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RIP Daron Beck (Pinkish Black)
Dean Roberts, the experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist who performed in the New Zealand noise trio Thela before embarking on a series of solo projects and records with Autistic Daughters, died this week, his labels Erstwhile and Kranky announced yesterday (August 14). Roberts died in his sleep, Erstwhile’s Jon Abbey wrote, citing the musician’s sister. Roberts was 49 years old. Roberts, then a teenager, formed Thela with Dion Workman and Paul Douglas in New Zealand in the early 1990s, rising to prominence through Auckland’s free‐music scene with a pair of albums for the U.S. label Ecstatic Peace! The first, 1995’s Thela, was a landmark of rock minimalism, blending post-hardcore guitar thrums with noise sonics and sparse percussion. The following year’s Argentina added ambient elements and glints of melody, attracting admirers of the coalescing post-rock network, as well as laptop composers like Fennesz, who later collaborated with Douglas’ Rosy Parlane project… (in Pitchfork)
RIP DEAN ROBERTS (1975-2024)
 
It isn’t often an artist seems to materialize from nowhere with a sound so disinterested in following any conventional rules that it inspires equal measures bafflement and stunnedness, but in 2012 with the release of the ‘Unknown Vectors’ EP, Sd Laika did just that. Taking the already alien sounds of grime music as a starting off point and abrasively twisting them into something even more unknowable, Laika had developed a sound that defied any easy categorization. 2 years later Dummy Magazine would come to refer to this record as ‘one of the most jaw-droppingly inventive debuts in recent memory and ought to be considered “the other ‘Cold Mission'” (in reference to the highly acclaimed Logos LP from 2013)’. After ‘Unknown Vectors’ Sd Laika became something of a mystery, disappearing from the scene altogether leaving behind him a small, but hardcore cult fanbase convinced they’d glimpsed something very special in those 5 tracks. It was only in 2013 when Tri Angle approached Sd Laika that a new record began to take shape. This record would end up consisting of songs Sd Laika had recorded in 2011 and 2012, songs he’d convinced himself would never see the light of day. For various reasons it looked likely Unknown Vectors would wind up being Laika’s one and only ever release, which is why we’re so excited (and as huge fans, relieved) to announce the release of his debut album ‘That’s Harakiri.’
RIP PETER RUNGE AKA SD LAIKA
 
In his 1998 book ‘Energy Flash’, dance music journalist Simon Reynolds describes the music of Autechre as “unlovely but queerly compelling sound-sculptures: abstruse and angular concatenations of sonic glyphs, blocs of distortion, and mutilated sample-sones, with occasional light relief in the form of pretty pulse-scapes of chime color.”
I went looking for the pretty in Autechre – specially in the most recent period 2010-2020 – which has been largely unknown to me. I found these, there’s striking and superior electronic music material in this period, worth many 1h mixes for sure.
 
Monno (not Mono)
Got to put this mix together after listening to Islaja’s ‘Angel Tape’. Islaja, has recently opened for Godspeed You! Black Emperor in an April concert in Tampere in her home country. That must have been special. The concept around ‘Angel Tapes’ is also special. Islaja is Finnish artist Merja Kokkonen, and she has been around. Since her debut in 2004, she has released four albums on Finland’s Fonal Records, one on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, one on Berlin-based monika enterprise, one on Svart, as well as a series of singles on labels such as Not Not Fun and Root Strata. She is an inspired and accomplished artist worth keeping an eye.
The majority of the tracks here are short and sweet, mostly instrumental, like interludes, bridges between movements, teasing for whats next. Exception to NY musician Grey Reverend’s beautiful contribution to The Cinematic Orchestra’s Jason Swinscoe project “In Motion #1”, for which he invited some of his favourite musicians and producers to provide soundtracks to or musical re-imaginings of seminal work by great avant-garde film-makers. Well worth of your attention – even after all these years – if you’re into timeless music of remarkable emotional reach.  
