More Thomas LaRoche Insanity - Creep of Paris and House Dust #1!

Thomas LaRoche. House Dust #1. 2018 Edition of 25. Research Laboratories.

https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

      a.       House Dust #1

      b.       House Dust #1

Thomas LaRoche is one half of Active Denial who produced two amazing cassettes in 2018 and 2019. House Dust is one of his many other projects on Research Laboratories. This short tape is in a limited edition of 25. It’s described as Musique Concrète; wavering tonal frequency continues in a steady line whilst metal scrapings drag out around, through and over it. Energy build as the scrapings and clattering grow. The scraping is relentless and becomes intensified as its’ sharpness rises, this is raw. I assumed the programme was repeated on the other side, but the tonal frequency seems to dominate the clatter. The tonal noise eventually takes over and it’s done.

I like this, another obscure gem from Research Laboratories.

C.O.P. Gavia Immer. Cassette. Research Laboratories.  https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

a. Untitled.

b. Untitled.

Whereas House Dust was a new tape with hand painted cassette case and artwork inside, Creep of Paris – Gavia Immer is way rawer. It’s a recycled cassette that is spray painted black, the cassette case is covered in packing tape with the name written on in pen and some details printed off and stuck on the back. Also, Gavia Immer is another name for a Common Loon or A Great Northern Diver bird.

Old instrumental Jazz music plays, it has some amazing drumming, this plays out until some recorded dialogue appears over a microphone. A man and a woman converse. A woman then talks, it seems to shift through different passages of dialogue with different characters. How old this is I don’t know, how it was obtained is a mystery. Old music takes over, the crackle of the old vinyl very prevalent as it dies off.

The B Side, contains old film music spliced up between passages of Field Recordings of inaudible dialogue amongst crowds, the two are cutup and play for periods of time with each taking over for a duration. This just continues, but it works and is the most effective side of the release, the relentless repetition of the two sources is good. It continues until a piano recordings and jazz play out. I found I was able to get into this more that the first side, I engaged more..

All in All it’s been an enjoyable morning of experiments from the Laboratories.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

MUUR - Bod album review.

Album: Bod

Artist: MUUR

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 143^rd Cycle

Tracklist:

      1.      Bod

MUUR’s Bod is composed of a single track of deeply resonant, atavistic, subterranean, and primeval ritual occult ambient, rising up from the deepest chasms. Strangely-garbed and faceless figures huddle in secret temples, bathed in the dim light of sacred fires and billows of incense, singing chants of abysmal power accompanied by instruments made from bone. This is the sound of tectonics shifting, of the planet realigning itself into a new paradigm, of ages-old power preparing itself for a renewal and resurgence into the light of the modern era. Tinkling finger-cymbals, guttural throat-singing reciting ancient texts that were once buried with our ancestors, massive fuzzed-out guitar chords, all set against swathes of deep sweeping bass chords and primitive rhythms. It’s like listening to the very earth itself reawakening a long-entombed power, a power that has been biding its time until all the right elements are properly aligned, a calling up of preternatural entities to wrest the world from the desecrators and defilers.

This really is the most extraordinary and the most glorious piece of ritual ambient I’ve heard recently. This goes straight to the limbic system in our brains, stimulating our most primitive instincts and connections. This is after all the purpose of rituals such as these – to forge links with those aspects of ourselves and our world that we’ve forgotten or lost. More than that, those deep subterranean voices and bass rumbles are felt deeply, sometimes physically in the pit of one’s stomach. These aren’t some empty ritualistic gestures aimed at some abstract deity: no, the entities addressed here are far older, far more real, and far more deeply embedded in the fabric of our reality than we are wont to acknowledge. These beings or, rather, spirits are intertwined with the physical matter that constitutes our planet. Even so, they are capricious in nature and they are not beholden to us: we are merely passengers.

MUUR’s Bod is goose-pimple-inducing, and the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood up, plus shivers ran down my spine. It’s a reaction that’s a result of our mind and body remembering – the resurfacing of our most hidden memories that modern society and civilisation have covered over with unnecessary detritus. It’s a reminder too of what we’ve forgotten, and what we’ve lost, as well as a signpost to a deeper reality.

Let the gods of the elder times sweep you along and bring you face to face with your ancestors – you’ll be grateful for it.  

Out on 30^th July and available as a CD in an edition of 500 from Cyclic Law’s Bandcamp page here: https://cycliclaw.bandcamp.com/album/bod

Bardoseneticcube & Shinkiro - Beyond the Edge of the Universe.

Album: Beyond the Edge of the Universe

Artist: Bardoseneticcube & Shinkiro

Label: Zhelezobeton

Catalogue no: ZHB-LXXVIII

Tracklist: 

1. Messenger from the Galactic Core

2. Dark Matter

3. The Void

4. Ultimate Fate of the Universe

Here we have four lengthy pieces of cosmic dark ambient that comfortably stretch across a canvas as broad and as deep as the universe itself. It amazes me at times how a species as planet-bound as homo sapiens can create such vivid, painterly, and sculptural depictions in sound of environments none of us have ever seen up close, and which we are unlikely ever to visit. I am disinclined to believe in astral projection but music like this makes me question my assumptions about that – how else to explain such mind-numbingly expansive and dramatic vistas of dark beauty as detailed here?

I cannot imagine a place more breathtaking, electrifying, or terrifying than the galactic core of the Milky Way. A nexus of out-of-control gravity culminating in a supermassive black hole, where stars orbit around it at speeds barely comprehendible, where matter and light are swallowed and spewed out violently at thousands of miles a second. The sheer ferocity is itself a grandiose and ineffable spectacle, worthy of our awe and dread in equal amounts. The opening track thankfully lets us observe the unfolding events from a safe distance, the slow dance outlined in sustained chords in major and minor keys that ring out across the inestimable distances whilst being accompanied by stretched-out bell-like tones. Even from here though, the pull of the forces at work is strong enough to be felt, giving us a tiny but exhilarating taste of what it’s like to be insignificant.  It is both inspiring and hideously alarming.

