politics being invoked and the familiarity of the covert identity tactics to music cultures, subcultures, and the like.
The opening track to I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me turns from a naive fatalism to an addled stream of consciousness that flirts, just about, with psychosis, establishing the record’s push-and-pull between the local and the global, the personal and public. Swarming, hinged string sections light the way ahead, barely hinting at the edges of a space with a rhythm, as if attempting to induce claustrophobia with the engulfing rush of total darkness.
In moments of continually tapering collages, Basic House appeals to paranoia. Never sustained to the point of exhaustion, it frames the placid momentum of its quieter passages when seemingly domestic recordings collapse into cracked dub motifs. However, more critically, it signals the play between the hyper-vigilant mindset that seeks to protect itself and its order, and the intuitive processes by which we code the means for this into our social signalling and general communication. Are we not always constructing a code for black operations, and so then surely this is what occult knowledge is? If so, how have we come to pour vast amounts of money into State sanctioned modes of this? There’s paranoia in every direction. credits
Finnish multimedia artist Jan Anderzén returns to Alter in characteristically singular style under his Tomutonttu guise. Kevätjuhla (translated as “Spring Celebration”) is his second release for the label following a split 7″ with Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010 (ALT02) and his first vinyl long player since 2011. Lately Jan has been busy within visual art, making mosaics, quilts and creating installation work for which the music of Kevätjuhla was initially composed. Inspired by the multitudes of mold and the microbial life, the installation Kevätjuhla was built as a listening station that sought a bond between sound, the earth and organic matter. Sound was sent to speakers through cables sprouting like stems from a pile of dirt with a single coleus growing on top. A graphic score of sticks, orange peel and party debris was hung next to the installation. The score is now visualised on the albums cover, rightly depicting the visual aesthetic of Tomutonttu.
In many ways Kevätjuhla is a landmark release for Anderzén as it sees both his visual and sonic practices coalescing as one. As for Tomutonttu specifically, it is a release that both acknowledges the projects past whilst also looking firmly to the future. Electronic and acoustic instrumentation blends together confidently and more refined than before with a minimal and razor sharp approach to production. Each track becoming an integral part of the records’ trippy cut & paste narrative, leaving the listener wholly unaware when one bit ends and another begins. Despite the abstract way in which Anderzén composes, this is still music which has a pop sensibility placed fully at its core. A confounding array of musical references such as folk, hip-hop and the colourful nexus of Yellow Magic Orchestra could be thrown up here, but with Kevätjuhla Anderzén has ultimately created a form of music that goes beyond genre classification and fully into the realm of ‘other’.
Alter is proud to announce the release of ‘Grey Scale’ by Japanese Industrial duo Carre. Using a mix of synthesisers, custom made electronics and guitar, Carre build their distinctive take on industrial music from the ground up. Originally released as a CD in Japan last year, the music on ‘Grey Scale’ was composed for an exhibition by Carre and painter Sakura Kondo with the audio and visual work created through a mutual creative exchange. The end result saw Kondo’s abstract paintings come to life as bite-sized Industrial wormholes, evoking thoughts of a more textural Conrad Schnitzler or some sort of lost Cabaret Voltaire bedroom recording.
Love Means Taking Action’ is the new album from the multifaceted Copenhagen-based artist Loke Rahbek under his alias Croatian Amor. It is the first full-length Croatian Amor recording since 2014’s ‘The Wild Palms,’ a release that was made available on cassette for a single month, and only in exchange for a nude self-portrait.
‘Love Means Taking Action’ will receive a wider, conventional release on vinyl through Posh Isolation, on CD through Alter, and across digital platforms.
The artist will also be giving away stems of the entire record. A free download will be made available on www.lovemeanstakingaction.com from September 30th, the album’s release date. With the stems comes an open invitation for anyone to use them as they see fit, making them public commons.
Since the inception of the project, Croatian Amor has dealt with a mixture of fiction and reality, often using real events and places as a platform for a largely fictional play. Where there is playfulness, there is revelation.
On ‘Love Means Taking Action’—without a doubt the project’s strongest work to date—the effect of the perpetual collaging of information is keenly felt. Short, unnerving moments appear with slick familiarity. Voices repeat and quietly glitch through tonal shifts. We are ushered along by the shuddering effect of the samples and field recordings on the pristine synthesis, with motifs and plot lines presented as quickly as they disintegrate. We are enticed to find comfort here but we are not guided through a space as with much ambient music.
The textures and terrains that ‘Love Means Taking Action’ present form an array of scenarios with what at times feels like a punishing degree of indifference to the listener. We are bluntly shown snippets of impassioned architectures. It is a process that draws the listener in through alienation. There is something in the way that the music and track titles progress which is not unlike the experience of submitting to social media news feeds, where love stories become the neighbours of civil wars and selfies, and reports from refugee camps are presented next to advertisements for lifestyle magazines.
‘Love Means Taking Action’ lets the fragmented motifs of fictions tenderly tug at reality’s patchwork veil.
In the artist’s own words, ‘Love Means Taking Action’ is “twelve tracks of very human electronic music.”
Conceptual beat-maker Nick Klein returns with ‘The Lonesome Dealer’ 12” for Alter.
Four disparate, industrial-tinged tracks that demonstrate a rough-hewn synthesis of noise and techno, ‘The Lonesome Dealer’ is born from a geographically transient point in Klein’s life spent between Miami and NYC. Despite this, Klein has turned personal disruption around to make his most focussed statement yet as an artist. From the hypnotic “Caberet Voltaire gone Reggaeton” patter of ‘Chats With Lucy’ – with its bruised drum machine rhythms and a jabbering refrain that embodies the track’s title – to the crawling computer acid of ‘Christian Rock Concert’, Klein teases out melodies from beneath layers of muddied beats on a record that is as pacifying as it is jarring. Dark and wavy club music for the heads, if you like. ‘Do You Want To Crash’ is perhaps the clearest realisation of this idea; its crescendoing din of noise giving way to a laser-cut synth line that shimmers like a diamond in dry ice, while ’Pain Management Resource’ is built around a clatter of hi-hats and wobbly polyrhythm that bounces along with a kind of ominous glee.
Having studied sculpture and performance in Miami, Nick Klein has largely dealt in sound-based art since moving to New York, but with focus on the potential of a democratic dialogue platform through electronic music, scale in volume, and the active role of touring performer.
Along with Miguel Enrique Alvariño, he co-runs Brooklyn’s Primitive Languages label which started from a shipping container in Bushwick’s “Punk Alley”. The pair have so far released sessions from the likes of Profligate, Balloon Movement, Pure Matrix, and Hubble.
New album from JS Aurelius of Destruction Unit, Marshstepper and the Ascetic House collective. A collection of field recordings and real-time live-coded audio compositions based on algorithms used for spoofing, hacking and otherwise sabotaging GNSS-based unmanned aircraft systems.
Philadelphia native and arch noise provocateur M Ax Noi Mach, aka Robert Francisco, releases On The Edge; his first full-length LP in six years, out March 11th on Alter.
Recorded once again with the help of Arthur Rizk (Prurient, Power Trip, Cold World, etc) at Salomons Gate in 2014, this new record chronicles some of M Ax Noi Mach’s heaviest, most intense recordings to date; their minimal, bare immediacy comes from primal desires brought to a boiling point in the US city he calls his home.
“M Ax Noi Mach has always been a primal endeavour,” Francisco told Noisey in an interview last year, “and it definitely comes from a private place. I’ve always had a fire inside of me; I’ve always had a feeling that I’ve had to release. Pure intuition. Pure rage, the animal let out of the cage.”
Musical touchstones on this 8-track album move from Nurse With Wound through Prurient and SPK. It’s an unholy, clamorous din spewed up from the bowels of hell. It’s the industrial trepanning of your psyche. The crunchy distortion of ‘Walking at Night’, album highlight ‘Second Glance’ and ‘Indulgence’, deal in anguished, hateful vocals – with words spat out like flames of fury. Then there’s the relentlessly abrasive drone of ‘Surrounded’, the muted, glossolalia-like mutterings of ‘American Child’ and the warped synth poetics of ‘White Heat’; all in all, a visceral, brutal record that absolutely refuses to let up.
The shadowy Robert Francisco has been a vital artist in the US underground since the late 1990s. He has done time in the power electronics unit Angeldust as well as Veiled (with Arnau Sala of Exoteric Continent and the Anomia label.)
But M Ax Noi Mach is the nexus of his poetic, visual, and sonic pursuits: his discography stretches back to 1999 and his immensely powerful live show has gained the project legendary status in electronic music circles across Europe and the US. The defining principle of M Ax Noi Mach’s sound is that it has resisted easy genre categorisation, remaining a singular rock through waves of American underground culture; in it, the shattered pieces of several strategies of urban, extreme musics cohere in a way that only Francisco can envision.
This new LP follows on from 2010’s In the Shadows.
Pheromoans mark their ninth year of existence with the release of fourth album, ‘I’m On Nights’, out on the 12th of February
A largely electronic affair, this new ten-track LP – recorded in Manor House, north east London – refracts vocalist Russell Walker’s stony poeticisms through a lens of analogue synths, while etching drum machine clicks and spaced out keyboard ditties into the bigger picture. Guitars and bass still make an appearance – helmed by Christian Butler, Alex Garran and James Tranmer – but they’ve mostly been eclipsed by the scrappy, artificial beats which now underline Walker’s diary-like, ennui-soaked rhymes.
Album opener ‘Wizard’ – with its blocky, Bizarre Love Triangle-esque intro and unnerving pins and needles crackle – jolts you awake with charges of experimental noise. Then there’s the plaintive synth pads on the LP’s eponymous, stripped back tear-jerker and the acid squelch of ‘Depressed Wobble’. Because, with ‘I’m On Nights’, musical touchstones take on a myriad cult guises, from the downbeat minimal wave of Solid Space or Absolute Body Control, to a hypothetical vision of Dan Treacy crooning caustically over ‘Mari’ by Martin Rev. That’s not forgetting, of course, the outlier crop of new wave-y post-punk bands which this time around see the likes of Datblygu and Young Marble Giants step up to the plate. And, as always, there’s the requisite nod to all things DIY and Messethetics.
Walker says he hope this new direction will create some distance away from a certain demographic; “…An attempt to alienate further the other dads at the nursery gates who kept slapping my back firmly and saying ‘nice work keeping our music alive compadre’, and trying to graft their aviator shades onto my forehead and contorting my fingers into the devils headset,” he explains.
Featuring titles like ‘Don’t Spread It Round College’ and ‘Brad’s Crush’, the bulk of the LP’s lyrical content reaches back into Walker’s 16-18 year old psyche; “It was at J. Sainsbury (Produce) in Uxbridge where I discovered the joy of working alone at night unimpeded and free to delve further into my hitherto unexplored imagination…!!” he explains. And it’s this theme of (oft night-time) employment which cuts through the biro scribbles of Walker’s quotidian missives; “temp work suits me / shift work corrects me” he opines on finale track ‘Rock & Pop Quarrel’.
Hailing from the holy trinity of England’s most southern locales – London, Brighton and Hertfordshire – Pheromoans currently consist of Russell Walker on vocals, Christian Butler on guitar & electronics, Alex Garran on bass & electronics, James Tranmer on guitar & electronics, Scott Reeves on drums & electronics and Dan Bolger on keyboards.
Mnemosyne is the new album from Berlin based, Italian/Belgian duo Lumisokea.
Shedding the bass heavy rollers found on last years Apophenia EP for Opal Tapes, Mnemosyne sees the duo welcoming space and tension into the fold.
Most of the groundwork for the record was made during a week long residency at the W.O.R.M Studios in Rotterdam which saw the duo make full use of the studios collection of synthesisers from the 60’s and 70’s. The improvisations with these peculiar machines were subsequently edited and combined with heavily processed recordings of gamelan bells, prepared piano, cello and acoustic drums. A meticulous two year period of reworking and reflection followed before finally arriving at what you have here; Mnemosyne.
An exploration of the grey area of sounds that vacillate between electronic and acoustic and aim to show their coalescence and kinship, like shadows of forgotten sonic ancestors. Shards of oblique melody merge with slow-burning rhythms, sudden changes of scenery melt into fog-drenched sonic artifacts.
In their own words, “The whole process felt like like cultivating a garden of the imagination which is no rush to be opened to the visitors. With this full length album we explore the more nocturne, narrative and twilight-like angle of Lumisokea. When listening back to it, we had strong images evoking times in an unidentified or unactualized past, like places and events that could have existed, but then didn’t. Hence our reference to Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek goddess of Memory.” – Lumisokea, 2015
Emerging from the murk and dirt of their Cardiff city home, Chain Of Flowers have revealed their long-awaited debut album. Recorded at Monnow Valley Studios in Wales, Chain Of Flowers is a dense eight-track opus of heavy shoegaze sonics and urgent post-punk. The band’s razor sharp attention to classic songwriting nous means the record dips and dives between euphoric, hazy melody (‘Glimmers Of Joy’) and overwhelming gloom (‘Bury My Love’), all whilst retaining a breathless pace. Lead track ‘Crisis’ epitomises this frantic personality exquisitely, skirting between sludgy atmospherics and hardcore’s punchy immediacy with aplomb. The six-piece sowed their seeds through the release of six songs over the past three years (via the band’s own Swine Language tape label), cutting their teeth on dates alongside Iceage, Cremation Lily, The Fall, The Smear, Shallow Sanction, Eagulls, Nothing and more before decamping to Monnow Valley for the four-day session that spawned their debut LP. “We dropped ourselves into the middle of nowhere and hammered it out with next to no sleep available to us. The urgency and delirium of the situation helped us,” explains the band’s vocalist Joshua Smith. “Though we only had 96 hours in a studio to physically make it what we wanted, this record is the product of our last three years as a band and beyond that as individuals. We spent a lot of time in our space writing these songs and we’ve also spent a lot of time ironing them out through playing as and when and wherever we have been able to. ”Mixed over six months by New York-based Ben Greenberg (Uniform, The Men, Pygmy Shrews), the LP sees Chain Of Flowers break free of their locality. “It’s been a drawn out but very necessary sonic exorcism for us,” explains Josh. “We are happy that it will see the light of day.”