Cascadian Pulse
Never assuming to be blown away by Cascadian Black Metal around the time it broke big sometime in the mid-00’s (in London it was playing in stores in Camden Town) and given the times of climate consciousness we’re living, this USBM movement is still deserving of its merits. Primordial Norse Black Metal is well known for atmosphere and ambiance (check early Kampfar, Windir and Enslaved) as it is for brutal assaults of demonic noise. The unadulterated beauty of the mountain come winter, the focus on atmosphere and the natural world play a big part in Cascadian as it did when a bunch of Norwegian kids decided to make bare chested photoshoots in -25 celsius snowy Bergen. Now some 15 years after the second wave, what bands like WITTR brought to the scene is nothing short of astonishing. Its not easy to redefine atmosphere and true emotion at this level of the underground, filled with brutality and chaos. This music, thriving with eco-centric messages has been largely responsible for attracting a whole new generation – from the biggest metal market – which at the turn of the millennium was hooked on Korn.
This is not a mix of Cascadian BM, but some of the bands featured here have something to say in that regard, as they use the atmosphere, the message and the aesthetic that characterises it. A strong message is also what Manchester based band A Forest of Stars delivers with their fantastic 2010 album, their best track (ever) opening this mix. Its a lesson in Atmospheric Black Metal of the highest caliber, for the ages.  
Pola X turns 25 years
Another small tribute to the great, late Scott Walker who scored the soundtrack for this little known French movie directed by Leos Carax and released in 1999. It stars the late Guillaume Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. The music in the movie, mostly instrumental, is testament to the increasingly experimental second coming in Scott’s career (he is 56 at the time of its release). It also features contributions by Sonic Youth and Bill Callahan, who also has a cameo appearance in the film.
The mix continues with some older bangers and new discoveries that were brought together by my purpose built library algorithm when digging for a combination of tags that included: art-rock, experimental, groove, polyrhythm. Mostly pleasant, happy tunes this time. Promise.  
Drone of Doom
Not intended but now that they’re lined up together, all these artworks speak volumes. There’s a pattern. These structures, complex, crumbling, ominous and massive. The Drones of Doom are coming. They are massive and repeating, they are patterned and when they’re not, they are the most intense. Its too hot, its burning, the smell and the heat, its all immense and on tv for your amusement.
Asva’s 2008 ‘What you Don’t Know is Frontier’ starts this epic journey, epic, profound, the work of patient introspection. This is cerebral music of the highest order. Do not reduce such monumental exercises of head music to elitism. Elitism is not what you know as societal, we must care but this is enlightenment, demanding of superior intellectuality and thought-provoking, multi-dimensional ceremonies. Stand still on the deserted beach, you must cancel the bar speakers at the distance, at all cost. Only then you will hear and you will be rewarded.
Fear Falls Burning, Sunn O))) and Black Boned Angel couldn’t make for a better arrangement. I struggle to keep the 1h standard. You didn’t expect the chops? Sorry.  
MSC ‘What You Say Of Power’
Following up on their thunderous 2020 collab release ‘I Don’t Ever Want To Be Alone’ with Rhode Island’s iconic experimental metal group The Body (of which MSC’s Zac Jones has long been a touring member), twin brothers Zac & Isaac Jones present their debut solo full length as MSC, ‘What You Say Of Power’. Backed up by a monumental homemade sound system and sprung forth from a time of motorbike accidents, broken skulls & van thefts, ‘What You Say Of Power’ is dense and physical, and yet at times also beautiful and delicate.
Growing up in a home in the rural Southeast of the United States where Religious music was the standard, the brothers found their own route, regularly listening to classical music before growing into fringe mainstays in the punk and metal scenes with projects such as GIANT and Braveyoung. They gradually evolved out of that scene, making their way towards the current project with the release of ‘I Close My Mind And Lock It’, two EPs released simultaneously that crystalised the musical elements and techniques loved and sought out by the brothers.
