Macronympha - 2003 - Close To The Edge

 

Mother Savage Noise Productions – none  528.40MB FLAC

Close to the Edge presents Macronympha in its most effective format: one untitled, album-length block of sound with no track divisions to provide artificial relief. Issued in 2003 as a CDr through Solipsism, it is a characteristically obscure item even within the group’s enormous discography. The homemade medium suits the music. This is not noise polished into a prestige object or framed as an institutional electronic composition. It feels privately manufactured, physically circulated and intended to overwhelm whatever playback system receives it. Once started, the disc establishes a continuous environment of distorted metal, electrical pressure and unstable low-frequency motion.
The title inevitably recalls the 1972 Yes album, but Macronympha’s relationship with the long form is almost its inverse. There are no virtuoso solos, lyrical movements or carefully announced themes. The piece develops through density, texture and changes in pressure. Yet the joke is not entirely simple. Like a side-long progressive-rock composition, it asks to be heard as a complete duration rather than a sequence of interchangeable attacks. Its internal changes matter. A listener who hears only an undifferentiated wall misses the slow alterations in frequency, the appearance and disappearance of metallic bodies, and the way apparently static distortion continually changes its weight.
Macronympha was founded in Pittsburgh by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella at the beginning of the 1990s. Their signature method involved scrap metal, four-track tape, analogue electronics, effects pedals, overloaded recording levels and repeated acts of physical manipulation. That history remains audible on Close to the Edge, but the sound is not simply documentary industrial clanging. Metal is rarely allowed to remain an identifiable object. An impact enters a chain of distortion, is layered with other impacts and returns as a shuddering mass whose source might be a sheet of steel, damaged motor, shorted cable or collapsing piece of architecture.
The opening establishes a dense middle and lower register rather than attacking with a thin burst of treble. A broad rumble fills the field, already carrying several conflicting motions inside it. Some layers grind continuously; others strike, scrape or oscillate. High frequencies pass across the top like electrical arcs, but they are attached to substantial weight underneath. This balance is one reason Macronympha’s noise feels unusually physical. Volume alone does not create its force. The listener senses imagined mass: objects resisting pressure, surfaces dragging against one another and machinery working beyond its designed capacity.
There is no stable pulse, yet the material repeatedly approaches rhythm. Metallic impacts begin to recur at roughly similar intervals, only to be swallowed by distortion or displaced by another layer. A loop appears to form, but its edges have been damaged so severely that every repetition sounds different. This produces a kind of industrial lurch rather than a beat. The piece moves forward through momentum without becoming dance music, power electronics with a march tempo or the mechanically regular “rhythmic noise” that was prominent in the early 2000s.
Macronympha’s approach is frequently described as harsh noise wall, but Close to the Edge demonstrates why that term can be misleading when applied too rigidly. The sound is certainly wall-like in its refusal of silence and its near-continuous saturation. It does not, however, maintain one unchanging texture. The apparent wall is made of large unstable sections. One layer buckles, another moves forward, and a third disappears so gradually that its absence is recognized only after the overall color has changed. It is closer to watching an industrial fire move through a building than staring at a concrete surface.
The low end performs much of the compositional work. Deep electrical hum and distorted mechanical vibration create a foundation, but that foundation is never secure. It swells, clips and sometimes seems to pull the higher sounds downward. Headphones reveal overlapping bands of rumble rather than one bass drone. Through speakers, those same frequencies become architectural, interacting with the room and furniture. The piece changes according to playback volume because its bass is not merely heard; it modifies the listener’s physical surroundings.
Above that foundation, the high-frequency material is deliberately abrasive. Feedback tones flare without resolving into sustained pitches. Static breaks into hard grains, and thin squeals pass through the mix like stressed bearings. Macronympha avoids the common harsh-noise mistake of placing all frequencies at maximum intensity all the time. Treble may become dominant, but it does so against the memory of heavier passages. When a narrow band of piercing sound emerges from a broad roar, it feels sharper because the surrounding density has briefly changed shape.