Uniform formed in New York City in late 2013 when old friends Ben Greenberg (Hubble, The Men, Pygymy Shrews) and Michael Berdan (York Factory Complaint, Drunkdriver, Believer/Law) realized they lived on the same street. Their impulsive collaboration quickly yielded Our Blood / Of Sound Mind and Body single. The six tracks that comprise the equally abrasive but more refined Perfect World have been coming together between tours and work ever since.
The music that Greenberg and Berdan conjure up under the Uniform moniker is immediate, aggressive, and even primal in form, but it plumbs untold depths. Berdan’s venomous voice mines deeply personal themes of resentment, regret, reflection and addiction over the hum of Greenberg’s almost impossibly disciplined guitar, bass synth, and drum machine lines. Greenberg uses the word “templatized” to describe their approach to writing songs for Uniform.
“There’s this set bunch of gear to create sounds, and it only creates sound through a certain process, or within its own limitations,” Greenberg said. “The goal of songwriting is to see how many different kinds of sounds you can get from the same basic process and machine.”
On Perfect World, that machine is firing on all cylinders. The guitar is run through a cheap ’80s preamp marketed to metal kids. The drum machine is equally no-frills, an Akai XR20 that Greenberg says “most people wouldn’t want to keep around.” These humble components are combined with noisy synth and Berdan’s profound howling to form something much greater. Post-punk, synthpunk, and industrial traditions are borrowed from as needed, but the constraints placed on the process mean the result is unique to Uniform. Berdan describes his lyrics as the consequence of feeling “so full of pain, confusion, deep selfishness, and general animosity that you make some horrible mistakes and have to learn how to forgive yourself for them.” Perfect World feels like the sum of all that pain and confusion, but it also feels like the catharsis.
Vegas Fountain is the new full length album from Copenhagen based industrial duo Damien Dubrovnik (aka Posh Isolation founders Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard). Since 2013’s ‘First Burning Attraction’ LP, Rahbek and Stadsgaard have continued to be consistently busy as label bosses but even more so as artists, performing more frequently worldwide and building a reputation for their fierce and powerful live show. It was during this time as well that the duo honed their craft in the studio and found a working rhythm where their live performance fed into the studio work and vice versa. Using this process to feed off the springboard of Rahbek’s words and imagery, it not only helped shape a stronger state of equilibrium in the project but also allowed the duo to challenge themselves, both musically and emotionally, exploring concepts like relations, performance, sexuality and their breaking points. An element of this was teased with last years ‘Patterns of Penetration’ single, but here it arrives full force with Vegas Fountain – Damien Dubrovnik’s strongest work yet. In the first couple of minutes into opening track “On It’s Double”, you get a sense that things have moved forward artistically in Rahbek and Stadsgaard’s world these past couple of years. The clear production breathes a subtlety into some of the sonics here that perhaps wasn’t revealed through the murk on previous records, heightening a tension that at some points breaks and dissolves into something almost melancholic – evoked by the reflective landscapes of “Interior 2: See Water Glass” and “Interior 3: Matching Window Blinds”. The attack remains however, with the punctuating saw toothed bass notes and screaming tones of “Interior 1: Upper Lip” (considered “problematic” to cut by the mastering engineer”), and the finale of the title track which has all the drama and explosive euphoria of their live show.
Vegas Fountain is co-released by Alter and Posh Isolation.
Acolytes is the self titled debut album by London based enigma D. Shan. Following up a puzzling (yet well received) 7″ on the Pheromoans’ Savoury Days label, Acolytes sees Shan develop his sound into areas of greater fidelity, complexity and a unique non-linear approach to song writing. Reference points could be drawn towards Art Bears, the Cold Storage scene, The Residents and Ralph Records roster, but they would all fall short because ultimately Acolytes is a highly unclassifiable record – which in 2014 is no mean feat. Features guest appearances from D. Bolger (The Pheromoans / The Bomber Jackets) and D. Aird (Vindicatrix) – parental advisory, explicit lyrics.
Deas is the new alias of London based guitarist Cameron Deas. ‘String Studies’ is unlike anything else recorded previously by Deas and is his first LP of all electronic based material. Recorded at home between February and March of 2014, the 8 pieces on this LP were recorded live with little or no overdubs using Deas’ 12 string acoustic guitar as a sampling source to trigger and in turn be manipulated by a modular system. The immaculate production and scalpal sharp twists and turns found within the music display a remarkable level of confidence and intuition in Deas’ new process, which makes it difficult to believe that this is his first documented work within the electronic medium. Mastered by John Hannon at No Recording Studio.
Popular feedback / questions from Deas’ recent European tour:
“Why don’t you play the guitar? I thought it was a guitar concert, I’m disappointed.” “Do you live in Berlin/Why do you not live in Berlin?” “How did you come up with the name “Cameron Dee-az”?”
Cremation Lily is the project of UK based Z. Zsigo. For the past 5 years Zsigo has been consistently working under most people’s radars with his distinctly personal take on power electronics, developing a modest cult following and a respectable catalog of releases through his Strange Rules label. In 2012 the project was brought to the attention of Steve Underwood from Harbinger Sound who subsequently released the ‘Fertility Servent’ 7” and the project began to gather a more visible live presence thanks to gigs with the likes of Consumer Electronics, Con-Dom, Natural Assembly and on the east coast of America too with Alberich and Âmes Sanglantes. Now Alter is pleased to present the first longform vinyl collection of Cremation Lily material – Fires Frame The Silhouette is compiled mostly from reworked and remixed tracks from previous CL cassette releases. All pieces are thematically linked by a time and place in Zsigo’s life and bringing them together creates a record of masterful atmosphere which ranks high in the industrial / PE canon and closes a chapter in the project’s timeline. Mastered by Arthur Rizk and cut to vinyl by Noel Summerville.
Alter give Bass Clef’s self-released ‘Acid Tracts’ a double vinyl pressing. It originally appeared as a digital release on the modular maestro’s Magic + Dreams label in 2013, spiralling seven “tracts” of intricately detailed acid dub feeling out ground between KFW, Tapes and more recent A Guy Called Gerald releases. It’s a quintessentially English sound displaying Ralph Cumbers’ talents, and is perhaps best viewed through the prism of vintage IDM. As with his outings for Punch Drunk and Idle Hands, it’s tilted towards the ‘floor, yet indulges more progressive inclinations, taking in knotty dancehall fibrillations, pinging electro-funk, loping hip hop, radiophonic dub, and restless techno oscillations.
Equipment used: Erica Synths Acidbox, Erica Synths Zen Delay, JMT DNVO-1, JMT Noisy Mic, XL13 Shard, and a prototype noise machine that was built for PSYWARFARE by the great, Max Wainwright
This was an interactive LIVE performance where the crowd was invited to participate.
Each individual in the audience performing upon the wireless synth became the 1st track.
During the 2nd track the audience took turns shouting vocals into the wireless noisy mic.
Erica Synths pedals created the infrasonic low end rhythms that pulsed and vibrated both the venue and the audience throughout the evening.
Ω)Reading this you are tainted, and now body compromised you are warned: kill the impulse or face your stolen ground. ______________________________________________________________
Following up on 2021’s Order, Anglo-Australian EBM/Synth-Punk band PC World return with the EP, Infinite Dream Weapon, a 3-track preview of intent and a sonic flag-planting PSYOP. Guiding the masses to anticipate next year’s full length LP, these tracks have been chosen to put the listener in the crosshairs.
At Heaven’s Gate jump-starts the dream at its logical endpoint, leaving the bystander lifeless. Inspired by our Industrial forefathers with its throbbing basslines and strident Keith LeBlanc-esque drums, At Heaven’s Gate seizes you into the locked-door communities feared throughout the days of Satanic Panic, poisoning the fantasies of the domesticated mind.
The eponymous track, Infinite Dream Weapon, is an instrumental pursuit designed for when you have no mouth and you must scream. Taking cues from Klaus Schulze and Cabaret Voltaire’s unfinished Earthshaker project, the filmic atmosphere shows PC World at their most introspective, letting the listener project their own paranoid nightmares through the Infinite Dream Weapon.
The band’s third sonic thread, Doublevision, is a pulse raising statement that targets institutional terror and human destabilization, motivated by the corruption that inhabits spaces of colonial guilt, aligning itself with the idea that a life of lies can become existential horror, waking in fright for all eternity.
With the Infinite Dream Weapon, we open a new force to ionize the air in one more bastardised direction. It is only in the consumption of this sonic parasite that the fantasy truly lives on as we make the approach toward tomorrow’s dream. Now, weapon in hand and back against the wall, the vision lodged in your cerebral fantasy, ask yourself “do you believe?”.
The collaboration between Klara Lewis and Nik Colk Void somehow seemed inevitable. Both artists having seen their releases published by Editions Mego, individually carving out idiosyncratic voices in the worlds of extreme, abstract electronic music.
With Full-On, Lewis and Void explore and assimilate the very edge of their individual practice where a unique collaborative interface allows two voices to combine and morph into a third voice.
Lewis and Void play ping pong with the conversation of sounds, generating ideas and bouncing them off each other, simultaneously encouraging the other to go further with their ideas opening up an opportunity to engage with previously unexplored terrain. Guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voice, sampling and outboard processing are folded in a playful unification with a propensity to tease, explore and extract new ideas and shapes, sometimes brutal, sometimes playful.
Trust was also a compositional tool allowing instinct to freely move on any aspect of the sound and space. This sound/feeling/instinct/association let this wild and wonderful material grow organically into something new.
The result of this exploratory interplay are 17 intense miniatures reveling in the process of unadulterated experimentation and whimsical interplay, not just between the humans, but the machines themselves. United in an endless series of sonic U-turns, this daring duo intertwine pop and noise whilst also bringing together visions of tender techno and forthright ambient.
The various zones manifest from all this reveals vocals shifting in mysterious ways, dust drenched beats churning limpidly and devilish string loops navigating a disorientating domain. The experience of listening to Full-On is to be confronted with a range of ideas resulting in a platter of emotions. A place where beauty and the beast collide with the impulsive and outright weird. What a wonderful world.
Welsh post-punk unit Chain Of Flowers return with their lofty and long-simmering sophomore full-length, rich with reckonings, reverb, and redemption: Never Ending Space. Despite some of the songs dating back a few years, the record first began materialising in earnest during the pandemic, by which point most of the band had relocated from Cardiff to London. Reunited and rejuvenated, they picked up where they left off, booking two multi-day sessions at Hackney hub Total Refreshment Centre with producer Jonah Falco. In this time they successfully channelled their kinetic chemistry into 10 full-blooded anthems of torn dreams, poetic delirium, and “hope stretched too far.”
Musically, Never Ending Space skews notably more maximal than the group’s previous work, fleshed out with trumpets, saxophone, synth, percussion boxes, and spoken word. (Smith jokingly calls them The Chain Of Flowers Orchestra). Yet the songs still swing and soar with a charged heart, ripe with hooks, drama and ragged melody. Opener “Fire (In The Heart Of Hearts)” stirs to life on a tide of wiry guitar and defiant horns, facing down the embers of love that still glow in the wake of pain: “Peace came tumbling like a shower of bricks / The mind twists slowly till everything fits.” A tense energy ripples throughout – from the nocturnal rush of “Serving Purpose” and “Amphetamine Luck” to the bruised battle cries of “Torcalon” and “Old Human Material.” Outliers like “Praying Hands, Turtle Doves” hint at proggy possible futures, while instrumental vignette “Anomia” offers an intriguing glimpse at a lesser heard facet of the band: swaying, shadowy, subdued.
The album’s title track is also its closing cut, a stomping, sparkling ode to “the wrong side of the night, where time goes to die.” Smith describes the scene: “Everyone’s talking, screaming, trauma bonding, but no one’s listening. Broken dialogue. Shouting over each other. You want to switch off, but everyone’s too fucked.” The guitars spiral and slide towards the oblivion of dawn, the chance to crash and do it all again. The song’s refrain captures the elision of time, spilling through the haze of days, from chaos to acceptance: “I can’t see the clock through the shrouds of smoke / Does it matter? / Common ground / In a never ending space.”
