The Junkie Flamingos - Lemegeton Party

Album: Lemegeton Party

Artist: The Junkie Flamingos

Label: Helen Scarsdale

Catalogue no: HMS051

Tracklist:

     1.      Evening of our Days

     2.      Goetia

     3.      The Language of Slaves

     4.      Restless Youth

     5.      Shape of Men

The Italian Junkie Flamingos project was conceived in 2017, bringing together Luca Sigurtà, Daniele Delogu, and Alice Kundalini. The latter name may be familiar to some: Alice is better known as the death industrial project She Spreads Sorrow, while Sigurtà is a composer of some renown himself, and Delogu is a member of the Barbarian Pipe Band (described as bombastic folk!). One can only imagine what kind of musical DNA is produced when such a diverse trio of musicians decide to work together, and also when the album title alludes to the Lesser Key of Solomon grimoire.

So what manner of sonic sorceries have been conjured up on here, the project’s first album? Alice’s influence is immediately apparent on ‘Evening of our Days’, grainy distortions and feedback whines, breathy vocals against a wind blowing down a hollow tunnel, with flavours of a twisting, echoing guitar figure, and a submerged rhythm bubbling just beneath the surface being contributed by Delogu and Sigurtà respectively. And this is just the gateway to a haunted suburban landscape of death industrial aesthetics, mixed with ambient stylings, electronics, acoustic instruments, vocals, and even pared back rhythms.

The five compositions here are from the wrong side of the tracks, dusky, dirty, dark, and dreamlike. These are the edgelands, the margins where polite society fears to tread, where alleyways are filled not with rats but with spectres and ghosts, the tumbling litter and debris of loves lost and those that were never meant to be. Streetlights, dim, flickering, and endlessly on the brink of failing, shine on huddled figures bracing themselves against cold winds funnelling down empty lanes, where photographs and posters of broken romances flutter hither and thither, and the chink of empty bottles rattle against hard ground. Here are the speakeasies where no one knows your name and don’t want to know it in the first, the drinking joint where all eyes turn to you upon first entry but look away when they realise you’re just like them. Death, loss, hopelessness, faithlessness, ennui, and apathy are the residents in this part of town. But, as they say, misery loves company, and here’s where you’ll find the despairing and desperate.

The beauty of this is how all the musicians have blended together so well: it would have been so easy for one element to dominate to the exclusion of everything else. Not here though: a misty, foggy, backstreet atmosphere pervades the entire album, each contributor shaping textures and manipulating atmospherics in a way that few can do with such confidence. It’s both about three very individual artists, each with a very individual vision, throwing their creativity into the melting pot and, with the finely-tuned palette of a master chef, added just the right ingredients to produce a magical brew that not only creates something new, but also underscores the contribution of each. It’s a true collaborative effort, and deserves a close listen. Stand on a lonely street corner late at night under a dimly-lit streetlight, spark up a cigarette, don the earphones, and savour the atmosphere, physically and musically.

Psymon Marshall 2019.

S.T.A.B. Electronics - Day of the Male.

S.T.A.B. Electronics – Day of the Male. Unrest Productions – 2015 CD. http://www.unrestproductions.co.uk/

Tracklist.

     1.       As it is.

     2.       Because I could.

     3.       Day of the male.

     4.       Indifferent and Inimical.

     5.       Marquis complex.

     6.       Metal and Excrement.

     7.       Mouth Bites Blackness.

     8.       Sick Human Syndrome.

     9.       This Can Not Be My Eternity.

It always makes me smile when I hear S.T.A.B. Electronics was started in tribute to Marco Corbelli after he passed away as I truly love Atrax Morgue but feel S.T.A.B. very quickly evolved into a next level project and there couldn’t ever have been a greater tribute.  Day of the Male is a few years old now, I got it around a year ago in 2018 from Unrest, it had a massive impact on me, and I feel the blog must occasionally look back to gain a better whole picture. Prior to buying this all I knew of was a recent interview in Special Interests. I bought this and Born for Righteous Abuse/Temple of Disgust and then not long after Enemy of Pigs was released, I saw S.T.A.B. play live and very quickly, this became one of my favourite present-day PE projects.

When I first heard the album, I was blown away by the vocal performance on the opening track ‘as it is’, it quickly became evident to me this project had a strong identity. The pulsating electronics and vocal that seems to berate itself or someone else was barely human, just a mass of ever intensifying rage. In comparison the vortex of sound of Because I Could is an implosion to the explosion of as it is. It takes the old style of warbly PE vocals and incorporates it into the entire sound of shrill noise so that both reinforce each other. The Death Industrial Throb of Day of the Male warbles the vocal so it’s a noise that rides the massive synth sounds, a wall of distortion is woven in subtly too. Distortion intensifies and the vocal becomes rhythmic, rising the works levels whenever something is vocalised until waves of noise drown it out completely.

Pulsating continues with pure blasts of distorted humming as the vocal clearly coherent roars over the noise, as tonal shifts in noise occur, the vocal does too the noise seems to lead the vocal through its diatribe. The vocal is untreated and brings another level to the work as if to demonstrate how it can function fluidly without effects.  Distorted noise and warbled vocals make Marquis Complex, the waves of distortion form a hurricane of noise around the vocal, the sharpness of the vocal cuts through. Again, it seems to lock with the noise through shrill warbling, the continual separation and bonding of the work are impressive. This piece plays with Wall Noise but allows the vocal to function and not be drowned out, just held under for periods of time, I feel Finnan allows himself to act out punishment, torture and violence to the self through his work.  