The soundsystem the brothers have built plays a central part of the story of this record and MSC as a project “is an extension of our path in music together”. One thing that can hamper electronic acts is the lack of control over the soundsystem available at different spaces, so MSC are grappling with that problem with a solution that speaks to their hardworking characters: building their own and touring it.  ↗ Tobira Records  
Gorgonn ‘Six Paths’
Back at the beginning of 2023 Japanese producer Gorgonn released Six Paths, a dense, crushing collection of bass experiments and soundsystem artillery that serves as both a treatise on Japanese Buddhism and as the culmination of years of “sci-fi steppas” and collaborations with some of the most ferocious practitioners of heavyweight bass experimentation, including The Bug, JK Flesh, Hype Williams and DJ Scotch Egg.
The six paths of the album’s title refers to the various branches that, according to the Japanese Buddhist faith, the soul is drawn down after death, depending on the karma accrued during one’s lifetime. Between an afterlife spent in the world of the celestials, or among the demigods, an eternity spent in suffering during a karmic cleansing in jigoku, a hellish purgatory presided over by the Japanese lord of death, Emma-ō, or a liminal existence wandering the earth as a hungry ghost, it’s reincarnation as another human, or animal, that Gorgonn takes aim at on the foreboding surge of a ‘Life As A Beast’ video. ↗ 180 Fact  
thoughts of hope?
A playlist of instrumental avant-metal containing a mix of hard bangers punctuated by beautiful near-acoustic melancholic interludes. Russian Circles and Isis are two of my favourite metal bands ever and here I serve 2 of the best tracks they have released in a stellar career. There’s a very special energy that radiates from playing instrumental metal at full blast, without the harsh vocals… even my wife can get through a few of these!
Mix Cover for Whitehorse & The Body. Having seen its release in 2019, as a limited tour edition CD when Whitehorse and The Body toured Australia together, this much sought after collaboration is finally seeing a vinyl release in two different pressings with the collaboration of Sweatlung and Tartarus Records. Released April 2022. Original painting by Jacob Rolfe.
Main Image: Hide.
A collection of released and unreleased material by Riccardo Dillon Wanke.
Mix Cover: “i” album cover released by Mazagran.
This is a mix I put together back in 2017 from a selection of released and previously unreleased tracks, kindly sent to me by Riccardo Dillon Wanke for a first instance of mixes I did then. RDW lives and works in Lisbon. He is a Multi-instrumentalist and Composer and he explores classical, improvised and exploratory music, focused on the diffusion of contemporary art. He is particularly interested in digital and analog manipulation of sound and its use into musical compositions.
Porto based composers and sound artists Rui Lima e Sérgio Martins fuse music compositions with performing art, theatre, cinema, documentaries and animation. Since meeting at the prestigious Soares dos Reis School of Arts in Porto back in 1997, they’ve been working together and collaborating with a vast range of visual and music artists. This is a collection of music scores for Theatre and Installations, kindly gifted to me by the musicians back in 2016.
Mix Cover: Visual for “Amigos Imaginários” (Imaginary Friends), a film-performance directed by Rita Barbosa with music by Rui Lima and Sérgio Martins.
Cover: Artwork for Ryuichi Sakamoto and Fennesz album Cendre released in 2007 on Commmons records, a label founded by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Avex Trax label founder, Max Matsuura.
Main Image: Still from ‘Stalker’ 1979. Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky.
“Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” – The Stalker
Mix Cover: Album cover for Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld album ‘Never Were The Way She Was’ released in April 2015 by Constellation records.
Video Excerpt: Rare bonus interview with Scott Walker from the HMV limited edition of the documentary ’30 Century Man’ directed by Stephen Kijak.
“This slow and heavy song, heavily influenced by acid folk soundscapes of the 70’s, tells a tale about the noble aristocracy of the sky. The hunting birds of prey that dominate the upper echelons of our world and punish with deadly force those who are not careful.” – Iskandr 2023
A painting of GYBE performing as seen in the brainwash.com website (with thanks to the artist, Eric Quach, for the scan). Eric is the Canadian musician behind Destroyalldreamers – a post-rock outfit heavily influenced by gybe and shoegaze – and more recently producing music and touring as Thisquietarmy.