Debut full length vinyl from the UK/Italian duo of Ecka Mordecai and Valerio Tricoli, working together as Mordecoli. Individually these two travellers have carved out a path of ghostly musique concrete (Tricoli) and textural cello wandering (Mordecai). Alter is proud to present the album Château Mordécoly a result of two musicians (and friends) coming together to explore the middle ground of their individual investigations. The results of a red wine induced residency at London’s Cafe Oto, Château Mordécoly is a panoramic audio field exploring both the physicality of sound, informed by the voice, cello and pictish harp of Mordecai, and the artificial manipulations of Tricoli’s revox tape machine. The delicate tension between the physical ‘real’ and the distortive ‘new’ leverages this release far beyond a tipsy residency and shifts it into a top tier electroacoustic take on the zeitgeist. Solo cello and voice appear rooted in the timbre of time. The magnetic tape is both a friend and covert manipulator. The physical elements open themselves to disfigurement as a means of propagating the fantastical audio that unfolds from the initial enquiry. There’s no witchery or wizardry on part of either player but rather a symbiotic passing of the baton as the line between the real and the non-real flow in and out of themselves. The results are at once sedate, shocking and subversive. Château Mordécoly is a disembodied sonic landscape; a phantasmagorical world of fantasy unfolds as the delicate beauty of Mordecai’s playing and singing is transformed into a playful and unusual landscape. Epoch’s are evoked as the visual stimuli resulting from these alchemical transformations conjure everything from a haunted house to the Middle Ages. At once sleek and modern mental images of a marriage between the ultra present and the deep vast past. A heavenly cloud unveils a clear symbiosis of the Italian church and all of its cobwebs frolicking amongst pagan Britain.
New 7” from Sydney’s Low Life featuring two previously unreleased tracks which tie up loose ends from the band’s first wave period. ‘Catholic Guilt’ was originally leftover from their ‘Dogging’ album sessions and re-mixed at the tail end of 2019 with additional overdubs. A signature blast of the group’s downer punk with washed out chorus-y guitars and self-deprecating lyrics. The B side has a remix of ‘Dogging’ album track ‘Dream Machine’ transformed into a minimal-synth banger by fellow Australian travelers Total Control. The sound of the Cosmic Psychos channeling the Pet Shop Boys.
A new double single by Hey Colossus for ALTER. Carcass is taken from their latest “Four Bibles” album and leaves a poppier impression, albeit Hey Colossus style, with dual vocals and searing guitars. Medal is a 2:41 blast of their signature dirge with a hook as big as the sound itself. The track debuted on their recent Marc Riley session for BBC6 Music but this is the studio version, with music recorded in Bristol and vocals completed in a cabin on the Ms Stubnitz ship. Two tracks, the two sides of Hey Colossus – half melodic downer pop and the other a destruction tune with no respite.
Cardiff’s Chain of Flowers return to Alter with their first new material since 2015’s self-titled debut album. A double A sided single, ‘Let Your Light In’ and ‘Flesh, Blood and Bone’ are two tracks which see the band moving beyond the dense shoegaze sonics of their debut, bringing forward a more spacious and streamlined sound that emphasises the powerful urgency of their live performances.
Despite ‘Let Your Light In’ offering a more optimistic tone to what fans of their debut may be used to, the charismatic guitar hooks, hazy vocals and fist-to-the-horizon anthemic qualities of the group are no less present. On this new found optimism, vocalist Josh explains: “Relationships of all kinds keep this world moving. We live in times of profound darkness, though I somehow find myself lucky enough to be surrounded by people that pour some light and inspiration back in to my life and this is not to be taken for granted. This song is an ode to love and companionship around the world, a gratuitous nod to the better aspects of the human race. A thank you for being you.”
‘Flesh, Blood and Bone’ on the other side appears to follow a darker and more pensive path at first with Josh singing at his most baritone and ominous. However when the chorus hits with its searing synthesiser melody, a switch is flipped. Musically it channels perfectly the bombastic new wave ambition of early Simple Minds, alongside the dramatic post-punk melancholy of the Chameleons. With this, Chain of Flowers are evidently making an effort to find a light within the darkness of the world and their own collective souls.
After a rugged debut EP for Hospital Productions last year, London’s Shallow Sanction up the ante with a brand new single. Two anthemic tracks of misanthropic, boot stomping deathrock that mix the dramatic lurch of Killing Joke, Part 1 and Christian Death with the primitive attack of the 4-Skins, Rudimentary Peni and early Blitz – so incase you were wondering if that strange mix was ever a thing, it is now. Features extra synth and electronics by Zen Zsigo / Cremation Lily
Damien Dubrovnik are Loke Rahbek (Lust For Youth, Var, Croatian Amor) and Christian Stadsgaard, two Copenhagen residents who are known for running the highly respected and prolific Posh Isolation label. ‘Patterns of Penetration’ is a new EP which comes relatively hot off the heels of a USA and UK tour with Helm and their first new material since last year’s Alter debut, the ‘First Burning Attraction’ LP. Lead track and recent live staple ‘Penis Corset’ is the most potent and pointed piece the duo have penned yet – the main body of the track is driven by a crude and primative rhythm made from an electronic bass pulse and blown out synth noise, punctuated by feedback and guttural vocals. The result is probably the closest the duo has ever come to creating something that fits the traditional ‘song’ format yet fully retaining an industrial atmosphere that is consistent with previous DD releases. On the flip, title track ‘Patterns of Penetration’ presents a calmer side of the duos work yet also find them at their most complex and rich, sonically speaking, with a two note synth lead, spoken vocals and washes of analog tape noise. Edition of 400 copies with artwork by Danish artist Martin Erik Andersen.
Finlay Shakespeare is an electronic musician working from the UK and across Europe. A childhood obsession with his parents’ record collection led him to both create his own music and build his own synthesizer equipment throughout his teenage years. After studying audio engineering, he was invited to become in-house engineer for the Moog Sound Lab UK, leading to collaborations with acts as diverse as Suicide, Charlemagne Palestine, The Grid and Mica Levi & Eliza McCarthy, both in live and studio environments.
In 2017, Finlay began recording a series of monthly “Housediet” releases – all improvised and captured at home utilising drum machines, modular synthesis and processed vocals. After several encounters with Peter Rehberg of Editions Mego, a compilation of the Housediet tracks was drawn up by Rehberg and Shakespeare, culminating in the release of “Domestic Economy” in early 2019. “Solemnities’ ‘, a second album for Editions Mego appeared the following year. In the period since Rehberg’s untimely passing, Finlay has recorded for Superpang, Modulisme and his own GOTO Records imprint. “Illusion + Memory”, meanwhile, continues on from where “Solemnities” left off, with Finlay once again aiming to work at the fringes of electronic pop.
Alter is proud to present “Illusion + Memory”, the third full length physical LP of Shakespeare’s utterly unique and sophisticated output.
Shakespeare’s obsession and knowledge of late 70’s and early 80’s electronic pop music is once again at the forefront of this intense and dynamic release. Alas, this is not some retro throwback. Shakespeare’s deep understanding of his machines breathes new life into a genre of music once defunct. Supporting the likes of Blancmange bolstered his reputation for sublime synth hooks and dark lyrical content.
Building on his previous work in the field “Illusion + Memory” is an unabashed pop record, as joyous as it is intense, moving from the brooding opening ballad “Your Side of the River” through the punchy “Theresa” which could be read as a love song to Throbbing Gristle’s United. Elsewhere “Climb” unleashes the opportunity to the dancefloor as wild electronics snake into all manner of schizophrenic shapes.
There is a romantic side to this music. In its homage to electronic pop of the late 70’s and early 80’s but also in the emotional punch Shakespeare injects into every second of every track. Shakespeare’s reboot of these musical forms is technically impressive, one rich in feeling and deep in emotion, atmospherically and vocally. The two come together to create a unique visceral sonic experience… today!
‘Water Temple’ is the debut album of the Berlin-based group Property. Comprised of Marijn Degenaar (NL) and Vivant de Non (AUS), the group use the theme of hydromancy to straddle the poetics of reverb from a post-punk perspective. The album wanders through dense end-of-world sensations without keeping away from piercing melodic instrumentation. As hazy as ‘Water Temple’ can get, Property just as easily trade the murky side of their post-punk sound for analogue synthesisers that feel almost celestial. Used to striking effect on ‘Water Temple’, the chorus-heavy bassline is interwoven with a strident melody that punctures the rhythm and accents the Neue Deutsche Welle energy that the pair play on at certain moments. Similarly, the vocals on ‘Water Tempel’ flirt with our cracked times from another angle, rendering a remarkable first transmission from this new duo. Foggy synthesisers fill the cavities of every track, though the driving leads ensure the ambience never overtakes the song-structures across the album. This tendency is best captured on the downer-anthem Blood Cube with its sharp drum machine rhythm, just as Clear Boys reprises this rowdy pop edge for a forceful album closer. The burning melancholy of ‘Water Temple’ is as shadowy as it is enlivening.
It’s by some strange inversion that since his untimely death in 1999 Bryn Jones’ Muslimgauze project has become evermore enigmatic as his publicly available recordings have become evermore vast. The Mancunian artist’s sudden passing at the age of 37 prematurely resolved a body of work that remains as experimental as it is diffuse, with an informal archive that was left spread between favoured labels and confidantes. And though this monadic project never abided by genre specifications, it all feels as if it is taking the critical pulses of its time and rendering them into something other than the sum of its obscure compulsions. Jones’ double album ‘Veiled Sisters’ from 1993 is no exception, and it persists as a magnificent outlier in his singular and bewildering discography.
Originally released by the label Soleilmoon, an early and lifelong supporter of Jones’ work along with Staalplaat, the album is a notable example of the uniquely recombinant fragility and fervour of Jones’ work. This 3LP edition marks the album’s first appearance on vinyl. Like much of the Muslimgauze catalogue, ‘Veiled Sisters’ is dedicated to the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its two halves—Sister One and Sister Two—calling on the history and conflicts of the modern Islamic world through opaque titles and snatches of musical oration.
Forgoing the raucous timbre and abrasion that Jones could occasionally employ, this album balances a medley of shrill instrumental bursts with a complex patterning of ambient atmospheres. ‘Veiled Sisters’ moves with a hypnotic gait across its extended runtime with a dynamic ensemble of electronics grounded in a pulsing yet evasive combination of low-slung kicks and dub-soaked bass. The hissy wash of drums, both played and machined, decorate a restless patina all over, and the cacophony of samples send impressions scattershot into Jones’ idiosyncratic yet readymade psychedelia. With a quiet intensity that is not often captured this succinctly in the Muslimgauze catalogue, this new edition of ‘Veiled Sisters’ is a reminder of the haunting wonder that Jones was capable of manifesting.
Audio remastered for vinyl by John Hannon. Audio remastered for digital by Cam Deas. Artwork restored by Ryan Tong.
Justin K Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, JK Flesh) breathes new life into his FINAL project for an album on Helm’s ALTER label. Formed in 1984 out of an obsession with the industrial, noise & power electronics acts of the early eighties, FINAL made its public debut at the legendary Mermaid pub in Birmingham when Broadrick was just 14 years old. A string of cassette releases via his Post Mortem Rekordings label established the name within the underground noise scene of the time until increased activity with his various groups (Napalm Death, Head of David and later Godflesh) meant that FINAL naturally fell by the wayside before the end of the decade. Broadrick reactivated the project in 1993 during the British ambient “isolationism” period and FINAL’s sound became focussed more on texture, producing beatless ambient work with a number of albums for labels like Sentrax, Utech, No Quarter and Neurot. ‘It Comes To Us All’ is the first FINAL album to appear on vinyl since 2015’s ‘Black Dollars’ on Downwards and continues to explore the textural nature of Broadrick’s ambient work – this time through a filter of blown-out harmonic noise that reconnects the project with its harsher roots. Rather than channelling the angst of early power-electronics, the noise here rumbles along blissfully through 8 untitled tracks, sombre in tone and at times beautiful. Melodies sampled from pop music are put through a process of decay, stripped of their form and worn down with a rusty, melancholic afterglow. Reducing all its parts to slow-motion shadows of their former selves, ‘It Comes To Us All’ is an exploration of the decay of all living things that we face collectively, day after day.
THE BAND: Low Life are a rock band from Sydney, Australia.
THE RECORD: Low Life’s 3rd LP is called From Squats to Lots: The Agony and the XTC of Low Life.
