S.T.A.B. Electronics - Funerals.

 

S.T.A.B. Electronics – Funerals – Old Europa Café – CD – 2023 – OECD 337.

https://www.oldeuropacafe.com/

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556830742937

        1.    Birthdread.

        2.    The Howl.

        3.    She Fucking Died (In Memoriam JS).

        4.    A Poxing.

        5.    The Death of Sex.

        6.    All Things Bright (Snowtown).

        7.    I Stand Alone.

        8.    Violence Begets Violence.

        9.    The Wisdom of the Grave.

        10. Grief.

A baby cries, this is the introduction to Birthdread. rumbling electronics and ranting soon become the core of the track, Keith Finnan never stops reminding us that “We Scream!”, he doesn’t stop for the entire track. For the first time in years a repetition as good as the start of Enemy of Pigs ‘Mother, mother please, mother, mother, please’ or the death tirade that began Day of the Male.

Muffled sound samples play out until an impressive display of synthesisers and distorted rage laden vocals becomes ‘The Howl.’  This uses something common to the Dalek power vocal technique but makes it original by heightening the treble of the vocal to such levels so that it becomes too sharp to accurately decipher. The electronics warble in accordance to the vocal, heightening the confusion of the sound. The muffled voice sample returns to its report after the death of the sonics.

Descending, depressive electronics back a bleak vocal rant of ‘She’s Fucking Dead’ -is this a lost love, a relative? The vocal repeats ‘She’s Fucking Dead’ until it becomes emotion made into a weapon to batter the listener into submission. I swear I can hear grieving in the background. This track is horrible, pure grief made into noise.

‘A Poxing’ impresses us away from grieving with big electronics, the drones, samples and vocals kick the shit out of each other, warbled vocals rant with a terrifying urgency and we are pulled back into the horror of She’s Fucking Dead. It is here that I am aware I am in a position similar to that of Martin Sheen’s character Captain Benjamin in Apocalypse Now being dragged down the river through the deepest recesses of Colonel Kurtz’s mind, I have no choice but to follow this journey to its end. The death synths impress the fuck out of me here, they are unbelievably huge, so drag me down that river.

Horns go off, sampled voices argue and the vocal shouts it’s head off, I feel as if I am properly in the middle of things now. Stuck in an argument deciding who to go off at, fuck you all I am ready, let’s fucking go for it. Let me finish my drink so I can break my glass ready for whatever comes next. This is ‘The Death of Sex,’ samples cry, the vocal roars, the horns sound like a traffic jam building up towards road rage.

Pulsing distant beats go off, boom, boom, boom, boom. Raving, ranting and electronics arrive, sampled dialogue plays simultaneously – that and the vocal battle for prominence of All Things Bright (Snowtown). The urgency isn’t in the vocals, but is totally manipulated through the electronics, they sound like old electronics, a bit Moog like, but they are in charge, bigger, divebombing drones cut in and kill the Moog until the vocal is left to do its’ work with the sample, the electronics come back once this has all been sorted out.

A dramatic intro lets us know ‘I Stand Alone’, the electronics throb, repeat and allow the sermon to begin. The vocal seems laced with more spite here than on other tracks to express the isolation. Technical question here, is this the stance of any listener of this level of Power Electronics? I have been playing this in my car on the way to work for months, my own deaf levels of isolation never stop, words and actions stab me in the face daily, am I completely fucked? Technically that makes this the soundtrack to the listeners life. I stand alone raises too many questions upon questions in my head, so fuck off S.T.A.B. The repetitive electronics and their tonal fuckery are amazing at least, the track’s die off is gradual and painful.

The urgency continues with samples in ‘Violence Begets Violence,’ the vocal reports, the electronics and the rhythmic beating noise are anxiety made into sound. The depth of the synths radiates an ambitiousness akin to a lot of Cold Spring artists like Colossloth and Satori and that of Control, but the vocal is a ranting death sound that radiates pure hatred. The ‘War Is Good’ chant is greatness akin to that of Hydra.