Another collection of favourite 90’s Black Metal. Highly regarded at the time and still pretty fresh today. Difficult to believe some of these tracks are approaching 30 years of age. This early to mid 90’s Scandinavian Back Metal sound, so prevalent as an influence in hundreds of bands for the last 30 years and taken to another level in production and in a more contemporary song structure by bands such as Fuath or Cantique Lepreux. The year of 1994 was an excellent year for me, the year I got into extreme metal by way of Bathory, Mayhem (through an album by a band called Eminenz, thats a great story for some other time.. ) but also Cannibal Corpse and Brutal Truth.
It was also the year of the infamous ‘Ultra Brutal – Open Air of Penafiel’, a metal festival taking place in a small satellite city some 40 kms east of Porto, under desert like 40 celsius sun, organised  by a guy called Alberto Barros who, legend has it, messed with too many band’s cachet and in this instance dropped Cradle of Filth at the Porto airport with no money for travel and no further  explanation. The bill consisted of Cradle of Filth promoting their debut ‘The Principle of Evil Made Flesh’. They played absolutely flawlessly, in broad day light, under the scorching heat, you could see their corpse paint melting. I am not sure which song they played first but I remember everybody just stopped what they were doing, some jaws dropped, admiring the sheer onslaught of their sound, specially Danny’s presence and Nick Barker… who was shredding at a pace I don’t remember seeing at the time from a young band playing a debut. As a drummer myself I was (and still am) astonished at the drum work in this album. There was also Grave, Gorefest and Hipocrisy in the bill.
I was so awestruck with the beauty of ‘Mono No Aware’ – PAN‘s first compilation released in 2017, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists – that I wanted to dig a little deeper into the cryptic name for the album.
Mono-no-aware (物の哀れ), or ‘pathos of things’, is a Japanese term that is difficult to translate, maybe as ‘an empathy towards things’ or ‘a special sensitivity towards ephemeral things’. In classical Japanese literature and poetry, it refers to the aesthetic ideal of ‘mono-no-aware’, which implies a particular sensitivity of awareness and responsiveness to something, an inanimate object or even a living being, or an emotional response to a person. This choreographic project challenges and summons different imagery and poetic materials, starting from this place of memory and evocation, and simultaneously acceptance and contemplation of the present time and its transience. A nostalgic body that is unbalanced between two temporal filters and two realities, the past, the present and an idea of ​​the future. Do images die on stage and are taken off stage? If a body did not dissolve, did not disappear like fog, would things lose the power to move us?. – Rafael Alvarez
Starting with one of the highlights of 2017, Jhator by Zu in perhaps their most ethereal venture yet, and a bold new trajectory for musicians and label alike (HOM) – a pensive, mind-expanding foray into abstraction and wonder, rich in cinematic ambience and transcendent, transformational power. Consisting of two extended pieces, this is a work that connects Zu to their antecedents both spiritual and musical, whilst forging forward in the manner of no-one but themselves. And it perfectly paves the way for a collection of genre defying tracks, somewhere between noir cinematic soundtrack and experimental electronics.
   
I put this mix together thinking about Scott Walker. He passed away 5 years ago last 22 March. Between two of his most recent albums: ‘The Drift‘ and ‘Bish Bosch‘, I decided to feature the latter, because I have so many mixes with songs from the former. I went for a selection of mostly highly charged, heavily percussive tracks, because as a drummer, that was one of the most satisfying aspects of Scotts later work, I guess after his uniquely rich baritone vocal delivery.
Released in 2006, The Drift was Scott Walker’s first album in eleven years, following 1995’s Tilt and it was my fully fledged introduction to the bizarre musical world of Scott, by the time of its release known as an otherworldly experimental musician. The album was recorded over a period of seventeen months at Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, with orchestra recorded in one day at George Martin’s AIR Studios in Hampstead, both locations in London. It is a masterpiece of dark, contemporary experimental music, produced by a 63 year old, which is impossible to un-hear and an album that has stayed with me, one of my favourite albums ever by one of the misfits in music of the last 50 years.