NOTES ON HOW TO LISTEN TO AGONY AND XTC OF LOW LIFE:
1. Some records hit you with an instant impression of timeless brilliance, and Low Life’s Dogging is one of those records, what the wise call “an instant classic”. 2. From Squats to Lots: The Agony and the XTC of Low Life is more like their second album Downer Edn (read Edition), a little more withdrawn, a little more textured. Complex. Rich. Which is to say: you’re going to need some time with it. 3. Some show, some grow. Low Life have done both. This one is a grower. Spend some time with this one. It’s got that nuanced flavour. Don’t guzzle. Sip. Savour. 4. Sip it, and sense the recurring brilliance of Mitch Tolman’s lyrics, exploring the usual territory of gutter life, lad life, punk life, low life. The dirge. Disgust and shame in white Australia. Council housing, bills piled to the neck, substance abuse and rehabilitation, the fallen lads and lasses who stood too close to the flame, loss and loneliness, from squats to lots. Un-Australian gutter symphony. 5. There is a celebration of resilience and that’s a central theme of this record and a time like ours needs a record like Agony & XTC. Low times are coming through, but if you’re low they won’t get to you. 6. Iggy Pop’s Bowie produced studio rock masterpieces ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust For Life’ are important reference points to the 3rd album sounds of Low Life. Here comes success! 7. ‘The Agony and Ecstasy’ is a 1985 novel by Irving Stone about the life of Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo. Stone wrote another novel about the single eared painter Vincent Van Gogh called ‘Lust For Life’. This synchronicity hit me. 8. Iggy and the Stooges are a pretty safe reference for Low Life (and all good rock music). Iggy and the Stooges are a low life’s Michelangelo, but solo Iggy like Lust for Life is a better reference for this particular incarnation of Low Life, which is to say they are studio rock albums. 9. Bowie later referred to this period of his life as profoundly nihilistic. But Iggy looked at it as the period of his life that saved him from an early grave. This confrontation is Low life lore. 10. Let’s stick to this, because there’s something about this era of Bowie that makes sense with Low Life’s new album, particularly Low. One should never miss the Low in our new album from Low Life. Producer and studio boss Mickey Grossman has the ear for the Low, and he has carved out a little statue of David right here. 11. Mickey’s ears are recording, mixing and producing the best of Sydney, most notably the Oily Boys Cro Memory Grin. A great companion record to this one. Use Agony & XTC AFTER Oily Boys. Not on an empty stomach, and don’t try to operate heavy machinery (bobcat, bulldozer etc). 12. The relationship between Low Life and Sydney hardcore should not be understated, but it also shouldn’t guide how to listen to Agony & XTC. This is not austere, disciplined music. 13. Think, like, if Poison Idea were given the kind of studio time and budget as Happy Mondays. You wouldn’t play it to a teenager. It’s not for children. This is a mature flavour, one for the adults who have had to contend with failure and hardship, medical bills and disappointed family members, betrayed lovers and worrisome growths, police brutality and tooth decay, humiliating bowels and collapsed septums, detoxing and drying out, for those who have seen themselves as corrupted and putrid and unloveable, for those who endure all of this and aren’t willing to lie down and cop it sweet: Low Life are still here and they ain’t going nowhere.
NOTES ON HOW NOT TO LISTEN TO AGONY AND XTC OF LOW LIFE:
1. Don’t think of shoe-gaze. It suggests a safe passage to 90’s reminiscences, a vogue style of our time, but nothing to do with Low Life style. Low Life style is always of its time. The content changes. Agony & XTC shares weight of records like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Slowdive’s Kebab, records that were laboured on after the songs were recorded, songs that were written as they were recorded. 2. We can call these “studio albums” as opposed to albums built in the heat of live performance. Studio albums from the 90’s are called shoe-gaze by some journalist nerds, but we know better than to use words like this. 3. Studio albums are excessive and, at the same time, so empty. Agony & XTC, Loveless, Kebab, Rumours: excessive! And empty. This is not to suggest this is Low Lite, some throwback, soft. A band like Low Life can make an overproduced studio rock album without having to use the word shoe-gaze. So, don’t think studio albums mean anything especially 90’s. Don’t look back. 4. Let’s lose these distasteful labels, like “shoe-gaze”, “rehab rock”, “stab”, “guitar OD overdrive”, “western Sydney wonder”. They can fade out. A low life was once referred to as a vagabond. Who uses this term today? Nobody. Language can murder. Words can die. Kill ‘em all!
First new single in 4 years from Welsh post-punk band Chain Of Flowers. ‘Amphetamine Luck’ is produced by Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Jade Hairpins) and serves as a taste for the bands second album, due for release in 2022.
White Flexi Disc 7″ w/ silver foil print and fold-out printed cover. Limited to 200.
MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice. The debut release XMIT, an eight-track album featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder, is out on 16 April 2021.
Tucker’s ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with this collection of harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. On the new album, MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions. In a move away from previous projects XMIT investigates erasing the self, removing obvious traits of the hand and voice, and allowing a focus on the humanoid rather than the human. Instead of recognisable lyrics and coherent imagery, MICROCORPS evolved synthesised voices to generate alternate characters.
He expands, “I was investigating how language brings our world into being and how manipulating the actual grain of the voice could open up momentary shifts in perception.”
Each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured. Setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance, using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing.
“I’d been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space.”
The album artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker that originally featured in his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2. XMIT refers to a time in which information both physical and nonphysical transfers at an alarming rate beyond human comprehension into an age which is at once banal and terrifyingly alien.
Since 2010, Adam Keith’s solo project Cube has been supplying a steady run of records and cassettes that capture songwriterly fixations and frustrations in a dextrous style of wounded electronics. Though Cube has been the centrepiece of his activity for some years, he’s all the while remained active in collaborations, playing in bands such as SPF and Mansion to name just a few. Rounding off a decade of dialogues and agitations, Alter now presents Keith’s third LP under the moniker of Cube, ‘Drug of Choice’
Based in New York, though managing a functional transience that takes in California too, Keith’s latest iteration as Cube launches a panoramic set of sonic touchstones into a gristly and hypnotic orbit. Seismic drum machine parts partition an album that layers industrial-tipped takes on digi-dub with roaming guitar lines, piano vignettes, and breakbeat theatrics. For all the abrasiveness and rhythmic allusions that Keith employs, his use of voices alongside lush manipulations of errant samples and atmospheres tempers the commotion, delivering something that feels as much focused on artful constructions of private experiences as it does the cathartic qualities of noise.
Tom James Scott holds a unique position in experimental music. With a soft brush approach Scott, who currently lives on the North-West coast of England, has explored delicacy in music with a variety of sublime releases on a variety of labels. Predominantly known for gentle investigations of guitar and piano, Scott has shifted to incorporating different technology and tactics over time. All of this, either in performance or recording, is embedded with a spirit that is quintessentially his own. Nightshade is the latest in his expanding catalogue, one which ignites an alarmingly new take on his approach to music. Echo on Water initiates proceedings with the unmistakable sound of tape. Any instrumentation is buried amongst the woozy sway of the medium itself, with its rough dynamics soon morphing into an overwhelmingly swirling mass of emotionally decayed sound. The movement of matter takes on a haunted shape with sounds looping and falling apart as the physicality of the medium holds it all together. The second track Blue Mist furthers this approach with its smeared haze of gorgeous emotion. This is deep exploration of ideas meeting matter. Wasting Stars takes up the entire flip side with the sound of tape recoiling a bit to allow the delicate glow of instruments to come more to the fore, with gentle effects that weave the musical matter. As a skewered take on Scott’s earlier piano explorations the atmosphere here is a subdued soundscape evoking the spiritual sadness found in the piano works of Gurdjieff/De Hartmann, with a modern lo fi angle. Nightshade is a deeply effective journey and one of the most exquisite examples of Scott’s delicate approach so far. Two sides of form which inhabit contrasting yet complimentary clouds of sound communicating in a stunning emotional flow. As music with only trace elements of melody, Nightshade is a beautiful take on tools being used to explore paths both highly idiosyncratic, deeply moving and discreetly personal.
Brand new full length from the Pheromoans, a companion piece to last years ‘County Lines’ LP. ‘I, Mustard Mitt’ finds the band at their most esoteric and free, producing one of the most intriguing sides in the bands discography so far. 7 tracks of skeletal guitar work, drum machine jams, spoken word and minimal electronics. A collection of songs both confounding and intimate, utilising the production work of guitarist Sticks to bring some clarity from the chaos of their origins.
Little Movies are an improvisational electronic music duo from Dublin comprised of Morgan Buckley and Ben Donohue, both affiliated with Wah Wah Wino, a label & collective whose release announcements cause literal heart palpitations amongst fans of weirder contemporary underground electronics. “Live At Cafe Oto” is the duo’s second release, a crystal clear and direct recording of their performance from when the Winowagon rolled into town for a showcase back in 2018. A 27 minute stream of razor sharp synthesised tones, burnt out drum samples and strange computer processed sound poetry presented in a relentless jump cut style – nothing repeats a single time. Add to the mix some deep mastering by Wino’s in-house engineer “The Bastard”, faint OTO audience ambience and you have an ideal night on the tiles for ALTER HQ. I can practically taste the Kernals from here.
Limited to 100 glass mastered CD, presented in PVC wallets with glossy transparent stickers. All profits from this release will be donated to MASI – the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (www.masi.ie) and Cafe OTO to help with their outgoings during the pandemic.
Back in 2019, Ravioli Me Away debuted their hyper-surreal operatic work ‘The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Terris’ across the UK, including two sold-out shows in London. Difficult to contain, and wound-up with a truant’s sense of narrative, it presented a wondrous cacophony of erupting media and performances patched together with wit and existential alarm.
A suite of songs circling themes of aspiration and the everyday run through the opera, and these were released in parallel by Wysing Polyphonic, one of the commissioning institutions. A selection of these songs were then reinterpreted and reshaped into forms that befit a club setting, debuting at Supernormal festival in the same year. Entitled ‘Naughty Cool,’ Alter now presents these collective club reworkings by HMS RMA for the first time on vinyl.
Uplifting and delightfully crooked throughout, the tracks are shuffled together and stitched as a ‘DJ mix.’ In six segments of vocal-led missives and soft drops, the sunniest hooks of early Chicago house are recalled, all cross-pollinated with the collective rhythms and tones of the UK’s rave subconscious. A freeform, DIY rowdiness lurks around every corner, equally evoking punk’s flings with disco.
The familiar sound and presence of Ravioli Me Away’s Alice Theobald, Rosie Ridgway, and Sian Dorrer aren’t lost in the edits and adaptations, and they come backed-up with Tom Hirst (Design A Wave), opera singer Siobhan Mooney, and Dean Rodney Jnr (The Fish Police), all of whom took part in the original opera itself. “Naughty Cool” was engineered by John Hannon at No Recording Studios and mixed and mastered by Amir Shoat in London. Photography by Amy Gwatkin.
This record is dedicated to the memory of Donna Lynas.
What happens when you arrive to a party and everyone is leaving as you are walking in? If a bass drum booms in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it even boom at all? Can you build a mansion with playing cards?
Nick Klein returns to ALTER with the cryptically biographical ‘No Shortage of Rope’, his third release for the label and significantly, potentially his first full length album. Consisting of 7 tracks, ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is a consolidated collection of recordings Klein made after leaving his long-term base of NYC to become a full-time resident of Den Haag, Netherlands. Using some newfound free time post-move, Klein wanted to approach his working process in the studio a little differently to create something long form, something that felt more like an album as opposed to being built with the club music paradigm as a given. Describing his time in the studio, Klein says it was “the most hermetic studio endeavour I have ever undertaken”. It certainly seems that Klein harnessed this period of productivity to make the most of what his music could offer as ‘No Shortage of Rope’ is the man in his most pointedly pure form.
As an artist Klein has followed his own path around the fringes of the contemporary American underground without much worry of where he may end up as a result. This has led the majority of his work to be best contextualised by the rough beat-music associated with artists like Beau Wanzer, Shane English or Container and the celebratory unpretentious world of noise. Opening track ‘Sitting In Glass’ sets an irreverent foundation with gratuitous chainsaw-like synth noise that sucks the air immediately out of the room. If this is a record made without the club in mind, then we’re made aware fairly quickly. The subsequent tracks are more or less Klein back at the office in beat-based terrain, but with some noticeable differences. The kicks are harder and percussive elements have been chosen and rendered with sharp detail, taking up more space and disguising how minimal these pieces are despite their bombastic delivery. The biggest surprise comes in the final track “French-Property.com”, a book-ending piece of percussion-less glacial electronics and maybe the most expansive thing Klein has made to date.
Regardless of Klein’s intentions regarding the club, it couldn’t have been too far from his mind purely for the reason that ‘No Shortage of Rope’ just bangs like fuck for the most part. This is hard rhythmic electronic music built for basements and the record-boxes of adventurous DJs, just very much made on his own terms.
Recorded live at Holocene in Portland, Oregon whilst on tour with Blanck Mass and Steve Hauschildt.
Saxophone samples courtesy of Karl D’Silva. String samples originally recorded by JG Thirlwell at 30 Below, NYC.
With thanks to Benjamin Power, Steve Hauschildt, Will McAndrew, Jeff Witscher, Daryl and all staff at Holocene. Special thanks to Grayson and Willow for driving all night to Oakland right after the gig.
Cover photo by Robin Christian. Mastered by Jack Callahan.
PRIVAT is a band based in Vienna. With one live show and a compilation appearance under their belt, the duo of Robert Pawliczek and Robert Schwarz are short on extant information. Despite this, there’s a wealth of novel tact and flashpoints in the wicked intensity of PRIVAT that makes sense as a consolidation of the duo’s cumulative activity across music and the visual arts in the last decade. Their debut album, ‘Ein Gedachtnis Rollt Sich Auf Der Zunge Aus’, is an annihilating introduction to this new collaboration.