Metal and Excrement is an exercise in allowing massive synthesizers to do their work and pulsate against each other. Big Death displays of resonating, pulsating Synthesizers are a frequent guest on Unrest recordings, this is a prime example. Their growling resonance here is pure and effective. As the noise erupts and warbled vocal kicks in, I realise I was being primed for a sonic beating. The vocal is so treated and so sharp that it cuts into your hearing and isn’t forgotten in a hurry.  The vocal seems to be drowning in the infected noise of Mouth Bites Blackness, even warbling it doesn’t help, the waves of distortion seem to grow in intensity and multiply, eventually the vocal gradually resurfaces to gain more clarity and win the war and make its point.  Samples, pulsating drones and a spoken, slightly distorted vocal interact on Sick Human Syndrome – the vocal is warped with effects as the dialogue of crude social commentary becomes more explicit. The pitch of the vocal is tweaked continuously to become more disturbing and inhuman. This Cannot Be My Eternity erupts immediately, there vocal is bolstered by explosive walls of noise, the vocal a sharp pitch that seems to erupt with the wall. There is some sort of ethereal backing sound that adds dimension and some bizzare, warped spiritual essence to the track.

I’ve gone way into S.T.A.B. after that live show and this album is the starting point of that journey. I haven’t heard everything, that makes me excited as I’ve got so much to discover. I can’t praise this project enough, I might have missed out on some classic, older projects but I’m right here for this one. Get this album if you don’t already own it.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

ANIHILA - Silent Annihilation.

Album: Silent Annihilation

Artist: ANIHILA

Label: Pretty Dead Girl Records

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      War with One (Silent Assassination of Adam)

     2.      Dividing Evil

     3.      Eusebes

     4.      The Annular Arch

     5.      Locus Meropis

     6.      Ascending Node

     7.      Dark Star

     8.      Another Cold Night Alone

ANIHILA may be an unfamiliar name, but the artist behind it should be known to quite a few out there: Duncan Ritchie, better known as Flowers for Bodysnatchers and The Rosenshoul. It’s described as dark space ambient, which it undeniably is, but it’s also much more than that: I would be inclined instead to call it dark matter ambient. Light is noticeable by its absence: the only thing which rules here is dense gravity. It still possesses substance, and if we had some way of penetrating and recording such distortions of time and space, this is what we might hear.

Dark matter: an invisible, highly diffuse yet incomprehensibly powerful paradox that accounts for a large percentage of the matter keeping our universe from flying apart. We cannot see it, only infer it from a careful study of the gravitational interactions between what we can see. ANIHILA manages to encapsulate this utterly baffling conundrum with a set of deeply occulted compositions (occult in the astronomical sense here, not the mystical) that are so gravitationally dense that anything within is only revealed by penetrating physically into their mysteries.

This is the equivalent of walking in to a dark cave at night without any means of illumination. We see nothing, but our sense of hearing becomes heightened and picks up all manner of strange noises. Then imagination takes over – creating phantasms and nightmares to explain their sources. Silent Annihilation begins quietly enough with ‘War with One (Silent Assassination of Adam)’, a vast space filled with winds and whispers, flowing in and out in a rhythm that is inhuman, as if we’re hearing a gargantuan lung breathing in and out in an endless cycle. Another example is ‘Locus Meropis’, which begins with a continuously roiling wave of crackling and sparking energies, leading to ghostly resonances and whistlings echoing and rolling in an unbounded void. Forces and processes beyond our understanding clash and collide, fuelling inconceivable amounts of power through unseen conduits. This compositional formula is highly successful – creating as it does a tension between what we actually see and what is observed through other, more objective means.

There were times when this album made me shiver – to quote a meme from a very popular sci-fi tv show, “It’s bigger inside than on the outside”. I don’t think saying that is stretching things too far – on the surface each piece is quite a closed affair, yet as you dive deeper into their mesmerising sonic qualities one detects subtleties and nuances that are often felt rather than heard, opening out one’s reactions. Rumbles and drones, quietly expressive of immensities, immeasurable flows and streams of powers whose magnitudes we’re incapable of envisioning, and vast cavernous enormities that defy sense, underscore the compositional strength of the pieces. I would even go so far as to categorise this as a ‘sensitive’ album, but only in terms of how ANIHILA have alchemised the prodigious nature of the hidden mechanisms that allow reality on a human-comprehensible scale to function and turned them into expressions allowing us glimpses into unimaginable enigmas.

Silent Annihilation is a tour de force of understatement, but therein lies this production’s appeal. It sweeps us on a tour of universal structures unbounded by any constraints that we understand, and shows us that in spite of our best efforts there are puzzles we will perhaps never be able to solve satisfactorily. All this is done without grandiose flourishes, just careful and considered attention to detail, creative use and manipulation of appropriate atmospherics, and a mature approach to understanding how sounds work. Because of that the impact is quite awe-inspiring, as well as humbling in some measure, just like the moment one stands outside on a clear night, away from any source of light pollution, and looks up to see the stars in all their unreachable glory. That simple act brings things into perspective.

Psymon Marshall 2019.