The Von Einem Tapes gathers seven cassettes recorded between 2011 and 2014 into a thirty-track, two-CD set lasting more than two hours. Such collections can expose every inconsistency accumulated across several years of small-edition releases, but this one feels remarkably unified. Mark Groves, the Australian musician behind Von Einem, had already established a narrow but surprisingly flexible vocabulary: processed speech, restrained industrial percussion, decaying electronics, low drones, metallic reverberations and sudden outbreaks of abrasive noise. Individual tapes may have been issued by different labels and created under slightly different circumstances, yet they appear to have originated inside the same sealed psychological environment. Mastered by Joe Talia, the compilation preserves their cassette-born roughness while giving the complete sequence enough continuity to function as something more substantial than a chronological clearinghouse.
Von Einem is named after Bevan Spencer von Einem, the only person convicted in connection with the group associated with Adelaide’s so-called Family murders. The project also draws upon other Australian crimes, psychological profiles and fragments of procedural language. That subject matter immediately creates an ethical problem. Naming a project after a convicted murderer risks directing fascination toward the offender, while the use of real cases can lend music an unearned appearance of seriousness. Groves generally avoids the theatrical aggression and domineering personality common to crime-fixated power electronics. His treated voice is clinical, flattened and often partially obscured, sounding closer to a damaged documentary narration than a performer assuming the identity of a killer. This distance does not resolve the problem completely, but it prevents the recordings from becoming straightforward exercises in murderer mythology.
The first disc is dominated by compressed scenes and abrupt pieces. “Silence and Brush Fences,” “Mummified Rather Than Dissolved,” “White Holden Sedan” and “Dirties” have titles that resemble isolated phrases extracted from police reports, local newspapers or inventories of evidence. The music behaves similarly. Sounds are presented as incomplete details rather than fully developed compositions: a pulse begins, a voice supplies several sentences, an electronic frequency shifts slightly, and then the piece ends before its implications become clear. Even the shortest tracks contribute to the cumulative pressure. They are not introductions to larger works so much as sealed rooms arranged along the same corridor.
Groves’ rhythms are especially effective because they rarely settle into conventional industrial momentum. The beats in “Dirties” and “Black Moods” thud rather than drive, repeating with the awkward regularity of machinery that has been repaired but not properly realigned. Synthesizer tones circle those impacts without releasing the tension they create. Elsewhere, junk-metal resonance, static and feedback occupy the foreground, although Von Einem seldom becomes a continuous wall of noise. Groves appears more interested in controlling empty space than overwhelming it. A sound can feel physically oppressive because of what has been removed around it: a lone impact echoes into silence, or a narrow frequency remains suspended after the voice has disappeared.
The processed narration gives the music much of its identity. Groves’ Australian accent remains audible beneath the treatments, grounding the work in a particular place rather than the anonymous dystopia inhabited by countless industrial projects. His delivery is calm to the point of emotional vacancy. It suggests someone reading a psychological assessment after every directly human response has been edited out. At its most effective, this method makes the listener conscious of how institutional language can convert suffering into a collection of dates, locations and behavioral patterns. At other moments, the recurring combination of impassive speech, low percussion and corrosive drone becomes predictable. Across thirty tracks, clinical detachment can harden into a formula.
The second disc opens the sound sufficiently to prevent that formula from consuming the collection. Distant, atonal piano appears in “Twice in the Head,” its notes sounding less composed than remembered from another room. “Forged Cheques” introduces an orchestral-string sample against crumbling drones and higher electronic squeals. These elements do not make the music lush; instead, they create brief suggestions of a wider emotional world that the prevailing numbness has suppressed. “Scripted Phases” places a fractured rhythmic framework beneath a windswept drone, while “Disturbed Then Refilled” returns to a thicker heavy-electronics pulse, a sustained midrange tone and a voice so altered that speech becomes another unstable texture.
This movement between recognizable detail and abstraction is crucial. The record is least convincing when its criminal references are expected to provide all the gravity. It is considerably stronger when the sound independently generates unease—when an object seems to be dragged beyond the microphone, when a rhythm falls out of alignment, or when a voice is reduced to consonants and electrical residue. The real cases should not function as decorative horror material, and the compilation occasionally comes uncomfortably close to allowing evocative titles to do work that the compositions have not earned. Yet its best pieces resist spectacle. They make violence feel bureaucratic, regional and concealed inside ordinary environments.
Vehicle references such as “White Holden Sedan” and “Orange Sigma” intensify that specifically Australian atmosphere. They are mundane objects, but their placement among descriptions of damaged bodies, forged documents and disturbed sites makes familiarity itself unsettling. The landscape implied by The Von Einem Tapes is not a gothic ruin or fantastical torture chamber. It is made from suburbs, roads, institutional interiors and quiet stretches of land. Groves’ “Thornbury Bunker” recordings repeatedly turn ordinary spaces into acoustic containers. The result is closer to forensic industrial music than horror soundtrack imitation.
The later portion of the set contains several longer pieces, including “A Group That Preyed on Itself,” “Hope Forest” and the concluding “Lower Light.” Here the tight miniatures begin to stretch into more patient environments. Sounds are permitted to deteriorate gradually, and the listener becomes aware of layers that would have been cut short on the earlier tracks. “Lower Light” is particularly well placed at the end. It does not offer a climax or explanation; it lets the compilation recede into a dimmer, less definite space. After so much processed information, the lack of resolution feels appropriate.
Talia’s mastering is essential to the success of this progression. The recordings retain differences in density and fidelity, as material sourced from seven independent cassette releases should, but changes in volume and texture do not make the compilation feel randomly assembled. The grain is preserved without allowing it to blur every piece into the same grey surface. The sequence also benefits from the alternation between one- or two-minute fragments and works lasting four, six or more minutes. Two uninterrupted hours of Von Einem’s restricted palette would be punishing in an unproductive way; the short pieces create exits, resets and changes of scale.
The six-panel wallet and accompanying booklet frame the release as a complete early-period statement, but the music remains more interesting than its packaging or scarcity. The Von Einem Tapes documents Groves learning how much he can remove from industrial noise while maintaining its physical menace. Its weaknesses are inseparable from that method: repetitions accumulate, voices sometimes lapse into generalized ominousness, and the invocation of actual crimes remains morally uneasy. Nevertheless, the compilation develops a distinct character through restraint, regional specificity and close attention to pacing. Rather than shouting its transgressions, Von Einem speaks quietly from inside a deteriorating mechanism. The listener is left to decide whether that voice is documenting the darkness, exploiting it or demonstrating how easily the two activities can become indistinguishable.
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