Schwarz’s background lies in both architecture and computer music. Across a handful of labels, he’s presented field recordings and experimental works, and he’s participated in exhibitions with some of Europe’s most prominent institutions for adventurous art practices. He is also the co-founder and curator of the Viennese festival PARKEN; Or, Live in the Park, which aims to mediate experimental forms of music in public spaces. Pawliczek is a conceptual artist and musician, and it’s his work that graces the sleeves and can be found in accompanying video material. He’s been involved in some exceptional groups and projects that have been centred in and around Berlin in the last years. These include Bobby Would, Heavy Metal, Itchy Bugger, and Pitva.
Having met in Antwerp in the orbit of Dennis Tyfus’ former gallery Pinkie Bowtie, the pair initially began to work on PRIVAT back in 2018 around a shared affinity for repetitive electronic music and an aesthetic preference for spartan coldness. ‘Ein Gedachtnis Rollt Sich Auf Der Zunge Aus’ makes good on their pact. The album presents a set of works that carefully balance the galvanising propulsion of rhythmic electronics with the kind of textural palette that betrays the pair’s experimental roots. Deadpan vocals are delivered throughout, developing a kind of frosty symbiosis. Tempered by just arrangements, there’s a song-writerly core that’s organising the album’s sombre meditations, piquing moments of comparison with Moroder’s rawness as readily as anything that’s cultivated in industrial music’s tape-worn dirges.
ALTER is proud to present ‘Tendrils’, the first LP release from London based artist & musician Malvern Brume. After gathering some hushed praise from the UK underground for a couple of excellent cassette releases and strong local live performances, ‘Tendrils’ is the first definitive document of the Malvern Brume sound world. His instrumentation and sound sources would be considered familiar staples in the world of “experimental” music, but Salter does an admirable job of making them his own. Comprised of 8 pieces, this is electronic music at its core but a kind that sounds as if it’s being played through fog. Like spores growing on a damp surface. Densely composed and thick with an almost asphyxiating atmosphere – even during the record’s more minimal moments – track titles like ‘Caught In The Exhaust Trails’ and ‘Sunk Into Plastics’ only heighten the tone further.
Salter was originally born in the countryside and since relocated to London, a place he finds “over stimulating in every sense”. Much of ‘Tendrils’ could be taken as a response to the city and a means of equating the two. Camberwell is listed as the location for composition, but field recordings are attributed to rural landmarks. The Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire / Warwickshire border and Seven Sisters Cliffs by the English Channel are two in case, but despite their picturesque origins Salter renders them into abstract clatter. As if dubbed from the private tape archive of an old eccentric. In addition, synthesised electronic tones hum and buzz, occasionally giving away to strange, slurring sequences that sound like lost transmissions from the radiophonic workshop. Despite the nod to this electronic music institution, it’s lacking the sincere level of esteem that can turn one into a heritage act. There is a strangeness and distant other worldliness to the music that feels unselfconscious and keeps Malvern Brume from being easy to define by contemporary terms.
Salter says the album is defined by movement and the environments that have inspired him over the years. In his own words, “each of these tracks is inspired by a journey or moving through a space, an audible A to B”. With that in mind, ‘Tendrils’ is perfect music for solitary inner-city marshland walks and urban bike rides to forgotten local suburbs.
Container is the project of American noise veteran Ren Schofield, originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and now based in London. Container first appeared at the turn of the decade with a slew of freakish tapes for various small labels. In wake of these releases, Editions Mego offshoot Spectrum Spools – run by old friend John Elliott of the band Emeralds – took the punt to release his debut LP, a collection of mutated Techno tracks simply titled ‘LP’. The record gained attention quickly in the Electronic music scene largely thanks to Schofield’s unique production style that separates him from forms of conventional dance music. Whilst the music of Container sits perfectly fine within the genre and is functional enough to blow apart the walls of any club, years on the US noise circuit have given Schofield’s brand of techno a rawness and direct intensity that stands out in the club and crosses over into other sub-sections of the underground. His modest set up of Roland MC-909, a four-track porta studio and an array of pedals allowed him to hone his scuzzy and bewildering beat music over the years, leading to three more well received, and literally titled, LP’s. Over this time period Container also released some EPs on Morphine, Liberation Technologies and Diagonal, did a variety of remixes for acts like Four Tet, The Body, Panda Bear and Fucked Up plus maintained a healthy touring schedule that reached over every continent. His exhilarating live show has hit pretty much every major electronic music festival and club in Europe, as well as tours and gigs with a diverse range of acts such as Wolf Eyes, Zola Jesus, Daughters, Pharmakon and Ryley Walker.
Almost a decade since his debut, Container arrives on ALTER with his first non-”LP” titled album called ‘Scramblers’. The title taken from both a Baltimore street drug and a Rhode Island Diner he used to eat at with his father. Schofield elaborates: “The juxtaposition between these two Scramblers is a great one. I wanted to pay homage to a nice name that lends itself to both depraved and wholesome contexts and do my part to carry on the tradition.” The eight tracks have their origins in live performance and a more high-octane delivery is noticeable when compared with previous Container albums. ‘Mottle’ sits in a mysterious zone between the productions of EVOL and early Ruff Sqwad. Fierce electro cuts like ‘Trench’ and ‘Nozzle’ work alongside the nauseous slink of ‘Duster’, which in typical Container fashion morphs into a frenzy in no time. A frenzy which may be linked cosmically to the fact that ‘Scramblers’ was recorded, mixed and mastered in one day, reinforcing further his unorthodox and fun approach to club music.
ALTER presents a remastered edition of Cremation Lily’s second album, on vinyl for the first time. Recorded whilst living in Hastings and originally released as a double cassette on his Strange Rules label in 2017, The Processes… forms a trilogy of albums in the CL canon that were influenced by the life and atmospheres within British coastal towns. Composed using a rudimentary set-up of synth, drum machine and two modified walkmans, CL draws upon a broad range of influences from the underground electronic music spectrum. Noise, tape music and ambient techno are all referenced and align to form a cohesive collection of tracks, flowing fluidly in sequence. Melancholic synth pads and deep kick drums intersect with crude field recordings and occasional bursts of feedback, evoking a claustrophobic uncertainty that feels more like being pulled under than carried above.
Features additional piano and violin by Theodore Cale Schafer. Remastered by John Hannon.
The stark, rattling percussion and morbid howls into the ether of ‘Theme 7’ signal not just the return of NAAAHHH but kick start Alter’s fiftieth release with suspense. ALERT dredges the depths of grimy UK bedroom studios, old computer hard-drives and budget lager-soaked gallery sonics in search of presenting a unifying vision of a particular brand of the here and now. Label associates Chain of Flowers take us deep into hypnotic motorik territory, whilst similarly driving new work from Teresa Winter shows a more frantic side to her productions than last year’s LP for Death of Rave. The underground sound of puddle country shines through with contributions from anarcho sample-mulch legends Cru Servers and Night School mastermind Apostille. Fellow Glasgow-based Helena Celle delivers an old-school jack trax style rhythm work out alongside The Modern Institute trying their hand at deranged happy hardcore and the finest Mancunian ambient you’ll hear all year from Space Afrika. One of the most enthralling moments comes from Raime side project Moin, a claustrophobic, tempo-disregarding marriage of sound that makes us feel like we’re lost at sea and seconds away from drowning. Positively unholy.
Each piece on ALERT is bound by a distinctly punk attitude, a form of experimentalism that skirts across genre markers and forces you to sit up and pay attention. Zero coffee house easy listening or functionality here – there’s metallic clanging, skittering drums and screeches, tough as nails gabber compression (check the Acolytes track ‘Feelings’) and dirgey guitar feedback all fighting for space in a surprisingly coherent manner. Sound artist and broadcaster Mark Vernon’s ‘The Object Invoked…’ lulls us into quintessentially British, nightmare-inducing radiophonic territories with terrifying fragmented media chatter, making for one of the highlights of the compilation. If anything, we can agree on the fact that this double LP stands to highlight the fringes of carefree, convention defying abstract electronics that currently permeate our little island in an illuminating and necessary way.
The Australian duo of Jarrod Zlatic and Nisa Venerosa harness expansiveness through a sepia-tone collage of intangible digital textures and adapted vocal chamber music. Formed in the early 2000’s, previous albums for cult-labels like Chapter Music and Siltbreeze waded through dubby psych-rock territories but their latest for ALTER stands alone. Recorded in Melbourne by Sam Karmel (F ingers, CS + Kreme), the album occupies an eerie, pastoral kind of twilight zone. Venerosa’s stark singing style challenging the ambient textures weaving in and out of the stereo field.
Plain Songs slowly unfolds through a mesh of processed drones, flickering static and fragile yet propulsive bedding loops. G.B.H sees the pair utilising layers of spoken word and keyboard motifs atop spiralling background whirs and softly uttered harmonies. The late-night atmosphere pervades with On Temptation and Forever Turned where slow, dissonant passages work in tandem with Venerosa’s spectral vocal shifts. Zlatic’s trumpet howls into the ether on ‘Flowers and Fade’ accompanied by drum rattles, repetitive mantras and oscillating synthesisers to mark one of the LP’s most unique and isolated moments. There are hints of Nico’s Janitor of Lunacy and Meredith Monk’s Book of Days at play, where the icy screeches and distortions give way to the wax and wane poetry of ‘A Short Confession’. The overall power of Plain Songs hinges on the strength of the voice and the way it interacts with the sound world around it, Venerosa demonstrating an ability to flit between moods and assume control. It is ever present and in sync with the cosmos, fighting its way through the dark and igniting the beacon.
ALTER presents the debut LP release from Melbourne’s Trevor, aka graphic artist and Total Control drummer James Vinciguerra. ‘Becoming A Bed’ gathers seven tracks that run the gamut between battered drum-machine beats, minimal-wave, scratchy noise and spoken word. ‘Romp with Monty’ is the album’s least demented moment and delightfully evocative of it’s title with simple melodies and rigid drum machine patterns. A sharp contrast to ‘Cabbage Land’s flailing gabber and breaks combination, resembling something akin to Jamal Moss or Beau Wanzer experiencing a severe breakdown of both mind and hardware. These hybrids of erratic, free percussion and wild synth blurts (see also ‘Midi 2’) lend the album a charming edge, favouring a playful kind of experimentation which extends to the album’s calmer moments too. ‘Bedtime Story’ provides one such bit of respite and the only appearance of Vinciguerra’s voice, processed here in a cold, curious monologue that ruminates on lethargy and illness, atop looping dark ambient textures. It’s position in the album providing a centrepiece of cavernous and confounding simplicity.
Elsewhere, tongue-in-cheek end skits sound as if they were heckled at the end of a gig and then decidedly left on the tape. The reckless rave of closing cut ‘Speed Ave’ reflects this in-the-moment sensibility, the machines being close to escaping their captain. It may provide the most didactic dancing effort on the record, but neatly aligns with a loose and uninhibited mindset that skirts around the same warped techno vision as label affiliates Cru Servers or Acolytes. This is music for the most fun of dancefloors.
Coming out of London and the South West of England, Hey Colossus are one of Europe’s great live bands. Since 2003 the 6-piece has been driving around the continent with their “pirate ship” backline of broken amps and triple-guitar drang, elevating audiences in every type of venue imaginable; a doctor’s waiting room in Salford, an industrial unit in Liege and a vast field next to a river in Portugal. Wherever they may roam.
Four Bibles is their twelfth studio album and the first to be released by London label ALTER, whose sole proprietor (the electronic producer Helm) encountered the group at their first gig in 2003. Recorded by Ben Turner at Space Wolf Studios in Somerset, it’s their most direct album yet and follows a well-documented trajectory of evolution that began (in the truest sense) with 2011’s RRR for Riot Season and continued across three albums for Rocket Recordings. Lead vocalist Paul Sykes sounds more in focus than before, dialling down the effects and using reverb / delay to carry his lyrics rather than smother. The band has also fine-tuned to leave some room for extra depth. Piano, electronics and violin (by Daniel O’Sullivan of This is not This Heat / Grumbling Fur) all find a way in amongst a familiar mesh of interlacing guitars, wrapped round a taut rhythm section. Like every other Hey Colossus record before, the line-up has altered and the sounds reflect this.
From the weight of “Memory Gore”, to the subtlety and swag of “It’s a Low”, via the sonic extremes of “Palm Hex/Arndale Chins” this is exactly as the band are live; raging & rail-roading but somehow in control. Grooves for those who want to dance or for those who want to hug a wall and nod…bleak dystopian imagery submerged in relentless rhythms and low-end rattle. The songs breath life and soul – Hey Colossus have never sounded fresher or more on point.
There is a book release to coincide with the album written by bass player (and founding member) Joe Thompson. It’s part of a new series called “Sleevenotes” by Pomona Publishing and the first four are out this year. Joe’s book sits alongside other contributions by Bob Stanley (St Etienne), Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees/Solo), David Gedge (The Wedding Present) and contains a diary of the years leading up to the release of this record. Touring with bands Sumac and Grey Hairs through Europe, recording the album, line-up changes, the band’s history and the big question is answered: Why?
For the last twelve years The Pheromoans have occupied their own peculiar niche in the UK’s DIY music scene. Initially known for primitive garage-esque repetition on their early releases, two LPs for Upset! The Rhythm saw the group develop a more pastoral sound before being mutated by electronics on 2016’s ‘I’m On Nights’. ‘County Lines’ is their fifth full-length and takes in each aspect of their past sonically, providing a wry tonic for today’s heady exhaustion.
