Ke/Hil – Syndrome/Antidrome.

Ke/Hil – Syndrome/Antidrome- Tesco – LP/cassette – 2017 – Tesco 113

Side A.

1.    When comes such another.

2.    Farmed flesh.

3.    The trite of life.

4.    My soul is dead.

5.    Designed poverty.

Side B.

1.Men to Drome.

Dusty Ruins.

3. Alone Kind.

4. Adumbration of man.

5. Clear sight on no land.

The stoic virtue of steadiness must lead to silence in its most extreme case. Isolation in silence.

Quote on the back of Syndrome/Antidrome.

I was thinking a lot about doing this review as it is tough reviewing a project you aren’t that familiar with. I was keen to review this as I’m a recent convert to GO’s work and Ke/Hil is two members of the said project. This album has sat on my shelf for quite a few months. Ages in fact. As with most releases on this label, they need a lot of thought as they are so confrontational.

I’d gone for a few walks over this time. I have a long-held fascination with tower blocks/flats those gigantic structures holding hundreds of family homes. Monuments to the living ideals of decades past that are always there and always relevant; even more so now in the wake of the tragic Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017. I always take photos of various tower blocks when I see them on my walks as they amaze me, they signify various points in my own past. I visited in flats, played in flats, fought in flats and ran for my life down the stairs of those flats. Due to this, they have a massive emotional resonance. Pillars of pure isolation. Cold, images of Tower Blocks and Flats dominate landscape on the covers of Syndrome/Antidrome. Staring at these gigantic, compressed living areas gave me a way into this album.

 

The first side of the album demonstrates long passages of cold, repetitive electronics. Drones, slow beats and echoing noise build an image of the hard landscape of tower blocks. The album certainly alludes to the failure of the tower block as a project. Farmed Flesh, Designed Poverty and My soul is dead are sonic poems about the isolation, humiliation and emptiness tower block life can bring.

Voice samples are abstract, are they representative of what Blocks of Flats became? Is it the true intentions of the projects? Are they the tortured screams the residents? The arguments and shouts are inaudible during which some of the urgent, taunting electronic methods of Genocide Organ pop through. Murky abstracted sound eventually builds clear pictures. The albums description reads like Science Fiction made from present day reality. It could easily be the tower blocks in Blade Runner, Judge Dread or today.

Death radiates through hums and drones, I don’t know what the vocals say a lot of the time, but they constantly signify pain and despair. The dialogue of My Soul is Dead breaks this as the beats clearly draw a picture of the desolation of empty dwellings. Whose Soul is Dead; resident or building?

The second side of the album seems to pull back into itself further allowing for foreground sounds and vocals to create a wider space and deeper sense of desolation. Vocals and loops seem more excited than the previous side which seems to suggest a rise from the desolation, or an alternate state of being in what already is. There are more ambient qualities, which make side 2 simultaneously abstracted and direct. Pulsations and radiating sounds shift the listener into the different stages of each soundtrack which serve as a platform for lengthy dialogues backed by minimal collages of sound. Things occasionally get busier, only to break it down into bleaker acts of despair. The vocals sound as if they are broadcasted into enforced emptiness, is it a voice too late, has this society already failed too far down the line? ‘Clear sight on no man’s land’ certainly tries to reach out, kicking off until it dies into an ending.

Good bleak electronics, reviewed in my coldest room for full effect. This album does mash up genres and sounds to exist in its’ own muddy threatening territory. Great work.

Choppy Noodles 2017.

Tesco website 

Tesco Bandcamp 

Premature Ejaculation - Rise (2010)

Premature Ejaculation – Rise – Date Unknown – Previously unreleased. Malaise Music – Mal 6 - 2010.

Rise is one of many previously unreleased Rozz Williams experimental recordings that have recently surfaced. Listening to Rise I would say it was made after Premature Ejaculation Parts 1 & 2 and somewhere around A Little Hard to Swallow. Therefore it dates around 1982 – 83, it is unique as it pre dates Body of a Crow in each track being broken up into 12 different titled pieces. However the advancement of some tracks suggests this may have been compiled with later 84 – 87 era Premature Ejaculation sound experiments. A mystery? It features 12 different assaults of sound and the tapes was backed with Come Orgs’ Necrophilia album, unlike PE parts 1 & 2, Rise is very clearly trying Power Electronics on for size and anti music with more successful results.