Mournful Synths and prayers spin together, beautiful, distorted, whirling electronics to form a black vortex of funeral sound – this is ‘The Wisdom of the Grave’. The vocal goes off, shouts and spits at the death of life. This is very bleak, but the best electronics are saved until last, perhaps the best of the project’s career, ‘Grief’ uses overridden organ noises and warped vocals. Whatever this is, it works.

My only suggestion is sometimes the project should let the electronics do all of the work, vocals aren’t always needed due to the clarity and strength of the samples and noise on here. I say this as I always thought of S.T.A.B. as an effective PE/Death Industrial project, but this release does demonstrate a clearly intelligent, effective and subtle use of electronics. Funerals is potentially the starting point to a new era of S.T.A.B. Electronics. Good work within this genre needs solid thought behind it to be remotely effective and the sharpness here is all in the fine details. Better be this good in Manchester next month, welcome to the now of Death Industrial. Excellent.

Nothing and Nobody 2024.

David E. Williams – Banana Peel Slips on Itself

David E. Williams – Banana Peel Slips on Itself – CD/Download – Old Europa Café – 2020.

https://davidewilliams.bandcamp.com/

http://www.davidewilliams.com/

https://www.oldeuropacafe.com/

The work of Philadelphia based artist David E. Williams was always good but seemed to rise to another level after the 2009 album Every Missing Duck is a Duck Missed. Recordings since then have been consistently great, it is as if they seem determined to consistently improve on the last. Williams has also been involved in recordings with Rozz Williams and Deathpile as well as scoring soundtracks and playing in Blood Axis, the Urge Within and The Muskets; this is his eighth album, Banana Peel Slips on Itself.

Williams is often accompanied by Jerome Deppe who appears on One Meatball, Erin Martz plays guitar on ‘Marquis DeSade was a Sadist.’

Feet are the subject of opener ‘Song About Being A Foot’, after hearing this I am determined to treat mine a lot better. The humorous Williams darkness is clear and reassuring that this album will be good. Marquis DeSade was a Sadist, has a Bad Goth track rhythm pattern, that is so raw it is excellent. I feel the clarity of the song, the (very) dark humour are in full flow as well as the prog -rock keyboard solos. Williams combines such unfashionable styles and makes them great again, he always seems to fix things a lot.  Three Brown liquids demonstrates Williams piano/keyboard skills to strong effect. Margaret Sanger Lives in Heaven demonstrates further piano skill into an amazing dark ballad about the famed Birth Control advocate and sex educator.  Each song demonstrates Williams’ skilled and inventive storytelling, the subjects are absurd and bleak, yet never unoriginal or boring.

Sun Cracks Through Black Cotton seems to evoke Howard Shores soundtrack to the David Cronenberg film Crash; it is unnerving, and the vocal is crashing and aggressive. Chiropractor Arrives by Helicopter is doom laden, slow, and hilarious. The absurdity of the subject matter is a comedic observation, was it something he read, saw, or invented? Dark Keyboards form the melody of Unworthy of Love, the lyrics are even darker, being able to read the lyrics on Bandcamp while I play the album is great, I never usually bother, but now realise how lyrically sharp Williams is. I dreamed I Caught a Cold really references the even darker sound of early work like Pseudo Erotica, it is a great mid album throwback. I May Be a Rat is humorous yet emotive, I still do not know where the keyboard sounds even came from, they are odd yet amazing.

Pets Will Eat Their Owners has a line I will never forget as long as I live – ‘ My Foreskin Melts Like Butter’, however it has the best tempo change I have heard in age. The great Jerome Deppe steps up to sing on One Meatball as further keyboard quirkiness comes from unknown depths. Lou Gehrig is excellent balladry, dark and slow as Williams reflects on the life of the legendary Baseball player. As the lyrics end, piano and keyboard instrumentation follows. The finale Somber Sombrero is the best ballad on the album, the vocal is smooth, a case of saving the best until last.