More of life’s banalities and stale daydreams are given a good airing in Russel Walker’s lyrics. Delivered with the usual droll lethargy, he’s a septic entertainer par excellence who teases out just enough of the very real horror of the UK’s current predicament to keep his aggrievements charming. At times—see Troll Attack—it’s a crushing lament. ‘County Lines’ weaves Walker in and out of meandering guitars and crude drum machines that waltz and tumble with live drums. Brittle synths light the way to the album’s aggravated sections, which ever so gently hark back to the group’s earliest recordings. The penultimate piece, Ultra Skies, offers the clearest trace of The Pheromoans’ past. The frenzy edges us into a reverberating trance, pulling a sucker punch like an inconclusive nightmare.
The whole “five band years = a lifetime” biz trope is justified, if not negated, by the second album from Sydney’s Low Life. Arriving with an aura of anticipation, ‘Downer Edn’ (read: Edition) feels like a collective document of the band’s timeline since their unforgettable debut ‘Dogging’; an album which made enough of a mark on the punk landscape in 2014 to justify a reissue on London’s Alter in 2017.
Recorded over two years and mixed in 2018 by Mikey Young (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring), ‘Downer Edn’ sees the core trio of Mitch Tolman, Cristian O’Sullivan and Greg Alfaro expand their ranks to a five piece. Dizzy Daldal of Oily Boys & Orion was brought in to reinforce the thick wall of guitars, whilst fifth member Yuta Matsumura, also of Oily Boys & Orion, re-joined the group later to free Tolman up as a dedicated front man for live duties. The hours of studio work have resulted in making the band sound more confident and fully realised, reaching for and finding a sound that was perhaps unattainable 5 years prior. However, lurking behind the bigger vision and polished production ‘Downer Edn’ is a complex proposition and remains a dark blast of an album. Expansive and cohesive, yet shimmering and rough; something they can be proud to call a definitive statement.
As far as Australian punk is concerned, Downer Edition not only shatters the boundaries applied by that descriptor, it does so with the lushest attack conceivable. Like their (admitted) influence, the enigmatic Ohio legends of obscurity, V3, seldom has the f*** word been sung (repeatedly) in such a believable and poetic manner. The visceral pounding of melodies throughout the album transforms their inspirations; desperation, neuroses, trauma, survival, hooliganism, violence, hope, rejuvenation, and their hometown of Sydney’s full architectural and social scope – from a realm of intangibility to the very, very tangible. In the words of Mitch, “We’re influenced by Sydney as a whole, whether it be the hot and muggy concrete streets of the West and South West, the “glorious beaches” of South Sydney, the racial tensions left over from the putrid Cronulla riots of 2006, the pompous and superficial fake tan/ bleached teeth combo suburbs of Bondi, as well as Sydney’s iconography: The Harbour, the Bridge, the Opera House, Kings Cross. All the desperation embedded in and around these areas, including the eternal influx of troubled people looking to get into trouble, is our experience and main influence.”
Unified on ‘RBB,’ ruminating on ‘92’, chasing the escape on ‘Rave Slave,’ and unwillingly defiant on ‘Warrior,’ Downer Edition reaches past the wild ride of Dogging – this truly is the album that Low Life have been threatening to make for nearly a decade.
Downer Edition is out on March 15 on Goner Records in North America, Alter in Europe, and Cool Death in Australia.
Alter follow on from the bilingual dark ambient theatricals of Liberez with this four track EP from veteran Hamburg producer Christoph De Babalon. As an affiliate of Digital Hardcore, Fat Cat and the recently founded V I S, CDB has tirelessly explored the intersections of breakcore, illbient and drum and bass. His work is at once uncompromising yet stylish – broken, punishing rhythms collide with dreary, doom-laden melodies and those eerie in-between spaces of vintage Unit Moebius or Deutsch Nepal. With Hectic Shakes he delivers a meditation on the ‘inner abyss’, the sort of abyss that lulls the listener into his sound world with next to no resistance. “Shakes and Shivers” fixates itself on deceptively playful grooves with eerie, nightbus-to-nowhere atmospherics whilst opening cut “Harakiri” manages to distort familiar jungle tropes into something even die hard devotees of the sound will find fresh. The EP closes with what we can only describe as a homage to 90s ambient techno in a ruff, post-hardcore fashion. Skittering drums weave in and out of longing, futurist synth lines and enough breakdowns to satisfy the dance floor.
Southend-on-Sea experimental outfit Liberez deliver the end result of a year and a half long recording process, an amorphous new line up and advanced studies in sound collage. On ‘Way Through Vulnerability’ new members Reay, Saunders and Ugarteburu channel the projects previous outings on Alter and Night School by conveying the same firm grounding in rhythm, though this time via Flamenco time signatures and eerie, repetitive clapping. At times sounding indebted to the ‘tribal ambient’ of decades gone by, at times sounding fresh in their approach (‘Here is the Proof’ is of note) the trio manage to export motifs from Italian avant-garde circles, UK industrial and dare we say post-rock all at the same time. The sound design on ‘Derelict Intentions’ makes heavy use of background ambience and bleak, world-weary minimalism to lull us into a false sense of calm before harsh and unexpected blurts of noise break the equilibrium. In doing so they swiftly side-step any preconceptions of ‘easy listening’ and opt instead to drag us deeper down into their own dark waters. At times we almost seem to delve into lost theatre soundtrack territory; fragmented neo-classical elements dance with punchy drum machines (‘Cara En La Foto Pt II’) and things draw to a close with the end credit worthy swansong of the album’s title track. The group repeatedly utilise Basque country language, Hungarian dialect and ancient Russian to lend their compositions a cross-cultural underpinning and eschew any clear geographic origin, a decision which all but adds to the perplexities of their unique brand of electro-acoustic purgatory.
Vast, expansive and introspective works utilising place-specific found sound on this second Cremation Lily LP for Alter. Contemplating mortality, illness and the perennial bleakness of British winter in a seaside town we find Zen Zsigo experimenting with piano, violin, synthesiser and walkman tape players. Layering field recordings of the Hastings shoreline atop druggy, stretched out 303 basslines and snippets of spoken word there seems to be an overarching thematic of memory and reflection at play. From vignettes of crumbling glass and bittersweet drones through to sprawling, semi-rhythmical pieces (‘As a sea creature…’) it seems as if Zsigo is trawling the coast for fragments of its former glory. The end result of his study manages to echo the work of Yoran, Leyland Kirby and even Jacob Kirkegaard yet the rare moments where he lays bare his own vocal narrative seemingly transforms In England Now, Underwater into sonic diary territory. Mixing salt-water soaked cassette loops with haunting, minimalist piano motifs and warped recordings of crashing waves and bird noise an intense atmosphere of Ballard’s drowned world is evoked through sound.
Departing from the band based setup of previous releases, Acolytes continue their exploration of loop based paradigms with Rupture. The release expands upon the murky jarring patchwork asthetic of the 2012 release, replacing brooding song structures with a more driving, visceral and relentless sound.
Rupture encapsulates the paranoia and agnst felt in an increasingly unrecognisable world. Liquified rhythms attempt to define an unmappable headspace typified by IO overload and wired hyperactivity, become mired in deep delays and sedate unease.
While ostensibly computer music, tracks such as “feelings 2” deviate from the clinical “on the grid” sensibilities associated with the genre, where out of sync drums and synth lines in eliptic orbits take it to messier lofi territories with no defined sense of shape or tempo.
YEAH YOU are MYKL JAXN and ELVIN BRANDHI. A father-daughter fluke who started making music as often as possible in 2013, under a variety of inordinate conditions; much of which has been made on drives in the family car. VHOD (the Slovene word for Entrance) sees Yeah You continuing to inscribe within the interstices. A new access point. Turning roadsides, refuse hubs, traffic islands and pylons into backdrops for this particular series of detergent routs.
Nick Klein’s new record, ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin,’ was recorded in Brooklyn, NY, on an economic set-up. With a spartan modular synth and Korg MS-20, Klein describes the process of recording as “focused around the relentless role of filtering out and managing the anxiety of existing in a metropolitan area in the current political climate.”
Though ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin’ starts on an almost uplifting note with the glistening melodic cycles of ‘Burning Mattresses,’ the asphyxia soon takes over, and the vertigo of the metropolis comes into lurching clarity for the remainder of the record. The height of the following track, ‘Peña Adobe,’ has the panicked terror of an archaic ringtone hitting the volume of an air raid siren, ‘Smelling The Sheets’ skulks rather than bangs, its momentum stifled and edgy, as if not enough was on Klein’s side when making his way to the studio that day. The anguish doesn’t taper, but rather culminates in the despairingly titled ‘The God In Vodka.’ At nearly 14 minutes, its disfigured rave stabs and blunted military tattoo-snare furiously pace into a clammy, toxic rush.
Despite the wry funerary image of its title, ‘Lowered Flaming Coffin’ is far from a lament for better times, nor a report on descending into contemporary hell. Like a frenzied metronome, the record syncs itself with the dynamics of unrest in order to grasp the brazen tactics that perpetuate the seemingly boundless inequalities in the world today. Klein forges this link with his own minutiae in stride, tethering the conceptual motivations to a fidgeting, personalized atmosphere of rhythmic dysphoria.
Pitching agitation in this way, the record unapologetically presents itself as a soundtrack for participatory intervention, forcefully side-stepping the queues
Mastered by Jack Callahan. Photos by Lazaro Rodriguez. Dedicated To Shannon Michael Cane.
However you might try to find the words for it, Total Control’s caustic charm is stunning and oblique. A sensible account of the band typically focuses on its parts—the associated groups, the touring configurations, etc.—as if finding ways by which Total Control is divisible gleans critical information for breaking through their cryptic sheen. With tonic, wry twists, and forever employing aphoristic brevity for the comic/cosmic dynamite that it is best reserved for, the band seems to indulge this with each new release, or tour, or whatever’s put on the counter. The bands European tour tape from 2015 was a sure reminder of this.
Their new 12″, ‘Laughing At The System,’ is a succinct statement, but it feels like the sharpest thing they’ve ever assembled. Written and recorded over the past couple of years in various lounge rooms, bedrooms, and rehearsal studios, across Melbourne, regional Victoria, and Western Australia, Al Montfort, Daniel Stewart, James Vinciguerra, Mikey Young, and Zephyr Pavey are—for the record—all accounted for in the process.
‘Laughing At The System’ is bookended by a title track in two parts. The scattered mania of the opener is an unsettling beginning, with cascading madhouse-riffs somehow finding a ricocheting unison. The closing part has the familiar head-charge of Total Control’s most gnashing moments, with the guitars balancing the equation between running-too-fast and drinking-too-fast in one queasy commitment. With a brilliantly acerbic wit, we’re implored to gather that there’s some equivalences here. And it’s this kind of impulse that’s kept up throughout the 12″.
Drizzled with Vinciguerra’s fraught fills, which have the rare quality of being unmistakably his in both electronic and acoustic form, this punctuation comes in and out of focus between elegiac moments and breezy experimentation, the latter including the elated instrumental ‘Cathie and Marg.’ Throughout, Stewart scripts a tumultuous wake for a flatlining reality, forever nudging the listener to second-guess themselves about the sincerity and intent. Far from cynical, but earnestly neurotic, the potency of the atmosphere that Total Control has mustered across ‘Laughing At The System’ registers as a deeply commanding, though bleak, psychedelicism for the future.
Mutant jungle forms, hazy glitch experiments and trance inducing downtempo collide with sharp percussion and dense low end on this latest Alter 12”. Helm’s recent ‘World In Action’ EP for The Trilogy Tapes is reworked by a whole host of favourites including Laurel Halo and Parris who offer up two distinctly different takes on ‘Blue Scene’. No Symbols boss Beneath turns his hand to title track ‘World in Action’ with that typically murky, deconstructed club aesthetic whilst Parisian mainstay Low Jack gets deep on the A2, his five and a half minute version of ‘Candy’ sounding like a cross between Nuno Canavarro and Whitehouse. Delivering what might well be the records most subdued moment, Brussels’ Sky H1 slows ‘After Dark’ way way down with some barely there auto-tuned vocals helping to bring things into the fold.
There’s an ordeal that underpins Low Life’s ‘Dogging,’ and looking back at it, perhaps this was inevitable given the album’s exceptionally derogatory attitude to its own scattered sense of time and debris. It’s an attitude that’s been hosed down in bore water-stained stupor, with all the anguished but forgivable hope and charm of plain packaged cigarettes.
‘Dogging’ crawled into the world desperately and painfully. Originally slated for release on Brisbane’s singular Negative Guest List Records in 2012, the label’s owner sadly passed away before it got there. It eventually emerged two years later as a split between two labels from the band’s home turf of Sydney, Disinfect Records and R.I.P. Society. It’s fitting that the latter had reissued Venom P. Stinger’s Dugald McKenzie-era material the year prior—arguably the only other Australian band that compares to the tough, shit-kicking intensity found on ‘Dogging.’