The cover features a triumphant soldier with a beheaded head on the floor in front of him and an army behind him. This is probably from the pre World War 2 holocaust ‘The Rape of Nanking’. The sheer horror associated to these events sets a violent theme to Rise.

Not Receiving is an assault of radio tuning distortion that really lays the groundwork for the later Happiest Tapes on Earth obsession with static. Voice abstraction (a continual Premature Ejaculation favourite) is simplistically demonstrated by settling on broadcasts but moving on before a sentence can be formed. Passages of music are only briefly allowed to blend with the static. Momentary flashes of American culture are briefly revealed before being violently erased from our minds by violent blasts of distorted static. The critique of American culture would be a continuous theme for PE.

Snakepit (Hide the Child) and Tunnels Turn to Walls offer raw instrumental passages of anti music, that offer brief but compelling passages of sound that would resurface in Premature Ejaculation at different periods.

Vacuum: Bolts of lightning like ignition break into a raw vacuum cleaner soundtrack, plainly conceptual in its everyday assault. The title adds a darker connotation, but the artful playfulness shows PE testing and poking at the seriousness of the noisier end of the industrial movement. This is funny, but a slight treatment of sound would have made this a lot more effective. However does this everyday event pull the horror of Rise into our daily life??

Reaching for Heaven is a pure tape assault, speed is slowed down to make the source totally unrecognisable, but it is a good and brief example of noise methodology. Business As Usual does the same but with an eruption of chaotic rumble. Both are good short demonstrations of noise, nothing more.

Vicious Circle is the best example of abstract guitar on Rise as it makes slight nods towards the quieter parts of Glen Branca but without the fullness of sound, Vicious Circle is sparse and spacious. Think Branca’s Ascension crossed with Earth’s Hex. Guitar would feature in some PE live shows and Living Monstrosities/Descent and was never really allowed much development in the later Rozz noise work. This is a shame as it began to flourish around this period.

The last five tracks tend to work around percussive effects and sample combinations more. The Coming of the Glory is a clickety clack racket. Rise breaks into dark ambient noise and falls into industrial percussion, Un…. carries the percussion on combining with a vocal distortion creating ritualistic repetition. (Not A) Laughing Matter offers a heartbeat rhythm, and noise box effect winding around eerie echoes a brief triumph of dark noise, all very symbolic of later PE. All these tracks offer rhythm without stumbling onto the dance floor as key and later industrial bands would.

On the Verge is an aggressive vertigo with ratchet like bursts of rhythm that descend into a rhapsody of rhythmic assault. Different sounds take on the rhythm for the periods of time. This is industrial repetition stretched to full on nauseous effect.

The minimal means of some of these pieces adds an element of dark humour to Rise; this was a key element to Rozz as a person that shines through here. However each track still achieves aggression successfully which works as an overall theme; tying in well with the brutality of the cover. The variety of approaches was characteristic of Rozz’s experimental work around this period; it stops the recording from becoming boring. The striking cover image and deliberate lack of audible samples make Rise very reliant upon the tracks made to achieve its’ aura of violence and serves to document a major step forward in Rozz’s early recorded work.

Choppy Noodles 2010.

STARK - A cautionary review.

Stark overview.

Untitled -2014 (re-released 2016) – Purge Electronics- Purge Electronics/Black Psychosis – BLACK06

A Cautionary Tale.

Rorschach.

Royal Oak.

Charisma Engine.

Crash Deconstruction.

Autodidact.

Frank -2016 – Obsessive Fundamental Realism – OFR – 006.

Monolith.

Tears Will Kill Us.

Close Your Eyes 83.

Lifting the Veil.

Dangerous Consequence.

In Vino Veritas.

The Morning After the Night Before (For Sutcliffe Judgend).

Hog.