David E. Williams is a one-off maverick talent who will never be popular, he will never be cool, but his work demonstrates pure clarity and radiates a brilliance that never seems to faulter. This album continues his long run of brilliance.

Dorkus Maximus 2020.

New Risen Throne - The Outside.

Album: The Outside

Artist: New Risen Throne

Label: Cyclic Law/Old Europa Café

Catalogue no: 133^rd Cycle/OECD 276

Tracklist:

      1.      The Outside (I): Sunrise

      2.      What We have Seen

      3.      The Outside (II): Facing the Void

      4.      Corrosion of Pillars

      5.      The Outside (II): Structure

      6.      The Outside (IV): Bodies Float Silently

      7.      Birth of a New Disciple (II)

      8.      A Vision of the Hidden (Sysselmann Remix)

      9.      Echoes from the Loss (Visions Remix)

    10.  Breath of Growing Structures (Taphephobia Remix)

    11.  Humani Nihil (Phantom Ship Remix)

    12.  Sad Silent Prostration Before the Monolith (Vestigial Remix)

    13.  Sigh of the Soul (Apocryphos Remix)

    14.  Signs of the Approaching Wastefulness (II) (New Risen Throne Remix)

    15.  Withered Regions (TeHÔM Remix)

New Risen Throne, aka Gabriele Panci, has been a purveyor of some of the finest dark ambient textures for a long while now, and this latest opus is a follow-up to 2011’s Loneliness of Hidden Structures (Cyclic Law – 38^th Cycle). As a quick glance at the tracklist will verify, it comprises seven new tracks and a further eight remixes created by some of the premier dark ambient acts working in the field today. As it’s such an epic aural tome I shall curtail my waffling and get straight into it.

As with most of NRT’s previous output, we are immediately beset with cold, dark, sweeping atmospherics on ‘The Outside (I): Sunrise’, perhaps at the coldest point just before the sun shows its face, yet ultimately one detects a streak of cosmic evanescence swirling throughout its length. Weaving in amongst the dankness are voices, ultimately overwhelmed by gargantuan tsunamis of oppressive, heavy drones. If I were to place this in any kind of geographical context, albeit a spiritual one, this would be Purgatory, a dimension suspended somewhere between the vaguely enlightened and the absolute damned, a piece of otherworldly real estate hovering between bright skies and an industrial wasteland of decay and filth, leaning heavily towards the latter though. Perhaps this is what the title refers to: a purgatorial realm where those on the outside are forever goaded and taunted by visions of the heavenly, knowing that they will never reach those heights. That is terrifying.

Next is ‘What We have Seen’, a slowly-pulsing, stealthy miasmic cloud of suffocation, an intangible and diffuse but sentient phenomenon that yet has a destabilising and destructive effect, perhaps like the slow onset of plague, feeling out the vulnerable and the doomed with its icy searching fingers. It starts off quietly, almost imperceptibly but, by turns, it gains a solidity and deadly weight that crushes both people and the light. A woman’s voice interrupts, perhaps a supplication to whatever saviour she believes in, until resonant tones like bells emerge out of the gloom – but what do they portend? Do they bring the promise of being saved or the harbinger of inevitable death in the wake of an immovable force? Choir-like voices only reinforce that notion, giving way to a massive wave of orchestral-style drones that threaten to subsume all before its onslaught. ‘The Outside (II): Facing the Void’ doesn’t give us any respite, wailing tones and drones blowing coldly across a barren landscape, that once was fertile and lush, yet now is nothing more than a paean to desolation. The only things that grow here are diseased and misshapen, perverted sculptures displayed in homage to a twisted vision of Nature. Not even high-flying orchestral sweeps manage to dispel the oppressive stuffiness, instead only suffusing the atmosphere with something monolithic and indestructible, demonic even.