The middle stretch is particularly effective at confusing foreground and background. A scrape that initially appears incidental may gradually become the most prominent element, while a heavy pulse recedes into haze. Sounds do not enter cleanly like instruments in a multitrack rock mix. They push through one another. This creates the impression that the recording itself is under stress, as if the tape, mixer and eventual CDr are not transparent carriers but additional materials being crushed alongside the metal.
That quality connects the release to Pittsburgh’s industrial geography without requiring a literal program. Macronympha’s earlier work often reflected the city’s deindustrialized landscape through amplified scrap and degraded recording technology. Close to the Edge does not need factory samples or documentary field recordings to evoke that environment. Its materials already carry histories of production, abandonment and reuse. Metal junk is not represented symbolically; it is given another working life as a source of sound.
The recording’s roughness is essential. Cleaner mastering might separate the layers more precisely, but it would also diminish the sense that they are contaminating one another. Distortion operates as both material and recording condition. When an impact clips, the resulting square-edged burst joins the original event. When several layers overload the available headroom, their collision produces a new composite texture. The piece is therefore not simply a performance captured imperfectly. The imperfections are part of the performance.
Macronympha’s noise is often distinguished from the rapid-cut style associated with some Japanese artists. Close to the Edge does not move by spraying hundreds of disconnected events across the stereo field. Its changes are slower, heavier and more cumulative. Instead of surprise through editing speed, it creates suspense by allowing a texture to continue until the listener begins noticing its internal instability. The question is not what sound will come next, but how long the present structure can endure before it deforms.
That method gives the piece an unusual relationship with time. Without track markers, the listener loses the normal means of measuring progress. The beginning does not present a theme, and the ending does not resolve one. Duration is felt through fatigue, adaptation and renewed attention. After prolonged exposure, the ear begins filtering the density and following small components: a dull recurring impact, a tremor in the bass or a narrow whistle buried behind the main distortion. When the balance changes, the entire field feels new even though its basic materials remain consistent.
The title becomes increasingly appropriate. The music remains close to an edge between motion and stasis, object and abstraction, control and collapse. It continually suggests that the next surge could become completely unmanageable, but Macronympha keeps enough control to preserve differentiation. Total chaos would actually be less intense. The sense of danger depends upon hearing structures form and then watching them fail.
There are no conventional vocals directing the emotional interpretation, and the absence benefits the piece. Macronympha’s imagery and surrounding aesthetic can be aggressively sexual, confrontational or antisocial, but Close to the Edge communicates primarily through material force. Its emotional character is not reducible to anger. There are passages of dread, grim humor, claustrophobia and even a severe kind of pleasure. The enjoyment comes from amplification revealing properties in ordinary discarded matter that polite sound would conceal.
The release is demanding even by noise standards. Its single-piece construction offers no convenient entry points, and sustained upper-frequency abrasion can become physically tiring. Listeners who require dramatic contrasts between quiet and loud may find its dynamic range narrow. At certain moments, the layers accumulate faster than the recording can meaningfully distinguish them, producing congestion rather than complexity. The modest CDr presentation also lacks the authority that a carefully manufactured LP or pressed CD might lend the material.
Yet that lack of authority is part of the appeal. Close to the Edge does not ask permission to belong to an established experimental canon. It arrives as an inexpensive underground CDr, containing one long action and little explanation. The listener must decide whether to enter it and how closely to listen. Beneath the initial brutality is a disciplined attention to weight, repetition and the transformation of physical objects through recording technology.
Macronympha’s best work makes harsh noise feel neither random nor overdesigned. The sound is organized, but its organization remains embodied and unstable. On Close to the Edge, scrap metal, feedback, bass pressure and tape-like saturation become components of a continuous structure that seems to be manufacturing and destroying itself at the same time. The piece never steps back to explain its process. It simply keeps pushing against the limits of its materials until the distinction between the object making the sound and the sound damaging the object disappears.