Scott Walker

Scott Walker press Cuttings

About Selected Ambient Works – Volume II
March 7, 1994 – The release of Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works – Volume II’ and my first encounter with the British electronic producer. Also probably the date I met my future wife. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of both with a glass of red wine and new mix containing some old and newer material. Some all time favourite musicians here, so many people to thank for making the music I love. RIP Ryuichi and Arthur. There is an interesting presentation of ‘Selected Ambient Works – Volume II’ at Warp, with Richard himself highlighting some tracks with some interesting facts.
About Our Side Has To Win (for D.H.)
The D.H. mentioned in the title of the last track of GY!BE’s 2021 album is Dirk Hugsam, an independent tour agent and friend to many musicians affiliated with Constellation Records, who sadly passed away on December 21, 2018.
Mix #101. A special number and a special collection of songs. One of the strongest selections I have done so far. I Love every single one of these songs to death.
About ‘The Sea is Never Full’
The origin of this collaboration began two months prior to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Dakota Suite had been touring Japan with their friends from the Japanese band called Vampillia and had been in several coastal locations in Wakayama as well as places near to Fukushima. The tsunami was very upsetting for Chris Hooson and David Buxton from Dakota Suite who then set about making music to reflect this overwhelming sadness and loss for Japan.
They approached Vampillia to work on these somber reflective songs for the sea. Vampillia is next-alternative music from Osaka. Guitar, Noise guitar, Bass, Piano, Classical Strings, Velladon on Opera, Mongoloid on the dark metal vocals alongside twin drummers Talow the Tornado (Nice View, Turtle Island) and Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins).
From this lineup of 10 (sometimes more) comes experimental and beautiful dark music. Besides the new work with Dakota Suite, they have previously collaborated with acts such as µ-Ziq, Merzbow, Nadja and Lustmord. Their intense experimental style is the perfect fusion with the Dakota Suite aesthetic.
The songs came from a desire to reflect the phases of the disaster, the rising violent seas, the destructive power and loss preceding sorrow at the devastation which followed. Chris Hooson was haunted by images of floating pieces of wood which had once been someone’s ancient dwelling. The music Dakota Suite & Vampillia have recorded on ‘The Sea is Never Full’ seeks to provide a mechanism to deal with this pain cathartically.
Various short pieces were passed between Dakota Suite and Vampillia, who added strings and the distinctive throat singing of ‘mongoloid’ from Vampillia. Japanese throat singing speaks to an ancient method, called ‘rekukkara’. It is tonal rather than melodic. As Hooson says “It seemed an appropriate way to convey the sadness we felt at the horror of Fukushima, which knows no words to express it accurately.”
After basic recording had been completed, David Buxton, in an act of pure genius, took apart every note of the music and created a two-part suite. It is hard to convey the seismic shift in this project after David presented this music in the form that it now stands. Hooson on his Dakota Suite band colleague Buxton “It has been the highlight of my recording career so far and David would not like the attention I give him, but I believe that this work in particular deserves to be heard as it is a work of beautiful and tragic choreography, it is a tribute to his mastery of music.”
This type of art cannot be written or envisaged, it can only be received and interpreted. Listening to this project continues to engender enormous sorrow in the listener, but the true beauty of such art is that it can take this sorrow as a cathartic force to help one manage these feelings. ‘The Sea Is Never Full’ marks another momentous release for Karaoke Kalk. Together with Vampillia they have sculpted a truly epic record spanning musical styles from ambient and experimental to post-rock and neo-classical. Suffice to say, the result has nothing short if a breathtaking emotional impact.
About ‘Yanqui U.X.O.’
U.X.O. is unexploded ordnance is landmines is cluster bombs. Yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international police state is multinational corporate oligarchy. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting. The new album is just raw, angry, dissonant, epic instrumental rock. Recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago and mixed by Howard Bilerman and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the original Hotel2Tango in Montreal.
Stubborn tiny lights vs. clustering darkness forever ok?