Comprised of Mitch Tolman, Cristian O’Sullivan, and Greg Alfaro at this point (the current 2017 line-up includes Dizzy from Oily Boys), the reckless ferocity and defeatist’s humour is pointedly nihilistic. It’s not kitsch nihilism either, it’s the kind that enlivens. Indexing happiness, fear, lust, grief, and sorrow, the wry indulgences outlined in Tolman’s coded and scheming lyrics amount to white-knuckle sincerity. It’s disarming, but it’s blunted by a weighty smirk. If all this weren’t delivered through a sardonic curled lip, the violence at the edge of it all would perhaps come off a little less real. There’s a bitterly angry confrontation with the contemporary Australian psyche once you enter Low Life’s estate.
Thugged out and at pace, there’s a genuine rush to ‘Dogging.’ The mindless logic of ‘harder and faster’ could never get you to where they were at this point. Even at the marginally calmer moments the guitars glance you like a headache revealing just how bad it is. There’s no respite, but on the the whole it’s a very functional arrangement between the three of them. Each song is belted out with a short, sharp fit, with some synthesisers occasionally glistening out at the edges. The restraint is all the more fierce as it amplifies everything that’s fucked about them. Low Life pull you through it all on all their terms, and that impact feels as untimely and excessive now as it did then.
Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ is the horrifically wry new album from The Bomber Jackets. Following on from ‘Lister,’ their debut for Alter, ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ has a restlessness that takes broader strokes. It finds and holds a register of meandering hope by setting the perverted detail of domestic minutiae against an acutely self-conscious melancholy that cynically daydreams its way into an awkward middle-ground between profundity and platitude.
Following the stop-start formation that plagued the group’s early days, the three-piece of Russell Walker, Daniel Bolger, and Sian Dorrer remain intact. Both Walker and Bolger will be familiar from the ticklish post-punk of The Pheromoans, whilst Dorrer has a varied CV with groups such as Plug, and Ravioli Me Away, and with involvement across London DIY nodes.
At times they give it a bit of a desaturated garage bump, other times there’s the throb of marching mono-synth wave. ‘Deranged Sauce Mum’ comes off as a chopped and screwed hardcore, though with Walker’s vocals it’s less gurning glee and more furrowed brow, it should be said. There are very many disparate elements across ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ that come to give the new album a kind of uneasy grace, which is perhaps the groups singular force, the unchaining of an ingenious familiarity that’s dizzyingly bizarre and equally bleak.
Lyrically and musically their new album contains the traces of many surfaces both interior and exterior. Its dream-like qualities are formed through a kind of musical frottage, always preserving the trace of the hand, arriving at its surreal heights through fidgety non-sequiturs of an aesthetically acerbic persuasion. In this way it never quite replicates anything that you feel to be present in its parts. ‘Kudos To The Bomber Jackets’ indexes petty despondency for better days, imagining some unforeseen and unremarkable circumstance that makes up for it all.
Welwyn Garden City’s former shredded wheat factory is on the cover. Redevelopment plans for the site are in progress.
If there’s a single guiding motif to this debut recording from Love Theme, it’s the melancholic throb of love learnt and love lost, a descent that tumbles and slips through the overall feeling of looking back. As intimately and carefully as its parts cohesively lament a narrative, it’s the after-image that catches your breath, like a memory morphing as it is observed.
Comprised of Alex Zhang Hungtai of the now defunct project Dirty Beaches, along with Austin Milne, and Simon Frank, ‘Love Theme’ is arranged from an improvised session with twin saxophones, synthesizer, percussion, drum machine, and voice. Over the course of a year the material was edited remotely from the members’ home cities of Montreal, London, LA and Taipei.
The record’s sullen ambience is never left too long to set in. The aching wane of the saxophone arrangements frisk the propulsive aggro moments of the mixed percussion, forcing a melancholic halo upon the queasy stupor of the synthetic swing that closes each side of the record. It’s a bizarre lust for life that’s being divined from equal parts dislocation and invigoration, a potent remedy which perhaps Love Theme can call their own.
Percolating and finding form over time, the record instinctively follows a travel narrative, moving across a series of landscapes, reflecting the innate experiences of the expressions and voices that were first collected in South London back in February 2015.
Rawabet is a live album from Helm documenting a special performance that took place on a bill with Maurice Louca in front of a sold-out audience at the Rawabet Theatre in Cairo on October 22nd, 2015. It’s also a snapshot of a period of pan-continental touring which took Helm from Egypt to Austria and then to Canada in three days. During these shows material from his recently released Olympic Mess album was re-imagined, expanded and performed alongside new and “other” material to add an alternative perspective to the original recordings. What ended up being performed in Cairo that night owed a lot to the energy of the city and thanks to a superb recording and mixing job by Khyam Allami, Rawabet can be seen as the definitive live document of Helm to date.
Live at Rawabet Theatre, Cairo, Egypt, 22 October 2015
There is a playfully cryptic euphoria embedded in Luke Younger’s work as Helm. An expansive constellation of references from across electronic music converge in his output, driving its narrative in and out of the heights of exploratory sound practices, covertly repurposing pop’s prosthetic limbs on the side. His latest record, World In Action, broaches the ever-present—and ever agitated—political thread that has been pulled through the project’s most opaque regions with a reinvigorated immediacy and purpose.
Recorded across East London, South-East Kent and Snaresbrook Crown Court at the height of the UK media’s attempt at divining integrity from the orchestrated turbulence of Brexit, World In Action presents four pieces that juggle the documentation of this particular moment with the desire to discern motivation from despair.
Frenetic woodwind instrumentation is guided through cyclonic synth pads in slow motion, while Valentina Magaletti’s percussion scatters the surface, scrambling the after-image of each piece as it propels us to the next. With a nod to industrial rock’s breakbeat excursions, field recordings drenched in longer than long ago gather these elements into a worn path through unimaginable terrain.
The track titles recollect a time of just accountability and presence in the UK’s mass media. This is a direct manoeuvre on Younger’s part, setting World In Action up as a sceptical, yet hopeful work, unafraid of the deep political anguish that underpins its intent.
The second album from Basic House takes a sober turn towards the thematic intersection of occult knowledge and globalised black operations, brokering a piercing anxiety throughout from the tension between the scale of the politics being invoked and the familiarity of the covert identity tactics to music cultures, subcultures, and the like.
The opening track to I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me turns from a naive fatalism to an addled stream of consciousness that flirts, just about, with psychosis, establishing the record’s push-and-pull between the local and the global, the personal and public. Swarming, hinged string sections light the way ahead, barely hinting at the edges of a space with a rhythm, as if attempting to induce claustrophobia with the engulfing rush of total darkness.
In moments of continually tapering collages, Basic House appeals to paranoia. Never sustained to the point of exhaustion, it frames the placid momentum of its quieter passages when seemingly domestic recordings collapse into cracked dub motifs. However, more critically, it signals the play between the hyper-vigilant mindset that seeks to protect itself and its order, and the intuitive processes by which we code the means for this into our social signalling and general communication. Are we not always constructing a code for black operations, and so then surely this is what occult knowledge is? If so, how have we come to pour vast amounts of money into State sanctioned modes of this? There’s paranoia in every direction. credits
Finnish multimedia artist Jan Anderzén returns to Alter in characteristically singular style under his Tomutonttu guise. Kevätjuhla (translated as “Spring Celebration”) is his second release for the label following a split 7″ with Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010 (ALT02) and his first vinyl long player since 2011. Lately Jan has been busy within visual art, making mosaics, quilts and creating installation work for which the music of Kevätjuhla was initially composed. Inspired by the multitudes of mold and the microbial life, the installation Kevätjuhla was built as a listening station that sought a bond between sound, the earth and organic matter. Sound was sent to speakers through cables sprouting like stems from a pile of dirt with a single coleus growing on top. A graphic score of sticks, orange peel and party debris was hung next to the installation. The score is now visualised on the albums cover, rightly depicting the visual aesthetic of Tomutonttu.
In many ways Kevätjuhla is a landmark release for Anderzén as it sees both his visual and sonic practices coalescing as one. As for Tomutonttu specifically, it is a release that both acknowledges the projects past whilst also looking firmly to the future. Electronic and acoustic instrumentation blends together confidently and more refined than before with a minimal and razor sharp approach to production. Each track becoming an integral part of the records’ trippy cut & paste narrative, leaving the listener wholly unaware when one bit ends and another begins. Despite the abstract way in which Anderzén composes, this is still music which has a pop sensibility placed fully at its core. A confounding array of musical references such as folk, hip-hop and the colourful nexus of Yellow Magic Orchestra could be thrown up here, but with Kevätjuhla Anderzén has ultimately created a form of music that goes beyond genre classification and fully into the realm of ‘other’.
Alter is proud to announce the release of ‘Grey Scale’ by Japanese Industrial duo Carre. Using a mix of synthesisers, custom made electronics and guitar, Carre build their distinctive take on industrial music from the ground up. Originally released as a CD in Japan last year, the music on ‘Grey Scale’ was composed for an exhibition by Carre and painter Sakura Kondo with the audio and visual work created through a mutual creative exchange. The end result saw Kondo’s abstract paintings come to life as bite-sized Industrial wormholes, evoking thoughts of a more textural Conrad Schnitzler or some sort of lost Cabaret Voltaire bedroom recording.
Love Means Taking Action’ is the new album from the multifaceted Copenhagen-based artist Loke Rahbek under his alias Croatian Amor. It is the first full-length Croatian Amor recording since 2014’s ‘The Wild Palms,’ a release that was made available on cassette for a single month, and only in exchange for a nude self-portrait.
‘Love Means Taking Action’ will receive a wider, conventional release on vinyl through Posh Isolation, on CD through Alter, and across digital platforms.
The artist will also be giving away stems of the entire record. A free download will be made available on www.lovemeanstakingaction.com from September 30th, the album’s release date. With the stems comes an open invitation for anyone to use them as they see fit, making them public commons.
Since the inception of the project, Croatian Amor has dealt with a mixture of fiction and reality, often using real events and places as a platform for a largely fictional play. Where there is playfulness, there is revelation.
On ‘Love Means Taking Action’—without a doubt the project’s strongest work to date—the effect of the perpetual collaging of information is keenly felt. Short, unnerving moments appear with slick familiarity. Voices repeat and quietly glitch through tonal shifts. We are ushered along by the shuddering effect of the samples and field recordings on the pristine synthesis, with motifs and plot lines presented as quickly as they disintegrate. We are enticed to find comfort here but we are not guided through a space as with much ambient music.
The textures and terrains that ‘Love Means Taking Action’ present form an array of scenarios with what at times feels like a punishing degree of indifference to the listener. We are bluntly shown snippets of impassioned architectures. It is a process that draws the listener in through alienation. There is something in the way that the music and track titles progress which is not unlike the experience of submitting to social media news feeds, where love stories become the neighbours of civil wars and selfies, and reports from refugee camps are presented next to advertisements for lifestyle magazines.
‘Love Means Taking Action’ lets the fragmented motifs of fictions tenderly tug at reality’s patchwork veil.
In the artist’s own words, ‘Love Means Taking Action’ is “twelve tracks of very human electronic music.”
Conceptual beat-maker Nick Klein returns with ‘The Lonesome Dealer’ 12” for Alter.
Four disparate, industrial-tinged tracks that demonstrate a rough-hewn synthesis of noise and techno, ‘The Lonesome Dealer’ is born from a geographically transient point in Klein’s life spent between Miami and NYC. Despite this, Klein has turned personal disruption around to make his most focussed statement yet as an artist. From the hypnotic “Caberet Voltaire gone Reggaeton” patter of ‘Chats With Lucy’ – with its bruised drum machine rhythms and a jabbering refrain that embodies the track’s title – to the crawling computer acid of ‘Christian Rock Concert’, Klein teases out melodies from beneath layers of muddied beats on a record that is as pacifying as it is jarring. Dark and wavy club music for the heads, if you like. ‘Do You Want To Crash’ is perhaps the clearest realisation of this idea; its crescendoing din of noise giving way to a laser-cut synth line that shimmers like a diamond in dry ice, while ’Pain Management Resource’ is built around a clatter of hi-hats and wobbly polyrhythm that bounces along with a kind of ominous glee.
Having studied sculpture and performance in Miami, Nick Klein has largely dealt in sound-based art since moving to New York, but with focus on the potential of a democratic dialogue platform through electronic music, scale in volume, and the active role of touring performer.
Along with Miguel Enrique Alvariño, he co-runs Brooklyn’s Primitive Languages label which started from a shipping container in Bushwick’s “Punk Alley”. The pair have so far released sessions from the likes of Profligate, Balloon Movement, Pure Matrix, and Hubble.
New album from JS Aurelius of Destruction Unit, Marshstepper and the Ascetic House collective. A collection of field recordings and real-time live-coded audio compositions based on algorithms used for spoofing, hacking and otherwise sabotaging GNSS-based unmanned aircraft systems.
Philadelphia native and arch noise provocateur M Ax Noi Mach, aka Robert Francisco, releases On The Edge; his first full-length LP in six years, out March 11th on Alter.
Recorded once again with the help of Arthur Rizk (Prurient, Power Trip, Cold World, etc) at Salomons Gate in 2014, this new record chronicles some of M Ax Noi Mach’s heaviest, most intense recordings to date; their minimal, bare immediacy comes from primal desires brought to a boiling point in the US city he calls his home.