Von Einem - 2015 - The Von Einem Tapes 2xCD

 

Index Clean – IC-001  781.09MB FLAC

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.

VA - (2008) Hated Perversions CD

 Institute Of Paraphilia Studies ‎– none

 Tracklist
1     –Nicole 12     Liquid Voyeur     3:39
2     –Nicole 12     Vogue Bambini     4:56
3     –Sick Seed     Agenda     3:07
4     –Sick Seed     Matronage     4:06
5     –Bizarre Uproar     Sieg Hail     8:07
6     –Eleczema     Ice Cold Enema     3:52
7     –Eleczema     Bob's Penis     4:11
8     –Grunt     Will To Do Damage     4:10
9     –Taint     Dedicated To Male Rape Group     5:35
10     –Dorchester Library     Incest Tales     2:38
11     –Control      Suffocate And Silent     7:01

Hated Perversions does not ease the listener into its world or disguise what it has been designed to do. Released by Freak Animal Records in 2008 as part of the label’s Institute of Paraphilia Studies series, the compilation brings together eleven exclusive pieces by Nicole 12, Sick Seed, Bizarre Uproar, Eleczema, Grunt, Taint, Dorchester Library and Control. The title establishes a deliberately repellent framework, while the original edition’s black, leather-like tall case and twenty-eight-page booklet turn the CD into something resembling a privately circulated case file. This is power electronics as confrontation, but the compilation is more varied than its imagery initially suggests. Behind the sexual pathology, poisoned language and acts of provocation lies an unusually strong survey of several different approaches to noise: whispered analogue minimalism, primitive rhythmic electronics, overloaded feedback, low-frequency pressure and long-form death-industrial escalation.
Freak Animal issued only 250 copies, yet the release was not presented as a modest homemade disc. Its elaborate construction gave it the physical authority of a prohibited document. Each participating artist received space within the booklet to interpret the subject, producing a catalogue of fantasies, taboos and deliberately objectionable images. The resulting package became more notorious than the audio and was eventually excluded from some online marketplaces. It is important, however, not to mistake controversy for achievement. Extreme imagery can create an instant reputation without requiring much artistic ability. The real test of Hated Perversions is whether the music generates its own disturbance after the booklet is closed. Much of it does. Its best selections make discomfort audible through pressure, repetition and damaged vocal presence rather than depending entirely upon their titles.
Nicole 12 opens the compilation with “Liquid Voyeur” and “Vogue Bambini.” The project’s analogue synthesizer tones are simple, close and oppressive, with little interest in conventional development. “Liquid Voyeur” combines an insistent electronic current with whispered vocals that seem to enter directly through the listener’s headphones. The track’s intimacy is more unpleasant than a barrage would have been. Instead of shouting from across a room, the voice behaves as though it has already invaded one’s personal space. “Vogue Bambini” is colder and less insinuating, replacing the first piece’s humid closeness with a more sterile arrangement of noise and processed speech. Together the tracks establish one of the collection’s central tensions: desire represented not as pleasure or release, but as obsessive attention stripped of ordinary human reciprocity.
That distinction matters because Hated Perversions continually moves between the suggestive and the physically brutal. Nicole 12 works through quiet fixation, whereas Sick Seed arrives with a rougher and more outwardly aggressive attack. “Agenda” and “Matronage” were the first officially released Sick Seed recordings, marking Pekka Perä-Takala’s transition from the harsh-noise project Gelsomina into a form better suited to structure, voice and psychological narrative. The sound remains corroded, but it no longer behaves like noise generated for its own sake. Buried rhythms give the distortion a forward pull, while the vocal performance supplies a recognizable human antagonist. The pieces seem organized around compulsion: sounds return not because they form a chorus, but because the music cannot stop revisiting them.
“Agenda” is comparatively direct, joining a tense electronic foundation to a voice that sounds both accusatory and trapped within its own fixation. “Matronage” is heavier and more contaminated, allowing layers to accumulate until the distinction between vocal distortion, amplifier damage and background movement becomes difficult to maintain. Sick Seed’s contribution points toward the project’s later ability to combine power electronics with more carefully paced industrial composition. Even here, at the beginning, the music has architecture. It does not merely turn everything upward and hope that volume will create meaning.
Bizarre Uproar’s “Sieg Hail” is a different kind of ugliness. The project has always understood that noise can become theatrical without becoming polished, using repetition, humiliation and damaged bodily presence to make a performance feel unstable. Here, the title’s warped spelling already turns a familiar fascist salute into something slurred and degraded. The track does not possess the clean, militant posture suggested by authoritarian imagery. Its noise is sickly, overdriven and physically unbalanced, with vocals pushing through a dense electrical surface that seems ready to collapse. Rather than presenting power as disciplined strength, Bizarre Uproar makes it sound diseased and compulsive.
That does not neutralize the symbolism or guarantee a critical interpretation. Power electronics often relies upon ambiguity, then leaves the audience to determine whether an image is being exposed, inhabited or simply used because it produces a reaction. Hated Perversions repeatedly occupies that unresolved space. Its aesthetic assumes that disgust is useful in itself, yet disgust does not automatically become insight. Bizarre Uproar succeeds primarily because the sound refuses heroic grandeur. Whatever domination is being enacted has already deteriorated into obsession, grime and loss of control.
Eleczema’s “Ice Cold Enema” and “Bob’s Penis” provide the compilation’s crudest change in tone. Compared with the tightly managed pressure surrounding them, these tracks feel more absurd, primitive and deliberately embarrassing. Their blunt titles strip away any pretense of refined transgression. The sound follows suit, using rough bursts, broken rhythmic gestures and an almost juvenile fixation upon the body. This grotesque humor is valuable to the sequence because an entire disc of solemn depravity would become unintentionally pompous. Eleczema punctures that seriousness, although the joke is less one of liberation than degradation. The body becomes ridiculous machinery: leaking, manipulated and deprived of dignity.