‘Corrosion of Pillars’, track 4, is an exercise in lulling one into a false sense of security, beginning as it does with plangent, almost soothing tones, before a breath-like drone rips into the fabric of this reality wherever it may be located, dragging with it darkness and infection. It’s seemingly anchored in a foetid solidity, a slow-creeping flesh-rust, eating the body of materiality from the inside, sundering its very cells and constituents, corrupting and necrotising. The next track, ‘The Outside (III): Structure’, doesn’t pretend to offer us any shelter either, a dank, claustrophobic dungeon dripping with stagnation and ichor, replete with mysterious voicings echoing up from secret subterranean places. All we can do here is to shiver against bare stone walls, and attempt to find warmth and solace where we can. Almost as if closing a circle comes ‘The Outside (IV): Bodies Float Silently’, the final iteration of the cycle (but not the final track on CD1): the endpoint, when the ghost in the machine becomes a literal machine, an engine of de-evolution that ultimately sends us (and the world) back to a primitive state, or even to time of endless death. Light is very much in short supply here, but not altogether extinguished – hiding in some chasm somewhere, away from the clutches of darkness, biding its time for the right conditions for it to re-emerge. The hints are there, albeit extremely faint.

To round off CD1 we have ‘Birth of a New Disciple (II)’, a track suffused with occult meanings and invested with a deep spirituality, even if it is itself wrapped in a kind of darkness as if to hide itself from the world. It soars and sweeps, occasionally creating sparks and clashing bolts of power and light, swooping to the ground only to veer upwards at the last moment. It is power personified, self-contained and confident in itself, knowing that it has ultimate control, and that its boundaries are limitless. Its worshippers know that too, and seek propitiation and appeasement, hoping to win its friendship in a bid for survival.

I won’t dwell too much on the remix disc as, although these tracks are ‘new’ in the sense of new interpretations of selected pieces of NRT’s previous output, this is a bonus adjunct to the new material. Nevertheless, I think they deserve a little time to be listened to and appraised.

Norway’s Sysselmann (Thomas Narverud) gives ‘A Vision of the Hidden’ even more of a sense of the occult streams behind everyday appearances, injecting some cosmic expansiveness into proceedings. Frédèric Arbour’s Visions project reinvents ‘Echoes from the Loss’ and transforms it into something etheric and deeply seismic. Taphephobia (Ketil Søraker) takes on ‘Breath of Growing Structures’ and reimagines and reshapes it into something uplifting, poetic, and mesmerising, a call from the depths of time, space, and dimension – a soundtrack perhaps to accompany the cooling of the universe and the subsequent coalescence of all matter into familiarity. Definitely a highlight.

Roberto Faloci, aka Phantom Ship, drags ‘Humani Nihil’ into the deep realms of some bottomless ocean, where it appears there are wonders to behold. Droning chords swirl effervescently, light appears to dance even at these watery depths, and colours and alien shapes cavort in profusion. This one is another highlight, and left me with a smile on my face. Vestigial’s reinterpretation of ‘Sad Silent Prostration before the Monolith’ is subterranean, burrowing deep into the strata of earth to reach the primordial chasms and caverns below our feet. Rumbling drones do a magnificent job of stirring the lizard brain right here. ‘Sigh of the Soul’, remixed by Apocryphon, delves even deeper if it’s possible, assailing us with deep bass drones that appear to echo endlessly around the bowels of the earth. Whatever lives down here wishes to remain there, and to be left alone.

No we’re on the home straight with the last two tracks. First is ‘Signs of the Approaching Wastefulness (II)’ remixed by New Risen Throne himself, and what we’re treated to is a masterful essay in creating disturbing, unsettling atmospheres, without resorting to overwhelming noise or drone. A barely audible distorted voice, placed against scratchings and disembodied noises, plus the occasional swelling and strategically-placed drone, are enough to create a vivid picture. Many would do well to study this. Finally, TeHÔM take the honours of rounding the set off, with ‘Withered Regions’. A lone bell, treated and distorted, accompanies a male voice, a ritual being enacted in some dark and secret place that isn’t anchored in any particular time or place, a sourceless Everywhere that somehow pervades all of existence but yet is not part of it. This is an incantation to manifest isolation, separation, distance, and ultimately, detachment from all that is material and earthy.