About ‘Horses In The Sky’
“We recorded some of it next to a campfire by the river, and the sleepy birds even chirped a little there beneath the moonlit trees; “yes we are oh yes we are thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra and tra-la-la band”… troubled fingers strive to knit upward ladders, joyously; THESE SONGS ARE STICKY, WORRIED KNOTS – everyone sang and handclapped too – (we learned to play these songs on the road mostly …)
“THIS IS OUR TORCHED ESTATES” = 6 busted “waltzes” for world wars 4 thru 6, or the sound of our nervous unit collapsing across sing-song eruptions of anxious light and clumsy heat, “mystery and wonder, messy hearts made of thunder,” tape recorded at thee mighty hotel2tango for all the GENTLE dreamers to cradle or discard… the politics of it is just love thy neighbour mostly, or heartbroken temper tantrums for grumpy refusers, or saucy anthems for all the stubborn dumbass resistance cadres maybe … (first song’s about war and drug addiction, fourth song’s about Kanada, and the rest of it is all love songs truly truly truly …) the indignant critics amongst us should note that as usual there’s more questions than answers here, more complaints than solutions, and at times the group singing is a little out of tune; the name of the record is “Horses in the Sky”, and we thank you all for still listening”.
About ‘Hymn To The Immortal Wind’
Just in time for their 10-year anniversary, MONO return with their fifth studio album, the absolutely massive ‘Hymn To The Immortal Wind’. The music is naturally majestic, with MONO’s trademark wall of noise crashing beautifully against the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted. The instrumentation is vast, incorporating strings, flutes, organ, piano, glockenspiel and tympani into their standard face-melting set-up. While Hymn continues to mine the cinematic drama inherent in all of MONO’s music, the dynamic shifts now come more from dark-to-light instead of quiet-to-loud. The maturity to balance these elements so masterfully has become MONO’s strongest virtue – save for perhaps their uncanny ability to sound every bit like a plane crashing into a Beethoven concert.
About ‘Do Make Say Think’
Do Make Say Think self-released this debut album in Toronto in 1997, and we heard it the following spring. The band’s infectious spacerock-cum-swing approach to sweeping instrumentals, and their brilliant realisation of the potentials of 8-track recording, hooked us instantly. Rhythm syncopation, reverb-soaked guitar, the occasional horn, and some of the finest saturated synth tones we’ve ever heard – this record conjures up rainy streets and wet cigarettes with the best of them. A classic modern lounge album that also shreds, with widescreen breakbeat blissouts driven by punk-rock guitars. An exuberant debut, containing all the building blocks DMST has been transforming into sublime music architectures ever since.
Omit’s ‘inSec’ is “new,” but not new. Recorded in 2013, the masters lost in the label’s murky somewheresville that always shows up when moving. For those who don’t know, Omit is an experimental electronics artist from New Zealand’s south island who, since 1990, has released thirty-some xerographed cassettes and CDrs in the Dead C orbit for those who do. It’s not enough to say that ‘inSec’ is an ambient masterpiece bringing to mind a John Carpenter soundtrack performed by the Hub because listening to it engineers new species. In this century that flatters itself to be of drinking age, it is a queer thing we haven’t come face to face with aliens.  Besides the xenobiological effects, Omit constructs your sentiment through timbral concepts that repeat and shift with minimal reference to harmony, melody, key, or mode.
Probably the best couple of minutes in this collection. If you don’t feel the chills while listening to one of Wrest‘s biggest accomplishments in a 20 year career in extreme metal, namely LoC’s self-titled opus, then this mix is not for you and you better skip to one of my safest Ambient mixes right now.
Few contemporary industrial acts are spoken of in such highly reverential terms as Alberich, the solo project of underground super-producer Kris Lapke. While Lapke himself may best be known for his production and mastering work, both for such diverse sounding acts like Prurient, Nothing and The Haxan Cloak to his audio restoration work for Coum Transmissions and Shizuka, Alberich has achieved a cult on par with many of the legends he works with. Lapke’s diverse contributions as a producer are recognizable for the perfect balance of maximalist and minimalist electronics that Alberich has relentlessly authored. Since Alberich’s 2010 masterful and highly collectable 2.5 hour NATO- Uniformen album, he has become a powerful force of modern industrial music. With only a series of limited tape and split releases, fans have been waiting with bated breath for a true follow up album. The first full-length Alberich album in almost a decade, Quantized Angel will be released April 12, 2019. In the intervening years between albums Alberich has grown more nuanced, creating atmosphere and tension on par with Silent Servant’s classic Negative Fascination LP in regards to production and attention to detail. The results create a newly polished but no less intense vision of modern industrial music. Over the course of the album’s eight tracks, Alberich demonstrates a vision of ruthless existential electronics, a sound both commanding yet questioning in introspective spirit.