Hyena – 2017 – Black Psychosis – Cassette – BLACK10

Perfect Poison.

Bridgewater.

My introduction to the work of STARK was an odd one, it came about due to a cancellation. Stark was meant to be one of five Power Electronics acts at the Hilumenoua Malediction in support of PE pioneers Sutcliffe Judgend in February 2017, at the last minute they cancelled and were replaced by a choppy, no-nonsense act called Dead Normal. I thought nothing of it, I did not know the project. When writing up my review I looked the project up, I found the Facebook and Discogs page and read up on STARK. I found out that this was one project in the wider prolific work of Steve Bagman who is also responsible for Bagman, (gone Dark) Bleach and Stosstrupp. In an interview with records reverse, Bagman refers to his struggles with OCD, Bipolar disorder and addiction. The name Stark comes from James Dean’s character Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. All Stark tapes are apparently recorded in one live studio session with no overdubs. 

Curiosity then lead to me buy the untitled debut tape from Black Psychosis Blog-spot. In no time at all I ended up with all three of the Stark releases. Bagman’s no-show and what I heard on FRANK ended up with me becoming obsessed very quickly. Due to this I have chosen to write this article about his body of work as Stark. As a reviewer, all the new stuff I hear now is compared to that of Stark and very few truly stand up to this body of work.

Untitled (2014) (Purge Electronics)

Stark’s debut tape immediately sounds like nothing else. The work has an immediate older analogue sound that combines teasing warped electronics, oscillating synthesisers and samples. Some of the electronics are so primitive, it makes an intense sound that darts between spacious and compressed. Are the samples police tapes, recordings from Bagman’s past, film samples or news samples? Bagman’s own vocal; screams, rambles incoherently and shouts over the proceedings and at times converses and reacts to the recorded dialogues. The personal conceptualisation and incoherent aspects to the recording up the intensity of STARK. I am unsure if it is themed beyond personal experience, the album to me appears to be the inside of Bagman’s head, the artwork also seems to imply that. Sampled clattering and Bagman’s background ranting add a haunted quality to parts of the tape.

The inside cover is a Rorschach test, the cover’s fold over is brains which reoccur a lot in the artwork. The front cover has head shots of lots of individual women, eyes covered with lines across them, some women are crossed out. The artwork for STARK is serious and intense, the sound even more so.

 

Frank (2016) (Obsessive Fundamental Realism)

Frank is more timeless in sound than the debut, it is also considerably more tortured and focussed as an album. The simplified electronics are homed in and concise. The vocal is the main tool for instant claustrophobia, yet the minimal nature of the music seems to allow for more space, the two elements continually collide. The vocals are close-up and compressed; forceful and domineering. Samples are sometimes suffocated to the point inaudibility whilst electronics hover over the murder scene. 

Frank is like bad memories that surround a bleak past. When it plays, I am somewhere I don’t want to be, mournful drones on Tears Will Kill Us reinforce that. Whereas the debut had interesting quirks, Frank is solitude, failure, loss, threat, sorrow compressed over 8 tracks. Is Frank Bagman’s past and psyche dragged across 8 tracks?

As with all Obsessive Fundamental Realism releases, Frank is presented in a black bag with the artwork pinned to it. Inside this there is the tape plus a variety of inserts linked to the album. 

Hyena (2017) (Black Psychosis).

Hyena has an immediately contradictory sound it holds back, but is a lot louder and built up/layered than other Stark recordings. It’s sound really delves in a lower level mournful area of noise. Bagman rants and raves in the background of ‘Perfect Poison’, as with other Stark releases there are no displays of rage and power, it is something ‘other’, as if something personal, not something outside of Bagman has been conceptualised into Hyena. 

Bagman’s vocal is replaced by a sampled interview on the reverse side ‘Bridgewater’. Atmospheric drones hover in the background and rise to submerge the entire dialogue in parts. It ends as if everything goes into override until it eventually dies out. Oddly the inner cover is a map of Lawnswood in Stourbridge.

Choppy Noodles 2017.

LInks:

Reverse Records STARK interview 

STARK discogs page.