“M Ax Noi Mach has always been a primal endeavour,” Francisco told Noisey in an interview last year, “and it definitely comes from a private place. I’ve always had a fire inside of me; I’ve always had a feeling that I’ve had to release. Pure intuition. Pure rage, the animal let out of the cage.”
Musical touchstones on this 8-track album move from Nurse With Wound through Prurient and SPK. It’s an unholy, clamorous din spewed up from the bowels of hell. It’s the industrial trepanning of your psyche. The crunchy distortion of ‘Walking at Night’, album highlight ‘Second Glance’ and ‘Indulgence’, deal in anguished, hateful vocals – with words spat out like flames of fury. Then there’s the relentlessly abrasive drone of ‘Surrounded’, the muted, glossolalia-like mutterings of ‘American Child’ and the warped synth poetics of ‘White Heat’; all in all, a visceral, brutal record that absolutely refuses to let up.
The shadowy Robert Francisco has been a vital artist in the US underground since the late 1990s. He has done time in the power electronics unit Angeldust as well as Veiled (with Arnau Sala of Exoteric Continent and the Anomia label.)
But M Ax Noi Mach is the nexus of his poetic, visual, and sonic pursuits: his discography stretches back to 1999 and his immensely powerful live show has gained the project legendary status in electronic music circles across Europe and the US. The defining principle of M Ax Noi Mach’s sound is that it has resisted easy genre categorisation, remaining a singular rock through waves of American underground culture; in it, the shattered pieces of several strategies of urban, extreme musics cohere in a way that only Francisco can envision.
This new LP follows on from 2010’s In the Shadows.
Pheromoans mark their ninth year of existence with the release of fourth album, ‘I’m On Nights’, out on the 12th of February
A largely electronic affair, this new ten-track LP – recorded in Manor House, north east London – refracts vocalist Russell Walker’s stony poeticisms through a lens of analogue synths, while etching drum machine clicks and spaced out keyboard ditties into the bigger picture. Guitars and bass still make an appearance – helmed by Christian Butler, Alex Garran and James Tranmer – but they’ve mostly been eclipsed by the scrappy, artificial beats which now underline Walker’s diary-like, ennui-soaked rhymes.
Album opener ‘Wizard’ – with its blocky, Bizarre Love Triangle-esque intro and unnerving pins and needles crackle – jolts you awake with charges of experimental noise. Then there’s the plaintive synth pads on the LP’s eponymous, stripped back tear-jerker and the acid squelch of ‘Depressed Wobble’. Because, with ‘I’m On Nights’, musical touchstones take on a myriad cult guises, from the downbeat minimal wave of Solid Space or Absolute Body Control, to a hypothetical vision of Dan Treacy crooning caustically over ‘Mari’ by Martin Rev. That’s not forgetting, of course, the outlier crop of new wave-y post-punk bands which this time around see the likes of Datblygu and Young Marble Giants step up to the plate. And, as always, there’s the requisite nod to all things DIY and Messethetics.
Walker says he hope this new direction will create some distance away from a certain demographic; “…An attempt to alienate further the other dads at the nursery gates who kept slapping my back firmly and saying ‘nice work keeping our music alive compadre’, and trying to graft their aviator shades onto my forehead and contorting my fingers into the devils headset,” he explains.
Featuring titles like ‘Don’t Spread It Round College’ and ‘Brad’s Crush’, the bulk of the LP’s lyrical content reaches back into Walker’s 16-18 year old psyche; “It was at J. Sainsbury (Produce) in Uxbridge where I discovered the joy of working alone at night unimpeded and free to delve further into my hitherto unexplored imagination…!!” he explains. And it’s this theme of (oft night-time) employment which cuts through the biro scribbles of Walker’s quotidian missives; “temp work suits me / shift work corrects me” he opines on finale track ‘Rock & Pop Quarrel’.
Hailing from the holy trinity of England’s most southern locales – London, Brighton and Hertfordshire – Pheromoans currently consist of Russell Walker on vocals, Christian Butler on guitar & electronics, Alex Garran on bass & electronics, James Tranmer on guitar & electronics, Scott Reeves on drums & electronics and Dan Bolger on keyboards.
Mnemosyne is the new album from Berlin based, Italian/Belgian duo Lumisokea.
Shedding the bass heavy rollers found on last years Apophenia EP for Opal Tapes, Mnemosyne sees the duo welcoming space and tension into the fold.
Most of the groundwork for the record was made during a week long residency at the W.O.R.M Studios in Rotterdam which saw the duo make full use of the studios collection of synthesisers from the 60’s and 70’s. The improvisations with these peculiar machines were subsequently edited and combined with heavily processed recordings of gamelan bells, prepared piano, cello and acoustic drums. A meticulous two year period of reworking and reflection followed before finally arriving at what you have here; Mnemosyne.
An exploration of the grey area of sounds that vacillate between electronic and acoustic and aim to show their coalescence and kinship, like shadows of forgotten sonic ancestors. Shards of oblique melody merge with slow-burning rhythms, sudden changes of scenery melt into fog-drenched sonic artifacts.
In their own words, “The whole process felt like like cultivating a garden of the imagination which is no rush to be opened to the visitors. With this full length album we explore the more nocturne, narrative and twilight-like angle of Lumisokea. When listening back to it, we had strong images evoking times in an unidentified or unactualized past, like places and events that could have existed, but then didn’t. Hence our reference to Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek goddess of Memory.” – Lumisokea, 2015
Emerging from the murk and dirt of their Cardiff city home, Chain Of Flowers have revealed their long-awaited debut album. Recorded at Monnow Valley Studios in Wales, Chain Of Flowers is a dense eight-track opus of heavy shoegaze sonics and urgent post-punk. The band’s razor sharp attention to classic songwriting nous means the record dips and dives between euphoric, hazy melody (‘Glimmers Of Joy’) and overwhelming gloom (‘Bury My Love’), all whilst retaining a breathless pace. Lead track ‘Crisis’ epitomises this frantic personality exquisitely, skirting between sludgy atmospherics and hardcore’s punchy immediacy with aplomb. The six-piece sowed their seeds through the release of six songs over the past three years (via the band’s own Swine Language tape label), cutting their teeth on dates alongside Iceage, Cremation Lily, The Fall, The Smear, Shallow Sanction, Eagulls, Nothing and more before decamping to Monnow Valley for the four-day session that spawned their debut LP. “We dropped ourselves into the middle of nowhere and hammered it out with next to no sleep available to us. The urgency and delirium of the situation helped us,” explains the band’s vocalist Joshua Smith. “Though we only had 96 hours in a studio to physically make it what we wanted, this record is the product of our last three years as a band and beyond that as individuals. We spent a lot of time in our space writing these songs and we’ve also spent a lot of time ironing them out through playing as and when and wherever we have been able to. ”Mixed over six months by New York-based Ben Greenberg (Uniform, The Men, Pygmy Shrews), the LP sees Chain Of Flowers break free of their locality. “It’s been a drawn out but very necessary sonic exorcism for us,” explains Josh. “We are happy that it will see the light of day.”
Uniform formed in New York City in late 2013 when old friends Ben Greenberg (Hubble, The Men, Pygymy Shrews) and Michael Berdan (York Factory Complaint, Drunkdriver, Believer/Law) realized they lived on the same street. Their impulsive collaboration quickly yielded Our Blood / Of Sound Mind and Body single. The six tracks that comprise the equally abrasive but more refined Perfect World have been coming together between tours and work ever since.
The music that Greenberg and Berdan conjure up under the Uniform moniker is immediate, aggressive, and even primal in form, but it plumbs untold depths. Berdan’s venomous voice mines deeply personal themes of resentment, regret, reflection and addiction over the hum of Greenberg’s almost impossibly disciplined guitar, bass synth, and drum machine lines. Greenberg uses the word “templatized” to describe their approach to writing songs for Uniform.
“There’s this set bunch of gear to create sounds, and it only creates sound through a certain process, or within its own limitations,” Greenberg said. “The goal of songwriting is to see how many different kinds of sounds you can get from the same basic process and machine.”
On Perfect World, that machine is firing on all cylinders. The guitar is run through a cheap ’80s preamp marketed to metal kids. The drum machine is equally no-frills, an Akai XR20 that Greenberg says “most people wouldn’t want to keep around.” These humble components are combined with noisy synth and Berdan’s profound howling to form something much greater. Post-punk, synthpunk, and industrial traditions are borrowed from as needed, but the constraints placed on the process mean the result is unique to Uniform. Berdan describes his lyrics as the consequence of feeling “so full of pain, confusion, deep selfishness, and general animosity that you make some horrible mistakes and have to learn how to forgive yourself for them.” Perfect World feels like the sum of all that pain and confusion, but it also feels like the catharsis.
Vegas Fountain is the new full length album from Copenhagen based industrial duo Damien Dubrovnik (aka Posh Isolation founders Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard). Since 2013’s ‘First Burning Attraction’ LP, Rahbek and Stadsgaard have continued to be consistently busy as label bosses but even more so as artists, performing more frequently worldwide and building a reputation for their fierce and powerful live show. It was during this time as well that the duo honed their craft in the studio and found a working rhythm where their live performance fed into the studio work and vice versa. Using this process to feed off the springboard of Rahbek’s words and imagery, it not only helped shape a stronger state of equilibrium in the project but also allowed the duo to challenge themselves, both musically and emotionally, exploring concepts like relations, performance, sexuality and their breaking points. An element of this was teased with last years ‘Patterns of Penetration’ single, but here it arrives full force with Vegas Fountain – Damien Dubrovnik’s strongest work yet. In the first couple of minutes into opening track “On It’s Double”, you get a sense that things have moved forward artistically in Rahbek and Stadsgaard’s world these past couple of years. The clear production breathes a subtlety into some of the sonics here that perhaps wasn’t revealed through the murk on previous records, heightening a tension that at some points breaks and dissolves into something almost melancholic – evoked by the reflective landscapes of “Interior 2: See Water Glass” and “Interior 3: Matching Window Blinds”. The attack remains however, with the punctuating saw toothed bass notes and screaming tones of “Interior 1: Upper Lip” (considered “problematic” to cut by the mastering engineer”), and the finale of the title track which has all the drama and explosive euphoria of their live show.
Vegas Fountain is co-released by Alter and Posh Isolation.
Acolytes is the self titled debut album by London based enigma D. Shan. Following up a puzzling (yet well received) 7″ on the Pheromoans’ Savoury Days label, Acolytes sees Shan develop his sound into areas of greater fidelity, complexity and a unique non-linear approach to song writing. Reference points could be drawn towards Art Bears, the Cold Storage scene, The Residents and Ralph Records roster, but they would all fall short because ultimately Acolytes is a highly unclassifiable record – which in 2014 is no mean feat. Features guest appearances from D. Bolger (The Pheromoans / The Bomber Jackets) and D. Aird (Vindicatrix) – parental advisory, explicit lyrics.
Deas is the new alias of London based guitarist Cameron Deas. ‘String Studies’ is unlike anything else recorded previously by Deas and is his first LP of all electronic based material. Recorded at home between February and March of 2014, the 8 pieces on this LP were recorded live with little or no overdubs using Deas’ 12 string acoustic guitar as a sampling source to trigger and in turn be manipulated by a modular system. The immaculate production and scalpal sharp twists and turns found within the music display a remarkable level of confidence and intuition in Deas’ new process, which makes it difficult to believe that this is his first documented work within the electronic medium. Mastered by John Hannon at No Recording Studio.
Popular feedback / questions from Deas’ recent European tour:
“Why don’t you play the guitar? I thought it was a guitar concert, I’m disappointed.” “Do you live in Berlin/Why do you not live in Berlin?” “How did you come up with the name “Cameron Dee-az”?”
Cremation Lily is the project of UK based Z. Zsigo. For the past 5 years Zsigo has been consistently working under most people’s radars with his distinctly personal take on power electronics, developing a modest cult following and a respectable catalog of releases through his Strange Rules label. In 2012 the project was brought to the attention of Steve Underwood from Harbinger Sound who subsequently released the ‘Fertility Servent’ 7” and the project began to gather a more visible live presence thanks to gigs with the likes of Consumer Electronics, Con-Dom, Natural Assembly and on the east coast of America too with Alberich and Âmes Sanglantes. Now Alter is pleased to present the first longform vinyl collection of Cremation Lily material – Fires Frame The Silhouette is compiled mostly from reworked and remixed tracks from previous CL cassette releases. All pieces are thematically linked by a time and place in Zsigo’s life and bringing them together creates a record of masterful atmosphere which ranks high in the industrial / PE canon and closes a chapter in the project’s timeline. Mastered by Arthur Rizk and cut to vinyl by Noel Summerville.
Alter give Bass Clef’s self-released ‘Acid Tracts’ a double vinyl pressing. It originally appeared as a digital release on the modular maestro’s Magic + Dreams label in 2013, spiralling seven “tracts” of intricately detailed acid dub feeling out ground between KFW, Tapes and more recent A Guy Called Gerald releases. It’s a quintessentially English sound displaying Ralph Cumbers’ talents, and is perhaps best viewed through the prism of vintage IDM. As with his outings for Punch Drunk and Idle Hands, it’s tilted towards the ‘floor, yet indulges more progressive inclinations, taking in knotty dancehall fibrillations, pinging electro-funk, loping hip hop, radiophonic dub, and restless techno oscillations.