Operation Cleansweep‘s 3rd release in the Release Now! series, this consists of unreleased Material of lost Tapes and material created during Operation Cleansweep’s creative period between 1995-2004.
Some of these tracks have been live performed in Munich 2002 and at the bands last gig in Dresden 2017. Here you have the typical ground-breaking saw/ing sound of what OC is in/famous for. This could easily by their best release-and their bands legacy. Operation Cleansweep unfortunately does no longer exist – but you can still hear the violent call to die!
About Secret Pyramid’s ‘A Vanishing Touch’
While possibly not the first ambient record to be inspired by J Dilla’s Donuts, Secret Pyramid’s A Vanishing Touch is in rarified company. The two seem antithetical – with Donuts a now classic collection of short beats compiled together and A Vanishing Touch being a 40-minute suite consisting of 14 pieces. However, like any genre, ambient music has a lot more going on beneath the surface than might be initially gleaned.
From the start, Amir Abbey dropped his usual songwriting process of long contemplation and careful sculpting. “I let the pieces live and breathe, and I spent a lot less time tweaking and editing. Doing this “brought an energy and mystery to the music that was missing from what I’ve made in the past.” This allowed the record to come together quickly”, with Abbey working on it nightly after his work day had ended. “Each album is a snapshot of where I am at that point in time. With this album, I have been thinking about shifting memory, how a moment in time does not need to be thought of as endless, but rather part of a cycle. Every beginning is as important and salient as the ending that follows.”
Working at home, as he always has, Abbey embeds synths, tape loops and processing, horns, ondes martenot, guitar, bass, and organ within the multi-tiered composition of A Vanishing Touch. Sounds morph, bleed, fade, and permeate with moments where a listener is able to make out what is being played at that moment. “I’ve intentionally blurred some of the instrumentation and it can’t be easily made out, so even if you pay attention to the sound, there’s something ephemeral about it.” Each measure feels deep, singular, mysterious, and unconfined.
It’s a new approach to ambience – the magic of the moment as a moment, not stretched beyond its point in time. “A Vanishing Touch is about impermanence and the beauty that can result from it.”
About the cover album: Two years after the release of their second album “Bareback” on Svart Records in 2018, Throat close the cycle on the album with a double remix version. Presumably a first within the noise-rock scene, Throat invited artists from the international noise/industrial scene to select a song off “Bareback” and deconstruct/destroy/rearrange the raw studio tracks provided to them. As a result, “Bareback (Stripped & Remasked)” contains a remixed version of the original album. The artists/groups participating on “Bareback (Stripped & Remasked)” include Government Alpha, Himukalt, Deison, Black Leather Jesus, Sshe Retina Stimulants, Vanhala, Heat Signature, Like Weeds, Linekraft, Lasse Marhaug, Concrete Mascara, Erratix, Niku Daruma, Kazuma Kubota, Jarl and Keränen.
Final word of warning: if you are looking for straight-up noise rock or new Throat material and can’t stand to have your head pierced by harsh noise power tools, this release may not be for you.
One of the most important multimedia artists of his generation, and surely one of the greatest experimental composers of our time, American minimalist composer, filmmaker and video artist Phill Niblock has passed away last 8th January aged 90. His ‘Intermedia Art’ features a combination of minimalist music, conceptual art, structural cinema, systematic or even political art, and has actively contributed to transform our perception and experience of time.