We’re in even more mysterious territory in ‘Dark Matter’, that hidden and puzzling gravitational force shepherding the observable matter in our universe. Looping mutterings and grumblings form its backdrop, with exclamations of sparkling crackles punctuating it in random bursts; the very components of the invisible fabric holding reality together, unseen and unfelt but essential. Fading in gradually the voice of the universe asserts itself, eventually breaking and crashing upon the shores of matter, sparking chaos and creation, and magnificent spectacle. It almost overwhelms but pulls back before everything fatally breaks apart.

Now we’re confronted by ‘The Void’ – a place of unutterable emptiness (for fact fans, there is actually a real void in space, called The Great Nothing or the Boőtes Void, where there are very few galaxies and is mostly unoccupied space). Bass gratings and bursts of metallic percussion fight through swelling chords, a clash between chaos and orderliness. This inevitably leads us into ‘The Ultimate Fate of the Universe’, something which none of us wish to contemplate let alone being capable of imagining. A state where matter loses its cohesion and loses out to the irresistible force of immense gravity, coalescing into the very infinitesimally-small singularity the universe began as. This final track is a lament for all that was and is now passing beyond the call of anyone’s memory. From darkness it was birthed, and into darkness it falls once again. 

‘Beyond the Edge of the Universe’ makes me want to buy a sensory-isolation tank and dissolve into non-being whilst listening to and experiencing this. Strangely enough, in spite of the destructive powers that lie behind the creation and continuance of the universe and their portrayal here, I find it all somehow comforting. Not entirely sure whether that makes me a grumpy nihilistic crank but it suits me just fine. 

Available from Zhelezobeton’s Bandcamp in digital format (https://zhelezobeton.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-the-edge-of-the-universe ) and also available in a limited factory-pressed CD in 4-panel digipak in an edition of 300 plus a limited edition tape of 50 with fold-out inner card and download code. 

Psymon Marshall 2019

Entre Vifs - Offrande et Partage.

Entre Vifs – Offrande et Partage. CD. Aussaat. 2019. Aussaat 10.

https://www.facebook.com/Aussaatundernte/

https://bruitiste.tumblr.com/

https://www.facebook.com/EntreVifs/

     1.   Holidays in Stahlstadt.

     2.   Red Fruits.

     3.   A Benevolent Storm Front.

     4.   Chaorgia Pantomachia.

Bonjour mes amis français, merci de m'envoyer un autre album d'Entre Vifs sur Aussaat Records !!!! (Google Translate est génial !!).

After the excellent Ontologie, I was converted to the work of Entre Vifs; their work remains some of the best I’d heard this year. The booklet to Offrande contains images of landscapes, architecture and shots documenting Entre Vifs amazing self-made electronic devices that make up their sounds. This album refers to recent legal fights by the project and a resurgence of activity in 2018. Offrande et Partage references Leonard Cohen’s Anthem (The Future) in its’s sleeve notes. The work was performed live in their Noisecraft Workshop in March – April 2018, these are excerpts of sessions 49B, 50A, 50B and 51A.

The opening track Holidays in Stahlstadt builds through ambient echoes in its’ slow creepiness that drags itself out, it’s doesn’t have the immediate massive attack of the last album. It’s heavy on haunted atmospherics and seems to wind itself back and down sometimes to a reduced palette of sound in order to grow again. Although I am immediately aware that the sounds are those of Zorin and Kobaian that make Entre Vifs, the track drags in sound, creating a very different type of brutality. It also seems to throw sounds around the room demonstrating epic dynamics to the point where I thought there was background noise around me, this builds to sonic hysteria - this long death of an opening track demonstrates the sophistication that exists and excites me within the sound of Entre Vifs.

Red Fruits seems to build on the Slow Death of sound. It attempts to form a sense of percussion within itself only to start dragging and barking out choking sounds as if it is in combat within itself only to then project that combat as sound towards the listener, this frequently happens throughout the album. There’s a wide scope of distance that’s played with, some of the track exists in the distance and projects to the forefront through steps of sound. It addresses its own failure by the recurrence of noise as percussion/beat and how it doesn’t become a noise artist using beats and making pointless EBM/techno stuff is again impressive. The work drags itself down to chokes, croaks and echoes; it splutters and fades.

The dragging and the dying seem to become intensified for A Benevolent Storm Front, the sound seems to pull itself and explode continuously, strip back suddenly and converse with itself – it’s very brutal, not settling on a formula, it seems to reformulate and reshape itself. The haunted sound echoes and resonates in its full form. Things shift non-stop, background and foreground communicate with each other continuously. Brutal interruptions lead new sonic formations, sometimes a rhythm tries to start, but that is warped and flattened to noise.

They save the biggest until last, Charargia Pantomachia (Your Attention Please) scrapes itself into action and all hell breaks loose. Low-level and High-Level assault share shifts in full distorted metal abuse.  Charargia does seem to shift into even more territories of sound than the others, it has the same yet even more exaggerated parallels in sound but never stays in one place for too long. I like the injections of Harsh Noise blasts put into the sound, they scream and interrupt.

This is an angrier album than Ontologie, it doesn’t let you zone in on the massive assaults of electronic and metal noise, it shifts around too much, you’re frequently pulled in and moved around with the work. The destructive qualities of the album literally create cracks to let the light in. I want more Entre Vifs in my collection, I will have to go backwards and get it all because I want to know, were they always this good, or did it take decades to get this good? Epic album, ace progression, do get it.

Choppy Noodles 2019.