It seems highly appropriate that I am currently reviewing this whilst much of the world is in lockdown to guard against a contagion: although where I am people are still free to go wherever and to mingle with whomever they please, this album somehow gives a foretaste of a deserted world, where the streets are empty, and the human voice and spirit has been stilled. It almost seems as if this album and its release form a kind of focal point, a nexus, wherein all the fears and hopes of mankind have converged. Perhaps it’s even a tad prophetic – even if it ultimately isn’t, it’s a magnificent album. Was it worth waiting nine years for? That’s for you to decide, but it’s arrived at a very propitious moment.

Available as a 2xCD in an edition of 500 in an 8-panel digipak and as a digital stream from here:

https://cycliclaw.bandcamp.com/album/the-outside

And also from the Cyclic Law and Old Europa Cafè websites:

https://www.cycliclaw.com/releases/new-risen-throne-the-outside-2cd-133rd-cycle

https://www.oldeuropacafe.com/catalog/category/the-outside.html

Psymon Marshall 2020.

ANTIchildLEAGUE / Cronaca Nera – Bruises and Bites

ANTIchildLEAGUE / Cronaca Nera – Bruises and Bites – CDR – Digipak – (OECDR 064) – 2017 – Old Europa Café - http://www.oldeuropacafe.com/

1.     Bruises and Bites
2. Calvarium
3. Carnal Supremacy
4. Cum in to my wounds
5. Hate e Prevaricate
6. Total Submission
7. Helga

Cronaca Nera and ANTIchildLEAGUE both released their first recordings back in 2001 despite each being active prior to this. However, Cronaca recently returned in 2015 after a 13-year absence. Donadio has been active since around 1997 first with solo work appearing on the Elegy 2 and Notre Dame compilations prior to ACL.  For Bruises and Bites, Cronaca created the sounds on all the tracks and Donadio did the vocal work.

After the insane areas ACL’s 2016 album Holy Ghost reached with its’ vocal insanity, increasingly experimental and dubbed out sound-scapes, this pushes a rabid return to the intense rage of the earliest recording by ACL - Hell-worm. This was also evident on the infected sonic-tantrum that was 2016’s Holy Spirit released on the Obsessive Fundamental Realism label. Vocals form a mass of rage that surrounds the waves of distortion that rain from Cronaca Nera’s violent pulsations and Death Synths. This amasses to spread panicked sonic filth and perversion throughout the album. 

The backing noise can be particularly choppy and violent, cutting into the massive sounds of the synthesizers. Gaya’s vocals screech, growl and order everyone and everything around. The cold surrounding noise switches rapidly between clinical, splintered and explosive. The explosiveness builds to controlled walls of distortion on Carnal Supremacy as Donadio loses her shit big-time. Selective walls also pop up throughout whilst Donadio rudely interrupts, disrupting the wall’s attempt to build and grow as a wall, only allowing for a whirlwind of anarchic noise.

Donadio’s vocal becomes angrier and increasingly inhuman as Bruises and Bites Progresses. The themes also become more sexual with each track. At other times the vocal disintegrates into violent, screaming, slathering noise. On the low level, minimal frequency abuse that is Cum in to my Wounds the vocal is vile, sickly and frothing. The last two tracks represent the death of the album. 

As a joint recording this is successful, both parties complement each other perfectly. Donadio presents herself as the as the deliverer and recipient of torture in each song’s scenario, yet the dominant persona is the most prevalent side to Donadio throughout Bruises and Bites. Cronaca Nera provide intelligent varied noise that is exceptionally cohesive with the vocals. They deliver rich contrasts in sound that stop Bruises and Bites becoming disinteresting or too samey. This is a strictly limited recording that needs more work together between the two artists to see their combined, abusive sickness develop even further. But if not, it is still an impressive addition to the discographies of both artists. Wanting and waiting for more. 

Choppy Noodles 2017 

Old Europa Cafe site
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