Phill Niblock initiated his career as a photographer and film director. A jazz passionate, he moved to New York in 1958 where he started photography in the mid-1960s, specializing in portraits of jazz musicians (Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Billy Strayhorn…). In the middle of the 1960s, he made his first films for the dancers and choreographers of the Judson Church Theater. From 1968 on, he focused on music and composed his first pieces, which, according to the artist, maintained from the start that they should be listened to at loud volume (in the region of/close to 120db) in order to explore their overtones.
Phill Niblock was particularly interested in the screening of moving images—films and slideshows. Produced between 1966 and 1969, Six Films, a series of short films with sound realised with 16mm film, heralds his experimental method through portraits of artists and musicians such as Sun Ra and Max Neuhaus. In 1968, the artist started experimenting a combination of his visual productions with his musical scores in order to create sound architectural and environmental compositions.
Phill Niblock was the director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968’s barricade-hopping.
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He pursued his film projects independently with ‘The Movement of People Working’, a long series of films lasting over 25 hours made between 1973 and 1991, depicting human labor in its most basic form. Filmed on 16 mm and then on digital video, in rural areas of places such as Peru, Mexico, Hungary, Hong Kong, the Arctic, Brazil, Lesotho, Sumatra, China, Japan and Portugal (a still of the Portugal intervention. to the right). The Movement of People Working focuses on work seen as a choreography of movements and gestures, sublimating the mechanical yet natural repetition of workers’ actions. The films are accompanied by slow evolving musical compositions with minimalist harmony. The sound volume offers a visceral experience where the superposition of tones echoes the repetitiveness of the workers’ activity. The project has been exhibited extensively with Phill and an eclectic group of guest musicians providing the music for the screenings.
RIP Phill Niblock (1933-2024)

Still from ‘The Movement of People Working’.

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Finally watched ‘Come Worry With Us‘, a 81 minute documentary directed by Helene Klodawsky released back in 2013. It follows violinist Jessica Moss and singer/guitarist Efrim Menuck of internationally acclaimed Montreal-based band Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, as they struggle to balance parenthood with making music and touring. They are one of a growing number of bands to have accepted an infant (Efrim and Jessica’s son, Ezra) into their touring life. Making a living has never been more difficult for musicians: a downloading generation has shattered the economics of the music industry, and constant touring has become synonymous with economic survival.

Krallice

With a superb intro from The Bastard Noise’s 2010 masterpiece ‘A Culture of Monsters’ which Eric Wood himself confirmed to me is narrated by Creation is Crucifixion‘s vocalist Nathan Martin, here is another mix of the charged and punishing variant featuring a few of the best albums of 2023 as well as introducing meth., a Chicago noise band I will be keeping an eye on.
Arrowounds was a very good surprise in 2023. There’s a good interview with Ryan S. Chamberlain in the Headphone Commute website, its a round of his studio where we learn about his gear and production techniques he employs to achieve the dense layers of sounds that characterise the sound of Arrowounds.
I watched Midsommar for the first time this week. The score is awesome. I am a big Bobby Krlic fan since the time of The Haxan Cloak.
Mexican composer Gibrana Cervantes latest album ‘How do we pass on eternity?’ is the result of a deep immersion in Mahler’s symphony No. 5, where the vital losses are intertwined with the creation of a rethoric formulation. Recorded in the FOA2 Studio in Tepotzlan, Mexico, the album becomes a masterpiece merging the philosophy, the holistic sanity and the introspection through the music. With its central theme, “Moving Through Our Waters”, Gibrana reveals her connection with nature, especially with the Pixquiac River in Veracruz, where the river currents and the flow of the water are transformed into a unique sound experience. Catch her with Rafael Anton Irisarri next March 2024 at London’s Cafe Oto.

Gibrana Cervantes

Ketev is the realm in which Berlin based sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman employs his unique ambient technoid soundscapes to explore the balance between darkness and light, fragility and strength, and tension and release. ‘Traces of Weakness’ follows up the solo contrabass LP ‘Études’ for Subtext records, and continues to expand on the themes explored on previous Ketev albums for Where To Now? and Opal Tapes. ‘Traces of Weakness’ was recorded at EMS Stockholm using their Buchla Modular Synth, and processed with reel-to-reel tape manipulations including personal archived field recordings.
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