Grunt’s “Will to Do Damage” brings the compilation sharply back into focus. The title reads like a concise definition of power electronics, and the track avoids unnecessary ornament. It is built from forceful vocal declaration, grinding frequencies and a hard internal momentum that turns intention into action. Grunt’s sound is full but not shapeless; separate layers of distortion remain audible even when the track reaches maximum density. A lower mechanical body provides mass, abrasive midrange frequencies create motion, and the voice cuts across both. Instead of inviting the listener to examine an atmosphere, “Will to Do Damage” pushes forward with a single declared objective.
Mikko Aspa’s involvement in the label and multiple projects connected with the collection gives Hated Perversions a strongly Finnish center, but the international contributors keep it from becoming a Freak Animal family sampler. Taint’s “Dedicated to Male Rape Group” is especially significant as one of the final pieces issued under the Taint name before Keith Brewer continued developing related methods as Mania. The track contains recognizably Taint-like feedback squeals, low frequencies, agitated breathing and vocals that repeatedly disappear into the noise. It feels simultaneously controlled and feverish. Unlike Grunt’s frontal violence, Taint produces anxiety by making the listener wait for elements to return.
The breathing is particularly effective because it supplies the track with an unstable physical scale. It can be heard as exertion, panic, arousal or proximity to the microphone, and none of those possibilities is comfortable. High feedback traces narrow paths above the bass pressure while the vocal performance materializes only long enough to unsettle the balance. The result demonstrates why Taint remained so influential within American harsh noise and power electronics: Brewer could make a limited group of frequencies feel psychologically active. The sound does not simply occupy space. It watches, withdraws and approaches again.
Dorchester Library’s “Incest Tales” is a short collision of drums, feedback and disorder. Lasting less than three minutes, it behaves almost like an interruption between Taint’s tightly controlled unease and Control’s extended finale. Its brevity works in its favor. The piece does not develop far enough to establish the identity heard in the compilation’s strongest contributions, but its crude percussion creates a sudden physical commotion. After so many selections built around private obsession, “Incest Tales” resembles a room being violently disturbed. It is messy, immediate and gone before its limited materials become exhausting.
Control closes the disc with “Suffocate and Silent,” the compilation’s great long-form release of pressure. Thomas Garrison begins slowly, using dark sustained tones and spacious low-end movement to create a sense of confinement. The early minutes are patient enough to make each additional layer feel consequential. Frequencies gradually thicken, the available air seems to diminish, and the piece grows from a haunted industrial environment into a destructive mass. Where several preceding artists rely on immediate disgust or direct vocal aggression, Control earns intensity through duration. The final noise feels enormous because the listener has heard it being assembled.
This ending also reveals how intelligently the compilation is sequenced. It begins with Nicole 12 whispering at close range, passes through Sick Seed’s emerging structures, Bizarre Uproar’s diseased overload, Eleczema’s grotesque absurdity, Grunt’s concentrated attack and Taint’s anxious feedback, then allows Control to expand everything into a broad field of suffocating sound. The collection is not a continuous wall, nor is it merely eleven unrelated exclusives. Each project uses a different relationship between voice and noise. Sometimes speech commands the electronics; sometimes it is buried, fractured or reduced to breath. That changing hierarchy gives the CD a dramatic arc even when its lyrical preoccupations remain narrow.
The booklet complicates any attempt to separate sonic merit from sensationalism. Its visual material was intended to cross boundaries, but some representations do not remain harmless merely because they appear within an underground art context. The use of sexualized child imagery, even when digitally manipulated, raises concerns far beyond ordinary obscenity and helped make the release legally questionable in some jurisdictions. This cannot be dismissed with the familiar claim that all provocation is an examination of censorship. At points the package appears less interested in analyzing exploitation than in testing how close it can come to reproducing exploitative imagery while retaining the protection of “art.”
That uncertainty is part of the record’s history, but it should not be romanticized. The compilation demonstrates both the capabilities and limitations of transgressive noise. Its artists are skilled at generating coercion, claustrophobia and shame through sound, yet the conceptual framework frequently treats vulnerable people as raw material for somebody else’s confrontation. One can recognize the strength of Control’s construction, Taint’s frequency work or Sick Seed’s rhythmic development without pretending that every accompanying image gains depth through association with difficult music. Shock may open a door, but it cannot decide what lies on the other side.
Sixteen years after its release, Hated Perversions remains a severe and musically effective power-electronics compilation whose reputation is inseparable from a package that deliberately pursued exclusion. The audio survives closer scrutiny better than many controversy-driven records do. Its eight projects do not sound interchangeable, and the movement from invasive whispers to overwhelming industrial mass gives the disc an unusually coherent shape. “Will to Do Damage,” Taint’s contribution and “Suffocate and Silent” are particularly formidable, while Sick Seed’s debut captures a project discovering the possibilities of structure inside abrasion. The collection’s subject matter remains ethically compromised, sometimes analytically suggestive and sometimes merely ugly. That friction cannot be cleaned away—and cleaning it away would misrepresent the release. Hated Perversions is strongest when its noise exposes compulsion as cramped, repetitive and spiritually empty. It is weakest when forbidden imagery is allowed to substitute for the same hard work.